The Blog

How did you get into brewing?

My older brother, Chris, introduced me to homebrewing sometime around 2008. We did our first brew session in his kitchen in South Minneapolis (a Summit EPA clone I believe, while drinking many, many Summit EPAs) and I fell in love with the process right then and there. Brewing didn’t end up sticking with my brother, so a year or so later he gave me all his homebrewing gear and I hit the ground running. I had worked as an Assistant Chef throughout most of high school and college and I enjoyed the translations between brewing and cooking, something that would ultimately lead me towards a deep exploration into infusing finished beer with all kinds of ingredients here at Indeed.

I knew I wanted to pursue brewing as a career, but I didn’t have any money to attend Siebel Institute for a formal education. So, I decided to give up my social life for at least a year to study every brewing book I could get my hands on whenever I wasn’t at my soul-destroying day job. In 2013 I took the plunge and got a job at Northern Brewer in St Paul, which exposed me to all kinds of brewing professionals, textbooks, ingredients, and, of course, tons of homebrew and craft beer. It was simply a matter of luck when a year later the owners of a then soon-to-open brewery called “HammerHeart” waltzed into the shop one day asking if we knew of anyone interested in a part time assistant brewer job. My coworkers all pointed to me. I spent two years at HammerHeart learning how to brew on a larger scale, and was promoted to Brewer shortly after I started.