In this wide-ranging conversation between Lee Cleghorn of Outer Range Brewing and Preston Thoeny of Wren House Brewing the duo discuss growth and construction, rolling with delays, and how sometimes the right location will reveal itself when you least expect.
Then the two explore a range of collaboration beers Thoeny and Wren House have made with various space agencies and scientists working on cosmos-related projects.
Below, he recounts how the collaborations started and have since progressed.
In his own words
Preston Thoeny: When you release three new beers a week, you have to come up with three new names a week. And we try and get clever sometimes. But sometimes it’s just things I’m into at that time.
I love space travel and space, space exploration and science and stuff like that. And we were launching a mission to Mars, perseverance and ingenuity.
We had two IPAs coming out, let’s just call them perseverance and engineering. And someone commented on the Instagram post, and was like “hey, look, our rovers on a beer can.”
So I reached out to that person. Are you involved in this? And she was like, oh, yeah, we were out of ASU. So Arizona State University is right down the street, or down the freeway 50 minutes or so. And they have a great space program there and do a lot of rovers and in other science specialties for for NASA and other firms.
And so I was like, Well, I’d love to meet you. Come down and I’ll give you guys some beers and posters. And so I got to meet some of the people who worked there, and they were just the nicest people in the world.
They had the same passion for science as I do, except their’s is amplified because they’re actually doing it for a living.
So I got to just sit there and pepper them with questions about how do you guys do this? How do you do that? And they’re the ones who run the the, I think it’s master cam, the camera on them or Mars rover.
So this group of people are the first ones to see images of Mars as they get beamed to Earth. And it was just this awesome opportunity.
It just was this really cool experience. And it all centered around beer.
One thing I like is doing collabs with people that bridges these unrelated careers. And build these relationships all just because we named a beer after perseverance.
We up naming that one Moxie, which was one of the scientific experiments being done with the rover and that mission. And then scientists from MIT, were reaching out this, this one PhD was like, “I designed Moxie, we send me some beers.”
And then someone from NASA reached out: “can we have a poster we love this.”
And it was just a surreal experience, I’m such a geek for this stuff to reach these people that we would have absolutely not reached.
Future Celestial Collaborations
We wanted to keep that going, that mutual love for each other’s kind of passions. And so now we’re doing a series.
And it’s going to be an indefinite amount of beers, we’re gonna do it until, until we’re tired of doing it, but the titles are based on heavenly bodies. So planets and moons and asteroids and stuff like that.
We’ve done Mercury, Venus and Earth.
W’re gonna do the moon and a couple asteroids and some other planets. And in the collaborative part is we bring out a scientist who has personal experience studying that body, and then gives a presentation while everyone’s drinking the beer at the release.
For Venus, we have someone who’s involved, either academically or professionally with the planet Venus, and they came down and do a slideshow, these brilliant people, and they’re talking answering questions while Idrink in that beer.
The amount of new guests, new new customers, we’ve gotten from that has been really cool. And created this kind of small community of people who can come Wren House and geek out on these releases.
I’m for that.”
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The above transcript was condensed and edited for clarity.
