Locally Brewed: Portraits of Craft Breweries from America's Heartland by Blessing Anna

Author:Blessing, Anna [Blessing, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781572847293
Publisher: Agate Publishing
Published: 2014-02-10T22:00:00+00:00

Jonathan was in his fifth year at Southern Illinois University, putting off graduation and enjoying homebrewing a lot more than class. He and a friend were making a keg or two a week, calling up friends to come and drink their beer. “We bought as many carboys as we could—we were brewing in these stainless steel Italian 100-liter pots, so you could make one keg at a time,” Jonathan says. The first craft beer boom of the early ’90s was just starting, and Jonathan found out about the Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago. When he learned that he could get a degree in brewing, it clicked that making beer might be what he wanted to do. Jonathan completed college as quickly as possible, and enrolled in Siebel.

After school, Jonathan searched for a brewery job for six or seven months, until he heard that Leinenkugel’s in Milwaukee needed someone to work on the packaging line. Just to get his foot in the door, he drove an hour every day from Libertyville, Illinois, to Milwaukee to work the line. Then one day Matt Brynildson from Goose Island called him.

Jonathan worked at Goose Island for three years, during a time—1997, 1998, and 1999—when there was practically as much talent and creativity in one place as Elizabethan England: Matt Brynildson (brewmaster at Firestone Walker), Gary Nichols (quality control at Bell’s Brewery), Josh Deth (manager partner at Revolution Brewing), Jim Cibak (head brewer at Revolution Brewing), and Phin DeMink (founder of Southern Tier Brewing Company). “Back then it was a really neat environment,” he says. “It was a melting pot of all of these brewers who were hungry.”

It was also really hard work. There wasn’t a lot of money, and the brewers often worked overnight shifts: nine at night until six in the morning. “That was awful. Also not the best idea: I was working all night in a factory, by myself, with temperatures and pressures and chemicals all around me,” Jonathan says with a laugh.

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