We fan girl for 79 minutes and 18 seconds. I mean, seriously, they've talked about him so much before, it's nice to actually hear from the man himself!

Join Gary Arndt, Joel, and Bobby as they interview Ken Grossman, founder of Sierra Nevada Brewing Company. From early brewing challenges to craft beer innovations and the story behind iconic beers like Celebration Ale and Torpedo, discover the journey of an American craft beer pioneer. Part 2 coming next week!

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TIMELINE

00:00 The Godfather of Craft Beer

05:09 Celebration Ale: A Deep Dive

14:49 Innovations and Brewing Challenges

34:50 Support us on Patreon!

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CREDITS

Hosts:

Bobby Fleshman - https://www.mcfleshmans.com/

Allison Fleshman -https://www.instagram.com/mcfleshmans/

Joel Hermansen

Gary Ardnt - https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/

Music by Sarah Lynn Huss - https://www.facebook.com/kevin.huss.52/

Recorded & Produced by David Kalsow - https://davidkalsow.com/

Brought to you by McFleshman's Brewing Co

McFleshman's: Hello everyone.

My name is Gary Arndt.

Welcome to another episode of Respecting the Beer.

With me, Joel and Bobby.

No special intros this time.

Because we got something bigger and better to get to.

If you are familiar with beer or brewing, you probably heard of today's guest.

He was the founder of the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, a pioneer in American craft beer.

His name's come up in many previous episodes, his Sierra Nevada Pale Ale helped define the American Pale Ale style.

His memoir, Beyond the Pale recounts the challenges of building a brewery back when Small scale beer making was nearly unheard of in the United States, and it's probably one of the best books on beer and brewing that you'll ever find.

Please welcome to the show, Ken Grossman.

Thanks for having me.

This should be fun.

McFleshman's: All right, Ken, we, Bobby and I worked really hard on formulating some questions.

Um, obviously the, there's only 12, 14 pages we distilled it down to, right?

Yeah.

We were able to, to whittle it way down.

Um, you're, you're a hard guy to study because you have your book.

Um, you've, you've obviously done a lot of episodes on shows like this.

Um, the, the amount of literature that, that you've published personally that's been published about you is, is profound.

Uh, so what I wanted to start with just kind of a simple question, phrased twice, what did your day look like in 1985 and what did your day look like in 2025?

Wow.

So 85, uh, I was still at the original brewing facility, which, um, you know, was a home-built, 10 barrel, very primitive and crude, um, brew house and fermentation cellar.

Um, not a lot of sophistication compared to today's startup growers who can buy purpose-built equipment.

Um, so we were chugging away in 1985, so we'd been in business five years.

Um, actually, uh, incorporated Sierra Nevada in 1978.

So, it took us a couple of years to build all the equipment to retrofit a building and to actually make our first batch of beer, which is the end of 1980.

We were, um, at that point struggling to build enough volume that we could actually get, uh, some bank financing.

Uh, I had purchased a defunct shuttered brewery in Germany, um, early eighties and had shipped it to California with the hope of getting enough money together to install and build a, a new facility.

'cause the original brewery was, uh, painfully, primitive and very, very small.

Uh, we started out in a 3000 square foot metal building with nothing, and by 85 we'd taken over the, uh, adjacent to metal buildings to use for warehousing and had expanded the brewery to, to try to maximize production.

So it was probably at about, I dunno, seven or 8,000 barrels in, in 1985.

With again, the hope of, of generating enough cash flow that I could get bank financing, which we had not been able to do, uh, previous to that.

So I bought this brew house with the whole hope of installing it the next year and, and actually it set in storage for almost five years, um, until we could generate enough income to convince a bank to loan us some money.

So I got my first SBA loan a couple years later.

Uh, 2025.

Um, right now I'm trying to be retired.

Um, I'm, I, I'm in my seventies and, and, uh.

I've worked really hard for a lot of years and I've got, uh, a good leadership team and two of my kids are involved in the business.

My son's out in North Carolina as part of that group and, uh, leadership team out there.

And my daughter Sierra's, um, in the Chico Brewery and I have a third daughter who's not involved in the business.

Right now I'm trying to mountain bike and, um, do some brewery work where I'm, uh, able to, to help.

Um, so I'm, I'm keeping my fingers in just a couple of areas of, uh, of new product development, um, and, uh, some engineering support to the, to the team that's getting up to speed on a lot of the stuff I used to do.

McFleshman's: Hopefully you're not doing too much 'cause your, uh, your intro there kind of reminded me of the Nelson Mandela quote when he said that he is looking forward to retiring from retirement 'cause he was too busy in retirement.

Um, I, you know, I, I've tried to retire before when I turned 65.

My hope was that I could slow down and, and, uh, a lot of things happened.

Pandemic and, and fires and hurricanes and things like that.

So I have stepped back in, uh, a few times since I attempted to retire the first time.

And, and this time I'm being more successful.

I'm, I'm spending more time doing fun stuff and less time, um, being involved in, in brewery operations.

McFleshman's: Well, congratulations on the second retirement.

Well, thank you.

McFleshman's: As you can see everyone at the table, including our producer, who has just had this beer for the first time, which is, um, somewhat shocking to me actually because I, Bobby and I, I know we, we have a consensus on this.

I am firmly of the opinion that Celebration Ale is the best commercially available beer in the United States.

I don't, I, I, I literally am on chats with people to try to find it.

Uh, my good friend Christophe, who gets it first each always finds it before anyone else.

I, there's like a watch for when it comes out in, in Wisconsin.

It's anywhere from the 24th of October, I think has been the earliest.

Uh, the latest, uh, and I'm not gonna scold you for this, but I think the latest was maybe November 6th, which was really a difficult year for everybody here.

Um, it, it is, uh, it is absolutely sensational.

And I, I, I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about what makes this particular beer so absolutely exceptional.

Well, I'll go, actually go back to the history of, of me brewing it.

Um, so, uh, 1981, we wanted to do a special beer and I, I, at that point I had traveled to Europe and, and it had some, um, you know, special packagings around holiday time.

And in the US actually there is a, an old tradition of having holiday beers.

Um, I've got some old bottles and, and cans of early vintages from some of the American brewers that are sadly out of business now.

So we wanted to do a holiday beer and, uh, I went to Yakima with the intent of selecting hops for, uh, for the beer in September during harvest, and found a really nice field of cascades that, uh, just were, popping with aroma.

They were a baby field, which is a first year, um, harvested field, so not quite a full yield of hops.

And the hops tend to be a little bit smaller sometimes with, with the baby crops.

Uh, the, the actual, um, hop cone.

Uh, but anyway, I found a field that really popped, and so bought a bale.

'Cause back in those days, uh, a bale of hops was a lot for a a, a small brewer who was doing.

Um, you know, a couple thousand barrels a year, uh, and we were using all ho c hops.

We had the intent of dry hopping it from the very beginning.

And so I think, uh, for us it was really our first commercial dry hop beer as home brewers.

I started home brewing in 1969, I think.

I did a lot of dry hopping and I owned a home brew supply store for a number of years before I opened the brewery.

And so I was familiar with dry hopping and had, I say done quite a bit of it, but I really wanted to, to make a heavily dry hopped, higher gravity, uh, holiday beer.

And so we did our first, I think it was 90 cases right around, uh, was the first year's production of Celebration ail.

And I fell in love with it.

Then it was, uh, you know, traditional cone hops and, and a mesh bag, hanging out inside the fermenter during the maturation process.

And it's something we've continued on, uh, really to this day and, and continue to grow and expand it.

, It's our most popular seasonal, uh, by far, and it's one that's, uh, like you I really do enjoy celebration l season.

It's my favorite time of year.

I,

McFleshman's: I would also point out it's our buddy Charlie Bamforth favorite Sierra Nevada beer.

yeah, yeah.

You know, Charlie, uh, when he first came to the States, uh, he made a comment to me about my bears being too hoppy and too bitter.

And, um, and I said, well, Charlie's been working for me, so, uh, I think I'm gonna stick with my, my plan.

And he, I think has, has changed his tastes a little bit over the years.

And, and now he appreciates, uh, hops more than I think when he had first come to the US from the UK.

McFleshman's: We could spend How many hours just on this one beer?

This one subject.

Oh, I, yeah.

This is the best beer in the United States.

I don't, I'll die on that hill.

But I wanted to bring up some lure.

Uh, a, a bullet, uh, I guess there's something called celly drippings right

Yep.

McFleshman's: Is that available anywhere outside of your pub?

It is not.

It is not.

Yep.

And, and you know, we've, we've been having these drippings and the brewers would, you know, grab a, a, a, a cup of 'em as we were emptying the fermenters.

So essentially it's the, the liquid that drips off of, uh, the beer that drips off of, uh, these mesh hop sacks.

And, uh, they started collecting it out in North Carolina to serve in the taproom a few years back.

And, uh, up until that point had really been only available to the brewers who were, um, there to, to capture the, the little bit of, of beer that dripped off the hop hop sacks.

Um, so we've started to, I guess, expose it to a wider audience and were getting.

I don't know how many barrels of, of drippings out of, uh, near nearly 40,000 barrels of Celebration we brew between the two breweries.

I think we get some, something less than 10 barrels of the, of the drippings collected.

McFleshman's: And the cat's outta the bag.

Now the, the brewers don't get to take it all home.

Yeah.

McFleshman's: Ken, I have been wanting to ask you this question since I first had this beer and I think it was 2006.

I was out in the Sacramento area and I had anniversary ale for the first time, and I was gobsmacked that that beer was sensational.

Um, did Anniversary Ale become Torpedo?

No, a actually, Celebration ale became Torpedo, uh, in a different, uh, in a different fashion.

So, when we were at the, uh, well we only had the Chico Brewery at the time and, and Celebration Ale sales were exceeding our ability to produce it in, uh, the conventional way.

So we, as I mentioned, we tie these big bags into, uh, into the fermenters and have them, uh, soak there for, you know, a week or, or so during the maturation process.

And I was playing with the idea of a external, um, whole cone hopping system.

It was, uh, something that, we played around with, I, I can't remember when I originally started, but, played around with for a number of years, um, and was not very successful at, at getting beer, uh, to flow through a bed of hops externally.

And came up with this perforated, uh, concept of a, of a cage, of hops inside of a vessel that we could circulate the beer through.

At the end of one of the Celebration Ale seasons, uh, I wanted to experiment, but we had didn't want to release it as Celebration Ale so we played around with the equipment and had a good success and ended up, um, putting it in our Chico tap room, calling it Torpedo because the vessel I was packed, packing full of hops, sort of looked like a torpedo.

That became torpedo ale.

McFleshman's: Which is, um, I, I, I can't recall the last time that I had beer in my fridge and Torpedo was not one of them.

Yeah.

Um, it is, it's an institution.

And the device itself, if anyone has done the tour, they've seen it.

They've seen these in use at your, at your breweries, I'm sure.

And you've, you know, we can we, I don't want to go off on the subject too much, but you are obsessed with keeping oxygen outta the process and getting the most outta your hops and the flavor stability.

And, and I'm sure a lot of that played into any, any moment where you try to introduce hops into beer.

I'm sure you're thinking about that obsessively.

Yeah, and, and, and actually it's a big, uh, ongoing concern.

Anytime you use even, you know, whole cone hops.

Uh, if you don't have any active fermentation going on, you're invariably gonna pick up some, uh, oxidation from, from the, so, uh, we tend to do, uh, warm, dry hopping, with a little bit of residual extract still left, and the yeast still active, so.

That any small amount of oxygen that gets in, uh, when you introduce the hops does get mopped up.

Um, but yeah, as you pointed out, it is a big concern of ours and we've done a lot of work around oxygen ingress and everything from bottle caps to, all the different processing that happens in a brewery, you know, whether it's filtration or centrifuging or, or whatever.

Uh, so we've paid very, very close attention to trying to minimize that, uh, everywhere possible.

Um,

McFleshman's: we have a note here to bring up EPR with you because of your obsession with, with oxygen and its impact downstream.

Uh,

and with that, that, that note came from Charlie?

McFleshman's: Yeah.

Well, and that's, that's it near the end of your book where you, uh, Charlie is in your book is kind of telling you, Hey, I don't know if we need to spend, I think it was more than, more than $200,000 on this EF 1990s money or whatever.

Yeah.

Right.

But I, I think it, it speaks to kind of your unrelenting, and I mean this as a complete compliment.

It, it's kind of your unrelenting commitment to quality.

Yeah, that's a funny story.

So, I was investigating EPRI was, I was looking for the holy grail of, of, uh, of looking at oxygen ingress.

There had been a bit of research done in the brew industry.

Uh, E-P-R-E-S-R, Electron Spin Resonance, um, is a, uh, very high tech, uh, instrument that's used to look at free radicals and, uh, uh, some breweries, I won't mention at this point, but some breweries were doing a lot of research around, um, trying to use this instrument to detect.

Whether or not you were picking up oxygen or, or, or essentially having flavor degradation.

So I read, read a bit of this research, and I was sort of sold on the, the concept.

And, Charlie was not, , on the same page.

Uh, he thought it was a, a very expensive way to measure, um, uh, SO two and iron.

Both which we could be measured with other kinds of instrumentation, uh, because the EPR will show if you've got, um, trace metals, copper, iron, uh, which are also bad actors for beer flavor stability.

And it'll also show if you've got sulfur dioxide present.

And so Charlie wasn't convinced that the, the science really was worthy of the investment.

And I was so convinced that I wanted to.

Not, uh, leave any stone unturned that I, I made the decision to, to buy a very expensive instrument.

And, not that it ended up showing us the holy grail, but it, it did show us at times where we had, uh, issues.

Um, it was able to uncover things like, uh, iron, that came from fresh stainless steel beer kegs.

We, uh, had a, had an incidence where we were analyzing beers on a routine basis, and the EPR came up with some very, ugly looking, uh, data for protector beer.

We tasted it, we didn't detect anything wrong with it.

This was that packaging.

The EPR showed it had a problem.

Um, and we sort of just chalked it up to, huh Um, we're not sure what, what it's showing us.

As it turned out, we were at that point in time expanding our draft packaging quite a bit.

And we had bought a, a, a lot of, uh, 20 liter or five gallon beer kegs, uh, which have a pretty high surface to volume ratio compared to a half barrel.

And this happened to be a keg that was, uh, freshly filled.

And what it did show us is that, uh, a after a number of weeks, we went and reta that particular batch of beer.

And at that point in time, we could definitely tell there was some oxidation that was, uh, well above what would've been have been expected.

And it turned out, uh, the bit more research.

We had a lot of free iron coming from the beer keg and started to dig into the, the whole science of passivation, uh, which these were passivated at the keg manufacturer.

But the passivation that's commonly done does not remove all of the surface iron, um, by any means.

And so, uh, we launched a pretty exhaustive plan to try to deal with, fresh kegs and the, the impact it had on the beer.

'cause we started to, to notice, uh, and I was about the same time I was in the trade quite a bit, uh, tasting our beer at various accounts around the country.

And I would occasionally get a metallic tasting keg.

And I just sort of chalked it up to maybe the draft system or something.

But in hindsight.

Uh, it was probably a, a, a newer stainless steel keg we were using that we were still picking up some free iron from the surface.

So we spent literally months researching how to passivate beer kegs properly and worked with the keg manufacturers, worked.

Uh, we were buying kegs from three different, uh, vendors at the time, um, trying to look at their processes.

We analyzed their ation or pickling solution they were using, and, uh, came up with the fact that it had a lot of iron in the solution.

They were passivating their kegs with.

Um, we experimented with all types of acid treatment, uh, to try to, uh, again, remove that surface iron.

Uh, none of it was successful and we finally, we actually did publish a paper on it and we presented it at, um, uh, I think A SBC or MBA, uh, at the time.

We did, uh, enough research and realized that hop acids were actually quite good at passivating the keg.

And so we came up with a solution of, uh, phosphoric acid and alpha and beta acids that we would dose at, um, a hundred ppm I think.

And, soak the keg and time was also required.

So we would soak the keg for about two weeks with the solution and it, and drain that out, and then we could refill it with beer.

And after that treatment we could pretty much get a, a keg that was, uh, free of free iron, um, that was affecting the beer.

So, uh, I, I do credit the EPR was sort of pointing us in that direction.

I'm not sure we would've, uh, stumbled on that on our own without that instrument.

So was it the holy grail?

No, but it, I think it did prove to be very valuable for us improving our quality overall.

McFleshman's: So if I'm interpreting this correctly, Charlie didn't know what he was talking about?

Um, no, Charlie know, he was talking about, um, if I had, uh, analyzed that beer with a, um, which now we, we have a ICP, which is, instrument that gets down into parts per billion of copper and iron.

So if I had analyzed that beer with that instrument, it would've showed me, I had, I can't remember, 70, 80 PP of, of iron in, in the beer.

McFleshman's: So do you still do that with every keg that comes in, or do you work with the manufacturers to, to, uh, pass a before it gets to you?

Uh,

McFleshman's: to your standards?

We do that with every kick that comes in.

Um, we, we did not find that anybody's treatment, um, got rid of the iron, and so we worked with all the manufacturers and.

Nobody could pretreat the keg well enough that you wouldn't have a, uh, have a taint.

I, I, I go back to sort of my very early years.

Um, I was out of the Coors Brewery.

This was probably very early eighties, and they were just switching from wax lined, uh, aluminum barrels, which is, uh, which is what they had been using.

They had aluminum kegs and they were paraffin lined, and every single cycle, they would melt the paraffin out with steam.

Uh, they would clean the keg, they would recoat it with paraffin, and then they'd put beer in it.

When they were switching to stainless steel, beer kegs and other stainless steel equipment, they would actually put beer in it, at the beer soak and absorb the iron and then dump the beer.

Um, and we had, uh, had toyed with that idea.

But, you know, the, the, the cost and the BOD load and waste water load and all that of using beer.

Uh, as the pickling or passivating solution re really wasn't practical.

So that's when we decided to come up with this alpha acid.

Um, but you know, going back historically, you know, Coors was very focused on that same issue.

McFleshman's: Right.

Where do you take the questions, Joel?

Because this is gonna turn into Right?

No.

Two weeks of interview.

I mean, that,

That, that, that was epic.

Um, so I, I'm gonna ask the only question, Ken, that I think can be asked, and, and I think you've kind of answered it, but we're gonna, we're actually gonna record another episode after this, that kind of highlights our very first experience, uh, 'cause I remember it.

I know you remember yours.

I'm assuming Gary remembers his, where were you the first time you had Sierra Nevada Green?

And my question in relation to that, why do you have a knack for creating beers that literally have an ethos about them?

Well, uh, that's a good question.

Um, you know, the original Pale Ale was one that, uh, as a home brewer, um, I, I brewed a lot of styles of beer, and so I was fairly sophisticated for that era.

So this was the, uh, well, lemme step back even a little further into my, uh, first initial observations of, of home brewing.

Um, when I grew up, uh, at a quite young age, I think probably eight or nine, I was exposed to fermenting work, uh, work being boiled on the stove the neighborhood I grew up in had, uh, a lot of interesting people, just like your group.

There was a, a metallurgist who worked for Rocketdyne and was a good friend of the family.

His son and I were best buddies.

Um, he was a mountain climber.

Did a lot of Sierra Club activities.

He was a cyclist.

Uh, loved to ride his bike long, long trips.

He was a foodie.

Um, and he was a home brewer, home winemaker.

Um, so he, he put a science into home brewing.

And this goes back to when he was in college, which I think was in the fifties.

He started home brewing and he got into it.

So, you know, back in that era, you know, all grain home brewing was really not being done by too many people.

Um, and so he took the science of brewing and, and studied everything he could, he could get his hands on.

He had, uh, a buddy who worked at one of the large breweries in Los Angeles, and that person would get him premium hops.

Um.

Give him a thermos yeast every once in a while.

And so he was making great home brew.

And, and so I was exposed to, to his thinking and, and his brewing at a pretty early age.

So when I started home brewing, I tried to get my hands on good ingredients and, and knowledge.

And back in that day, there wasn't a lot of knowledge that was written for home brewing.

So when I came up to Chico in 1972, I continued to home brew and, and actually did a little distillation and made some wine, and then I opened a home brew supply store.

And so I was pretty keenly, uh, into beer and, and brewing.

And then with Davis, right down the road, I started to go to the Davis Brewing Library.

Um, and then I got together with one of my customers, became my partner, Paul, uh, Kamozi, to open Sierra Nevada.

I think for us, um, you know, Uh, trying to brew the best beer we could goes, you know, back to our roots and, and, uh, trying to come up with balance and flavor.

Um, you know, one thing that we've strived to do all these years is make drinkable beers that have a lot of qualities to 'em.

Um, not just, uh, the flavor and aroma, but just the, you know, the whole package of, of what we're, we're trying to put in front of, uh, our consumers.

I don't know, um, on the, I guess on the development side, really just trying to really enhance flavor and drinkability, I guess has, has sort of been our, our at our roots and, and try to make beers that, that people keep coming back for 'em that are moreish as we say.

You want another one?

McFleshman's: Well, you, whatever you're doing, uh, it, it, it has absolutely worked.

And I know that one of the reasons that it has worked as effectively as it has is because you have consistently found yourself at the forefront of technology.

You have always been, um, you know, in your brewing process, whether it's your use of energy or, or, or whatnot, but you are.

At the, at the core of it, and this is where I, I, I'm hoping to, to connect your thoughts with Bobby's, because I know he does many of the same things, but you are remarkably innovative and, and you have been since 1978.

I mean, when you read the first eight to 10 chapters of Beyond the Pale, it is one story of innovation and tinkering.

And, uh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna repurpose this and make it this after the other.

And it, it, it's, it's remarkable when you think about all of the, the work that you did between 1978 and and 1990 repurposing this, and we're gonna squeeze a hundred more bottles an hour by doing this.

We're gonna do this to increase, uh, you know, our, our yield by.

By 2%.

So I, I wanted to ask you three different questions about innovation.

Um, and I, I'll go through 'em one by one, but what was your most memorable innovation in those early years of developing the brewery and having to repurpose and, you know, pilot new technologies and, and things.

And I, I can see, and I'm gonna say this to the audience, but you're smiling right now, so I know this is an area that, that you take great pride in.

Yeah, I'm trying to think back, uh, some of the, the, I guess, more novel ones that I came up with, um, and it's not all of 'em worked out a hundred percent of the time, but, but, uh, um, I had a little malt room.

I built my first malt mill, which was, was very primitive and shook and made a lot of noise and, um, was not long for this world.

Um, so I ran it for, I dunno, a year, a year and a half.

And then, uh, built a little malt room out behind the, the brewery.

And we had a 3000 square foot building and I added the bottle shop on.

And when I went down to the city to get a permit to do that, um, my original drawing showed a seven or 800 square foot.

Uh, addition for the bottle filler.

'cause after we leased the building, we couldn't fit everything in it.

Um, we didn't realize that going into it.

And the city said, well, if you add over 500 square feet, you're gonna have to pay, um, development fees.

And, and we didn't have any money.

So I said, well, how about 498 feet?

So I drew a line across the paper and shortened the room and made it 498 feet and didn't pay those fees.

So I didn't want to pay fees in the future.

So I started to build, uh, things like the malt room on peeler cores to make a mobile.

So they weren't a permanent structure.

And so my original malt room was out back and I had, uh, bought a mill from, um, the Orley Brewery, which had been their backup mill.

And it was from 1906.

Really primitive, heavy cast iron two roller mill, uh, and set it up in.

In the back, in this little building I put together from scrap, uh, sheet metal and built a malt weighing scale, which was a meat scale, that had a hopper hanging underneath it.

And and a microswitch that would trip the feed off to the auger that was feeding and I would weigh out, uh, my 480 pounds or whatever I was brewing with, uh, at the time.

One day I came out and, and, uh, something had happened and the micro switch had slipped or something, and the auger had emptied all of the malt out of the silo into the room.

And it was pouring out the door of this, of this little malt building, when I came out.

So, I ended up building from a vacuum cleaner that I picked up, uh, an industrial explosion proof vacuum cleaner.

I built a pneumatic grain handling system.

Um, out of that, back in, uh, probably 82 or 83, utilizing, I can't remember what I used for elbows, but, uh, it was totally cobbled together, but it would suck the malt from way out back, uh, up to a, a hopper above our mill.

Uh, suck my foot together out of, as a vacuum cleaner and some spare parts.

McFleshman's: This is totally you, is so you.

My gosh.

You guys are like kindred spirits.

So yeah, so that was a big innovation.

I put a gris case in.

'cause up until that point I was actually milling into buckets and then dragging the buckets up and dumping them into, uh, the mash ton and, and stirring it with a canoe paddle.

I did that for years to mash in.

We had, again, very primitive brewing equipment, no ability to heat the mash ton

So we were doing one temperature infusion.

It was into an old, insulated cream vat that I'd picked up at a scrap yard somewhere.

So that was the, the first, first mash ton.

Um, yeah.

And that, that's one where talking about primitive, um, I didn't have enough money to buy perforated or slotted plates for the ladder ton bottom.

Um, and ended up drilling, I estimated about 4,000, uh, holes through, uh, stainless steel plate.

Yeah.

Um, and my, my teacher at the time says, you know, you can buy perforated metal.

I was doing this out at the junior college so I could use their radial arm drill press.

He says, you know, you can buy perforated metal and you don't have to drill all these holes.

I said, I don't have any money.

I can't.

I've got this scrap metal.

I can drill holes in it for free.

Um, just the cost of a couple bags of drill bits.

Um.

So, yeah, so those were, yeah, some of the, the early primitive things I did,

McFleshman's: And that original brewhouse has gone on tour in the last 10 or so years, right?

It feels like.

Yeah.

I loaned it, uh, to, uh, Quin Topia Brewery up in Quincy when their brewery burned down, uh, a few years back.

So it was actually gone for a, a number, almost two years, uh, helping them out.

Uh, but we got it back.

It's in front of the brew house, or or front of our main brew house right now on display.

Uh, since this is our 45th anniversary this last week.

, McFleshman's: Oh, congrats on that.

yeah.

Thank you.

Um, yeah, the,

McFleshman's: Chico or Asheville?

it's in Chico.

The, the plan actually, right when COVID was starting, um, we had put it on wheels.

We actually built a frame underneath it and um, made it so it was totally mobile.

It had its own propane tanks.

Um, you could pull up to a place that had power and, and water and brew beer.

And so, uh, for our 40th anniversary, the plan was to drive cross country, um, drive across country from the west coast to the east coast and end up, uh, in Mills River, uh, after brewing, um, I don't know how many stops we had 10, 15 stops along the way to brew at friends' breweries.

And we would make the work and let them ferment it.

And so the, that was our plan.

And I did the very first brew day down in Berkeley, outside of our, our tasting room at the time, the Torpedo Room.

Um, and then COVID hit big time the next week and shut everything down.

And so we, we didn't take that brewhouse on the road.

Maybe for my 50th, if I'm still able, that would be fun to do.

But, um, yeah, it's fully transportable and, and so we can tow it around and, and brew beer.

McFleshman's: Sign us up.

I'd love to be on the potential list of stops.

Oh yeah.

That, that, that would be something.

Um, Ken, Bobby, Bobby, Ken.

You two are the same person.

Um, I, Ken, when I come into work, Bobby's repurposing something and

You gotta always do.

McFleshman's: I'm in the tap room.

I've brewed beer for many, many years.

I don't brew nearly as well as he does.

Uh, but when I come into work, there's always some tinkering happening.

And, and, and we also have some neighbors.

I pointed that out earlier.

We have some neighbors, the brewery across the alley and the, the founder is one who has done fabrication at all the large breweries.

So he has the ability to, to teach me and, and to execute on some of these big ideas that we have.

So, yeah, it's a lot of fun that what we have going on, on this block and in this industry.

Yeah, I, I've, uh, over the years, I've, I've dug into a lot of areas of brewing.

Some of it that's, um, well outside of brewing since as wastewater.

I'm a fair expert on wastewater treatment at this point.

Been involved in a building a few plants and, um, so you end up learning science and learning, uh, areas, um, that are outside of just brewing beer when you're a brewer.

And that's gonna wrap up this episode of Respecting the Beer.

Be sure to tune in next week as we continue the conversation with the Ken Grossman.

You're not gonna wanna miss this.

And remember, it's on Thursdays moving forward, so don't be disappointed on Monday.

Respecting the Beer is produced by me, David Kalsow with music by Sarah Lynn Huss.

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