Alex Ganum Oral History Interview, July 2, 2018

TIAH EDMUNSON-MORTON: Okay. Take two [laughs]. Your name.

ALEX GANUM: My name is Alex Ganum. Today is July 2, 2018. I was born [in] 1980.

TEM: We are in the Barrel Room in Portland, Oregon, Upright Brewing. This is Tiah Edmunson-Morton. I know you grew up in Michigan. Were you born in Michigan?

AG: Yep. Exactly in the Detroit area, much of my whole upbringing.

TEM: Did you have a large family there?

AG: No. my parents are actually Argentine. They moved to Detroit in the early '70s. We have a very big family that still lives in northern Argentina. So, really it's just my immediate family that lives right there in the Detroit area.

TEM: What brought them to Detroit?

AG: Work. At the time there was work there. The situation in Argentina has always been kind of so-so, and so my parents actually for a long time had the 00:01:00intention of moving back to Argentina. I was born in 1980 and then it was all the way until 1986 when there was still this loose plan to move back to Argentina and eventually Dad sat me and my brother down and said I think we're just going to stay here in Detroit. That was that.

TEM: Did you like it?

AG: Like living in Detroit?

TEM: Yeah.

AG: At the time, no. There's a lot that I miss about the Midwest now. It's funny, too, that I was probably just barely 22 when I moved to Portland from Detroit. Michigan had a really vibrant beer scene, even back then. Now it's even better. This was back in 2002. There were great breweries making killer beers over there and I didn't really get too much time to enjoy, at least in any sort of legal ways [laughs].

TEM: [Laughs] Statute of limitations, I'm sure has worn off on your illegal 00:02:00pre-21. Tell me some stories or some things that you remember about what you liked when you were growing up, what you liked to do.

AG: I mean, its funny thinking about that now. Now you see kids seem so busy now. Kids have schedules that I think rival my work schedule now and I remember growing up you would never hear stuff like that. When we were growing up I feel like life was pretty simple. It was just about messing around. We had an empty lot on our block when there were a lot of kids about my age growing up on the same block. We just did old school kid stuff, playing sports on the empty lot and messing around getting in a little trouble and stuff, but it was just a lot of fun. I think being a kid should be, it should be a lot of fun and not so much 00:03:00of a heavy schedule. Don't rush through life, you know?

TEM: Did you play sports, too, on the more organized side of activity?

AG: Yeah, a little bit. I played soccer and basketball and ran track, that kind of stuff.

TEM: What'd you do when the weather was crappier? By that I mean cold.

AG: That's something that I'll never miss about the Midwest. It's a really long winter. When you're used to it, you're used to it and it's all you know, but coming out here it's a way different story. The winter feels like a blip compared to the winter out there. I'm kind of a sucker for gardening and flowers and stuff like that, too. I don't like vegetable gardening. I like ornamental stuff. Out here, February there's flowers popping out and things starting to grow. You wouldn't even think about that in Detroit. Even in May there's not a 00:04:00lot growing over there, and we've already been through a huge chunk of spring at that point out here. Back then, in the wintertime, I don't know. I got pretty fuzzy memories. I mean, you know when you're young you still played with snow and you go outside and all that stuff. When I got a little bit older, as a teenager and you have a car and you're working and stuff, I remember trying to get to work when there's 2 feet of snow on the ground and you have to leave like an hour earlier than you normally would. It's that hassle that you live with and you get used to and it's not a big deal. Looking back on it, it wasn't any fun.

TEM: Yeah. I talked to somebody who grew up in Detroit who said that they had a city ice rink, that it would get so cold for so long that the pond would freeze over and they would go ice skating.

AG: Oh yeah. There's a big lake that would freeze and you'd see guys ice fishing and that kind of stuff.

TEM: Yeah. What about academically? What were some of the things that you were 00:05:00interested in or felt drawn to when you were in school?

AG: I kind of have a funny relationship with school and education. I never liked being in school at all. You know, I mean I always enjoyed learning quite a bit, always loved the sciences and math and that kind of stuff. I was one of those guys, but I guess I'm just super stubborn. I didn't like being told what we had to study. I mean, I hated it. In English class when they told you these are the books you have to read. Those books were almost always no fun, especially as a kid. Is there is a 16-year-old or 15-year old boy want to read The Scarlet Letter? You know? Maybe it's a great book, but when you're 15 it's not what you want to read. I had some pretty serious ups and downs academically where I 00:06:00wouldn't be surprised if I had the record for the biggest spread between highest grades and lowest grades. I had one report card that was pretty much all F's and one that was all A's and everything in between. It was kind of a funny time for me. I always had that disdain for education, too, even after that. I never liked the formality of it when you can just go learn on your own, I think is a lot more useful and better experience.

TEM: Did you feel like you had opportunities to do that free choice learning? What were you drawn to that was learning but wasn't The Scarlet Letter learning?

AG: Yeah, I remember one semester where I pretty much failed everything there were a lot of those days where I would just skip class and go to the library and just sit in the library all day and just grab whatever. I was reading all sorts, a lot of history, too. I loved reading biographies. I always thought other 00:07:00people's lives were really interesting and there was a lot to glean from that. All sorts. Just all over the place.

TEM: Were there museums that you would go to or big libraries that you would go to in Detroit? I've never been there, so I don't know what the cultural infrastructure was like when you were there.

AG: Detroit's Institute of Arts is fantastic. I have lots of fun memories of going there. It's a really special museum. There's a huge mural that Diego Rivera did that man, oh man. It's just a really special mural. It's huge. It's an iconic thing there in Detroit. Then there's goofy stuff, too. We had, and I think this sort of speaks to the history of Detroit or modern Detroit where we had the oldest freshwater aquarium in the country's in the city. I think it's since closed but was-I loved it when I was a kid. I'd always beg my parents to take me there for my birthday and that kind of thing. I mean, it wasn't a nice 00:08:00aquarium. It was probably pretty dilapidated and just not. I mean, we'd go every year and they'd always have the same fish [laughs].

TEM: [Laughs].

AG: And the fish looked really depressed. There was a sturgeon in there that looked like he was 100 years old and probably was from the beginning of the aquarium or something.

TEM: I just picture-please let me out!

AG: Yeah. That was just, it was one of those, like the thing where as a kid you have nothing but fond memories of it but looking back you think, like, God that was a really kind of depressing you know place but you still love it. That's the beauty of being young, I guess. Same with the science center. I forget what it was called, but whatever the science center was in Detroit. I loved that place. Like I said, if you like sciences and stuff of course you're going to be drawn to that. Again, looking back at it I don't think it was the best funded facility 00:09:00and stuff. For a city the size of Detroit with the history of Detroit and the prosperity that it used to have, see that kind of stuff. It just makes you think. Then you travel other places. We weren't too far from Chicago. We'd go to Chicago sometimes and the museums there are pretty spectacular. Of course, all the other cities in the country when you go to New York, San Francisco, or Boston that kind of stuff. You see some pretty amazing stuff. You think, Detroit's maybe a little bit behind.

TEM: By the time that you were born and aware of things, like economy, was Detroit struggling? Could you feel the sort of, the economic struggles that we now certainly are very aware of?

AG: Yeah, I suppose. I mean, this is the city, I mean when I was born in 1980 00:10:00the city had already been struggling, of course. I think that the population a couple of years before my parents moved there in '71 was probably the peak time, when there were almost 2 million people there. Throughout most of the time when I was growing up there were about a million people there. The city was half empty and looked half empty. When you're young you look at it and you see all these old buildings and a lot of empty buildings but they have a lot of character still and you admire it. You have that sense of this is some kind of neat old architecture, neat neighborhoods. There's that sort of weird beauty in the ruins of it. Then, yeah, you start to realize, okay, this is a pretty depressed place. Economically it was really rough for a lot of people there, and there was a lot of tension in the city, too, obviously. It was, yeah it's funny. Moving to Portland, I was still pretty young. I was only 22 when I moved here. 00:11:00Portland's like the opposite of Detroit in a lot of ways. For better or for worse. It's super safe here, but there's so much stuff about the Midwest in general that I miss: the sensibility that people have in general. Ironically, I think that even though people are so much more liberal and progressive out here, I think that where I grew up people were a lot more open-minded. I don't know if that has anything to do with just years going by and also it could be a matter of time, but I do miss the more accepting nature that I think of people in the Midwest.

TEM: Yeah, well, I grew up in Oregon but lived in the Midwest and I remember that kind of, I know it wasn't just, I mean there was the hospitality I guess. I 00:12:00remember coming back to the northwest and feeling that kind of "get off my lawn" kind of feeling. This is my lawn. That's your lawn.

AG: Around here in Portland, especially, I think that you know groups of people or groups of friends tend to be very like-minded. That's something that I don't remember at all. I remember growing up especially as a teenager and stuff we were actually really keen on having a nice mix of people like mostly, for us, it had more to do with what you were into, how you felt, not so much difference in-we didn't think about race and money and that kind of stuff. For us, it was just about mixing it up, like crowd so we had fun stuff to talk about and debate about. There'd be arguments, but they would always end in good times, I guess. 00:13:00Now here I feel like it's really difficult to debate with people or to talk about stuff, because it just becomes very personal, offensive. It's just not the same. I really miss that.

TEM: Yeah, we definitely, it feels like we generally have lost our ability to argue respectfully, or productively.

AG: Especially [unclear].

TEM: Yes. I know that you came here to go to culinary school. What were some of the earlier things in your life that made you want to do that? Made you think that you wanted to pursue that as a career?

AG: Yeah, like I said school really wasn't working out for me in any way and I didn't know what I wanted to do. I ended up, I moved to a college town, to East Lansing, when all my friends went to school. Most of my friends went to school, 00:14:00so I figured I'd kind of tag along. I didn't stay in school very long and then I ended up working in a college town, which is super fun. I think that's great advice for young people. If you don't want to go to school you can still go to a college town and work and then you can party and have a blast and you're not on the hook for all the studying and stuff. It's actually a really fun time. Yeah eventually all my friends graduated and I was still hanging around. I was looking for something to do and I had a roommate at the time that had a gig at one of the nice restaurants in the area and so through him we started talking a lot about food and we were working on a lot of stuff at home and I took an interest in food that way. It kind of just took off from there. I think I had a natural I think sort of interest in food and flavor and aroma and that stuff, 00:15:00too, which naturally led to the beer stuff later on.

TEM: Was that something, did you feel a cultural influence at your house? Was there, did that play into your upbringing? A diversity of maybe flavors or styles of food?

AG: Yeah, I guess. I wasn't very aware of it at the time, but we had fun stuff going on at the house with food. Part of our family, even though they're from Argentina, the older part of the family's from Syria. We grew up with lots of Middle Eastern type food which can be pretty fun and some neat spices going on, too. Yeah, just really fun preparations but yeah, I guess that would play into it, for sure. Then also in Detroit there were a lot of different ethnicities 00:16:00represented in that city, maybe not too big of an Asian culture, especially coming out new, but pretty much everybody else. I remember going to the local Polish restaurants. Those were great because I feel like eastern Europeans they really love to feed you, you know what I mean? If you're a skinny kid you got away with just forcing the food down your throat, telling you you're too skinny.

TEM: That made me want some pierogis [laughs].

AG: Oh yeah. There was a lot of Polish people around where we grew up. One of my buddies, I remember his mom was Polish and she would make pierogis all the time and we would just inhale them, you know? Then when my mom would make empanadas or something like that, they would come over and we would inhale those.

TEM: Were you into flavors at that time? When you were a little kid, did it seem 00:17:00like you had a sixth sense about flavor?

AG: I don't know. I don't remember that. I mean, I loved eating! So maybe there was something going on that I can't really remember, but yeah I don't remember a particularly keen thing about aromas and flavors and what not. I think I just liked eating because I was burning a lot of calories.

TEM: I hadn't, yeah, I don't know if there are kids that become prodigies, you know? Like if that's something that little kids even pay-or could even pay attention to. I don't know when palates develop enough to have a palate?

AG: I mean there's other parts about food that I think are maybe more important than how it lands on your tongue. So many memories of going to visit our family in Argentina and having the big classic Argentina salad, you know the big 00:18:00barbeque. It's a really fun experience. It's hours long and there's order to it. The foods are really neat. You would see stuff that you would never see in the states. Even the way some of the same cuts are cut, they come out different. They cut the ribs differently in like this way [makes a vertical gesture], kind of like Korean style but really thick. Stuff like that, and I think that experience of having this meal with a lot of people, a lot of times you'd be sharing it with a lot of folks. It was really old school. Down there the men do all the meat stuff on the grill and the women do everything else, you know? It's probably still like that now but a little bit old school and backwards. I just have really nice memories of those experiences, though.

TEM: If you have a visual picture in your mind of what those events look like, what are the things that stand out to you? Smells? Colors? Sounds?

AG: Yeah, I mean it was all hardwood being put on the grill. Lots of smells. Lots of hardwood smoke and then usually you're outside, so there's the natural smells from outside. Lots of beer, like really cheap, south American lager, [unclear] that kind of stuff, by the liter. It was always, beer was always a huge part of it. Coca leaves, too, if you ate to much you'd put some coca leaves in your mouth. That would bring you back to normal, which was nice. Lots of fernet, fernet and coke, which is super popular now, at least just the fernet part. I remember telling my cousins when fernet became really popular in bars around here and people were drinking it straight without coke. Down in Argentina you have to have it with coke. If you ask for a fernet at the bar it just comes with a coke. I was telling one of my cousins that people who live in Portland 00:20:00are drinking fernet straight. He didn't even believe me. He said, ¿Fernet embebido? ¡Imposiblé! Funny stuff. Same with avocados. The cool thing about that part of Argentina where my family's at in Tucumán is it's super agricultural. There's all this neat stuff that grows there and it's way different than the stuff that grows around here. You've got avocados, mangos, all this cool tropical fruit. The avocados were another funny one where I remember the first time I saw these avocado trees they were these huge trees and they have tons of fruit on them and this was back when avocados were a buck a 00:21:00pop. I thought, man, avocados are pretty expensive, but they look like they yield great. They pick really easy, too. Half the time they just kind of fall on the ground and you just pick them up off the ground. I remember telling another cousin, you know back where I'm at you pay a buck for each avocado. Again, like, no. nobody would pay a buck for an avocado.

TEM: It's probably 2 bucks an avocado now.

AG: Yeah. It's more now. This story goes way back. But I think a lot of that agricultural aspect of being down there really turned me on, especially aromatically, too. Getting to have some of those tropical type fruits right off the tree. It was really opening because they just you pick them and you put them on the kitchen counter. It's really hot down there in the summer time, so the smell might just fill out the whole house from the fruit just sitting there. That was really neat. The other thing I liked about being down there, too, was 00:22:00that there's not too much in the way of choices. I think it's very, very old school in the sense that even in the city. San Miguel de Tucumán it's a pretty good-sized city. It's bigger than Portland, but most people still go to the butcher to buy their meat. They go to the produce stand and get their produce. If you go to the produce stand, there's one every other block, and if you go at a certain time of the year they might just have lettuce, onions, and carrots. That's it. Most of them don't have refrigeration so the lettuce looks like shit because it's just wilting away. It's just kind of, there's a part of that that spoke to me later on about making the kind of beers that we do and the old style of brewing where you're using what you have and not just fishing for the most exotic stuff for the sake of doing unique or extra special or that kind of 00:23:00thing. I think there's a lot to be said about simplifying and using what you have. It may sound kind of cheesy, but I really believe in that. I remember one time coming back from one of these trips to Argentina not too long ago. It must have been less than 10 years ago and that idea of choice really struck me. One of the first things I did when I got back was I went to the New Seasons up the street from my house to go get some food and restock the fridge. I remember seeing so many different options for produce or for I think I had to buy a jar of mustard. There was a mustard aisle, and it bothered me. You know? It was this is way too much choice and I don't think it's healthy for the head. You can really focus on other things. Some people probably do fine having all that choice in front of them all the time, but I think if you want to focus on other 00:24:00things it can be kind of a bad distraction.

TEM: The noise of it.

AG: Yeah.

TEM: Yeah. What you described it seemed very seasonal and the seasons I imagine aren't just the four seasons that we think about, but that you can have divided up seasons. This is the strawberry season. It's two weeks long. This is the time when you do something with that. How often did you go? Did you go every year?

AG: [Coughs]

TEM: It's the lingering Portland winter... July 2. [laughs]

AG: Portland's great, but it's not perfect. I'm sorry, what was the question?

TEM: Oh, I was asking how often you went back to Argentina?

AG: Growing up, we usually went every other year. Lately, especially since I opened up the brewery, I've not been able to go quite as often. It's kind of hard, though, to take big breaks from the brewery. Also the family's getting older, too. Older cousins that were my age are starting their own families, and sort of feel a little bit I don't know, a little bit less connected than you used to be when we were growing up. We have a pretty big family down there. Parents were either the oldest of 6 or the youngest of 6, so I have a very big spread of cousins.

TEM: Did they ever come to visit you in America?

AG: A couple of times, but not too often. I mean, it's pretty expensive to fly up and down.

TEM: How long would you go for?

AG: Two weeks, which is kind of a typical time. I mean a lot of its travel time, too. It takes like a day and a half to get down there, pretty much, and that's if it goes smooth. I had one time, the first time I flew down without my family 00:26:00I was by myself. I think it was 1996. Everything went wrong on the trip on the way down. Flights getting delayed, cancelled, strike in the airport. I mean, you name it, you know? I forget how long it took me to finally get there. I mean, it was like days [laughs]. It was pretty wacky. I'm like, I was having a good time. It was kind of an adventure as a 16-year-old. It's just funny thinking about that now. Gosh, I don't think I'd be game for a 3 or 4-day journey.

TEM: Yeah. I was just listening to a podcast on the way up here and it was actually that when we as adults reflect on travel and we want everything to be a wonderful adventure, but we don't actually want it to be. You know, like we want it to be a very predictable, wonderful, delightful, predictable adventure. 00:27:00That's not as fun.

AG: Yeah.

TEM: We want to get to the place where we're going and not be bored. What made you want to come to Portland? What was the original kernel of that idea?

AG: This might sound kind of funny, but one of my last jobs when I was still in Michigan was working at a natural food store. I just met a lot of people at the store that would rave about Portland and they said, you'd probably really like it in Portland. You should go check it out sometime. Then when I started fishing around for something else to do and was thinking about culinary school. I found out there was a school here in town and that was kind of it. When you're 22, it's like whatever. It's not like I was moving here with the intention of oh, I should stay here forever.

TEM: And open a brewery.

AG: Yeah. You just show up and kind of wing it. I could have been here for 6 months and left for all I knew.

TEM: Yeah. What are some of those early memories of Portland? Again, that kind 00:28:00of sense memory but also what was really fun and different and kind of hooked you immediately?

AG: Yeah. Like I said, it's very different from where I grew up. I remember that first winter being so mild and I think I wore like a spring coat all the way through the winter. I just got rid of my old winter coat a few years ago. It's been in my closet collecting dust for over a decade.

TEM: Just in case.

AG: Yeah. I mean, I've always enjoyed big cities. It's funny, because out here I feel like you meet so many folks and they love outdoorsy stuff. They go hiking every chance they get, go camping all the time. I love to go to cities. I'm super comfortable in big cities, downtown. I like to explore cities. I like talking to people. Yeah, for me it was just like and Portland's pretty small 00:29:00compared to like metro Detroit's actually quite large. Detroit itself doesn't have a tremendous population there's a lot of people that live around Detroit. Here you've got you know not that many folks outside the city. It felt really small. I mean, I thought it was so easy to get around. The city is really walkable, which I thought was really cool. Detroit, I mean it's the motor city. You feel like you need a car. Everything's so spread out over there. Here you don't really need a car. You can do so much by foot. I really walking a lot and especially because it's so pretty out here, too. It's really nice to walk around.

TEM: What is it about cities that you like?

AG: I don't know. I mean, I think they're just exciting. There's so much to see and do. Like I said, you can just talk to people. There's always neat food. Of 00:30:00course, I like all the museums and that kind of stuff, but I think the liveliness of it I really enjoy. I don't feel like I need to be out in nature to find peace. I feel like I can find peace sitting on the couch reading a book anywhere. So, I like to be I think more stimulated, I guess.

TEM: As someone who likes cities, I'm always curious about what is it that other people like about cities? You came here in 2002, enrolled in culinary school, how long did that last? How did that go? Did that feel like a different kind of school or was it more of the same?

AG: Well, yeah, I mean you're just cooking stuff and it was a whole lot more fun and I think more creative than English class in high school. I mean as I went 00:31:00along I started to home brew while I was in school and I didn't know if I was just bored. At some point I connected with a home brewer. I'd never been around home brewing much. I'd been enjoying some craft beer before I left while I was still in Michigan. I had a taste for beer, but I knew nothing about it, really. Then I met a home brewing buddy. I started home brewing with him and I just loved it. I was sold right away. I started home brewing myself and I really dove in. It's funny. It's the story that so many home brewers have, guys that become professional brewers later. You get into it and the next thing you know there's Carboys right next to your bed. You're falling asleep with the bubbling going on and all that kind of stuff. You have a little studio apartment where there's beer stuff everywhere. It's super fun. It's so fun to be in the early stages of 00:32:00learning about something that, I mean I just really loved. Going through school, I must have been about halfway through the program and I realized what I wanted to pursue beer making. I talked to the dean about finishing up my program with an internship at a brewery. He said, absolutely. Which was rare. I remember being really nervous at that meeting thinking he's probably going to say no, blah, blah, blah. I couldn't wait. I was ready to jump in. I wanted to make beer so bad. I've always been a little impatient or impulsive. He said okay, to my surprise, and I started sending out letters to breweries all over the place trying to find some place to take me in for an internship. I was just not really having a lot of luck. It was difficult. I started widening my search, widening 00:33:00my search. Eventually, I was sending all over the country. I finally good communication going with the folks at Brewery Ommegang and back then Randy Thiel was the brew master there. I think he's at New Glarus, or the last time I talked to him he was at New Glarus. He's originally from Wisconsin, so he's back home. Randy's a great guy. They took me in over there and Kevin Davis was the other brew master at the time. It worked out so well. I mean, I got really lucky. Kevin took me in, let me stay at his place. I don't think I gave him anything for rent. I think he just told me to take care of the cooking and stuff [laughs]. He was vegetarian. I remember we used to do a ton of Indian food. I learned a lot about Indian cooking then which was a lot of fun. It was great. I mean, those were the really intensive days. We worked pretty long hours at the 00:34:00brewery. There was a lot to do there. There was a lot to do at the brewery but there wasn't a lot to do otherwise in the area. It's kind of remote, actually.

TEM: Wasn't it Cooperstown, is that right?

AG: Yeah. But the brewery's not even the heart of Cooperstown. The brewery's kind of on its own. If you're standing outside the brewery at Ommegang you're just staring at trees and grass and stuff. It's actually really pretty. It's a beautiful brewery. They had really neat processes going on. They were doing open fermentation back then. They used a really cool yeast strain. They were bottle conditioning. Like all this neat stuff. I think back then, this would have been 2003, there wasn't a lot of that happening in the states. Compared to now, it was very little, little of it happening. It was really cool. The guys took a ton of time to explain a lot to me and they both, they were both real brew masters. Kevin had graduated from UC Davis. He still had all of his brewing texts and all 00:35:00the old practice exams and all of his notes. When we would get back to his place after work, I was just deep in all that stuff. For me, it was like having a free library right there. When I had questions I could just ask him. It was great. I had a really, really good experience. It was only a few months. I learned a tremendous amount.

TEM: Why do you think it was so hard to, I mean you were going presumably not asking for lots of money, if any money at all.

AG: Oh, no I was like just for 2 or 3 months to work for free in exchange for, I guess, knowledge.

TEM: Why do you think it was so hard?

AG: Well, being on the opposite end of it now, I think it is really, it's time consuming to teach somebody. We get requests here all the time. People want to come in and work for free and learn and of course I would love to take more 00:36:00people on but it's quite a commitment. If you're pretty deep in managing your own business, sometimes I feel like I don't even have enough time to go take a whiz, you know what I mean? You're just busy. The thought of that responsibility of creating a good experience for somebody to learn I think it's kind of daunting, or almost impossible, really.

TEM: Well, I guess as you were answering that I was thinking probably for all the same reasons of challenging to have an intern in the library, too. Just what you were saying. It's not just somebody coming and working for free. It's you teaching people.

AG: A lot of times the requests come in like that, though. They say, oh, you know I'll be out of the way. I just want to absorb it. That's not really how it works.

TEM: Yeah. At that point, did you think that you wanted to start your own 00:37:00brewery? Were you thinking about being a business owner?

AG: I think every brewer probably wants to do their own thing, right? I think that even when I was still home brewing I had these visions of operating my own place, what kind of beers you would make and all the fun stuff. I didn't think too much about the business part of it. You learn that stuff later as you go.

TEM: When you were home brewing what were you really attracted to? What did you think was super fun to make?

AG: All the Belgian-type stuff. I had a job at the Belmont Station, the local bottle shop here in town and there were some really neat beers available even back then. This was back when the store only had 400 beers or something like that [laughs]. I used to bring home stuff all the time and share it with my roommates. I remember culturing the yeast out of bottles and stuff that you 00:38:00thought were really interesting and learning a lot about fermentation that way, just through experience. I think the third or fourth home brew that I made was from yeast that I prop'ed out of a bottle, stuff like that. Just kind of moving forward and trying new stuff.

TEM: When did you start working at Belmont Station?

AG: It must have been 2002, when I got here in town. I was pretty busy in school Monday through Friday, so I was able to get a job, this was back when the station was next to the Horse Brass and it was pretty tiny, or really tiny. Only one person worked at a time. I for a while there I was the Saturday and Sunday guy. It was 10:00 to 10:00 Saturdays and Sundays. Two days. In those two days off, I mean off from school, I was able to get like 25 hours' worth of work in. 00:39:00It was 10:00 to 10:00. It was perfect, so I didn't wake up too early and I could still have fun after work. It was really the perfect schedule while I was in school.

TEM: Who were some people that you remember coming in that you still see around? Did you have any regulars?

AG: Yeah, gosh, there were a lot of people that lived in the neighborhood that would pop in. There was one guy who lived 2 doors down who would get a Hawk's Oatmeal Stout every day. That was his beer, I remember. I think his name was Oliver. He was an artist and I have a piece of his in my house still now. Yeah, of course, some brewers would pop in. It was a good place to work. As an aspiring brewer there were a lot of connections to be made either to distributors, home brewers that kind of stuff.

TEM: How long did you work there?

AG: Yeah, my memories are not super sharp. I'm not big on timeframes. It must have been-I mean I worked there until I went to Ommegang, I think. Then when I came back, I started working there again. Then I got a job with Dan Pedersen at BJ's. Then when I left BJ's...

TEM: I don't have that date.

AG: I think I worked there for a little bit. Say it again?

TEM: I was like, do I have that date for you? I don't.

AG: It all happened in the early, mid 2000s.

TEM: Well, I guess part of my question is not to test your memory, but I was curious if you were there long enough to see evolutions and see changes in what people liked or...

AG: I mean, I saw the... in those earlier times I mean I remember beers like 00:41:00Alaskan Smoked Porter would come out and maybe we would get four cases of this super special beer and the employees would buy half of it. There's like 2 cases of this killer beer to sell and like some beers like they, you still had to hand sell them. There were these legendary beers that weren't flying off the shelf, you know. Or like Cantone bottles would just be hanging around for like $9 or $10 or $7.5. Nowadays of course it wouldn't exist. A Cantone case comes into town somewhere and guys are pouncing on it for $30 a bottle or whatever it is. So much has changed. The production level of these special beers and availability has changed, too. The first time the Abyss came out from Deschutes there was a line around the block or whatever it was. Fast forward a few years later, this was after I left, and we talked to the guys that worked there and 00:42:00they get 50 cases of something but then you know it's not flying off the shelf because there's so many options. We're still in the thick of that right now. We have all these special beers available on the market. The audience is getting bigger. The crowd's getting bigger. There's really a glut of options out there.

TEM: I talked to Joel Rea, who owns Corvallis Home Brew Supply, and of course has an amazing selection, too. I talked to him I think last year. I talked to him more recently, but I interviewed him.

AG: Joel's awesome. I love Joel.

TEM: He is awesome. One of the things that I really like about Joel was that you can go in there and ask him about stuff. I wonder, you have been far enough away from that experience at Belmont Station, but I'm curious how that has evolved and changed. Do you feel like consumers are still calling on their people 00:43:00experts, or are they calling on their internet people experts? Do you feel like there's still that kind of, I don't know, beer sage at a bottle job?

AG: I'd like to think so. I think there's a lot of misinformation online, so I think if somebody's trying to gather details on their own and they're not careful they're probably just going to get filled up with a lot of misinformation. I see that a lot. But then that ties in also to a consumer, I don't know wanting to have an expectation before they even get into a beer. I think that sucks. That's just no good. I think that you should be able to enjoy beers on their own and with an open mind. It sounds simple, but it's more and more rare for people to just get into a beer and really enjoy it on its own.

TEM: Yeah. Well, and then I guess to have somebody to talk to about it. Somebody who is also open-minded but educated enough to be able to talk about it, if you want to talk about and not just drink it because it's something you-

AG: Yeah, you want people to just give you the really clear-cut info of what you're getting into, or after the fact. I think it can be more useful to talk to somebody after you drink something. Maybe glean info after the fact can be a lot more useful, because then you can formulate your own impression of it and take it from there.

TEM: What was it like to go to BJ's and be working as a brewer? Not as an internship but presumably being paid.

AG: Yeah.

TEM: What was that experience like to be professionally doing this as a job?

AG: It was awesome. It was great. I mean I think brewers get into it because they really love making beer, even through days that might seem kind of lame or maybe you have to wash 300 kegs or maybe you're going to spend a whole day in the walk-in cleaning kegging and cleaning tanks. Overall, it's still a really awesome experience, because there's more fun stuff to be had. [unclear] and processes like that. It's really exciting. You get to be a little creative. You get to work with your hands. Everything that's a joy about being a brewer, you get to live out your work.

TEM: What were some of the things that surprised you were differences between home brewing and commercial brewing?

AG: Yeah, you just have to take it pretty seriously. You're not just making beer. You're managing a brewery. There's paperwork. You have to deal with taxes and all that kind of stuff, reporting. Obviously, that's stuff you're never going to deal with as a home brewer, you're not reporting anything to the tax and trade bureau, or whatever, or getting labels approved and that kind of stuff. I mean, the process isn't all that different. There's more emphasis on certain things, like cleaning and yeast management is obviously very important and money management, too. Some brewers like to run their stuff really tight. I think some home brewers don't even think about the cost. They just kind of do whatever. Obviously, with a brewery you got to be aware of that kind of stuff. You can't just make the beers as expensive as you want necessarily.

TEM: Yeah. The scale.

AG: Yeah. I mean, it's all obvious stuff. I don't think I have anything like, too interesting to comment about that.

TEM: But it was still fun?

AG: Working?

TEM: Yeah.

AG: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Getting paid is nice, too. There was still a big learning aspect to it. I think when you first get into it, I mean, assuming that you have somebody above you that's a good teacher, that's really knowledgeable. I was really lucky at BJ's. This guy Dan Pedersen, he was phenomenal. He taught me a ton, a ton of stuff that I still use today. That goes back to that joy, that really beautiful joy of learning.

TEM: What was a typical day like for you?

AG: Back then?

TEM: Yeah. Did you have a typical day back then?

AG: During the brewery, and in a small brewery, especially everybody's doing everything. Even back then when I was not far into it, Dan was teaching me how 00:48:00to file taxes and do all the reports and that kind of stuff. I'm glad that I did because obviously I have to do all that stuff now. It was good to learn it early. Yeah, those are the fun things about having a really tiny brewery. When I started there it was just me and Dan. I was just replacing his assistant who had moved out of town. That was another thing I liked about Dan. Dan would say my title was brewer and not assistant brewer because he said if you're doing all this stuff on your own and working on your own on your projects, you're not assisting me at all. You're just a brewer. I thought that was cool. I appreciated that. Yeah, so I mean a typical day could be all sorts of stuff. Most of it was just the typical parts of running a brewery.

TEM: How would things change over your time there? Were there more people added?

AG: Yeah, eventually we got another person, Vasily, who's kind of a well-known character from the old Portland beer scene, he's at Hill Farmstead now, and he's got his own label, too, makes really nice beers. Vasily's a special guy. We had a nice, nice time together-I'm sorry what was the question?

TEM: Oh, I'm just asking how it changed over time. Like how did or did it change when you were there?

AG: It got a little bit more streamlined, kind of more what you would expect from a corporate-type structure where for most of the time I was there I think we had about 6 or so company-wide beers that we had produced. A couple of those recipes were great recipes, too. There was a nice Bavarian Hef[eweizen], and a nice classic American pale ale. They were tasty beers. We didn't mind brewing at 00:50:00all. I think there's that stigma attached to corporate beers or company-wide beers that they have to be lame. Those were great beers. At the Jantzen Beach pub, I think we must have had 18 or 20 taps. We got to fill them out with whatever we wanted to otherwise. It was awesome. We got to brew so many neat things. That part of it, I think, started to change, or the company at one point wanted to standardize some of the seasonal releases or annual releases, and so instead of having to make like a Belgian style or a Grand Cru for new year's, or a whipped beer for spraying or some sort of spiced beer for autumn, all of a sudden we got a recipe for those beers, instead of being told to make one however we wanted to. In that sense, there was a point where we had to become 00:51:00what you would expect, I guess.

TEM: I'm going to take the leap and assume that given what you do now that you liked the creative?

AG: Yeah. I think I did. Any brewer's going to tell you they would like to be in control of what they produce, probably. Even if the recipes you're being handed are great recipes, you still want to do your own thing. Then you keep learning that way, too. I've been making beer now, I guess since then. Making new beers, every time you learn a ton. It'll probably be that way forever.

TEM: What do you remember about Portland in the late 2000s? I know that a lot of what I read about you and what led to this brewery had to do with this connection with local ingredients and going to the farmers' market, thinking 00:52:00about food generally as well. What are some of the things that maybe you were, maybe valuing or wanting to have more control over based on the experiences you were just having generally in Portland? I suppose a sort of origin story of Upright question.

AG: People ask all the time why or how we ended up making the beers that we do. It's a funny question to answer because the real truth is that I just liked drinking these types of beers. These French and Belgian, farmhouse type beers. I loved them. I just wanted to make beers along those lines. They just really 00:53:00spoke to me. Of course every brewer wants to make everything. We love German-style beers. Right now the guys in the brewery the guys are kegging our Upright Lager [gestures with air quotes], like lager. It's basically like our take on a Budweiser. Making pretty much any style of beer that can be super enjoyable and super fun. I think that there's obviously certain stuff we gravitate toward. You're going to probably gravitate towards the stuff you enjoy to drink. I thought those beers were so exciting and so fascinating. Again, you have to think that back then there wasn't a lot out there, certainly, being produced here in the U.S. All of this was based on all these French and Belgian beers that I was bringing home from the Belmont Station. It was really just coming from that. I just found the beers so exciting. It's super stimulating and 00:54:00those beers, what I, what stood out most to me about the beers I think is they were all different. That's the funny thing when you go back to wanting to categorize everything and people having expectations and it's like, no, man. You crack those bottles and it's just like an expression. It could be a very singular expression of how the brewer was wanting to make that particular batch. Maybe you get that same beer with the same name from the same brewery 6 months later and it tastes different. I think that's something that can really be embraced.

I guess, the Fantome Brewery is the most extreme example of that, where maybe they put out their winter beer one year and it's got the same label as the following year, same name and everything and it's a totally different beer the next year. I think that's fun and that's fine. It's a tiny brewery. Why not? There's like nothing telling you you can't do that. I think people often and 00:55:00even like small business or small breweries if they want to do stuff more by the book or more kind of like the big boys game. I mean, I don't know why because it's super nice to feel like you can do what you want. So long as the beer is tasty, why not change it up? We tweak our stuff all the time and we joke around, but it's not a joke. There were times when we had year-round beers that we were significantly tweaking every single batch. This could go on for like years. No batch was brewed the same as the previous one. They're always going to come out okay. I mean, almost always, rather. But you make little tweaks all the time. The point is that you're following a path with the beer that it's evolving and you're always going to deliver something that you feel proud of to present to a 00:56:00consumer, to a fan of the brewery, but you're keeping it really fluid and keeping it really exciting that way.

TEM: How did people respond to that in the early days of the brewery? Archivists love change over time, so how did they respond early and have you seen a shift in that kind of it's okay if it's different?

AG: I think a lot of those people might not know this, and if they do-you get all sorts of reactions, right? There's the people that think the original ones were always the best. There's all sorts of reactions, I guess, but really at the end of the day you have to be happy with what you're putting out. If you think you can make it better, then, hey you've got to be tweaking it and making 00:57:00changes to it. You can almost always make it better. I mean, it's very, very seldom you'd hear a brewer say this beer is perfect. It's almost never perfect. It can get pretty close a lot of times, but...

TEM: Then I would guess that the definition of perfect is an ever-changing mark, too.

AG: Yeah.

TEM: Or an ever-changing assessment. What led to you leaving BJ's? Did you leave knowing that you were coming here?

AG: Yeah. Kind of. It was sort of a weird story. I was in a hit-and-run car accident and it messed me up a little bit. I was in kind of rough shape. I thought it was okay and then I kind of got worse over a few months and that was one of my bigger mistakes was trying to work through an injury. I was 26 at the 00:58:00time and I had no health problems. I felt like I was really healthy and pretty solid. So, you just figure oh I have a little pain this is going to heal. It's going to go away. But that was stupid. I wish I could go back in time and tell myself, you know take care of yourself. I didn't know. That kind of caught up with me. I ended up having to let the job go. I was in pretty bad shape after a few months. Then I think at that point I got my gig back at the Belmont Station for a little bit. I needed some sort of income. Then I got the job at the Belmont Station back and I thought maybe this is the time when I should start planning my own brewery. That was that. In the meantime, while I was in rehab 00:59:00and getting better and putting a plan together for Upright.

TEM: How did things change or, well, so I'm, let me say what I want to ask and then have it be lots of different questions within the same question. You had gone away and had this professional brewing training experience. People had moved on, so time had passed and different styles were coming out, maybe not with the rapidity that I feel like things maybe change now. So, what was it like to go back to that Belmont Station gig? Were there things that seemed really different about the people who were coming in?

AG: Oh yeah.

TEM: You were talking about the supply level, that the specialty supplies there would be more of the beer, the specialty beers.

AG: Yeah. Absolutely.

TEM: That's a big question.

AG: In my eyes, craft beer was becoming mainstream around this time when you'd see a 75-year-old woman walk into the shop with a 6-pack of some really cool IPAs, some obscure IPA, and put it on the counter and you'd say are you buying this for your son or something like that? Or your grandson? She'd say, nope this beer is for me. Then it hits you like a ton of bricks, like oh wow. Everybody's drinking this beer now. Then school. I think it was really exciting to have craft beer and really quirky beers weren't necessarily just for this really specific audience. It was really opening up, genuinely opening up. I thought that was great. So, with that, I think is when we started to get this massive explosion of openings and people kind of being opportunistic, too, about jumping into the industry, not necessarily just producers but as anything that they could provide the industry and maybe make a couple bucks.

TEM: Yeah. I think there seems to be a 10-year cycle. The original mid 1980s and 01:01:00then the kids of the '90s, which a lot of them didn't make it to the next year. It seems like there are a lot of people right now that are starting, the 10-year anniversaries are starting to roll out from this class off, I don't know, mid to late 2000s.

AG: Yeah, totally.

TEM: A lot of them maybe didn't make it, either. When you thought about having your own brewery, what did you want from it? When you thought about this is, I will make this investment. I'm going to take this leap-this is what I want it to look like. This is what I want to feel like. This is what I want people to do?

AG: Yeah. I mean I just wanted to create a career, like a long-term lifestyle 01:02:00for me and the guys that work here, too. To me, it was really important to make a place that people like to be in. Running a brewery it's some work. It's not the easiest gig in the world, necessarily. In that sense you want to be able to still look forward to it and make it really satisfying. I don't think there's any reason why work shouldn't be satisfying, so with the space I thought it was really important to make it a pleasant space to be in and work in. That might mean a lot of different little things. It might mean having extra actual space, you know, and not being totally cramped. It could mean having maybe a more relaxed schedule, or just trying to be more accommodating of what people's needs 01:03:00are and that kind of thing. Trying to spread around all the good tasks and bad tasks so nobody feels like they're getting just the butt end of the deal. I think all of that stuff is important. It's crazy to me that people think that work has to be this unpleasant experience. Even the location of the brewery was really important for me. It's just a few miles from my house. All the guys live pretty close by. We could have got a cheaper place that was 10 miles out on the outskirts of town and deal with traffic or a longer commute or this or that. But how much is that worth to you?

TEM: Tell me about this physical space. We are not in the brewery.

AG: Yeah, this is just a storage room.

TEM: But tell me about this building, what was it about this space that when you 01:04:00saw it you said that's the one?

AG: It was a few things. I'm kind of a sucker for old brick buildings. This space fell into my lap. I was with a buddy at Amnesia Brewing when I was looking for a place for the brewery. He was just asking, how's the search for location going? I said, I haven't found anything yet. Still poking around. A woman who worked with the owner of the building just happened to be at the table next to us. She overheard and said, hey you're looking for a spot for a brewery? You should come check out this building. I knew what building she was talking about because I'd driven by it a million times. I was already excited when she mentioned what building it was. Eventually, I got in and checked in the building. It's certainly not the most conventional location for a brewery, but I 01:05:00connected with the landlord. He was a very reasonable guy. We ended up hitting it off pretty well. We just made it work.

TEM: If this is like an embarrassingly novice question, don't actually guffaw at me, but you wanted to make beers that were open fermentation. That meant this space mattered in that sense, too, right?

AG: Well, it's not spontaneous fermentation, which a lot of people mix up.

TEM: Oh, okay.

AG: Yeah. That comes up a lot. We still just pitch one or two yeast strains into those open fermenters. The room is kept clean otherwise.

TEM: Okay. That's what I-and I read something about the specialness of the space so that it's not-okay, because I was thinking how did you decide in this old 01:06:00building what was openly floating around would be something that you wanted.

AG: Oh, yeah, like we'd try to keep that room extra clean.

TEM: Okay. It's not the traditional farmhouse open up the windows, let the blossoms from the apples... that's what I always think about with farmhouse that they're going to open it up and then the blossoms flutter in.

AG: Oh, yeah, like the Lambic style approach.

TEM: Yeah [laughs].

AG: There's definitely beers where we're trying to encourage some sort of wild yeast and that kind of stuff, but the boiling part of production is way more clean and modern than that.

TEM: The space was important more from like a preference, not from a microbial level importance?

AG: Yeah, exactly. It was great for us to be able to get a spot essentially in the middle of town for a production brewery. You've got to remember, too, in 2009 when we finally got open we were building the spot out in '08, but there 01:07:00were almost no small production breweries in this city, like none. I think of Alan up at Hair of the Dog was probably the only small production brewery in the city, if I remember right. Everybody else had a pub and that was the model that had been in existence for a long time. It was kind of unusual to find this space, I think, so close to the middle of the city. Naturally, production brewery-I guess a lot of people who don't own breweries might not realize this, but as a production brewery, basically, even with our little tasting room, the majority of what we sell goes up for wholesale distribution. Your profit margins are pretty slim on wholesale. If 90% of what we sell goes to distributors and we don't sell a lot because the brewery's tiny, there's just not a lot of revenue 01:08:00or profit coming in. Normally you wouldn't be able to afford a spot in the middle of town because it would just be too expensive for a tiny production brewery. In that sense, it was really unusual to get this location.

TEM: Did you start with the staff, you have a staff of 4 now is that right? Including you?

AG: Yep.

TEM: Did you start with all of those guys? Did you open with a staff of 4?

AG: Let's see, when I started Gerritt, who worked at the Belmont Station with me, he came on board. That was, I mean gosh it's so funny looking back on this stuff. You're so naïve when you're young. You think like this will be easy. I know what I'm doing. I got a good handle on stuff. I'll just run a brewery by myself. He asked if he could help out because he wanted to learn. He was a pretty avid home brewer at the time. I said, sure. He helped me build it out. Then I taught him how to do all the commercial stuff and we went about it 01:09:00together and then it must have been a month or two in and he was like, so do you want to officially hire me? It was obvious that I needed help [laughs]. He's been with me since then, way before we got the doors open. Then, yeah, Bobby came along in 2013. Brent, our fourth guy, he basically manages the tap room. He helps us with packaging and that kind of stuff, too, but he's more of like the tasting room manager than anything else.

TEM: I know that you recently expanded, or remodeled, the tasting room. Was it always your intent to have a tasting facility as part of the production brewery?

AG: No, not at all. There was going to be in that little, whatever that is, 300 or 400 square foot section of the tasting room is, there was going to be a wall 01:10:00built there and it was going to be leased to someone who built pretty high-end bike frames. Then I guess they backed out at one point when we were probably, I don't know, a third or so into the build out of the brewery. The landlord came to me and said do you want this extra little rectangle of space? I said, let me sit on it for a day and think about it. I knew the walk in was going to be there. I thought we could just put some taps in the wall and have a tasting room. I mean, it was a total [unclear]. Which is hilarious, because even though we don't move a lot of volume through that tasting room, it's been really important for us financially to have some place to sell beer on premise, because even though it's small volume it does provide a nice revenue stream for us.

TEM: Well, I imagine too that it's nice, people like to go to the brewery. There is that kind of, I think that from my perspective it seems like that's part of the point of craft brewing, is that you can have that interaction with the space where it is made, the experience of interacting with the space.

AG: Like I said, you have to remember, too, back then there weren't tasting rooms. It was all pubs.

TEM: Yeah, so I guess people maybe thought they would go somewhere where they would eat, too?

AG: Yeah.

TEM: Is that the difference? Would be that it would be more restaurant-like?

AG: Yeah. That's just what people were used to. The tasting room idea is as simple as it is, for however long it's existed in the world online it was just kind of out there, I guess, for beer, at least in Portland at the time. That's 01:12:00why we didn't think much of it. We were just kind of like, whatever. Let's give it a shot. We don't really have much to lose.

TEM: What was it like to have people in the space? I read in an interview that said that there were times when, well somebody put that there was a "don't sneeze" post-it.

AG: That's kind of a joke on the fermenter room door, though. We don't let people in the fermenter room for anything. We don't even go in the fermenter room unless we have to. We might leave a beer in progress in there for a few days without going in there and check on it or anything. We'll just kind of let it do its thing and deal with it when we absolutely have to.

TEM: What was it like to enter this market in 2009? What did the market feel 01:13:00like to you?

AG: I thought it felt pretty wide open. Yeah. I thought it was a great time to get in and start moving some beer, especially with the stuff that we were doing, because nobody was doing this kind of stuff. That's changed a lot over the years, I think. Gosh, when we, the first time we put out our sour peach beer and I think a lot of people never even experienced anything like that, certainly from a domestic producer. Now there's the Peach Beer Fest. It's in its 5th year or something like that. I mean, stuff just took off for sour beers and barrel-aged beers, fermentation beers, farmhouse type beers. It was less than a decade ago and nobody was doing this stuff in town, nobody.

TEM: Did you find that the tasting room as it was before the remodel was an 01:14:00important place for people to interact with the beer? Did they come in and ask questions or was that more because you distributed so much more that your communication happened more with the distributors or the people who were selling the beer?

AG: I think in both ways, for sure. For us, especially with the styles of beers that we do, I think it makes a lot more sense to just connect with people directly. I really love it when people come into the tasting room and we're able to just talk and have a conversation about it. A lot of times they're home brewers who are really into beer, so the conversations can be really detailed and specific, which is a lot of fun because people are showing a real genuine interest or a really big interest in the beers. I mean, we're brewers. We'll talk beer all day.

TEM: What about marketing? How did you-there's that kind of direct communication, but then there's the marketing aspect. How did you approach that? 01:15:00What did you think about messaging?

AG: We kind of just didn't, really. I mean, for I feel like, this again goes back to those early years when we were kind of the only game in town doing these styles. The beer sort of took care of itself, because I think there was that audience of people that were into it and they didn't have very many options. We didn't really have to reach out. They sort of reached out to us. Obviously, those times have come and went. Now we're trying to do more to reach out to people, to differentiate ourselves from other breweries and that kind of thing.

TEM: One person that I had about space that kind of fits in with that idea of marketing and competition is size and space. How do you, and the kind of competition of the market when you're the only game in town there might be 01:16:00competition from other people who are doing different things, but when you have other people who are doing similar things how do you differentiate? How do you think about growth? How do you think about competition? If we opened up your brain and had a little window inside your brain what do you think about those things?

AG: It's tough. Because I mean I'm really just a production guy. I like to make the beer and so there are a lot of times when I don't, it's not at the top of my list of things that I want to do to address getting sales and making sure that the brewery's financially sound and that kind of stuff. If I had it my way, we'd still be home brewing, just more. I think there's the fun challenge in finding 01:17:00ways to stay relevant in a pretty crowded marketplace, too. I think for us the best way to go about it that I think still holds true to who we are what we want to do is make the beer interesting and tasty. I've always believed the beer should have a lot of character, and really what farmhouse style beers are all about is, again, having an individuality and a real, true sense of character and expression. That's something that you don't necessarily see I think in a lot of the new breweries, like breweries that are really jumping into it. I get that making mixed fermentation beers can be a lot of fun and it's really exciting because there's a lot of just the nature of them is pretty fascinating, but that doesn't mean that you just sort of jump in without, if you want the beers to be 01:18:00tasty, it's like a writer, you have to have something to say. I think with a lot of people jumping into it some of that's getting washed out where people just want to make beers that have the hallmark notes, like the big wild yeast expression or the strong sourness or high acidity and big oak character, these kind of extremes of what people associate with the beers. I think for us I'm trying to find a way to keep our overall profile I think more balanced, kind of through this time where people are going to extremes. But consumers like the extremes because they're easy to identify with. That's the one thing about consumers, it's tricky. People like to identify with what they're drinking. 01:19:00That's why extreme flavors are always popular. But there's always going to be I think a big enough market for more nuance, more subtlety. For us the challenge is how do we connect with that crowd? That crowd naturally isn't as easy to connect with because they're just quieter, if that makes sense.

TEM: Yeah. What about social media? In the time that you have been running this brewery I think the way that we expect to interact with businesses and each other, writ large, has changed a lot. How have you and have you used social media to connect? What is your way of connecting?

AG: Yeah. That's tough for me to answer. To give you a sense of the kind of guy that I am with social media: Gerritt and Bobby started an Instagram account for the brewery without telling me. I mean, I didn't even know what Instagram was 01:20:00for a long time. Somehow I sort of stumbled into it. They showed me some posts that they put up. I said, oh man, when did you guys do this? They said, oh we started this account like a year ago [laughs]. So, social media's not really my thing. In a lot of ways I feel like it goes against a lot of the ways I want to operate the brewery, just being more personal and having character. It's difficult to show true character on social media. I'm always trying to connect with people face-to-face if I can or actually I really like people when email, too. Sometimes people will email the brewery with a specific questions and I've had really nice email conversations with people about how we make the beers. Usually they're home brewers or they're brewers from different places. You can 01:21:00have really nice interaction. I love writing, and so when people write I like to think that I try to respond really thoughtfully and spend some time with it. Sometimes you have really nice exchanges or you even meet people that become friends over the years, that kind of stuff. To me, that's the way it sort of I think should be done and the social media stuff can be a little bit of fun. I've learned how to use the Instagram thing. I've even made a few posts myself now. Bobby tells me I need to work on my hashtags, though [laughs].

TEM: You're not on the Snapchat?

AG: I don't even know what that is.

TEM: My daughter's 14 and she hates it when I call it "the Snapchat" because I try to be as dorky about it as I can. It is interesting, I think when I was talking to Lucy Burningham we talked about the role of the journalist in this kind of, this world and that they're used to be, well there still is, but it 01:22:00used to be that you had journalists come in and they interviewed you. There was this kind of personal relationship between the person who was writing about the brewery or their experience with the beer as opposed to the consumers direct reporting, too. There's this tricky world that we're living in where, I mean people are experts on different things but not everybody is a journalist or not everybody is a beer critic. I think that kind of negotiation, I guess, of allowing people to have an experience that they share and that that can be a marketing, but at the same time it doesn't, it's not, it's counter to a lot of that what you were talking about the actual experience of actually experiencing the beer.

AG: There's so much. This goes back to the misinformation that floats around online. Over the years you make a lot of different beers, right. Maybe you're carrying over the names but making significant changes to the beers. There's 01:23:00beer variations year to year, batch to batch. There's so much stuff online that's just flat out wrong. It's so misleading. I think if you're relying on all the stuff online that's not direct from the company that people are posting left and right. I mean, I don't know. It's crazy. It's a whole world that I don't really follow.

TEM: Quite the opposite, well, maybe not the opposite, but I'm curious about food and what it was like, you sold direct to the farmer's market for a while, is that?

AG: Yeah.

TEM: That is the truth?

AG: Two seasons or two years we sold beer to the PSU market. That seems like a very immediate interaction with people. What was that like? Being within this-?

TEM: It was cool. There were some great things about it and difficult things 01:24:00about it. Back then all of our beer was in 750 ml bottles. They're pretty heavy. Trying to sell people at the market these pretty heavy bottles of beer at 9:00 a.m. or you know, it wasn't the easiest avenue to sell the beer, but we were able to, if not necessarily move too much beer at least talk to a lot of people about the beer and taste people on the beer. There were a lot of times when, this used to happen all the time when I would be talking to somebody at the market about what we're doing and then the market would close, I'd wrap everything up, come back to the brewery to unload and then that person I was just talking to an hour or two ago was in our tasting room hanging out because the tasting room was open. That happened a lot of times. That felt like it was obviously working right. That was good. But I mean there were all sorts of fun stuff about being at the market that has nothing to do with the business. I 01:25:00really enjoyed being able to trade beers with other venders for food. That was, I mean everybody loves bartering when you can but being able to barter for really, really tasty ingredients was always really nice. I always looked forward to that.

TEM: Did it feel inspirational to you at the time? I guess thinking about that local, seasonal mentality or mentality is not the word, or orientation-that's not the right word, either.

AG: I know what you're getting at.

TEM: Did that influence what you did? Because you were there for the two weeks of strawberries or you were there for corn bursting out?

AG: I guess this is going back again to being stimulated, you know, and in that sense you're being stimulated through a lot of different senses there, even visually seeing everything. It's really beautiful and it just wakes you up. It 01:26:00gets you excited. Then of course on the palate, you know. In your nose. All that stuff. Even the tactile sensation of water. A lot of that stuff was super neat to around. The PSU market's big. You see all sorts of different stuff. I learned a lot about different ingredients just being around it all the time. Then you can talk with your growers, too. If there was some really oddball vegetable you've never seen before you can talk to the growers and learn all about it, too.

TEM: What is something oddball that you got inspired by?

AG: Hmm. I'm trying to think. Well, I remember the mushroom vendor there. He would come in with truffles and being able to smell those truffles, that was neat. Talk about spectacular aroma. Yeah, anything that was aromatically forward, even tasting different varieties of honey. I think there's a lot to be 01:27:00said, too, about being in tune with what you have in front of you. This goes to the or speaks to the value of having an experience or having an open mind, because one of the greatest things I got to experience as a young brewer was, or this may have been when I was still home brewing, I was with Oregon Brew Crew, the local home brew club and Van Havig, who's at Gigantic Brewing, he used to be the head brewer at Rock Bottom at the time. This was many years ago. Van would always host an educational meeting for the Oregon Brew Crew once a year. One year he sets up all these hops on the table and I think he had like 6, maybe even 7 different lots of Cascade hops-all the same variety of Cascade but 01:28:00there's one from Idaho, two or three from Washington, you know two from Oregon maybe one from northern California. Then Van said alright go and just check them all out. You went from pile to pile, rub them with your hand and smell them. They all smelled different. Every single one smelled different. That really changed the way I look at things ever since. That was a really, really important moment for me it makes you step back and think, okay I need to put a little bit more thought into how I formulate stuff and use ingredients instead of just reading a recipe and going, oh, Cascade Hops. They're lemony or they're grape-fruity or a lot alike. It makes you not want to rely on somebody's official descriptors and instead make you own call.

TEM: It seems like having a smaller facility allows you to do that, too. You could have six different beers that were all with Cascade that could express, 01:29:00could have the hops expressed differently.

AG: Yeah. There's a wonderful flexibility with having a small production volume and a small batch size.

TEM: Let me look at my food to see if there were-I do want to talk about your restaurant stuff. So, that's under my food and beer. I want to hear your thoughts on ingredients and the importance of seasonal, local ingredients but also the importance of place within the Willamette Valley we have this major hop growing region. We have amazing water. We have access to great wild yeast but also Wyeast is a company. Certainly some grain and that's just the more standard 01:30:004 ingredients that go into beer. Talk about what you love about ingredients or the things that are really exciting to you about being here as it relates those ingredients and all the other ones.

AG: Yeah, I mean.

TEM: It's like talk about this entire thing-go! [laughs]

AG: Yeah. Well, the core bare ingredients, the malt and the hops especially, the nice thing about malt and hops that they do store really well so you don't necessarily get much of an advantage of getting malt or hops locally necessarily. It's just something that I think might feel better, right? Then that's not to say that you don't have all this other stuff available to mess 01:31:00around with, especially if you're doing farmhouse style beers or fresh fruit beers. For instance, I mean half of these barrels behind me have all sorts of different fruits. There's Gewürztraminer grapes, pinot grapes, different cherry varieties, peaches, nectarines, apricots-this is all the stuff that you know is really specific to this area. I know the grower really well for all this stuff. Having that connection's really important, for sure. But there's all sorts of different quirky stuff, too. We have a beer, our [unclear] right now that we do once a year called Flora Rustica that uses calendula flowers and yarrow flowers. The yarrows I just pull out of my backyard, but that goes back to an experience of learning it again, where I had a buddy, Vasily, he made a home brew once and 01:32:00he says, I want you to taste this. It was a saison with yarrow in it. He didn't like it. He thought it was way over the time. I loved it. I thought it was the tastiest thing. It had this really bright, funky lime note to it. I remember Vasily was thinking about dumping it. I said, don't dump it, man. He gave me a handful of bottles I really enjoyed. But immediately I was thinking I want to make a beer with yarrow in it. I kept trying it at home and I just couldn't get it to produce the same flavor profile.

I ended up this long journey trying to figure out how the hell Vasily got this profile that I loved and I mean it got silly, you know what I mean? I was ordering yarrow seeds online in different varieties and I had them growing all over my backyard. I was thinking it was a varietal thing. I was buying all the dried yarrow I could find from different sources. I just kept striking out and 01:33:00striking out and striking. This is going on for a long time and eventually I just realized that the most important part of it was harvesting the yarrow at the right time. Even though it flowers all summer long you want to harvest it, to get that character that I liked you had to harvest it early in the spring when the flowers were pretty young. That was it. I mean, there's certain varieties that I think taste better than others. I figured out which variety that was for me and now that beer's on our schedule of whenever those flowers pop out that's when we put it on the schedule right away. That's that. That's fun stuff, though. Like you know it was a fun learning experience. We've been making that beer I think every year since we've been open here. I look forward to it every time. It's a recipe that doesn't really change that much, but I really love it.

TEM: Did you do that with beers made by walking? Was that one that had yarrow in 01:34:00it, too?

AG: That beer, what did we do?

TEM: I don't have any-I think I didn't, I cut off the part that talked about what the beer was.

AG: We did a different beer for that. Ah-I can't remember. Yeah, I can't remember.

TEM: It would have been in the Larch Mountain trail system [laughs].

AG: Yeah, that's right. I remember going on the walk with the guide and it was actually a really lovely time. We had a nice time chatting and I remember tasting a few different things, that ginger root stuff where the roots are really tiny but they smell a lot like ginger and the Oregon grape. I can't remember what we ended up using. That's one kind of a long time ago.

TEM: That's pretty funny. I've got all these notes and like when you cut off the part that actually is the thing you'd want to ask the person.

AG: [Coughs] Excuse me.

TEM: That's okay. Talk about yeast and how your-about how you use it and why it's important to what you do and how that's changed, maybe?

AG: Yeast is, I mean especially the farmhouse type of beers it's like probably the key part of it. Yeast is going to get you so much of the character, and I think even a lot of professional brewers don't maybe put too much stock in just how far the yeast takes the beer as far as like the finish, the color and stuff. Everything about the beer is affected by the yeast, it seems. I mean for us it's just been a lot of fun working with different yeast strains over the years and 01:36:00finding what we like and usually we don't, we'll never find the perfect yeast. There's always maybe you find a strain that you use for a while that has this aspect or that aspect that you love, but then it's missing this or missing that. Lately something we've been doing for the past couple of years is combining different yeast strains and then that has its own challenge of how do you maintain this mixed culture of several generations and so. That part's super fun. Some brewers, especially the guys that I think are more controlling, the more engineer types they'll hear something like that and think, oh man this is a nightmare. How do you deal with this? Those are the guys that want predictability. If that's how you look at beer production, then you shouldn't even be thinking about making these kinds of beers because they're going to be probably really boring if you're just really trying to like get them so fixed 01:37:00that they're just reproducible.

TEM: Have you found that yeast behaves differently in this space? Do you have something that was kind of tried and true thing that you would always use or gravitate towards when you were home brewing but then when you came to this space that it behaved differently?

AG: No, I mean the open fermenters that we use will definitely produce some different flavors than they would otherwise in a taller tank or a closed tank. Over the years we've come to learn what to expect, even with strains we've never even used we can at least an inclination of okay, we've experienced this yeast. Maybe in a taller tank or from a different brewery that has more conventional tanks. I think I know what it'll do or which way it will lean in a shallow tank.

TEM: Talk about the beers or what you like to do with not hops.

AG: Oh, yeah, in fact the one every year that's a lot of fun is called the Special Herbs. That beer is a hop-less, I call it a [unclear] Saison that has, it's got lemongrass, hyssop, Sichuan peppercorns, two types of orange peel and I think that's it. I might be forgetting something. People ask a lot how did you put that recipe together? How do you formulate something like that? Something like that can go back to having a food background of what are the notes through the general points of what you want to hit on the palate. You pick certain ingredients looking for different spots on the palate. I look at flavors 01:39:00oftentimes as being bright or dark. I think a lot about the finish and how flavors might hit up front or linger or just be mid palate or maybe some sort of combination of all that stuff. I mean, at the end the goal is always the same: to make the beer tasty and with character. That's the challenge of having something that's really pleasant, really enjoyable but unique and not sort of trying too hard. It has to have an eloquence to it, I think. Even a beer that's sort of semi-extreme can have a degree of elegance to it. That's where it gets tricky.

TEM: What's your favorite experimental ingredient that you've used? I am thinking of the craziest ingredient is beef hearts.

AG: I had a feeling you would say that [?].

TEM: I'm sure that there...

AG: That beer was really tasty. That beer, it was so unfortunate that I think a lot of people when we put that beer out assumed that we used beef hearts in some sort of symbolic way of on, the heart, it's this very intense, bloody like just like people thought that we used hearts just because they were hearts. It was purely, functional. Actually, I talked to a buddy of mine who's a professional chef about this problem when I was working with Jason from Burnside Brewing and we wanted to make a beer that had this sort of meaty quality to it. We couldn't figure out how to work that into the beer, with the main problem being that there was all this fat that you don't want to have any sort of fat content in the beer for obvious reasons. I was just talking about this with my buddy Tim. 01:41:00Tim, he thought about it for like 10 seconds and said, just use beef hearts. He goes, they're perfect. It's like all pure protein, big flavor, no fat. Just cream them up real well. Boom. It made so much sense. I went back to Jason and told him and said, oh perfect. We'll get a case of hearts. We'll char them in the kitchen there at Burnside. We'll bring them up there and we'll work them into the beer. We were really stoked about the beer, because we thought it came out really tasty, even the color was perfect of the beer and then when we put it out everybody was making such a big deal about the beef hearts. It was just like, oh man. It was just supposed to be like a beer. We weren't trying to shock people.

TEM: I actually was linking it to you being involved in meat-related restaurants 01:42:00and I thought like, oh there's this, the meat link. Oh, see if I can cross these two worlds together. So, maybe I was...

AG: Yeah. Jason and I are both kind of big into meat and cook food and stuff. He's a total food enthusiast, too, but that's why we really why we wanted to link the two together because it was a personal combination, I guess.

TEM: So, what is something-

AG: I mean, I think it was a fun idea, too. That's the other thing, beer can be really playful. To me that was a really playful project that people took way too seriously.

TEM: What is something that was a playful project that people-well, what's another playful project? What's another favorite thing you did, whether that's like a kind of collaboration, or work with another sort of ingredient?

AG: Yeah, I don't know. Jason and I did an oyster stout. That was a long time ago. That one really weirds people out sometimes if they've never heard of it before. But it's not like we invented that. That's something that's been around for a while, I think we just sort of brought it back into Portland a little bit because Poor George would do it at the time, too.

TEM: I think, I read Oyster liquor. Am I remembering that correctly?

AG: Yeah, we use whole oysters and oyster liquor, juice, it's basically just the water that comes off the oysters when you shuck them.

TEM: Oh, okay. I was thinking like there was some crazy distillation that happened, but I guess it's just the...

AG: It's basically just seawater.

TEM: Well, it sounds fancier if you call it liquor. I was like, oh this was like a, this is something really special.

AG: If you saw it you wouldn't think it was fancy, that's for sure. It's this 01:44:00very opaque, gray full of silt and stuff.

TEM: Like the oyster color?

AG: Yeah, pretty much.

TEM: What's like a fruit that you really love using or something that you've made that you really want to do again?

AG: I really enjoyed using wine grapes lately. Anything that has a varietal character can be really nice. We've been using different varieties of peaches over the years. The skin of the peach has some really neat aromatics that I really like. There's a real deep herbaceous quality to a peach skin that I think is really reminiscent of tomato leaves. It's like borderline intoxicating. It's such a neat, deep complex smell but really enjoyable.

TEM: So, smell when you brew with it or smell when you're processing it to brew with it? Sorry, in that you get that from the beer or from the process of making 01:45:00the beer?

AG: Yeah, both. I mean, you just smell the fruit as you're using it. You can smell it right on the skin but then it ends up in the finished beer like a year, year and a half later too.

TEM: Okay, restaurants. Food that is not beer food. Talk about why and how you opened Grain & Gristle and the Old Salt Marketplace.

AG: I was kind of, you know, things that happened that we'd meet people that you just start talking about maybe we can do this together, like a project that sort of born out of just a little discussion, I guess. One of my partners, Ben Meyer, he at the time was at Ned Ludd, and we met there kind of bonded over beer. It 01:46:00got to the point where he was ready to move on and start something else. We hooked up a third guy along the way and yeah, just really simple stuff. No real special story there. Very natural thing. Pretty low key.

TEM: What has been surprising about being involved in those business as it compares to running a brewing business? What are some of the special facets of both of those?

AG: Yeah, I mean restaurants are a lot different than breweries, for sure. It's kind of funny, especially from a business perspective of how the numbers are so significantly different, but of course restaurants have a lot of employees. Something that people don't know often about breweries is you don't really need that many people to run a brewery. So, our place is tiny and it's really just 01:47:00me, Gerritt and Bobby that do pretty much all the production stuff. I mean, up the street at Widmer where they're cranking out a ton of beer there's probably not as many employees as you'd think. Whereas a restaurant, a small restaurant, can have a pretty tremendous amount of employees. They can be a handful. Obviously, and for me, can be a lot better managing people that kind of thing.

TEM: Have you, do have involvement in the business side or the management side of the restaurant side of the restaurants? Or do you have a different role?

AG: I'm kind of a more... it's a funny question that's really difficult to answer. People are like what do you do at the restaurant? I'm not behind the bar and I'm not in the kitchen but I do a lot of little things. A lot of it's like just general managing stuff or really lame owner stuff, like going and buying 01:48:00toilet paper and that kind of shit [laughs].

TEM: Now we know. Know the interview gets real. We know what you actually do. You go buy toilet paper, no. How has that changed as Portland has changed? How do you adapt from a kind of restaurant owner role? How do you feel like customers have changed or styles have changed? I mean, the Grain & Gristle's been open for 8 years, so almost as long as this brewery has. How has the restaurant world changed or has it?

AG: Yeah, I mean I think in Portland, for sure. It's kind of the same as the beer world, in that sense. It's gotten extremely competitive. There's probably 01:49:00more options for consumers than there really needs to be, and so when you're on the producer end of it again it becomes a challenge where maybe the days of having sort of a good product speak for itself, they're just gone. So, you need to find I guess more modern ways to be relevant and to capture some consumers or an audience. That's tricky. I think that's especially tricky, I think the guys at the restaurants and myself we're kind of the same. We're sort of old school. We're not really keen on social media. We're not keen on what's popular, what's hip. We're kind of more straight up guys and so it's difficult I think in that sense to really wrap your head around how do you reach the modern audience. It's just different. It's really different. It's kind of an awkward conversation, 01:50:00really. I think it is a little disheartening that people can be really fickle.

For instance, going back to the beer stuff, we just had to switch from the 750 ml bottles to smaller ones, the 375 ml. It seemed like whatever it was like a year or so ago, maybe a couple of years ago, that the demand for these 750 ml bottles just nose-dived like out of the blue. Those kind of drastic changes I find really disconcerting. This is a package that was popular before you and I were born. 750 ml bottles have been used for so long. Then all of a sudden [snaps fingers] nobody wants it. That's alarming, I think. Not just as a business owner but what does that say about the modern consumer. What does that say about just the modern person? It's being way too fickle. I don't think 01:51:00that's a good way to go about things, necessarily.

TEM: It seems like that kind of want of something's different because it's not what you have.

AG: Yeah.

TEM: There's not necessarily a reason.

AG: What's hot, what's hip. Oh, a couple breweries are doing smaller packages now, like everybody just jumps overboard all of a sudden. It's like, whoa. What the hell's going on here?

TEM: I imagine no matter the size of your business, that's a hard shift to make.

AG: Oh, yeah! For us, it was difficult. I mean the brewery being small we don't make a lot of money. When stuff's going smooth, our profit's pretty modest. If you need to retool the whole lineup, well, it's already a pretty small amount of money that we have to play with. In any business, you have to be smart with how 01:52:00you spend and how you manage everything, but I think in a tiny business you have to really put a lot of thought into every decision that you make, otherwise you're just not going to make it.

TEM: Mm-hmm. What is still exciting to you about being in this business?

AG: It still feels super fresh. Making beer is just that old romantic notion of getting to be creative and, again, working with your hands, getting to maybe use some new ingredients. It really doesn't get old. I can't believe that I've been doing this since I was, I mean I was 23 when I was at Ommegang. I'm still really excited to come to the brewery, especially when we're making new beers or bringing back old ones that we really like. I still feel really young. I feel 01:53:00like I'm just super stoked and I can't wait and I get excited. That part of it feels really good.

TEM: How do you get new ideas? Do you travel?

AG: I feel like there's inspiration everywhere. Really, everywhere. It could be in my backyard. It could be at the farmer's market, like we were talking about earlier. It could be talking to people. I mean, you have to always be receptive to, again, like what's stimulating you. It can be all sorts of stuff. It can be stuff that you'd never even expect, too. It could be maybe the aroma of some weird object that has nothing organic about it, like smelling a brick wall or something. It sounds silly, but there's so much neat character out there that can point you in whatever direction.

TEM: How do you, the three of you who are doing the brewing, how do you share that? Do you have Monday morning meetings?

AG: We don't do any meetings here. We don't do any meetings. It's too formal for us.

TEM: What's the, I guess that feedback loop like? What does that look like for the 3 of you?

AG: We just talk a lot. We're all really different. It's tough to say. I think the guys, there even more straightforward than I am, usually the one with more off-the-wall ideas and stuff. They do a good job of reigning me in when I'm getting too wacky, I think [laughs]. We just talk about stuff. A lot of times it feels like we're just hanging out. As we're working doing stuff, we'll just be talking about what we're doing later on. Or at the end of the day when we wrap up production, we'll just sit down and have a beer and chat. We wouldn't call it a meeting. We're just hanging out.

TEM: [Laughs] I wonder if I start calling them chatting hangouts at work it will feel better than calling it a meeting. I doubt it.

AG: A meeting makes it sounds mandatory.

TEM: What is the role of music? That's something that was actually one of the first things on my "about the brewery" list about you. Talk about the role of music. Now, the name has a special meaning, but also about the it's not just the jazz. Talk about the role of music in this brewery.

AG: I mean, the name and the whole reference to Charles Mingus is really important in explaining how we approach things and how we view beer. This goes back to so much of the stuff we talked about earlier of not wanting it to be categorized, not wanting people to go into things with expectations ahead of time. Mingus's music in particular is really free, I think. I don't know any 01:56:00other musician that seemed, I think, that unbound, especially in the what a lot of people would have called this little realm of jazz, thinking that it should be really specific. If you really listen to his music, he was really doing what he wanted to do. He had a lot to say. He had a voice. It really shows. That's totally what we're all about down here, about wanting to find something that we feel is worth expressing and then getting that expression across. There's a huge connection there with what Mingus was doing and how he did it and what we want to do. That's really important. Then the rest of it with music and stuff, who doesn't love music? I mean, like it's just, it's a really nice inspiration even though it's never really been like direct inspiration for producing beer. Like, 01:57:00I said, you get inspired and you get stimulated in so many different ways. I'm not trying to say that there can be a direct connection between a song that you hear and then a beer that you formulate later. That's kind of outrageous but I think that something as simple as maybe if music makes you happy or if music inspires some sort of strong emotion in you, maybe that spurs you into something beer-wise. Or something else. I mean, like I said, that can be something that you read. It could be a conversation with somebody that has nothing to do with alcohol and beer that gets your wheels turning and next thing you know you're somewhere else.

TEM: Yeah, it's the smell of a brick wall, that kind of being open, yeah, being 01:58:00open to inspiration from different directions or facets of life.

AG: I've been thinking about that a little more lately, since I've been under the weather the past week or so I almost lost my sense of smell for a period over, there were a handful of days where I felt like I couldn't smell anything. When you lose a sense like that it really makes you think about how much you really do use it and what you do with that, too. You don't just use smell to just smell things in that very straightforward sense. Your senses carry you to different places.

TEM: Did you have certain things that you could still taste or smell? Or did they come back in different, like at different times?

AG: I'm still working on it. It was a frustrating week last week. There were a couple times when I really needed to assess some stuff that was in progress, and 01:59:00then just I mean nothing. Then you rely on the guys but then you know they're different. I'm trying to get an idea of where things are at, but it's a little bit uncomfortable to be pulled out of that.

TEM: I had one time when I lost my sense of smell and I was always a coffee drinker. I stopped drinking anything with my coffee because I thought this is just I'm feeling the mouth feeling. I don't like the mouth feel because I can't taste it. Then now since then I've been a black coffee drinker. I realized how much of it was the mouth feel, instead. What do you like to do when you're not here? Are you not here? [Laughs]

AG: [Laughs] I have a bit more free time now. I mean, I have a pretty simple life. Like I said, I really enjoy music at home. I listen to a lot of records. I 02:00:00like to read. I watch a lot of hockey. I really love hockey. Watching hockey, not playing. I can't skate, so. I mean, I've never tried to skate, but I'm assuming that I wouldn't be a very good skater but I really enjoy hockey. I love food. I like to cook at home. Pretty simple stuff. I like to try to live a lower stress, pretty mellow lifestyle outside of work.

TEM: What's your favorite thing to cook right now? Do you go through phases where you're really into certain styles?

AG: Yeah, I mean, I kind of like everything. I don't do any baking at home. So, not baking. Not pastries and that kind of thing, but pretty much anything savory. I like simple stuff at home, too. I like to just throw meat on the grill with just salt. I like sourcing good ingredients and keeping them simple. A lot of the same philosophy that we have in the restaurants of letting the 02:01:00ingredients shine and do their thing.

TEM: What is the question that you wish people would ask you? This is because I was actually listening to Charles Mingus myself last night because I felt it was my prep for the interview. I was thinking about concluding questions. The question that I always ask people is what did you think that I would ask that I didn't ask. You can answer that one to, but I feel like you're somebody who's been interviewed a lot and I'm curious what it is you want people to ask you about that they don't ask you about. It could be that they do a great job. Then I don't have anything more of an ending.

AG: I mean, I don't know. I feel like I always end up when people start asking me about what I do and how I do things, I always kept myself going back to how 02:02:00important it is be true to your character, to maybe only put stuff out if you feel like you have something worth putting out. To me, that's not necessarily a quality thing. It's about having that expression, having the voice. I don't know. I think that's something that's important that when you see other people getting interviewed or other people talking about beer or what they put out oftentimes I don't hear that. I don't hear the importance of having something to say or having something unique to put out there. I think now with the time that we're in of people putting up breweries left and right, it's important to stay focused on getting your expression out there. Nobody ever asks where that comes 02:03:00from or how you ended up that way. I can answer that anyways. I don't have an answer to that, but I'd be curious and wish I knew how I ended up this way. I feel often more people don't say the same thing.

TEM: Well, it's a really interesting way to think about it, though, that it's not just I want to put out a product because I see that people are making this thing and people seem to enjoy it. That might be a motivation. That it is this sense of I have something I want to express, not just I want to give you beer, to make beer for you to drink, but that there's something. It's like painting, I guess. You sit down in the canvas and you have something that needs to go out in the world or away from your brain.

AG: If the inspiration was something specific, you know if you go back to the 02:04:00brick wall thing or a slate type of character. That's something very specific that maybe you want to convey in a beer, so you have a beer that revolves around this mineral or metallic quality, something like that. You have a point that you're trying to get at for us. I don't know. I just feel like people are going about things in a sort of singular way of let's get this little point across. Like a little snapshot. To bring somebody back to your inspiration, hopefully when you get the beer across. Then if you talk to somebody and they say oh I picked up on this or were you trying to go for something like this, I think you'd be surprised at how many people really do pick up on stuff without you telling them and that they'd be totally spot on with what your intentions were with the beer, where it all began.

TEM: How do you get that feedback without talking to every single person? How do 02:05:00you talk to people without having every single consume come through your doors or having a huge tap room? I'm thinking about just the logistics of that kind of, that infinity feedback loop.

AG: You just talk to the people that you can. Maybe you have some regulars that have, maybe you have regulars that you identify with or maybe what's really happening is that they identify with you. They sort of get what you're trying to put across most of the time. They understand the way you put things together and so maybe you kind of keep going back to them to get a new dialogue going.

TEM: Do you go to festivals? Is that something that...?

AG: Nah, I mean, not often.

TEM: Yeah.

AG: But I'm not doing brewery stuff in here. I like to not do brewery stuff most of the time. Breweries are [unclear]. The number of brewers that are like every event and doing all this stuff like outside of the regular work schedules it really blows my mind, because I feel like I barely have enough time to do all those simple, stupid things that I even do at home. I'm always behind on the records I want to listen to and a reading I want to do and I'm missing hockey games all the time. I don't know how you can tack on more industry stuff into like for me what feels like an already simple life. Some of these guys have families and kids and stuff. I don't even have to deal with that and I feel like I'm short on time.

TEM: What did you think I was going to ask you that I didn't ask you?

AG: The usual one-what's in store for the future? You know?

TEM: What's in store for the future? What's next?

AG: When's Upright going to expand? You know? That's the question that everybody asks. The funny thing is most people ask that question assuming that the answer's going to be yes, we can't wait to expand, blah, blah, blah. But no, the breweries holding pat. We put more focused on barrel usage over the years but the overall production volume should pretty much be the exact same.

TEM: Have you always had this space?

AG: This room we've only had for about a year and a half.

TEM: Okay. I was remembering something about having extra space for doing this kind of barrel aging.

AG: Yeah, I think we started filling this room in it must have been November/December 2016.

TEM: I wish, this room is the, I wish people could have the scents of what the air feels like or what it smells like. It definitely feels like a cellar.

AG: Oh yeah. It definitely has a cellar quality to it.

TEM: It feels very cellar, it feels like a stellar cellar. I think that notion of growth. I hope that as an industry we keep talking about that or maybe as people. Why do we have to keep getting bigger? Why is that the next step? Why is that a measure of...

AG: I think that's really sad and depressing that that's just assumed to be the way to operate. That's just silly.

TEM: Then I'm glad I didn't ask it. [Laughs] Yeah. If people listen to the tape I may have alluded to space as far as expansion. But yes, I think it seems like that would be untrue to what you want to do. Not that it doesn't ever happen or you never want to-

AG: Well, it's not like the doors never closed, right? You can do what you want every day but I mean if you have a good thing going... if I wanted to make a 02:09:00million bucks I wouldn't have opened a brewery.

TEM: Yeah. What is next as far as something that you are excited to be trying? There's this space and I'm assuming all of the things that you don't know that will happen to what's going on in these barrels behind you, but what's something that's exciting, oh I want to try out this ingredient? I want to try out this blend? I want to try... like what is something that's jazzing you up about a future thing? Creation?

AG: Yeah, I mean we're starting a new label called Ives that has the same base beer in a lot of different barrels. So, like our Pathways Saison, it gives us the opportunity to just make specific blends for a larger lot of barrels, 02:10:00something that we weren't doing in the early years of the brewery when beers were basically set form the get-go, where we'd say alright we're going to fill up these 5 barrels or these 8 barrels and these are going to get blended later. That was the plan that we would have rarely deviated from. Now, getting to pick from a lot makes the blending opportunities kind of fun. A lot of times it's overly romanticized in the beer world. It's not like-we make jokes about it here, like the romance of blending barrels and stuff. People really like to romanticize making beer and it's cool. I love it. Don't get me wrong. But it shouldn't be overly romanticized either, though. The blending is fun. I'm excited about that. We're learning a lot, too, from that experience. I don't know. We just got a play it by ear, day-by-day or month-by-month kind of thing, which is funny because I think these beers are two years old or whatever.

TEM: Yeah, I was looking, walking around looking at the dates and thinking, I think there was a date on one of them that was 2013.

AG: Oh! That was a previous fill. We don't have anything that's that old.

TEM: Oh! So, right, sharpie that one out.

AG: The new date might be on the other side of the barrel or something like that. We have a bad habit of switching from head to head instead of going along the same side. Yeah, we'll see. I don't know. Just trying to navigate the industry and stuff still. I'm excited for it to settle down sometime, but I don't know if that's ever going to happen.

TEM: Do you feel like the new taproom space has settled or unsettled? What's been the impact of having a more formal tasting room?

AG: It's been a lot better for us as far as making the spot more comfortable. I 02:12:00think people when they come in now they hang out a little longer and we're able to connect with people a little bit better. There had been people sort of bounce in and bounce out. That part of it's nice. It just feels like more of almost like a community spot in that sense, even though we get a lot of tourists down here. It's fun though to get tourists down here and talk to people from, I mean we get people from all over the world, especially in the summer time. It's a lot of fun. To have a cozier place to do that I think is really neat.

TEM: Yeah. I think it's people, it's like you know what to do when you come to a place where...

AG: Yeah, there's a bar.

TEM: And that I imagine that, of course people have to want to find you.

AG: Yeah. There's that.

TEM: They have to know. We'll say to all the other people who have written about you that I appreciate that they said take the elevator.

AG: [Laughs].

TEM: Because I did.

AG: I mean, there's part of this I really liked being hidden. It's kind of fun, but at the same time business-wise it would be way better if we had direct sidewalk access. We would probably make twice as much money if we had a door to the sidewalk, but you know it is what it is. We work with what we got.

TEM: It's part of the adventure.

AG: Yeah.

TEM: Well, thank you for talking with me.

AG: Likewise. Thank you.