Friday, 21 Jun 2002

OLYMPIA, Wash.

Well, it is finally Friday. Having just briefly reviewed my entries for the last few days, I fear I may have given the impression that my job is less than fun. Today, however, is the kind of day which makes the beer business worthwhile. Although we will be very busy arranging last-minute shipments to distributors and stocking the Fishbowl Pub with beer for the weekend, we do have a fun production meeting scheduled.

After taking care of business as usual all morning and putting out several minor fires, we finally convene in the early afternoon to do a little quality control and new recipe formulation. This is why we all joined the business. I started out as a homebrewer before founding the company, and all the brewing staff began as homebrewers and beer geeks. Fundamentally, we just love beer. Some of us drink more beer than others, but we all love making, talking about, and sampling beer in its varied and wonderful forms. If we didn’t love beer we would get real jobs with real pay.

At today’s production meeting, the usual suspects are present. First, there are the people we proudly refer to as The Mighty Fish Brewers: Philip Roche, Jennifer Gridley, and Jeff Wuellner. Dominick Tullo is also present. Dom does not brew but he does make sure the beer gets finished, packaged, and loaded out the door. These four people are joined by their supervisor, Martin Bills, and myself.

My own role in production is a complicated one. I am the founder of the company and am currently responsible for marketing and selling our products. I was head brewer for the first year we were in operation and I have been in the business longer than anyone else. In short, I am a know-it-all who refuses to go away, and I insist on having my opinion heard. Actually, it makes sense for me to have some input since I am the most in tune with what our customer base, including distributors, bar owners, and beer drinkers, are currently infatuated with. Fortunately, my choice back in 1999 to go organic was the right call, so I still have some credibility.

We begin production meetings, especially on Fridays, with a broad sampling of our products. Since last October when we first began brewing our new Leavenworth Beers brands, we have been tasting a lot of these products. I was about the only person in the group who was very familiar with these beers, since I was used to tasting them while doing my rounds in Seattle. These beers are very different from our Fish Tale Ales brands. They are unfiltered, we use a different yeast altogether, and for the most part we are using different malts and hops in brewing these beers. We are finally starting to become more familiar with these beers, but it has been a struggle. Everybody does not agree on recipes, procedure, or even the way the beers should be changed to improve the original Leavenworth recipes. Nonetheless, I believe that a consensus is finally forming. Sitting around drinking beer with your coworkers on a Friday afternoon tends to lead to a consensus of one form or another.

In addition to all this important sampling of finished product, we also take the opportunity at these meetings to examine some raw materials. Today we are scrutinizing some new organic malt and hop samples which our suppliers sent us. The unfortunate reality is that there are extremely limited varieties of malt and hops available to organic brewers. To claim that our beers are “organic,” we need to brew with at least 95 percent certified organic raw materials. Since there are no certified organic hops grown in the United States (at least none that are commercially available to brewers), we need to import all of our hops. The very best are grown in New Zealand, which seems to be free of certain pests and diseases that hops are prone to. Naturally we hate having to import hops. The shipping cost only adds to the cost of the beer and we feel guilty about the fuel expended in getting them here.

The need to import hops is just one of the little compromises we are faced with in trying to become the greenest brewery possible. Sometimes we find more eco-friendly solutions, sometimes we don’t. But the little victories make it worthwhile. Just recently we found a company that will collect and recycle our shrink-wrap. You can’t avoid shrink-wrap in the beer business, and so it came as a great relief to remove this stuff from our waste stream. We also found a farmer last month who is feeding our spent organic grain to his livestock, which is certified organic and sold at our local farmers’ market. I love being able to buy this guy’s meat for my family.

The bottom line is that brewing is resource intensive. We use a lot of water and energy to produce beer. There is little we can do about that. Still, we’ve had a lot of success in reducing our waste stream and using raw materials that are certified organic. It does not leave any but the narrowest profit margin, but we do love working here. It seems like ages since that cold morning in January when we reached rock bottom. Should we have just hung up our boots and called it quits? I don’t think so. If we hadn’t stuck it out, all those beer drinkers looking for a more eco-friendly alternative would have far fewer choices. On this particular Friday afternoon, I choose to sample another Fish Tale Organic India Pale Ale. TGIF everybody.