Boarding the Beer Camp Bus With Sierra Nevada’s Brian Grossman

, Boarding the Beer Camp Bus With Sierra Nevada’s Brian GrossmanWhen asked whether his title was VP, Sierra Nevada’s Brian Grossman replied “Second Generation Brewer.” Coming up on 36 years in the craft industry is no small feat; neither is running a 6-city beer festival involving 31 partner breweries, hundreds of brewers and thousands of attendees.

I was lucky enough to snag a few minutes with Brian on board the Beer Camp bus to find out what goes on behind the scenes. 

 

What comes to mind when you think of Boston and the craft beer scene?

There’s this whole new movement of these cloudy IPAs that are taking it by storm, and it’s pretty cool that brewers are experimenting with different beers — which is what we did when we first started with this beer [points to can of Pale Ale] in 1980. Brewers are thinking outside the box and still pushing it, pushing it, pushing it. 

 

, Boarding the Beer Camp Bus With Sierra Nevada’s Brian GrossmanI know it can be tough to forge a balance between fan favorites that people have known for generations, and try to innovate at the same time. 

Why we make beer is still the same; it’s always for fun. As soon as making beer becomes a job, you have totally fucked up. We work very hard, but it’s always gotta be fun and rewarding. That’s why we do it. 

 

So, Beer Camp. You’re coordinating cities, breweries, operations; how do you make this work?

I have the easy job; I get to drink beer and hang out with my buddies. But there’s a huge amount of work involved. We’re doing this also in San Francisco as we speak, so there’s two teams executing at this level. You hire good people, is how you make these things work. 

 

Is someone planning this year-round?

We did this two years ago. We took a bus literally cross-country, which was a terrible idea. Don’t do that. It was Chico, down to San Diego, to Denver, Chicago; then we hopped on the train to New York, up to Portland Maine, then down to North Carolina. It took us two years to basically recover. Then I said, “We’ll do beer camp again, but there’s no way in hell we’re getting on a bus.” 

 

So, this one’s more for show?

No, we’re on a bus again. Just because you’re the boss it doesn’t make you right all the time. You get pointed in directions. We have two buses now; one on the West Coast and one on the East Coast, but we’re sleeping in hotel rooms and we’re seeing family for a few days in between, which is helpful.

 

What has you excited today?

The cool part about Beer Camp is you get the small, local guys, regionally speaking, that will come — and they don’t distribute the beer anywhere but their own respective breweries. So there’s tons of brewers that you normally wouldn’t see, here. My favorite beer is cold. 

 

, Boarding the Beer Camp Bus With Sierra Nevada’s Brian GrossmanTell me about the Northeast region’s Pat-Rye-Ot Revolutionary Pale Ale – it was based on colonial ingredients?

Without driving the bus over Sam, literally or figuratively speaking…  The way that we divided the country up is in six regions; this region happened to have Sam in it, and we called him to lead the charge. Sam was like, “Well, we’ve got almost all of the colonies here in our group, so let’s make this colonial beer.” Factually speaking, that’s not really correct; there are a lot of colonies on the other teams; North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia. But the inspiration was there; what the hell would our forefathers be drinking? And there was a lot of apple cider at that time. And rye is this great ingredient; a little bit goes a long way. This rye IPA is 9% rye, which has such a distinctive, sharp, white pepper nose. You don’t need a lot, and it can totally change your beer. 

 

How hard was it to get all the regional brewers together? What was the process like?

We brought everyone to North Carolina and said “Alright guys, here are the teams; what are we going to make?” And no one said “Well, I want to make an IPA” and someone else said, “Well, I want to make an IPA.” There’s only one IPA in the pack, which is awesome to see. We all know IPA is king, it’s growing, it’s probably going to be half the volume of craft in the future (my prediction) — that’s okay, but there are so many other great beers and styles out there, that you don’t have to do that. So there was no doubling up. We all just literally broke into groups. We brought one of our brewers to each group just to make sure we could make the beer, physically — there’s always some restrictions. And we figured out a way to make every one of the beers.

 

How long did the brewing process take?

The whole meeting was in September, then we brewed ’til today. We went over email, email, email, then they all got back together to brew, in essence, a pilot batch, and got these beers back to us. When you go from ten barrels to 100 barrels, it’s not a direct expansion of the recipe; there are plenty of things you don’t double or triple. We had to taste the beers and understand, okay, this is what we’re looking for. We scale the recipes up, and we have to make tweaks as well. It’s very difficult to get it right the first time; mother nature can throw you a curveball. 

 

, Boarding the Beer Camp Bus With Sierra Nevada’s Brian GrossmanIn one of your promotional videos for beer camp, Dave McLean from Magnolia Brewing said Beer Camp is like a time capsule. How will you remember the craft industry in 2016?

There have been more changes in the last 6 or 18 months than basically since Prohibition. Sales and mergers, and ups and downs, and distributor and retail lawsuits; what did we get ourselves into, and why is our industry doing this? There are plenty of great brewers out there that are passionate, but the unfortunate part is that there are so many others looking at this thing just to make a dollar. It’s like, you don’t understand all the hard work that fellow brewers have put in to pave the way for this to happen.

 

Not to end this on a down note, I heard that the proceeds of Beer Camp are going to nonprofits?

So, the festival part of Beer Camp is actually not put on by us. They’re put on by the state guilds, and you need a really strong state brewing guild to be an advocate for the small local brewers that are out there. So, the Massachusetts Guild is putting this on, and they get all the proceeds from this festival. Then the supergroups actually picked a charity that they wanted to donate to. The hope was, let’s focus on making better beer, let’s internalize it to the brewing community. So $100,000 is going to charities. Brewers are really fun people, but if you look at your local brewery, look at what it does for your community. We’re good guys. Sam Calagione, his famous line is, “The brewing industry is 99% asshole-free.” And I totally still agree with that.  

 

Photo Credits: Ben Lewis at Neural Shunt Media

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