CBB // As you guys were deciding to start Beachwood Brewing, how did you decide on what kind of beer program to build? Talk to me about how you started formulating what those beers were going to be and why.
JS // I’ve always been a curious person, [and] my scientific sensibilities will drive me to interminable revision, believing that things can always be made a little bit better and never just thinking that you’ve arrived at some kind of final destination. … So when we opened the pub, I knew that I wanted to brew a wide range of beers, but I didn’t know quite how wide. And I was fairly convinced that, like many brewpubs that came before us, we would have a certain number of flagships, and occasionally we’d throw in a twist and do some kind of one-off beer. And I thought, you know what, those are the six beers that I’m always going to brew year-round. But the public had a very different opinion about that. So that kind of changed what we were doing early on.
Another thing that changed what we were doing early on is hop contracting. [It] was something that was fairly easy to do for many, many years—even arguably, decades. And when we opened in 2011, that was kind of on the heels of that hop crisis when everybody was over-contracted—that was when I believe Anheuser Busch decided to abandon Willamette hops—and then, suddenly, there was this glut of this huge crop that was no longer needed. So, hop contracts really got very quickly adjusted tightly. And when we opened, kind of the reaction that I got from our suppliers was, “Oh, you’re a new brewery? Yeah, we’re not going to contract with you.” Or “We’re going to give you a very restricted contract because we don’t know who you are, and you essentially have no business credit.” So I had to buy surplus hops from friends at other breweries.