Hello, everyone.
Thank you for joining Utah Beer News for the
second in what we hope will be many one-on-one
conversations with local brewers, breweries,
and everyday imbibers.
I’m Tim Haran, founder of Utah Beer News.
And my guest today is Chad Hopkins, owner
and head brewer at Hopkins Brewing.
Welcome, Chad.
How are you doing today?
Great.
How are you doing, Tim?
Doing good.
Thanks for joining us on these virtual tastings.
I know it’s kind of a weird time right now.
So I thought we’d have a little fun with
tasting some local beers.
As many of you know, breweries, restaurants,
bars, they’ve been shut down to dine-in
and drink-in service for about two months
now.
Some are starting to reopen on a limited basis.
Others are taking a more cautious approach.
They’re evaluating procedures required to
open as coronavirus, or COVID-19, continues
to be a concern.
But we’re here today to do a virtual tasting
of a couple Hopkins beers.
Well, one for sure, the Stonewall Sour Saison,
which is a really nice beer.
And then, if we have some time, we might get
to a couple others, or at least talk about
a couple others that I know Chad is excited
about and has had a good response to so far.
But before we get into the tastings, Chad.
I wanted to give you a couple minutes to talk
about what’s going on at your brewery, how
you’re handling things personally, professionally.
Is everything just kind of weird right now?
Yeah, it’s strange.
You know it’s been going on for so long
it almost feels normal, which is a little scary.
But we, you know, when this first happened,
we shut down for a couple days.
Then we had the earthquake right after, too.
So it’s like, well, let’s take a little
break here to gather our thoughts and figure
out what we’re going to do.
We laid everybody off — well, furloughed,
about 26 of my team.
I kept my kitchen manager and we were just
on this upward trend of sales.
We’re busy every week, every weekend, every
month was a record, record sales.
So we were ordering food, ordering food, just
ramping up and we were kind of unsure what
was happening with everything.
We were so busy here.
So when that happened, it was like, wow.
I don’t know what we’re going to do here.
It was just me and my kitchen manager for
about five weeks running limited hours, limited
days, just wanted to move through the food
we had.
And we planned on shutting things down until
we figured out what was going to go on in
the world.
But, you know, we got a little help from the
government, some money came through.
I’ve had great customer feedback and support
and so we’re busy.
Those five weeks of me and my kitchen manager,
some of the busiest five weeks I’ve had
since opening.
So it was a lot of work because I was still
working in the brewhouse, still kegging beer
and cleaning and running the bar.
It was hard.
I bet.
It’s nice to get some funds and see that
people do want us around even if we are doing takeout.
So it’s been great.
I’ve hired back several of my team and they’re
running the shifts here now.
It gives me some extra time to do some extra
things at the brewhouse and spend a little time at home.
Good.
Yeah, so you guys opened up New Year’s Eve
2018 so you were just celebrating your one-year
anniversary, a little more than your one-year
anniversary when all this happened.
I can imagine it was just a shot to the gut
when you had all this momentum going, people
were really excited and then to have this
happen it had to be a big blow.
Yeah, it was a little devastating there for
a minute but we’ve got to do what we’ve
got to do to get through this thing.
I want to ask you a couple more questions
but we should have a beer in our hand probably
while we talk about this.
I’ve got a crowler here.
This is the Stonewall Sour Saison.
Great.
I’m pouring the same thing.
Perfect.
We’ve been closed a few days here so my
beer’s pouring a little foamy.
I see you’ve got the Fisher/Hopkins collaboration
crowler there.
Yeah, I saw you post about that.
You had to get a little help from your friends
on this one, huh?
Yeah, it was great.
I was down there picking up some beer and
he was like, “how are you doing on cans?”
Ah, I’m going to be out in a couple days.
“You want some?”
Sure.
That’s awesome.
What have you seen from the overall craft
beer community the last two months?
Has it really been coming together to help
each other out?
Yeah, I think the first month was like, nobody
was really talking much.
It was kind of awkward.
Everyone was trying to figure out their own
personal lives, their own businesses and what
they were doing.
These past couple weeks people weeks people
are starting to come out and say, OK, this
is still going on.
What can we do to help each other out?
I ran into a lot of the breweries, we’re
chatting in emails going back and forth — what
do we want to do?
What’s going on here?
Bewilder just started doing dine-in so I went
to see how Cody’s doing over there and seeing
how they’re making that work.
So it’s been great to have so much camaraderie
between the brewers going into this.
Alright, cheers.
Cheers.
Stonewall Saison.
That is a good one.
So you brewed this one for the first time
last year.
Maybe explain a little bit why you brewed
it initially and then what’s involved in
this batch.
Well, this was the first sour we did here
other than the Brewers Guild Festival Chili
Mango that we did with Salt Flats.
So this one was our own that we brewed here
for Pride Month.
Celebrate the Stonewall Riots, which turned
into Pride, and so we did this last year,
so we brewed it again.
I brewed this while we were closed.
I had some ingredients and some yeast ready
to go.
Let’s get this thing going ahead of time.
This beer is nice and light.
It’s below 4%.
It’s like a standard saison is supposed
to be.
Super drinkable.
Yeah, I really like the saison yeast that
you use in this.
It’s a sour but it’s not one of those
pucker your mouth type sours.
It’s fairly mellow.
But the saison yeast I think is really great
in it.
Yeah, it adds some nice, kind of funky earthy flavor.
My palate’s super sensitive to the sours
— the super tart beers.
Traditionally sours weren’t really tart
and then these American sours started coming
out — I can’t drink them.
They just wreck your palate.
You said this is your first sour as a pro
brewer and I jotted down some notes that I
think either I talked to you last year or
I got it from some of your social media.
There’s some orange peel, coriander.
Does that sound about right?
We put it in the end of the boil.
It’s got a nice citrus, a little lemon pithy,
lemon zest to it.
Highly drinkable.
You get complexities from the saison yeast
as well.
But the way we do this beer is completely
natural fermentation.
Some brewers will add lactic acid, some will
pitch actual lactobacillus yeast.
Lactobacillus naturally lives on grain and
so there’s a certain temperature it likes
to thrive at so we brew the beer — well
we do the mash, run it into the kettle and
let it cool down to 120 degrees, which is
kind of the top end of that.
Drop a bag of Pilsner malt in there and let
it sit.
I check it every several hours, check the
pH, check the flavor to see if it’s right
where I want it.
Once we hit it, then we kick on the boil and
there we go.
Throw in hops and all the things.
Nice.
Yeah, I was excited when you brought this
one back because it was one of my favorites
of your beers last year.
Another nice effort.
And you wanted to talk a little bit about
of one of your newer beers you’ve got on
right now.
I actually picked up, my wife and I came over
to your place on Sunday and got some food
and beer to go.
I picked up a crowler of the, you’ll have
to remind me of the name — Rico Pico, Pico?
Pico Rico.
Pico Rico.
Yeah.
Lager.
And it was really good.
So tell me about that one too.
Yeah that’s been our most popular beer for
the past couple months here.
It’s named after one of my cooks.
They call him Pico Rico.
So we decided to name it after him.
That’s a Mexican lager, traditionally more
German-style, so it’s kind of my take on
that.
It has local Solstice Malt in it.
It’s floor-malted pale malt which is similar
to a Maris Otter, which is something you would
use for the base malt of a German Vienna.
So it’s got a nice malty flavor to it, a
little bit of flaked maize.
A little bit of Munich malt that also Solstice
makes.
And then it’s all whirlpool hops with the
Hallertau Blanc.
That adds a nice grass, citrusy, kind of a
white grape flavor to it as well.
That was a really tasty, easy-drinking beer.
I liked it quite a bit.
I’ll throw a lime in it.
It’s a great summer beer.
We put that on right when the weather started
warming up here.
We’ve been selling that really fast.
We’re probably going to be brewing it again
here in the next couple weeks.
One thing you were doing that I loved right
before all this kind of went sideways is your
small batches.
Are you thinking of starting those up again
where you have 10 or 12 almost five-gallon
batches pretty much, weren’t they?
Homebrew.
Yeah.
That was a cool concept.
They were really fun.
It was kind of a bummer because once this
happened we had just a few days before done
our small-batch release for St. Paddy’s.
And of course they sold out that weekend.
People came in asking for small batches to
go.
They’re gone and we’re not going to bring
them back until we can reopen.
But we’ve had a lot of requests for them
and we had a lot of them ready to go.
We actually canned them up and they’re can
conditioning.
We didn’t do any forced carbonation on them.
They’ll be ready here I think next week
we’ve got a couple of them coming out.
We’ll start up on the small batch again
soon.
I’ll definitely stop in for that.
Every other Friday you were doing those and
just the names and the descriptions and the
unique, creative recipes that you came up
with and it was awesome.
So I’m looking forward to more of that.
Yeah, those have been really fun.
I’ve handed that off mostly to Matt Yeager.
He’s been owning that whole program and
so it’s been pretty fun.
I contribute here and there but, yeah, I have
to give him props for those beers.
There’s going to be less than 20 cans of
each batch that comes out.
It will be super exclusive.
Are these 12-ounce cans, 16-ounce cans.
They’re the crowlers, so 32.
Oh, crowlers, OK.
Nice.
You’ve got to-go food, crowlers of all your
beers available right now.
Just trying to think — your hours, I guess
they’re kind of up in the air sometimes
so keep an eye on social media for your current
hours.
Yeah, I think I like what we’ve got.
I was all over the place.
I kept changing them.
But I was like, alright.
Wednesday through Sunday, 3-8 p.m. for now.
That Stonewall Sour Saison is just really
good.
Before I let you go I want to get to this
other one, too.
I want to taste the Guava Goddess.
Yeah.
You’re welcome to pour yourself one, too,
if you want or you can continue with the Stonewall.
Whatever you want.
Yeah, this is another popular one.
In fact, I brewed this again already, so it’s
in the fermenter right now.
We added the guava not too long ago and then
we’ll dry hop it pretty soon.
So we might run out of it for a few days but
it will come right back.
Perfect.
I write on this one that this was using the
Pink Boots blend of hops?
Yeah.
And that’s been a really fun blend.
It pairs so well with fruit.
So we threw it in the whirlpool and the dry
hop.
That’s always fun to see what they do with
that blend each year.
Are you using fresh guava in this one?
Yeah, so it’s guava puree from Oregon Fruit
Products.
Nice.
That’s a good one too.
Yeah both of these beers are just awesome
for summer.
I mean, these are great.
This is all 100% pilsner malt from Solstice
Malt again.
I love having a local maltster here.
Yeah, I haven’t talked to James in the last
couple months.
How is he doing?
He’s doing OK.
Things slowed down quite a bit.
Yeah.
But he’s still staying busy.
That’s good.
Yeah, I think you might have been one of the
first breweries that was really using his
malt and now it seems like a lot of them are
jumping on board.
Yeah, he opened not too long before we did.
Yeah, he started going in 2018.
I was getting Maris Otter coming from the
U.K., which is my favorite base malt.
And his, I tasted a batch next to his version
of his pale malt, floor malted like a Maris
Otter, and it’s incredible.
And it’s fresh.
It doesn’t have to come all the way over
here.
It’s just made down the street and he brings
it up, so it’s great.
Very cool.
I’m glad things are working out for him.
He’s a great guy.
So this, when you brewed this the first time,
the Guava Goddess, you used the 2019 Pink
Boots hop blend.
Did you use the same one for this version
or did you use the newer blend?
I used the new blend for this one.
OK.
That beer was such a hit last year that I
ordered a couple more cases of that blend.
We brewed it a couple more times last summer.
And then this version that I just brewed recently
that’s in the tank right now I had some
leftover hops from the previous Pink Boots
blend so this has both years Pink Boots blend
and the next one coming out, so since I ordered
so many of them and the new ones came out
before I finished those up, I was like, let’s
try both, see how that turns out.
It’s tasting great.
This is a great beer.
I like it quite a bit.
Nice work.
Before I let you go, I want to ask what’s
next for you guys?
What are you thinking as far as next steps?
Anything you have planned or just anything
you’d like to add that people should know
about Hopkins right now?
We’re just kind of playing it by ear.
Just kind of watching the world and what’s
happening.
The weather’s so beautiful, yesterday we
pressure washed our patio and our furniture,
so it’s ready but I just don’t know what
we want to do now.
We want to do some extra cleaning around here,
some detail stuff.
But we’re ramping up for opening, we just
don’t know when.
We’re actually hiring a few more people
in a couple days.
I was actually going to hire them right before
this thing went down and that happened.
But we’re back on orientation this week.
I’m just kind of watching the local businesses
and going around different places, seeing
how they’re doing things and if we can make
it work here.
I’m shooting for hopefully June to open.
But again, we’ll play it by ear, see what’s
happening in the world.
You just never know what’s going to happen.
It’s uncharted waters for a lot of people.
Thanks, Chad.
I just wanted to check in with you and taste
a couple beers with you so thank you for taking
some time to join Utah Beer News on the virtual
tastings.
I wish the best of luck to you.
If there’s anybody else who’d like to
participate in one of these informal little
tastings, feel free to get in touch with me.
And be sure to check out Hopkins Brewing.
They’re still open for to-go, food and beer,
during the week and on weekends.
Check them out in Sugar House.
Thanks again Chad.
Cool.
Thank you, Tim.
Appreciate it.
Cheers.
See you next time.
Cheers.
