WIBG: Many professional brewers get started with home brewing, when did you get your start brewing and what led you to take up the hobby?
Rob Mullin: I first started to homebrew in 1988 when
my girlfriend at the time gave me a homebrew kit for my birthday. As a political campaign worker, I had a hard
time finding time to brew so one Sunday I turned off my phone and brewed my
first beer, a dry stout. Brewing became
an escape from a stressful job that was responsible for 20-hour workdays and
insomnia.
In 1988
after losing a primary election in a run-off I took a vacation to the Tetons
where I had one of my first exposure to Grand Teton beer, which was then Otto
Brothers Brewing, Moose Juice Stout. It
was great to fill a growler with beer and explore the Tetons.
After
coming back from vacation, I went back into work campaigning. Following a loss in the 1990 campaign season,
my sister who worked for Green Peace and knew about my love of beer introduced
me to John Mallet at Old Dominion Brewing Company in Ashburn, VA. He hired me to drive the delivery truck and
work in the brewery.
WIBG: Prior
to joining Old Dominion Brewing in 1990, did you have much exposure to craft
beer?
RM: I drank my first craft beer in a small
wine and beer shop in Asheville, NC.
while working for a Congressman there in 1988 It was an Amber Lager from
Hope Brewing Corporation. I remember it because the shop hosted
occasional beer education courses that really turned me on to flavorful beer.
WIBG: How long were you with Old Dominion, and what
role do you believe they played in developing your own brewing philosophy?
RM: I was with Old Dominion for almost 9
years and it played a big role in my career.
I was originally hired to help with deliveries, but within a year I
became more active in the brewery. It
was a fantastic place to learn how to brew professionally. In my time at Old Dominion, I worked with two
of the best brewers in the business, John Mallet (who now works at Bells’sBrewing) is, in my opinion, among the best American trained brewers in America;
and Ron Barchet (who founded Victory Brewing), who I still believe is one of the
best German trained brewers. We had long
conversations on the merits of decoction vs. infusion mashing, yeast
management, recipe formulation, etc. John
taught me almost everything that I know, including that I should be open to new
ideas and willing to try new techniques as they are developed. From Ron I learned about traditional, proven,
German brewing techniques and the German brewing heritage. In my time at the brewery, production grew
tenfold to 25,000 barrels per year.
I was
very lucky to learn to brew at a great east coast lager brewery, surrounded by
great east coast lagers like the Old Dominion Dortmunder Export, Penn Pils,
Stoudt’s Dortmunder Export and Theo DeGroen’s Pilsner. At that time, ales were more of a west coast
phenomenon, probably due to all of the additional equipment required to brew
lagers and the increased capital requirements that come with lagering beer.
WIBG: After leaving Old Dominion, can you give me a
quick rundown of your brewing experiences prior to Grand Teton?
RM: After leaving Old Dominion, my next stop
was the Commonwealth Brewpub at Rockefeller Center. My bride and I had just had our second child
and we moved there to be close to her sister.
It was pretty interesting, fun, and exciting to live and brew in New York
City. Unfortunately, the owner was a
real estate developer who sucked cash out of the brewpub to open a bistro. One day I showed up to work to find the doors
padlocked.
Around 2000,
I started at Trap Rock Brewing in New Jersey; it was the ideal brewing
job. At Trap Rock, a 5-star restaurant, I
had the privilege of working with Bruce Johnson, a true artist. Named the best chef in the state by the New
York Times, he developed an amazing menu and I was tasked with brewing beer to
match his creative cuisine. When I
arrived, Trap Rock was brewing three beers, a light, an amber and a dark. After I arrived, I developed nine new beers
five times a year as the menu changed.
We had long discussions about different flavor pairings that could complement
or enhance the flavors in his meals.
That was where I developed my interest in beer and food pairings. I was constantly trying to brew beers that
would enhance and compliment the food. I
tended to brew a lot of lagers to compliment the more delicate flavors in the
seafood dishes. While at Trap Rock, I also
brewed a really fun Double IPA that we served at Michael Jackson’s 60th
birthday party, it was modeled after a beer we brewed at Old Dominion called
Tupper’s Hot Pocket Ale, it had a
massive amount of dry hops.
While
at Trap Rock, I also learned a lot about online rating sites, we would get
horrible reviews from people who were angry that they could not order a
hamburger and fries in our restaurant.
To them, it wasn’t what a brewpub should be. The most absurd was a review that gave us
zero stars. The author of the review
drove up, was offended that we offered free valet parking, got back in his car
and drove away without even coming in and trying our food or beer. It highlighted the dark side of customer
reviews.
That
aside, my time at Tap Rock was an amazing experience, my wife and I were ready
to buy a house in the area so that I could cut down on my 3 hour round trip
commute, and then 9/11 happened. We
could see the smoke from the brewery, and I will never forget that day. Unfortunately, the 9/11 attacks led to New
Yorkers leaving Manhattan, and driving up the price of homes outside the city,
so we were unable to find home that we could afford on a brewer’s salary.
Fortunately
in early in 2002, Charlie Otto was advertising a brewmaster position at Grand
Teton Brewing. Having spent time in the
Grand Teton area 12 years earlier, and having loved the area, I jumped at the
opportunity. I immediately flew out to the
brewery, spent time at the brewery with Charlie and was hired as the new
brewmaster in May. Luckily I was able to
convince my wife to move out of the city, to Victor, Idaho.
WIBG: The first recipe you developed for Grand Teton
was Bitch Creek ESB, right? What were
your thoughts when you developed it and did you think that it would as big of a
success as it has been, winning medals at competitions almost every year since
its introduction?
RM: When I arrived at Grand Teton, Charlie was
in the midst of a trademark dispute over his Moose Juice Stout with MooseHead
Brewery out of Canada. They thought
having Moose in the name of our beer lead to confusion. We were joined in the lawsuit by Big Sky
Brewing who was producing their Moose Drool Brown Ale. In the end, Big Sky chose to pay royalties
and continue brewing Moose Drool, and we
chose to cease production of Moose Juice.
At the time, Moose Juice was the only dark beer that we brewed, so Charlie
and I were hoping to replace it with another dark beer.
Charlie wanted to brew an ESB, like
Redhook. I had previously brewed an ESB
at Commonwealth in Manhattan that received a good review from Michael Jackson,
and I think that’s what he had in mind.
However, I had just moved out to the Rockies and I was darned if I would
brew a British Style in the middle of the country. I was ready to move on and try something
new. I really wanted to work with some
of the new, flavorful west coast hops that were being developed at the time.
That year, we went to the GABF to
try all the ESBs that were being served.
Charlie and I stopped at every brewery that brewed an ESB, taking notes
and comparing our opinions. No single
beer did it for us. At the end of the
day I found one beer that had the malt profile I wanted, and another beer with
the strong hop profile that I wanted. I
found Charlie, combined the two beers into one glass and gave it to Charlie,
telling him, “This is the beer I want to make.”
He thought it was great. It
didn’t taste like any other ESB that we had ever tried and we knew it had to be
our next beer.
Back at the brewery, we brewed a
beer to match the flavor profile that we experienced at the GABF. I thought of calling it a Mahogany Ale, but
Charlie wanted the reference point of an “ESB,” which at that point hadn’t yet
been reclassified as “Extra Special Brown.”
We had a local contest to pick the name of the new beer, which was won
by the owner of the local flyfishing shop / soda fountain with the name Bitch
Creek, after the local river and in part because it’s the name of a fly fishing
fly that is popular in the area. Her
shop had donated one of the prizes for the first place winner and she ended up
winning it back.
Two years later a local homebrewer
joined our team and suggested that we enter Bitch Creek as an American Brown
Ale at the GABF. That year we won the
gold in the category. I really feel like
Bitch Creek helped to define what an American Brown is today, although at the
time that definitely wasn’t our goal. We didn’t brew it to fit a style; we brewed
it because we liked the way it tasted.
It was useful to bring a homebrewer on who could guide it into a
category after the fact. I think that is
a huge testament to our local beer drinkers.
I don’t
think the success of Bitch Creek lies in the medals or awards that we have won
with it. To me the proof of success is
how many cases we sell of it every year.
It quickly became our flagship beer, only being surpassed last year by
our Sweetgrass Pale Ale, which took the lead because of draft sales.
WIBG: What can you tell me about the Grand Teton
brewing philosophy and distribution strategy?
RM: We had a lot of early adopters demanding
our full flavored beers. However, there
are only 3,000 people in the county and we are 6 hours from Boise. We simply don’t have the local market to
support our production. Because of that,
we have to ship our beers in order to grow. I know that seems like a backwards business
model, but it is what’s been working for us.
We ship to places that have fantastic local breweries and have to
compete in someone else’s local market.
We knew that we couldn’t try to ship a cream ale to Wisconsin to compete
with New Glarus’ Spotted Cow, for instance.
Why would someone want to buy our cream ale in the store when there was
a well-brewed local cream ale available?
We knew that to compete we would have to brew beers with extra flavor,
beers that would stand out on the shelf and give consumers something they
couldn’t get from their local breweries.
That worked at the time, because it was before all of the breweries
started to go with big, bold, flavorful beers.
However, there was still some
confusion about why our beers were selling.
When we launched Bitch Creek, I think our marketing director was
convinced that Bitch Creek sold because of its name, that locals were buying it
because of the local reference, but beer drinkers in other markets were buying
it because they thought it had a risqué name.
In that vein we put out an organic Blonde Ale called Au Naturale that
had a nude lady on the bottle. However,
it didn’t succeed because at that point the organic niche wasn’t big enough in
our market. The thought at the time was
that if we could build a better, more risqué marketing campaign, we would sell
more beer.
Fortunately, four years ago when
the new owners purchased Grand Teton, that approach didn’t appeal to them. The company refocused on the tradition of the
brewery and beer. They weren’t going to
put up with risqué things for the purpose of being risqué either on the labels,
or in the name of the beer.
They wanted to focus more on the
beer and believed the only way we could succeed was to brew high quality beer
rather than focus on a marketing gimmick.
Our continued success is to focus on quality first. I think that was the problem during the first
craft beer boon in the mid 90’s, a lot of breweries were starting up, fueled by
venture capital, not brewing. A lot of
the new breweries were unable to brew consistently good beer, which caused them
to go out of business.
Now in this latest craft beer boom,
there are tens of thousands of great brewers entering the market. These are some great professionals, but they
lack the capital to set up a laboratory and hire a good quality manager. The next big shakeout is going to be the
breweries that can’t expand to the point where they can afford a quality control
department. Quality is really the most
important part, brewing a consistently good beer. The craft beer market originally grew at the
expense of imports; it is only in the past few years that craft breweries have
started converting domestic beer drinkers.
That one bad bottle that makes it out of a good craft brewery could ruin
that Budweiser drinkers experience for all of us. That one bad beer, which a craft beer drinker
would be willing to accept, could lose the craft beer movement an additional
convert. The industry has huge potential
and if we can convert domestic drinkers with consistently good beer, there is
no limit to the growth craft beer will experience. It is so important to focus on quality; it’s
the next big challenge that the craft beer industry will have to face moving
forward.
WIBG: Water plays a huge part in the development of
a beer and many breweries utilize reverse osmosis to strip the minerals out of
the beer, working to develop a water profile from scratch. How has the water profile in Teton Valley
influenced the beers you brew?
RM: All of the recipes when I started
included an acid adjustment. The first
thing I did when I started was to get rid of the water treatments. We quickly realized that affected the beers
that we brewed. However, we found that
our untreated water produced really good, malty beers because our water profile
is close to the water in Munich. All of
the water in the area is from the mountains, it is 3-500 year old glacial
runoff that filtered through Teton Mountain granite and limestone before it
comes up at a spring half a mile from the brewery. There’s very little chlorine in our water and
we add nothing. I actually have a really
hard time traveling because water in the rest of the country tastes chemically
to me. Our water on the other hand has a
slightly sweet flavor. The greatest
success we have had with it has been with our Double Vision Doppelbock, a full,
malty German-style lager. Double Vision
was brewed as a testament to our water.
In the
last five years we started to brew hoppier beers, but our water doesn’t let us
get the same amount of bitterness out of the hops that a different water
profile would allow. We could treat our
water, but decided that we could just add more hops to get the extra bitterness. I think that’s what sets our hoppy beers
apart. We get a fuller hop aroma and flavor
from the increased amount of hops. It
can also be hard to get the yeast to fully attenuate in our hoppy beers. The common denominator though is that our
water allows us to brew well balanced, flavorful beers. The key is balance and the goal is to never
get extreme bitterness.
WIBG: Is it an homage to traditional brewing that
you leave the Teton Valley water as it is rather than treat it?
RM: I am very interested in traditional
techniques and use modern technology periodically where we can. Recently I learned about hop products, for
example. We can use hop extract which is
nice because we can add more bitterness without losing wort in the hop matter. For flavor and aroma additions however, we
stick with pellet hops. We use dextrose
in Lost Continent and Pursuit of Hoppiness to get extra fermentable without the
added body.
Water
is something that I don’t want to compromise on. I like the idea of terroir being
important. That 100 years ago, every
city produced different beer. Styles had
to change and be defined based upon the local water and local ingredients. I would love to develop a local Teton Valley
style.
WIBG: I have read that there are term plans to source
all hops and barley locally, is the move to source locally a new initiative, or
is it part of a long term growth plan that is now receiving more focus?
RM: We are also very proud of our
barley. This area is recognized as
growing the best malting barley in the world.
All of our base malt is grown and malted within a couple hours of the
brewery at a maltster in Pocatello, ID.
We have been unable to get locally sourced specialty malts. We would love to find a local source, and it
would be fantastic to get a small maltster here in the Teton Valley so that the
farmers didn’t have to ship their barley far away, to get it malted so that it
could be shipped back here to our brewery.
All that money and production could stay here in our local economy.
50% of the hops that we use are
Idaho hops, and we are hoping that within 5 years, close to 90% of the hops
that we use will be local. There are a
couple of the new proprietary strains that we currently use that we have been
unable to find locally. South Idaho has
a great climate for growing hops. It’s
dryer than the Yakima valley with long, sunny days that are great for hop
growth. The proof is in taste testing;
Idaho hops are as good as if not superior to hops produced in other parts of
the country. Because of that, we try to
contract all of our hops from an Idaho source whenever possible. The conditions here are also conducive to
high alpha hops. Chinook, Galena (both
of which were developed in Idaho) and Centennial have really taken off
here. Ten years ago, they were used
exclusively for bittering additions, but they are now increasingly being used
for flavor. Compared to the old 4% Alpha
Acid Cluster hops, Chinook, Galena and Centennial are huge.
Recently three of our brewers and I went to spend a weekend with four of the families that provide our hops. We went boating up Hell’s Canyon, toured their farms and had a great time. They are great people and produce some of the best hops in the world. Until recently they were tied up in a big Anheuser-Busch contract, but recently got let go. The Busch family was probably the most conservative in the business, they were determined to not fail like Schlitz did, by altering their ingredients. They didn’t want to change from the 14 varieties of hops used in Budweiser. Because of that they helped prop up legacy hop varieties. When InBev dropped their contracts, that gave us access to those great hops for the first time.
_______________________________________
Be sure to check back on Friday for the conclusion of my Interview with Rob Mullin where we discuss the Cellar Reserve series, his thoughts on beer, and his advice for homebrewers who are aspiring to open their own craft breweries!
Happy Drinking!