Ghostfish really kind of was born out
of just a plaything, a hobby. Brian and I
were always socializing around beer with
our significant others and we started to
brew some after I got a little kit for
Christmas. After--I don't know--a half
dozen sessions of doing this and joking
about it wouldn't it be cool to own a
brewery? We really kind of thought maybe
there was something to it. So we kind
of started playing around with a
business plan and kind of joking around
about logos and names and all that kind
of stuff and it was clear that this was
something fun for us and and that, you
know, we were both at a point in our
lives where we were ready for something
different
Hi, I'm Brian Thiel. I'm one of the
co-founders and owners of Ghostfish
Brewing Company. My role in this business is I handle marketing and sales, amongst other
things. Truthfully we all wear a lot of
hats.
Hi, I'm Jason Yerger. I'm the head
brewer and one of the co-founders here
at Ghostfish Brewing Company. We've been
in business for close to three years now.
Been here since the beginning. Since the
early days when it was really just a
business plan and a dream. Before this,
I didn't have any sort of professional
brewing background. I was just a home
brewer with celiac disease in fact the
celiac preceded the home brewing. I was a
huge beer snob before I got diagnosed.
Gluten free beers are beers like Ghostfish and many others that are on this site
that take the time to choose ingredients
that are naturally gluten free because
we care about the people who are
drinking this beer, whether they're
celiac, gluten intolerant, or just beer
lovers in general.
Our restaurant, our food, our beer, our storage, every single part of this brewery has never seen gluten
and so we keep it that way, it's an
integrity issue for us.
So today we're gonna walk you through a pilot batch
here at the brewery on our half barrel
pilot system. We're going to do what I
consider a basic single hop Pale Ale
recipe. Here we have all the
ingredients laid out. We're going to be
using malted millet and malted rice. It's
an all grain batch with no syrups or
sugars, and we're using the Caliente hop.
Another serendipitous point in the Ghostfish kind of history and that is finding Jason, the third owner and the
third partner of Ghostfish Brewing Company. My wife and I which, by the way, she has
celiac disease. She had been diagnosed at that time probably for about five or six
years. She was a beer drinker. Cried for a
full weekend if not a week when she got
her diagnosis. After we had these initial
email conversations and he brought a big box
of his gluten free homebrews and we sat
on my front porch.
Randy was there, my wife was there, and we sat around and cracked open some of
these gluten free beers Jason had created and I knew that it was a good fit
for us the moment that my wife actually
had her first taste of his beer.
I recall looking at her and seeing tears
rolling down her eyes. And that's the moment
I knew that we had found the right
person.
This is our pilot system. We got it from High Gravity Brewing which is actually a homebrew supply store.
Sort of like the top end of home brewing kind of equipment but you know many of your
viewers may have similar setups at home.
Basically a hot liquor tank, mash lauter
tun and boil kettle. Simple three vessel
setup and if you want to take a closer
look in here, you can see that we have
the totally standard button louver false
bottom. Nothing special, nothing custom
made. Works just fine for our purposes.
In fact, if our commercial sized mash tun worked half as well as this, I would be ecstatic!
There's a lot of hurdles. You
guys, if you want to start a brewery,
there's there's a lot of hurdles. And so
you've got to have the perseverance to
get through these things. So we really
got lucky with this space. You can kind of
look around, this is a hundred-year-old
building with huge timbers. We have a very
finite amount of square footage so this
allowed us to go vertical. And the space
just feels good it feels, it feels funky,
it feels like a brewery. We were just
about done looking we were ready to
settle and then this space came
available and we just all kind of smiled.
Unfortunately, we couldn't afford it.
Our biggest hurdle was probably the
financial requirements that it takes to
open a brewery. I mean, you can see behind
me, this is a capital intensive business.
Okay, so our policy on dogs. Obviously I'm a little bias.
Our policy on dogs is we love dogs. We encourage dogs. If you have dogs, please bring them.
If you don't, please come say hi to Kai. He'll be here just about every day of the week.
This is the famous Kai.
He doesn't know what's going on, but he likes it because Dad's hugging him.
If tomorrow there was a doctor that discovered a
magic magic pill you know that could
cure celiac disease or people who are
gluten intolerant. That they could take
this pill and then all sudden they could
just ingest gluten again and they could
drink any beer that they wanted to and
have tons of bread, that we probably
would still do what we're doing because
we feel like it makes great beer.
We really just want to make amazing craft
beer and we want to make it local and
fresh and we want to deliver it that way
and we want to make it with top-quality
ingredients, but we want to make it for
everybody. We don't think that anybody
deserves to be left behind in this movement.
This is our little slice of heaven.
