The Exchanges

Q There's a story that, that I've read about when your, your dad came to pick you up and, and drove you home, and he, he was, obviously you were disappointed. Your parents were disappointed. What, what do you remember about that?

A Yeah, so I lived on the third floor of this boy's dormitory that, for whatever reason, the administration school allowed all the troublemakers to, to be under one dorm, so I was in there with a bunch of friends, and I had my record player on. My dad pulled up in his F one 50 pickup truck, and I just opened up the window and just threw garbage bags of all my belongings down in the bed of the truck, you know, while my roommates played That's Life by Frank Sinatra, I guess, An homage to my Italian heritage, and then my dad drove me from Northfield, uh, back to Greenfield, Mass, like a couple towns away where we lived. You could see him, like, you know, jaw, like, clenching, doesn't know if he should say anything, and I just, I didn't know what to say to him, and at one stop sign, he said, you know, Sammy, sometimes you're a tough kid to love, and that was the only sentence I got on my, my way home, and it was a brutal night, you know, my mom, I got home, and she had a book Ready for me that was called When Bad Things Happen to Good People, and then literally the next morning, we go outside, and my Labrador retriever that was on a run outside, the run recoiled, and he hung himself and died, so, and within 24 hours, I got kicked out of high school.

AI assessment note: “he said, you know, Sammy, sometimes you're a tough kid to love”

Q Right. So from what I understand, in, initially, maybe in the first at least year, you were brewing all of the beer for this restaurant in 15 gallon kegs on propane burners. That's not a lot of beer for a restaurant that has a 150 seats every night, so what, just help me understand how, how you were brewing enough beer. What were you doing?

A Yeah, so, um, I had a mattress in the cellar of the pub, so I would only go home to our house maybe three or four nights a week, and then stay in the basement of the cellar, and we would shut at midnight or one, and then I'd start brewing, you know, before the day would get hot, you'd want to start brewing by You know, eight in the morning or so, so five or six days a week, I would triple brew, you know, 12 gallon batches. It worked fine. I would use the hose before people got there in the, in the, in the brewery for my showers. And Mariah had a real job because we needed insurance.

AI assessment note: “five or six days a week, I would triple brew, you know, 12 gallon batches.”

Q Um, while you weren't in college, Sam, at Muhlenberg College, were you a, a beer guy? And I mean, everybody's a beer person in college at some point, right? You know, but did you think about beer? Did you, Notice it, appreciate it, or were you, ah, like, ah, kind of a typical college student, just pounding beers?

A More like that typical college student. I will say, you know, when I left Muhlenberg the next day, I moved to New York City and English major, I wanted to go take, you know, courses at Columbia or, you know, at Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac went, and so I started taking courses in the MFA program up there, but, ah, to pay my rent, I worked at a bar across the street from Columbia, That was called Nacho Mama's Burritos, which is a pretty, you know, auspicious name for what actually was an amazing first generation craft beer bar. And, you know, within weeks I had Chimay Red and Sierra Nevada Celebration, and that's really where I had my epiphany beers and started on the journey, you know.

AI assessment note: “More like that typical college student.”

Q So you, you, you thought right then and there, I'm going to start, I'm going to write a business plan. Before we get to the business plan, you had not yet understood the science of beer at this point. Now, of course you do, but then you were kind of just throwing things into a bucket and mixing it and hoping it worked out at that point, right?

A Um, to some extent, but I would, at that little shop of hops, I bought the book that I first read in the library called, uh, the joy of homebrewing and Charlie Papazian, Wrote that book, and it's considered sort of the Bible, and so Charlie did a really great job in The Joy of Homebrewing of putting into layman terms the science of fermentation, so by reading that, I had some level of confidence, because his rallying cry throughout the book was, don't worry, relax, have a homebrew, which is basically, yep, there's some serious science going on in your kitchen right now with these little single-cell animals called yeast, but don't freak out, you know, this has been happening for thousands of years, trust the process, and you'll make good beer.

AI assessment note: “Um, to some extent, but I would, at that little shop of hops, I bought the book”

Q Did you go into that job thinking that you wanted to start a business one day? Because you went to, to take writing classes, but it seems to me that maybe actually you really were already thinking about What could I do? Maybe I could, like, what kind of business could I do? Is that, is that right?

A Yeah, I think so, because, you know, my dad was really entrepreneurial and always kind of presented to that. He always sort of romanticized that, not in like a corny over the top way, but just he respected that sort of American dream, you know, land of opportunity to be an entrepreneur. So that was in the back of my mind, but the other thing really was the owner of Nacho Mamas, Joshua Mandel, was only like four or five years old, and he, he'd left like the start of a career in, in tech here in Boston, moved back to New York City, And started a burrito takeout joint with no entrepreneurial or business experience. So I didn't have to look that far from me to have this inspirational figure. And then he and I kind of both got into homebrewing at the same moment when he was my boss. So it always felt very natural, like baby steps to go towards writing a business plan.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I think so, because, you know, my dad was really entrepreneurial”

Q All right. So Sam, I remember this is like early nineties and home Beer brewing kits were like, kind of becoming all the rage. Maybe they already were, I don't remember, but you bought like a home kit to, to, to brew your own beer in your apartment?

A Yeah, you know, myself and Joshua Mandel tracked down in the New York Yellow Pages. There was one store, I think, in all the five boroughs, or at least in Manhattan, called Little Shop of Hops, and you could buy these, like, prefab kits, and he walked out and went to the Upper West Side, where he lived with his kit, and I started walking towards Chelsea, and as I was walking to my apartment with my homebrew kit, I passed a bodega that was having a sale outside on, like, all this moldy or just squishy, like, fruit fly-covered fruit, And for some reason, I was like, oh my god, look at all those cherries. Look how cheap that is. What if I take this pale ale kit and squish the cherries into it? You know, it's not the recipe, but I wonder how that would taste. It has fermentable sugars. The Belgians brewed with fruit. So that was kind of the moment, you know, for me, I took that kit home and, and, uh, started boiling it in our little tiny apartment.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, you know, myself and Joshua Mandel tracked down in the New York Yellow Pages.”

Q So that, that, that's interesting because you had been working at this Restaurant that sold Belgian ales, and as you mentioned, there's a long tradition of using fruit in Belgian beers, right? So you were, you were kind of inspired by that, and thought, hey, I wonder if I could do something like that with my home beer kit.

A Yeah, and it was kind of like a hot mess, like I didn't bother to read the instruction manual or anything, and I bought all these used giant, like, 32 ounce glass bottles, And the other thing is, it said you could either, like, sanitize the bottles with the solution or just heat them up in your oven to sterilize them. So I remember I heated them all up in my oven while I was getting the beer ready to be bottled, and I took them out with, like, tongs and put them down on the floor to cool a half an hour or whatever, and I came back to, to pick it up. I was like, what the? And they wouldn't come off the ground.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, and it was kind of like a hot mess”

Q Meantime, there's, I think, I think another pretty pivotal moment was, was around this time, sort of the turn of the millennium, around 2000, when you launch the 90 minute IPA, and then eventually the 60 minute IPA. These, this would become signature beers for you. What, what, first, just can you explain what is the 90 minute IPA?

A Yeah, sure. So IPA is a, you know, many centuries old English beer style, and basically it was India pale ale, right? India pale ale, and it was basically process, you know, an elimination. The English would send beer to the troops in India and just learned through different shipments. If they sent regular mild or regular pale ale, the beer would be spoiled when it got there. So they kind of amplified the alcohol. They added extra hops, very hoppy, more bitter. So those two factors made this more durable, more intense beer style called IPA. So that was already in existence, but what we did is kind of took our culinary inspiration into that IPA space. So one morning, I think it was a 99, I was heating up water to brew, and a chef show came on the television above the bar, and they were talking about if they added little pinches of cracked pepper to a soup the whole time the soup was simmering, that the flavor, the complexity, the nuances of the Pepper would be woven into that soup, you know, more gracefully.

AI assessment note: “what we did is kind of took our culinary inspiration into that IPA space”

Q I mean, most people's palates at that time was like, you know, your standard Coors and Miller Lite, and maybe Sam Adams, um, which is a great beer, but was not as radical as what you were, you guys were doing. Were there people who were like, nah, not for me?

A Yeah, I mean, especially once we opened, you know, Necessity's the Mother of Invention, and the fact that we couldn't afford a full-scale, you know, commercial brewing system, and Had to start with tiny little pots and pans, you know, making 12 gallons of beer in the corner of our, our restaurant. It was actually a blessing in disguise, because I would brew two or three batches per day, and let's say I was brewing raison d'etre, Belgian brown eel, with raisins and beet sugars. In the three brews that day, I would tweak one variable in that recipe three times, and that was our first, like, de facto focus group, so I would ask the customers who cared enough to visit this Crazy little brewery. Hey, did you like the batch that had more raisins, less raisins? And we kind of developed the recipes in concert with our original fans, and that's kind of how our brand grew.

AI assessment note: “Necessity's the Mother of Invention, and the fact that we couldn't afford”