Gary introduces you to the owners of McFleshman’s Brewing Co and hosts of the show, Bobby Fleshman and Allison McCoy-Fleshman! Bobby tells his beer origin story (with a little help from Allison).

From his first sip of beer on an Oklahoma farm after a game of quarters to brewing English ales in his PhD advisor's basement while working at NASA, learn how Bobby turned a love for science into the world's favorite beverage.

Got a question about beer? Send us a message on Instagram or Facebook and we'll probably answer it on the show!

Hosts:

Bobby Fleshman

Allison McCoy-Fleshman

Gary Ardnt

Music by Sarah Lynn Huss

Recorded & Produced by David Kalsow

Hello everyone and welcome to episode one of the

Respecting the Beer podcast.

My name is Gary Arndt and with me today are the proprietors of the McFleshman's

Brewing Company in Appleton, Wisconsin, Bobby Fleshman and Alison McCoy Fleshman.

How are you guys doing?

Great.

Fantastic.

What we're going to do in this podcast, is we're

going to talk about everything and anything dealing with brewing and

beer over the course of the show.

But for the first episode, we kind of want to establish the origin story,

just like you do in any good movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and

how you get to a point of running a brewery, how you set one up from becoming

just a, a fan of beer and brewing.

Because it's an interesting story.

I think a lot of people may.

See themselves in it.

Maybe they're home brewers.

Maybe they just love beer.

And how do you get from that point of a passion for beer to turning

it into something real, where you're making beer on a regular

basis and selling it to the public?

So, where does this begin?

How do you, how do you go, what is the starting point?

Okay.

first of all, thanks Gary and uh, my team here for putting this together and having

such a wonderful voice to introduce us.

where does our story begin?

maybe it's my introduction to beer in general.

Maybe it's where I was living on a farm in 19.

80.

I was four years old we had uh, I want to say 8, 000 acres of wheat fields.

And so we brought crews through and they harvested this wheat and

at night they would play quarters.

And if you guys are familiar with quarters, it's a game where you put

quarters into a bowl, but bouncing them.

And then there's rules by which people drink around the table.

I.

I remember being four years old, one of my earliest memories, and

my parents were around the table and there were these styrofoam cups

and they were drinking something.

I was interested.

These were, these were people that I met in the summertime and they would

come and go each year and I wanted to be involved, wanted to play this game.

So at some point they said, give him a shot, and they gave me a

quarter, explained it to me, and I bounced a quarter in the bowl.

And they said, okay, so, right, we're going to have to play by the

rules, so they gave me some beer.

It was some Coors Original, or Banquet, made famous by Smokey and the Bandit

movie, and anyway, they gave me the tiniest amount, probably no more than an

ounce, but I remember the taste still, and I remember being smitten by it.

And fast forward to where we are today.

I think I've always had a love for beer, but that was an awkward

moment for everyone in the room.

I, I related to an episode of King of the Hill where they gave Bobby

a case, a carton of cigarettes to convince him that he didn't want to

smoke and then he became hooked on it.

It wasn't as extreme as that, but I related to that moment.

But I mean, that's, it's, it's hard to know where to start, but that beer

is something that's sort of been in my blood, even though my family wasn't.

The family of brewers per se, we were from Oklahoma and so

not even from a brewing region.

And so you're a four year old beer drinker and where do you go from there?

Yeah.

So you fast forward a lot of years, because at that point in the

world, it was all industrial lager.

And before you go any further, I grew up in Wisconsin.

This was a very strong Germanic culture.

Going to the tavern was something that was very common.

You might give a kid a sip of beer or something like that,

and like most kids, I hated it.

Like you taste that for the first time and it's something that you don't enjoy.

Did you actually like enjoy it or was it this like, oh, I just

want to be like the grown ups?

Beer is the social beverage.

It's the social lubricant.

So maybe there's a part to Both of those truths.

I think I enjoyed it and I think that I wanted to be part.

But no, I intrinsically liked it.

But you're asking about what's next?

There's a lot of years of growing up around beer.

Didn't really drink much beer, honestly, growing up.

Didn't enjoy it particularly.

So maybe there's some answers to your questions there.

I quickly realized that it was all the same, you know, as most people did in

the craft that came to be craft brewers.

And it was boring.

Even if it was consistent, most beer was just boring.

So you know, I'd let it sit and I fast forward to probably about 1999.

I discover various, craft beverages such as Sierra Nevada pale ale.

Hmm.

Is that true?

No, cause you were when I first started dating you.

That was in 2002.

You were obsessed with one particular beer.

Right.

Yeah, my first.

Michelob Amberbach.

I wouldn't say it's my first, but yeah, the one that I really

threw myself into was Michelob Amberbach.

To the point, when we were in Hawaii one time, we found

a big ass Mir that we actually bought that had Michelob Amberbach, and we

struggled to get it into the suitcase to get it back on the plane, because

you were obsessed with that beer.

Yeah.

I think it was for two reasons.

It did have some flavor relative to Mir.

A non caramelized version of the same beer.

but also the branding and that you find that to be true with a lot of German

brands even though this isn't any longer a German brand, it, it did draw me in,

I was marketed to, and that's true,

but that's like a, that's a, a mass produced beer, not

a craft beer, a hundred percent.

What was it that was so special about it?

Was it just that they were doing something different that it was available?

So they were clearly responding to the first wave of

craft brewers and, and Sierra Nevada is, is the most notable of those.

And they were just capitalizing on it.

They had access to tap handles everywhere.

And so all they had to do is become a quote craft brewer overnight.

And you have someone like me who was misinformed, thinking

that this, this is somehow.

Truly a different process, truly a different product when it, when it

was only slightly different in all honesty, you drink with your eyes first.

This was Amber and it did have some caramel flavor added.

And so by that definition, it was, it was.

I wouldn't say craft, but it was definitely more of a crafty beer.

And I would say like through the seventies and eighties,

I think the United States was known for a major beer producers.

You had the Miller's, the Budweiser's, the Coors like you mentioned.

And based on kind of my memory of it, you start to see these craft beers appear in

like the early nineties, mid nineties.

And so it was.

Was that kind of when you started to pay more attention?

Right.

And remember I'm from Oklahoma.

That's probably the last state to see anything craft.

So,

yeah, there were some pretty significant liquor laws.

And so Oklahoma is one that you could only brew 3.

2 percent or lower.

You couldn't refrigerate

it and you

couldn't refrigerate it.

So, okay.

Yeah.

You, you, you find the, the Michelob Amber Bach.

Where do you go from there?

How do you, so you said you were misinformed at the time.

How do you, how did you figure that out?

Or what, what did you discover that took you like, Oh, there's

something better than this.

And that's where I think it, it deserves credit

and probably not just with me.

it, whether it was craft or crafty, it.

It, it got me into what would later become actual craft beer

because it broke the mold.

And like I said, I think to answer

his question, I think we just started trying at that point.

We would travel a lot go down to Texas and Texas had much better

access to varieties and stuff.

And so we would buy a bottle here, buy a bottle there.

And just try, start to try new things.

And we even had a bottle collection is huge.

And well, it's from Shiner, Texas.

But I think just trying new things.

And then as we had travel, we started to discover that there are,

were these little breweries around?

I remember we went to New Orleans.

And we went to a beta.

Yes.

And so I think having access and just going to where there was actually

beer is also what's what sparked it.

So let's let's take a step back.

You said you guys met each met in like 2002.

Roughly?

Yes.

Correct.

How?

because there's a, well, I was wearing an

eyepatch at the time.

So like a pirate day.

Yeah, scratch

my cornea.

No.

I was, undergraduate at university of Oklahoma.

Bobby was an undergraduate at Oklahoma city university, and we did

a summer research program through the physics department at OU.

And it was love at first, no, it really wasn't.

I was actually wanting to flirt with another guy but I'd scratched my

cornea and so I was wearing an eyepatch.

But we'd played a game of ultimate Frisbee with all the participants.

That stereotype is true.

Physicists, scientists play ultimate for that.

It's

true.

And the reason I ask is because science is actually a big part of this story, right?

Where it probably isn't for most brewers.

And most scientists are probably, if you guys know, I'm guessing.

Yeah.

Probably find, this career path to be kind of interesting or at least different.

speak of that route, how it, how it took you from the world of science to beer.

Right.

So let's see, when did I, so we were, we were in the process of discovering

craft beer, but then in graduate school, it became a hobby for me.

I met someone else that was brewing and we would do.

Just stovetop, basically just big pots of soup in a way.

We were doing this.

I was getting into it.

I was enjoying it.

I didn't have any fantasies.

I don't think at that time of a brewery.

I think I was just amazed by it.

No, we actually, in your, after your general exam.

So when you're getting your PhD, you normally pick up a hobby or two that you

could, like, actually do and finish in a reasonable amount of time because the

PhD takes so freaking long to complete.

And so his gift to himself after he got his general exam was

a homebrew kit inspired by a friend of ours who was brewing.

And I remember you recorded your video, a video of you, Very first homebrew ever

and you forgot half the ingredients.

So you have video of this.

Bobby realizing like the brew is done.

He's so excited.

He's like, wait, what is this?

And he's like malt bag sitting on the counter.

2005 making videos with these old video

... Cause whatever they were, they were tiny video cassettes.

I was, so it was a laborious process, doing and trying to record and

edit, whatever that looks like.

And for my notes, cause I knew I would not remember to write everything down.

So I thought I'll just record this big disaster.

And sure enough, it took me four hours to do something that should

have taken an hour and a half.

And then I remember being so proud and, triumphant.

And then.

Catching my face go white when I recognize half of the sugar malt

was not actually inside of the beer.

I forgot half of the ingredients.

So it came out to be very, very low alcohol.

I loved it when it was finished because like you do your children, no matter

how ugly it was, it still felt like a triumph at the end of the day.

Everyone around the room, even at that point smiled and drank it,

but I can't even imagine going back and tasting that today.

But no, it was a hobby.

It got me.

It, it got my mind off of other things cause going through the

general exams is a stressful time.

And it was, it was, it was a way for me to just, just have fun.

And then my friend, his name was Larry Maddox, I should mention this guy, he

was the first one I ever brewed with.

If you want to say that homebrewing was my first brewing experience, he sold

me his equipment when he got out of it and I got deeper and deeper into it.

And I realized at some point that.

But just like with when I was, we'll, we'll talk about this,

but when I was a physicist, you can never learn all of physics.

Contrary to my naivety going into that, I'll just do physics and

then move on to the next thing.

No, you just have to drill as far as you want to drill as far as, as sustainable.

And that's what I was doing with beer.

And I realized there's a lot of science here and there's a lot of engineering

here and there's a lot of architecture.

there's creativity here.

There's a million different disciplines that come into play.

And then when you open a business, you get into marketing and sales and

advertising, and you have to consider all these, these things and how far

you want, you can push yourself, how much you can absorb and execute on.

But I was, yeah, enjoying it more and more.

I can fast forward even a little farther to explain why I went.

As far as thinking about opening a brewery,

well,

yeah,

you said you're studying physics.

Yeah.

You're not studying food science.

You're not studying organic chemistry, something that would seem

to be a more, you know something closer related to, to brewing beer.

What were you studying?

Right.

I was studying to be a planetary scientist.

I, I went that way by way of astrophysics, my, my university,

University of Oklahoma is where I got my, my PhD officially, but my, my thesis

advisor was from Boulder, Colorado.

So I lived in Boulder.

That's a long commute.

It's 11 hour commute.

But it was actually quite fun for me to go

back and forth to lots of ski trips.

So I was studying to be a planetary scientist.

I studied galaxies.

I did some on solar evolution.

I did various different projects along the way.

You started out on cosmology,

which was looking at supernova and there are a lot of

things that I did back in the day, you know, to find my way in the field.

But I found an advisor that worked with NASA that had been Boulder.

Her name is Fran Bagonal, and she still works with the division

of outer planets for NASA.

So all the gas giants outside of Mars orbit, I met her at a meeting.

I funded my own way to a meeting and, and, met up with

her and we became good friends.

She's an expat from England and,

she has very particular tastes in beer.

Yeah.

And so that's kind of what I was getting at.

Yeah.

Meeting her and living in her, what her house or basement, I don't know.

Right.

Was kind of one of the inflection points that brought you here.

What happened with that?

It was, yeah.

Fast forward a tiny bit there.

We, I moved in with her and to obviously do research.

We were working on Saturn missions, Jupiter missions, studying

the moons of those planets.

But by that was sort of by day, that was the day job, the weekend job

was making beer in her basement.

So that was paying my room and board.

I didn't ever spend a dime to live.

And if you guys have ever been to Boulder, you'll know how expensive

and how awesome of a community it is.

But for me to live essentially for the cost of making 10 gallons of

beer a week in someone's basement was a pretty awesome experience.

I got to do that and then be immersed within a really awesome

culinary and brewing scene in that, in that region, you, you run into

places like, Avery Brewing Company, which was just a bike ride away.

And that's a really fantastic brewery out there.

Another one that no one's heard of Asher Brewing amazing.

Go up the road, you, you go to the home of, It was

Fort Collins,

Dale, Dale's pale ale, and I'm thinking of Oscar blues.

And then up from there, you go to, you find new Belgium and then my, one of my

favorite breweries in the world is Odell.

Those are some places I was starting to discover what real beer was.

So I, I had.

Yeah.

Not only that, we were discovering what breweries were.

Right.

Because in Oklahoma, there were really two, maybe three, but

when you were living in Boulder.

And they were from

the first craft movement in the 80s and

90s.

And living in Boulder allowed us to go explore.

And you were there for eight months and then on and off, you would go up there

commuting over about three or four years.

and so it was an opportunity to really see and taste so many different styles.

And the wonderful thing about Boulder and Fort Collins is that some of

those breweries could subspecialize.

And so there was a brewery that just did Sours or Odell like that

in New Belgium for, oh my gosh, that brewery is amazing as well.

And so we kind of got to see all these different breweries in different stages.

And I think that's where we were exposed to this other world of kind

of being the brewery hunters, not just the beer, but also, Going after like,

well, what, what is an experience?

Like what's a destination sort of thing?

Cause that was, that was really the

beginning of, of the next big wave of craft brewing with it,

it may not have begun in Fort Collins and Boulder and lions, and Longmont, but

it definitely was alive and well there.

So I was seeing that you can brew 15 gallons at a time, or you

can brew 150 barrels at a time.

There were, there were so many different models that you could, that

there was also a giant Anheuser Busch brewery right there in Fort Collins.

So you get to see all the full spectrum.

the water's fantastic there that that's a marketing campaign

that Coors capitalizes on.

I should say that.

Yeah.

If you go just South of Boulder, that's, that's the home of Coors and they have

the largest refrigerator in the world.

And that was an interesting spectrum of breweries.

So when you're visiting these breweries, are you going there just to

hang out and drink, or are you actually getting to know the brewers and learning

about what they do and how they do it?

A little of both.

At that point we weren't getting to know them.

We weren't we were just consumer experiencers of the beer.

Yeah, can we get a tour?

scheduled or not In in usually you're not talking to someone that's making the beer.

It's front of house But the small ones there's a person behind the counter

that does it all I should say that I should Do we want to talk about beer?

Well, I just, when didn't you, we first start

to want to open a brewery?

I don't even remember.

Was, I mean, I guess you, you can't.

When did I confess it or when did I think it?

Oh, that's fair.

but no, you, you started to win homebrew competitions and our

homebrew club called the Yeasty Boys.

They got mad.

Which there were girls.

There were.

there were two of us.

You started to like win those competitions and they got mad that they, they told

you, if I recall correctly, they're like, you can't enter anymore, Bobby, cause

you're just going to automatically win.

And that's not fair.

Well, I think this is where my technical side was

winning over, you know, it's a group of maybe 30 total members.

My technical side allowed me to just read recipes and execute on them.

There wasn't a lot of art artistry there.

I was still feeling out.

What does it mean to be a pale ale?

What does it mean to be an IPA?

What is a porter?

And I was just executing and I realized, okay, I'm, I'm technically a good

brewer, but I don't know the first thing about how to start from scratch.

I don't know where beer has been, where it's going.

And it was also a really good group in Nike.

We all shared recipes, but we shared techniques and we, we even did

experiments with, you know, each other.

We'll read it all.

We all have to start with the same batch and then we do different things to it to

see what would happen, like brewing it or fermenting it at different temperatures.

And so there was, I don't know, I think we were all excited to

play, but I still don't know when we decided to open a brewery.

Well,

like I said, there was a confession date and

then there was a think date.

Well, let's go back to this because

I think this is interesting.

If you look at like a Michelin star chef.

There is a process they have to go through of working in a restaurant.

They may start scrubbing the dishes and they got to be a sous chef or something.

And basically you've got to get your reps in and what you're

describing sounds like, okay, you could be a really good cook at home.

You can take a cookbook and you could make Julia Child's beef

bourguignon or something like that.

But then there's another step where you're coming up with the recipes

where, you know, enough about everything that goes in where you can

figure, Oh, this would go with this.

And so was this sort of just like your, your elementary education in, in brewing?

This was the book off the shelf at, at Barnes and

Noble, just, just putting my toe in the water of what is beer.

And, and at that point, I, I'm sure I did start to come up with my own recipes.

There was, there was information on the internet.

Oh, I could totally take over on this story.

You did start to, Oh, I remember.

So one, it was, Brewing Classic Styles by, was it Papacian?

that's Jamil, Zayn's chef.

Oh, so that was one.

But in our homebrew shop, it was called Learn to Brew in, it

was actually in Moore, Oklahoma.

but, the guy, I love the

tornado.

Yep.

Tornadoes going through all, all the time there.

But he had an all grain section his name was Chris.

Should explain all grain.

Oh, all grain is when you start with the grain

and you only use all grain.

you're the brewer, go.

Yeah, you can start with a can of extract made

famous by the prohibition era,

which if you are starting home brewing,

that's the way to start.

But if you want to do recipe development, move over to all grain once you

kind of get the technique down.

But what Bobby would do is he would walk in and it would take forever.

I swear I waited so long.

And he would walk in and just like, Put his hands in one of the bins of

grain, eat on it for a little while, walk to the next one and he'd add a

little bit of this grain and that grain.

And it took him forever just to pick the damn grain.

But what he was doing, I think at least, was he was like starting to understand

flavors from like a foundational level.

And then.

For at least wanting to understand.

Right.

And now that I, I, I know you now as a brewer, I see that

recipe development happen.

When you taste grain, you're actually tasting the finished product.

So we're, we're kind of talking about recipe development.

You end up talking to brewers, sharing secrets, going on the internet.

There's another piece of this story though.

And that's like owning a brewery and brewing as a professional, those dues

are paid not by making recipes because a brewery doesn't want you to walk in

and start making recipes and when you start making beer that they already sell.

There was a German brewery a few miles north of our house in Oklahoma,

and a really good one that had been there since I think the late eighties.

It was fantastic.

It's called Royal Bavaria and it's in the

absolute middle of nowhere.

Yeah, I recommend anyone finds yourself in Oklahoma City for a

layover, just drive a few miles south.

It's worth it.

they had a 10 barrel copper clad brewing system built in Germany, which is just

exactly like we have here in the end.

I, maybe that inspired me to open the brewery we have or

use the equipment we have.

I wanted to know how they were making beer that tasted like that.

So I'd kind of gone, this is backing up a little bit from the Boulder story.

This is before I even met the people from Boulder.

I wanted to know how beer like that can be made.

You know, German, German lager from the source is just incredible.

And I still think about the smells and, the taste of that

restaurant and that brewery.

So anyway, I started to get closer to that group.

They, they sold at some point in the early two thousands and I got to know

the new owner and the new brewer at the time as they were transitioning.

And I got to go there and helped deconstruct these old German recipes

and, and we're, you know, we're brewing and we're doing tank cleaning and

we're milling grain and we're doing, it's not a huge brewery at all, but

when it's just a couple of guys on a, on small equipment, you get to

know a lot about production brewing.

Fast forward from that, there's a big brewery in Oklahoma city that

I got connected with through that network and I was washing kegs

and hand bottle, hand canning.

Inordinate amounts of, of product through rudimentary equipment.

We had a boil kettle that was, I can mention this brewery because, you

know, they did what they did because they didn't have the, they didn't have

quite the resources they do today.

It's coop, C O O P, or co op, depending on how you might, it looks

like co op, but we always say coop.

they're a great brewery, fantastic IPA brewery in Oklahoma, and

I wanted to get to know them.

I should add that you are doing this at the same time

as you're still finishing your PhD.

So normally you would leave at 4 a.m.

to drive up into the city to go to coop and then you'd come back.

Then you'd actually go.

I would be filling kegs and washing kegs.

One side of the room I'd be washing kegs, maybe, you know, one at a time,

obviously on a keg washing machine, but on the other side of the room, I

have eight of them filling at a time.

So I'm over here filling and I'm washing and filling and washing.

And this is all before I go to class at eight to finish my

dissertation and so on and so on.

So is, was this a part time job or was this sort of your

way of becoming an apprentice?

Yes.

And yes, yeah, it was my way.

I said, Hey, I'll work for free.

I need the experience.

And they put me on the lowest rate Cause breweries don't have money, you know, it's

not like they can just for the, but you know, I, I made, I earned the money and I

was milling grain and I was I can explain this in a future episode, but we were hand

canning and crazy amounts of beer there.

It was a laborious experience.

The boil kettle was either on or off.

So I was in charge of running the boil because if you left it on a second too

long, it would shoot out the manway.

And if it's not long enough, you don't get the IPA you're looking for.

So you put the scrub at the, at the bottom of that pile to do that.

I've known many people that have gotten PhDs

and the process seems horrible.

It's horrible.

Like, it basically consumes your entire life for several years.

The fact that you're doing this in the morning seems to indicate at

least at the back of your mind or sometime that this is really kind

of what you wanted to be doing.

we knew by then that you were going to finish

your PhD, but you weren't going to stay in, well, stay in "science."

I use quotes around that because science is beer and beer is science.

but you, the goal is

That's a shirt by the way,

Go team.

we knew that you weren't, you were going to complete the PhD,

but that then you were going to move on into the brewing industry.

So for a lot of reasons, obviously you want to finish your PhD.

I mean, I had, I think it was nine years,

Eight eight.

Okay.

So I took seven, you took eight years.

And this is post, this is my postgraduate career was eight.

it included effectively, it included three years of

professional researcher in Boulder.

So even though I hadn't yet received my, my doctorate, I was sort of

in some sense passed ahead of the publications to make that happen.

There were a couple of publications though that I still lacked.

So that's what made it difficult as I had to continue to finish those while

I'm, I know I'm training to be a brewer.

I know this is what I want to do.

You were actually writing one of them

while you were in beer school.

I was in brewing school.

I was thinking about this yesterday, having a conversation and remembering

how much shit that, I have, we have done, like the same time oftentimes, and

I finished my fifth publication while I was studying microbiology and chemistry

to become a master brewer under the Institute of Brewing and Distilling.

So I, my mind was being just pulled in so many directions to

think that I was able to do that.

And I think it was only because we lived apart at that time.

I lived in California and Allison lived in Oklahoma.

That I think both of us professionally were doing quite well at that moment.

That's true.

No distraction

And she she was taking on her first research position, teaching

position post having her phd and here I was still writing a fifth publication

post having written my dissertation,

but you had also I mean, there's quite a Research is never done.

You just kind of walk away, but you had already done the work and so it but

It was it was not it was it was a lot to it wasn't just Hit print.

It takes some analysis and some work, but.

Yeah.

So we've done a lot of multitasking.

Gary's right.

I think that was, that was symbolically the time when we decided to open

the brewery when I'm cleaning kegs at four in the morning before

wrapping up the last few pages on my dissertation on the same day.

To get into beer school.

So the, the master brewers program at UC Davis, it was

like a two year waiting list.

And then you were on the list to get in, in 2014.

And then they called and said, guess what?

There's someone that dropped off the list.

You are now in this year.

Can you come?

And we knew about a month before you left for, Davis.

I think we had about a month to plan.

so we had the opportunity and we took it.

It wasn't just because it was faster.

It sped us along by at least a year, if not two.

but the way that that program works is if you turn down a slot, you

get sort of filed back the, it was, it was, could it be even longer.

So this is an opportunity and I'm sure we'll talk a lot about

it later, but this is one of the best brewing schools in the world.

And I applied as a, having a, you needed a physics degree, a

biology degree, a chemistry degree,

Some sort of science background.

Needed some things, something STEM in order

to get in on, on these programs.

And it was a six month intensive or maybe five month intensive.

Yeah,

session or

it was six months.

It was, was a class of 39 and I was the only non chemist

or biologist to Gary's point.

It was, it was a tough change of career for me and I'm nothing if not tenacious.

And what's the word of that, Alison, what would, how would you describe me?

When I fixate on a, on a goal?

I have a lot of words to describe you.

I know I shouldn't open that up to the wide answer,

but I had decided I'm doing this.

I can do this.

I'm not gonna be as good as of a chemist or biologist as everyone in this room,

but I can learn what I need to learn in order to to make up that difference.

And when it came to the engineering side of that program, they were, they were

the ones that were sweating bullets.

And I was fine with that.

It took me two years to ultimately to pass all the examinations to get my, it's

the Institute of Brewing and Distilling.

They're based in London and they were operating out of UC Davis.

They were operating one of their testing programs, one of their training programs.

And I made it through engineering and I made it through physics.

I actually made it through chemistry, those modules, which

were 15 pages, each a handwritten.

three days or one day per module.

But I didn't make it through the biology for a full year.

And so

you took the test twice.

I took it a second time and only offer it once per year.

And I, we, at this, at this point, fast forward, we had actually

moved to this town of Appleton.

You were a physics professor and I was a

Professor at Lawrence University and I'm kind

of meandering here, but I guess I'm just trying to say that.

I made a lot of, commitments starting with that job cleaning kegs four in the

morning to open a brewery and I was going to get it done and, and finishing my

PhD in a lot of ways was a step toward opening a brewery because you have to

show investors that you will finish something as insurmountable as that was.

it was a, it was tough as Gary points out.

It's a, it's a commitment and you can't just wish yourself a dissertation.

You have to be all in.

So, I hope that doesn't come across as though I was just, checking a

box when I got the dissertation.

I love that life.

I love that career.

And, beer just kind of, sucked me in and, and it was just the next, next chapter.

It was funny though when we when we told my parents, your

parents, like, Hey, you know, I think he's going to stop doing the whole NASA thing.

We're going to switch over and he's going to go into a, be a brewer.

They're like, what?

They were very upset by this.

And then, you know, come to find out that there's actually so

much more science in beer than anyone could ever really imagine.

It really does make a better pint.

I get asked a lot.

What is it like not teaching?

What's it like not being a scientist?

And I'm still a teacher.

I'm still a scientist.

I have a different classroom.

I have a different venue, different topic.

You don't turn that off.

A physicist is a problem solver.

That's what it is.

And if anyone wants to understand what physics is, I always describe it that way.

Yeah.

Don't go off Big Bang Theory.

Let's pause here.

And then when we come back in the next episode, I want to talk more

about beer school, as opposed to, you know, there's the art and science

of brewing and then how eventually you came to open McFleshman's.

Perfect.