All About Beer: With no professional experience and brewing for a brand new brewery in a city renowned for its beer culture, were you intimidated when you first started? Yeah, absolutely. For months I had a huge amount of anxiety. I was confident that I could make good beer, but I wanted to enter the... View Article
All About Beer: The words “environmentally and socially-conscious” appear first in a list of attributes that describe your company. Where did that commitment start? Pat Conway: It’s been an evolution. My brother Dan and I almost immediately had a recycling effort at the brewery back 24 years ago. Now we have the three waves in... View Article
Big Boss has been through a lot of incarnations, hasn’t it? It was Tom Cat, which became Pale Ale (it was really owned by the same people), then it became Rock Creek, and that’s when I became involved. Rock Creek became Chesapeake Bay for a very short time and nearly went under. We came back... View Article
What was your background before you turned to brewing? I went to art school for college, then had to figure out a way to make a living. So I became a carpenter/cabinet maker and did that for about 15 years. I became a homebrewer in the mid-’80s and was enamored with the small breweries that... View Article
Congratulations on this anniversary! What’s the most surprising thing to you about the fact that you’re sitting there in Juneau, observing the 25th anniversary of your brewery? Marcy: It went by so fast—in some ways. It seems like forever ago that we were first were trying to raise the money and all that, but on... View Article
What do you bring to brewing from your early background in history and philosophy? That’s a great question, and one I’ve thought about a lot, funnily enough. My approach to brewing is…almost like a “liberal arts” approach. I like to look at different relationships. I use science and craft to help me get there, but... View Article
I recently gave a presentation at the National Homebrewers Conference in San Diego on aging beer on exotic wood, which covered Spanish cedar—they use it to construct the humidor boxes to age cigars and they also use it in the construction of cigar inserts. I also discussed lemon and grapefruit wood aging in the Dos... View Article
In 1976, an ex-Navy man named Jack McAuliffe founded America’s first modern microbrewery, New Albion Brewing Co. in Sonoma, CA. In an era when American brewing was dominated by a few large facilities brewing versions of light lager, McAuliffe hand-built his brewery from the ground up, and brewed full-flavored bottle-conditioned ales in the English tradition.
What do you hope your fans will take away from your Moveable Yeast project? The primary goal of the series was to demonstrate to beer lovers―who may not be as familiar with yeast as, say, homebrewers would be―how large an effect yeast has on the flavor of beer. People talk about malt and hops a... View Article
