All right, last question, beer burp. Cough button or celebrate it into the mic? Cough button. Nobody wants that. You know what, I think that this deserves a little bit of a decision here, because I mean a few burps, but over here. Cough, cough. Well, hey there, Jeff. How are you? I'm good, Kristen. How are you? Good. I'm very excited about today. I know it might not sound like it, but this excitement will build. Oh, I'm sure. It always does. Excited Kristen sounds like regular Kristen, but... Pretty much. There's just kind of one speed. Until the drinks start pouring. Slow and steady until six o'clock. There you go. That's right. Happy hour. Happy hour somewhere. Or a shine. Anyway, we're here with a couple of my good buddy associates from Binny's Beverage Depot. First and foremost, I call you big guns. I don't know if you like it, but I can't stop it. And that's Roger Adamson. He's our beer buzz. He's our beer guy, beer educator, and also actually quite knowledgeable in spirits. Hey, Roger. Happy to be here. Thanks for that introduction. I'm excited. I'm happy to see you, buddy. And of course, we've got Patrick Brophy. Hey, Pat. Hey. So today, guys, on the docket, we want to talk about beer. We haven't really talked about beer in a few episodes. So who better than double first name, party Marty Scott? Marty Scott, how are you? I'm doing well. When is the podcast actually going to begin? When the green fist goes in the air. That's when you know the podcast has done it. Which is a reference to Marty's title. So what is your role at Revolution Brewing? I'm lucky enough to be on the brew staff. I operate the Barrel Age program, the Deepwood program, as well as the majority of the innovation stuff. Dabbling quality, dabbling, trying to not screw stuff up too much. Do whatever Big Jim Seaback tells me to do. We want to talk about the beginnings of Revolution. Tell me how it started though. So the brew pub, the building 2323 North Milwaukee Avenue was purchased in 2008, about two years before we opened the doors. Josh Deeth, the chairman of the party. What's up, Josh? His wife Krista, head brewer Jim Seaback, chef Jason Petrie and Michelle Foick, also of Goose Island alum. Maddy Kemp, employee number one at Revolution, built it out of an old print shop. They got the building. Josh had tried to start the company a few years prior. Found this building. They got it and started busting it out. And in February 2010, they opened up to a bar that was three deep on Monday nights. Beers like Anti Hero, I don't even believe was there when they first opened up. It's now our flagship. They started by essentially home brewing at Josh's home. Jim and Josh, the first Working Man Mild, the first Cross of Gold, I believe the first Iron Fist Pale Ale were brewed there. Maybe one or two others. But those were the first ones that hit the menu, that and the Eugene Porter. And yeah, it was gangbusters from day one. When did the production facility come online then? Because you grew so fast out of that brew pub there. Yeah, it was just keep expanding and going and going. It was pretty quick. I think the brewery on Kedzie Avenue was kind of in the five to 10 year plan. Josh really wanted to have his product packaged. And in the early days was thinking, oh, we can fit this in the brew pub. And the consensus roundly from the brew staff was no, we can absolutely not do this. And the business was brisk. And it allowed us to break ground on the 3340 Kedzie brewery about what, two and a half years after the doors opened. And a few years after that, we were the largest independent operation in the state. It was just totally unreal. Well, it just sounds like you guys had a stellar team. As serendipitous as it might be, so many of our Chicago neighborhood brew pubs that are around everywhere, you know, they're very close to each other. And so you would think that they would almost be some sort of cannibalism, but there's not. They're all thriving, they're busy, but they don't grow like you guys did. You know what I mean? As fast as you guys did. So you have to really look at the internal framework of the people in charge as to why it happened so fast and why it is as good and successful as it is. Yeah, and I certainly don't want to discount our leadership and the right decisions we've made over the years. We are not Revolution despite our missteps or despite our team or anything like that. It is because of the hard work and the know-how of people who started Revolution with close to 20 years brewing experience. Cool. Good beers too. I enjoy them. Yes, yes. Speaking of beers, I was told I had to do this. There we go. That's a satisfying sound. That's all I know about that. I was going to ask, can you talk a little bit about the artwork on the cans? Because I mean, the beer is great, but man, the packaging is so sharp. Yeah, my pleasure. Ian at Mighty Few, he's done the Lion Sheriff, not pretty much all of our designs save for a handful of collaborations over the years. Before we even broke ground at the Kesey facility when we saw the very first mock up of the Antihero Cannon, what you're seeing on shelves now is Mark 2 of the Antihero. The rays on the outside are a little bit wider. There have been a couple of very subtle changes to that packaging. But the moment that we saw in the early days of the brew pub, that first mock up of the hop general and the hop grenades or the hop packages fallen from the parachutes and all that kind of stuff, we knew then, at least I knew then, that revolution was going to be something to be reckoned with. Did I think that that beer could make us what we are today? Absolutely. But it takes more than great liquid to build a company like we've become. And the first time I saw that, I knew I had to do everything in my power to not get fired. And it worked. Hey, here we go. I'm still not fired. That includes not saying, F***ing Barrel To Bottle. Yeah, we're waiting to not get fired, bro. Yeah, but we've got kind of three main branches of branding. And I'm leaving out the Deepwood series. That's kind of all on its own. And it's a ridiculous thing, in the best way possible, now that that's in cans. But we've got the mainstay beers, you've got the Fist, let you know it's Revolution, with the Rays, tie everything together. And then typically a character or something to let you know what makes that beer different other than the color of the can. You've got the Hero series, very comic book forward based on the kind of fictional team built around the hop general. And then the seasonals kind of follow that for the most part. And then what you've got the High Gravity series, which is kind of almost like a cautionary note to the to the buyer or drinker, that what they're about to get into is serious business. I almost missed the Chicago series, the Chicago Pale Elficity and Chicago Pills, as well as Across the Gold. That's the real third brand. It's kind of stripped down, dare I say, retro, but familiar, easily identifiable. And just lets you know that's a sessionable everyday product from Revolution. What was the decision like for putting the Deepwood series in cans? The Barrel Age Beering Cans is not something you see every day. No, it's not. There were several things, I think, none more important to reality. We just were not satisfied with the quality of the product that we were seeing from our bottling line. We had a bottling line that did its job, and we worked the snot out of that thing for years. And it was great when you drank the beer fresh, but bombers were not often sat in coolers. Typically, you see those almost exclusively sitting warm on a shelf. And if you can control your inventory, and you can avoid putting certain beers in that packaging, typically the consumer gets about what they expect. But we had this really nice canning line, and we were looking at getting an even nicer one. And we thought, hey, we're going to get this top of the line German fourth-generation technology canning line. And why would we ever put some of our most expensive and time-consuming beers into a package that is not going to perform as well for the consumer? That's what the brewers were saying. We wanted to go office-based, printer on our bottling line. Violent fantasies were had a lot of times, what we'd like to do to that bottling line. And you look at the footprint that the barrels consume over the course of a year or two or two and a half years. And you say, well, we could easily just put a couple of fermenters in that space and crank those, crank those fermenters out 20 times over the course of the year. Well, it's so fun for you guys, as creative as you are, to turn everything into a cash cow. You still have to have your creative integrity. Yeah, we still want to be able to show people what we're capable of. You know, at the heart of it, all artistic beer and all of that, it's all science. Good beer is based on a good understanding of science. Bad beer is predicated on the absence of scientific knowledge. So yeah, we want to be able to show just what we're capable of doing. And those beers do make money. We're expanding it. But it's all about value to the consumer. It starts with quality. If it's not a quality product, then there's nothing you can do price point wise to make it a good value to the consumer. So your Deep Woods series really blew up this last year. Was that something that had been in the works for a while? And then we just finally saw that come to fruition this past year? Heck no. It's been good for a while, man. Don't you talk about... A lot more variety though now. Oh yeah. We've always been draft heavy for the parties, the release parties, where we invite everybody to the brewery to buy the beers. We always have draft variants to try to keep it as interesting and varied as possible. But this year, heck, we did eight cans, eight different releases in cans, and that's that's a lot. And we're going even more aggressive next year. I don't know that the final tally is even decided, but it's going to be more than that. What's up for the Tasty next year party, Marty? What are we pouring here? We're going straight for the jugular here. This is Cafe Deeth. Deeth's Tar is, or Death Star, depending if Disney's lawyers are listening. You're not going to say they are. They're always listening. So then it's definitely Cafe Deeth. And the base beer is our Russian Imperial Oatmeal Stout, called Deeth's Tar. It's Deeth, apostrophe S, as in belonging to Josh Deeth. Tar is in black, thick, and in this case very yummy. So it's a 15% or 14.8% Imperial Stout aged in a variety of bourbon barrels for about a year. And the Cafe version, we used a blend of dark matter and gas light coffees, and we added that to the beer after the barrel aging. So super fresh, we aged it on there only for about 36-48 hours cold to get only the most volatile and scrumptious, chocolatey and slightly acidic notes from it. The dosing rate is key to that. If you want it to be really punchy, and we did. The first time we did a coffee beer, it was Coffee Eugene, and that was at about 3 quarters of a pound per barrel, and it was aged for a week on the coffee, cold still. And I think I was about to miss a deadline on a coffee beer. It either got asked of me two days before a festival or something like that, or I must, I made a mistake and not made the beer in time. But what I found was that the coffee would give you what you want when you want it. And if you leave it on there, you can get vegetal. You'll start pulling things, the alcohol, especially these high ABV beers, the alcohol pulls a lot of stuff out of the coffee that water won't. But what we found was the coffee character that we enjoyed, we still got after only a couple of days' contact time, even cold. The base beer, the D-Star this year, was the best that D-Star has ever been by miles. The barrels that we used to age said base beer in were better and fresher by miles. And the coffee selection that we did this year was more intentional. Who'd you say sourced the coffee? It was a blend of dark matter and gaslight. Okay. And we ran small trials, bench trials starting in our QC lab with pipettes. And how indicative this beer is of not only the program, but the brewery over the years, continual process improvement. You have not done the best you can. And if you think you've done the best you can, pack it up and go home. Don't try again next year. If you think you'll never repeat it or surpass it, get the heck out and make room in the market. All right. Well, while you're here, I have a question that I wanted to make sure we got to. One of my favorite beers from you guys, probably my favorite. We see a lot of congruency on the market today with a lot of IPAs, a lot of Imperial Stouts. I think one of the most interesting beers you make is Rye Way to Heaven. Besides having an awesome name, it is really a cool beer. Let me preface this by saying that beer was almost killed. The kids, as we call it, as lovingly as I can conjure, the kids were not interested in that beer. But it was a brewer's favorite and it still is. This year, pulling last year's vintage out of barrels for quality control samples, just so we can taste and smell and see every single barrel before we put it into a batch, plate it out, make sure it's microstable. We got this totally unique from years past beer. And it wasn't just unique to Ryeway. It was unique in any kind of barrel-aged beer we had tasted before. It's got this beautiful, ridiculous maple character to it this year. And there's no maple syrup. There's no maple sugar to it. It's just a rye wine, essentially, aged in rye whiskey barrels. And the confluence of the wet mill and all the other things that I alluded to before this year, it's just a monster. And now we're going back to basics with this beer. It's about 60% rye malt. And if I can get sciency, is that cool? I think you already did. Yes. Well, I'm going to lean in and do my best Barry White. Lay some science on us. Let's talk about beta-glucans. So beta-glucans are a component in most malts. They give structure to the seeds. And they are water soluble. So you can put it in the mash and you can extract those. And rye has just got a ton of them. And they're not fermentable. So it's a great way to add a lot of body to a beer without adding sweetness. So by using a heavy rye grist, you can get something that looks like clean motor oil in rye whey, or if it's a heavy rye stout, looks like dirty motor oil. But just the viscosity of it. But it's not sweet. So people will pour that beer into a glass and they'll look at the bubbles struggle to get out a solution. And they're going, oh my gosh, this thing's going to set my blood sugar through the roof and yada yada yada. And it's going to be cloying and all this. And they're afraid, like, oh, it's actually not nearly that sweet. This year's batch is a little bit sweeter than in years past. We were still dialing in the wet mill for this past batch. I can assure all of your listeners that next year is going to go back to that super sticky, super dry version. I've only been to a few breweries in America that A, have a wet mill, and B, are transparent about what that does for their beer, to their beer, and why they put that kind of process in place. Can you, for the beer novice in us, can you explain the benefits of a wet mill versus traditional milling in a commercial brewery? So, the mill typically, a dry mill, will take dry mill or dry grain, and it'll kind of crush it up, and then it gets introduced to water or hot liquor, and then that hot liquor extracts the sugars and proteins from the grain itself. In a wet mill, the hot liquor, the water component, precedes the milling. So, rather than crushing and cracking dry grain, think more of like squeezing the fruit out of a whole banana peel. So, we're going to hydrolyze or hydrate the endosperm of the grain, leaving the husk material intact. And when it goes through the mill rollers, and the endosperm is separated from the husk, the husk stays intact. And you're able to squeeze out pretty much the entirety of the endosperm. That endosperm is all of your malt extract. The enzymes are all in the husk, but they stay together. You leave behind the husk, and it allows you more efficient laudering, or the separation from liquid and solid. After all, we want to drink our beer and not eat it. And we start to see this earlier conversion of the starches, or the simplification of the starches in the wet mill. So the mashing process, where temperature and time conspire to simplify the starches and sugars they're in, that starts before we even start milling. So we get a way higher extract. Rather than getting 70, 80 percent extract, we're looking at 90, maybe even higher than 90 percent. And so we get to make the same amount of beer at the same strength with using a lot less grain. In short, at Revolution, we save, I want to say, eight to ten thousand pounds of grain a brewing day to produce the same amount of beer. That's cool. Very cool. That's exactly the kind of analytical, efficient answer I was looking for. Thank you. Excellent. You have satisfied the Brophy. So we've got a customer Q&A. We can't go anywhere without our listener Q&A. Thank you. What we do is a customer Q&A portion, and they write in to us on Twitter, PartyMarty, and if we pick their question and you answer it, they get $20 gift card to Binny's. The person that wrote is at Big Powerful Belly. That's our Twitter handle. So at Big Powerful Belly wrote, I know Barrel-Age beers are popular right now, but are there any beers flavored with flowers or herbs that are worth trying? So he likes, or she likes those, you know, big old Barrel-Age beers and wants to know if there's anything that has an herbal or a floral component that isn't, doesn't suck apparently is what they're saying. Let's unpack that two ways. Yeah. First, Marty, is that something you guys have ever focused on? I mean, doing flower or the herbs? There's a pink beer we've made for a number of years. Rosa. Yeah, that's the one. That's the one. Yeah. Rosa, I have to recommend it as it's pushing 6%. It'll get the job done, but it's low bitterness. It's fairly dry. You can drink a couple, two, three, maybe four, as long as you're not driving. Over there. Yeah, over there. Other than that, from Revolution at least, we've added some chamomile to a barrel-aged quad before. I don't want to say that's it, because we've made probably 10,000 beers over the last eight years. There's a few breweries that definitely specialize in it, or that's been their forbidden route right here in Chicago, would be the first thing that comes to mind. But you run the risk of them being really perfumey or so. They have that one lavender. Is it an ale? Lavender and citrus, is it? I can't recall. But nonetheless, that was good. Yeah. The breweries that do it well, they can be neat. But there are a lot of people who kind of struggle with it. But Rosa's, you know, with hibiscus, hibiscus is cool. And people are, I think, starting to dig. They'll have like iced tea made with hibiscus. So it's becoming a little more known and popular. So besides looking beautiful, like it actually does impart some good flavor. Hibiscus actually predates hops as a bittering agent in beer. Thank you, sir, for writing in that question. Or ma'am, because maybe it's a woman. I don't know. I just assume it's a guy. It's sexist, but yeah, big bellies can be on anybody. Exactly. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. Go bigger. Thanks for spending your time and coming in and talking through the beers. And more importantly, thanks for bringing us beer, dude. I really appreciate that. My favorite kind of beer. Almost more than the information. Not quite. It's right there. It's a close second. My pleasure. Thanks. Thanks, bud. Well, for Roger, Pat, Kristen, Marie Ellis, and of course, I'm Jeff Carlin. Keep tasting. Thanks for listening, guys. Cheers.