Mother’s, Free State, Tallgrass — new brews call for road-tripping
Mother’s Brewing Co.
215 South Grant Avenue, Springfield, Missouri
The charter bus left Central States Beverage 20 minutes late, foreshadowing what would become a theme for this trip: tardiness. Jon Poteet, the beer distributor’s vice president of marketing, had invited me to tag along with some contest winners headed to Mother’s Brewing Co. in Springfield. I’d been planning a trip to Mother’s myself. If a free ride on a chartered bus to a brewery sounded too good to be true … well, of course it was too good to be true. Yet away we went.
When we set out, there was already beer on the bus — some large-format bottles of Crane brews and other rarities. Everyone knew that beer wasn’t going to be scarce. Chicken wings and burgers and beers awaited us in Springfield. But the other theme of this journey promised to be plenitude, and I was looking forward to sampling healthy portions of brews that Mother’s doesn’t ship to KC. The company calls these tasting-room exclusives Backyard Beers — named for the grassy yard facing the tasting room, where much of the beer drinking and Olympic-style beer games would commence. (The tasting room is open from Wednesday through Saturday, with free tours on Saturdays on a first-come, first-served basis at 2, 3 and 4 p.m.)
As we arrive at Mother’s on this early June afternoon, the taps are set to pour Grow Cukes, Not Nukes (cucumber farmhouse ale), Maypole Lager (golden lager), London’s Burning (smoky porter) and Sandy (hopped-up wheat). There are strong beers: Doozy (double IPA), Love Factory (imperial red ale) and MILF (barrel-aged imperial stout). There are beers inspired by food: Holy Molé (brown ale with cinnamon, cocoa nibs and ancho, chipotle, pasilla and quadjillo peppers), Knight of the Iguana (chocolate-chai stout) and Chocolate Thunder (nitro porter with Askinosie cocoa). Looking it over, I start calculating how many growlers my refrigerator at home might accommodate.
Brewmaster Brian Allen is taking a turn giving a tour of his brewhouse, which in a previous life was an Interstate Bakery. That closed in 2009, and Mother’s owner Jeff Schrag moved his brewery in shortly after. Remnants of the factory’s Twinkie days linger. A Butternut Breads sign hangs in the taproom. A “fresh and delicious” sign sits above a cooler.
The old building provokes some headaches, and Allen admits to a certain love-hate relationship with it. Walking through the brewery is a bit like going backstage at Saturday Night Live: Quirk abounds, such as the robot costume — Beer Bot 1.0, “the world’s first beer delivery robot,” according to a YouTube video — that blocks an entryway.
“We did a video,” Allen says. “I kicked it in the balls.”
Last year, Mother’s packaged 10,500 barrels of beer. “We’re hoping to do 12,500 barrels this year,” Allen tells me. “A busy day of shipping beer is probably three full trucks going out”: 22 pallets and about 90 barrels of beer. “On average, we’re probably two trucks a day. Right now, our busiest months of shipping beer is 1,200 barrels of beer out of the door. Our slowest month this past calendar year or 12-month cycle is 650.”
In the grain room, head brewer Doug Riddle stacks sacks of Vienna malt. A picture of a young Tom Cruise rests atop a tank for no apparent reason. A cooler door is covered with a graphic of Han Solo in carbonite. A fog of Pink Floyd rolls from a stereo speaker. There’s a loose, summer-camp feel to the whole brewery.
Allen leads our tour group to racks of barrels in a humid room. He tells us that the company’s barrel program is, as usual, evolving.
“We started with Foggy Notion, which is barleywine aged in Missouri sherry barrels,” he says. “We did that for three, maybe four years. And then the provider built a distillery, and they weren’t selling barrels anymore. So we’re trying to get some Spanish barrels in to resume that. Bourbon Barrel Imperial Three Blind Mice is all bourbon barrels. MILF is a combination of bourbon, rum, sherry, brandy and corn whiskey [barrels]. So we’ve got some local distilleries down in the Ozarks who we’ve traded wort for barrels or we’ve bought barrels from.”
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The beer in the barrels ages from two to 15 months.
“When we go to do MILF blending, we’ll sample every barrel and assess its character, make sure it’s not bad or infected and then do several different blends and go from there,” Allen says. “A beer like Bourbon Barrel Imperial Three Blind Mice, there’s not much of a blend going on. We’ll taste the barrels to make sure that they’re not infected and have the profile that we want.”
Allen grabs a hammer and a nail and cracks into a barrel for a taste. Inside is what he calls Blackout, a 9.5 ABV beer that has been aging for about a year and a half. What’s in the barrel gives off a funky nose but goes down smooth.
“We’ll probably bring it out in the fall,” Allen says, and someone cracks that Mother’s should rename it Drunk Santa.
We return to the taproom to fill growlers with Backyard Beers. Just released last week: Pink Thing cranberry hibiscus saison. Already, it feels like time for a return visit.
Free State Brewing Co.
Production facility: 1923 Moodie, Lawrence
Brewpub: 636 Massachusetts, Lawrence
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Free State founder Chuck Magerl, owner of Kansas’ oldest brewery, is a beer evangelist. As he makes the rounds at his brewpub on a Tuesday morning, he stops by tables to chat with diners and friends, preaching the benefits of a wet Kansas.
“Beer is an integral part of human enjoyment of life, events, activities, things to keep people engaged and interacting with each other,” he tells me. “It’s a convivial beverage best enjoyed in the presence of other earthlings.”
And this is a place where hungry, thirsty earthlings can generally count on finding one another. Officially, I’m here to meet Magerl; the brewpub’s head brewer, Geoff Deman; and sales rep Seth Sanchez. Unofficially, the first thing my eyes seek out is the beer board. You never know which special-to-the-restaurant beers are going to be on tap any given day until you see that board. Today: Cherry Bomb lager and Late Addition session pale ale, with a yet-to-be-named Dortmunder set to join them soon. And, of course, there’s more to come from the tanks.
“Right now, I have what I think is going to be a stunning Pilsner,” Deman says. “It’s young — it’s only about 11 days old — but I’m already really into it. I think, give it another five weeks and it’s going to be pretty good.”
Deman’s work inside the brewpub has been spilling over from Free State’s production facility across town. Several of the beers that started at the brewpub have graduated to bottles.
“It’s pretty cool to see those offerings end up in six-packs now,” Deman says. “Both the Winterfest and the Stormchaser were things that I developed down here, and now the first three of the Front Porch Series are all going to be beers that I developed down here. It’s always fun to see people drinking in here and see the immediacy of what you make and people enjoying it, but it’s a whole nother level to see people out and about.”
Free State’s Front Porch, a limited-edition series, includes previously released beers alongside new ones. Free State’s next limited release, Garden Party — a light lager infused with cucumber, juniper berries and basil — is slated for store shelves this month. And a September release of the hop-forward Yakimaniac IPA is on the books. Deman says more favorites could be on the way soon.
“I think eventually you’ll see things like John Brown get out,” he says. “This is a way for us to keep up with the Joneses, so to speak, in terms of getting something new in front of people because new is driving things in craft beer now.”
Keeping up with the Joneses is easier with Free State’s crosstown production brewery online. That’s where the bulk of Free State’s 10,000 barrels of beer are now brewed. (This year, production is set to hit 11,500 barrels.)
I meet head brewer Steve Bradt at the six-year-old, 40-barrel brewhouse — where, the second Saturday of every month, he leads tours at 2 p.m. During a typical 45-minute walk-through, he tells the story of Kansas’ oldest brewery (Free State started in 1989) and explains the brewing process. And when it’s over, you try some beers.
“After the pub had been going for the better part of 20 years, we were running out of space to produce beer for the market outside of the pub,” Bradt says. “We realized that we were going to have to up our game and change plans or start telling people no, which we’ve never been good at. You hate to disappoint people.”
One thing that won’t disappoint is the prospect of a tasting room at the production facility. The project has been on the backburner, but Bradt would still like to see it come to fruition.
“We’re right along the bike trail,” he says of the Burroughs Creek Trail. “I think it has potential just to give people another opportunity to see Free State in a different venue.”
Bradt commences this afternoon’s tour.
“We’ve got a little bit of everything going on today,” he says. “We’re starting the Octoberfest. Because it is a little bit longer of a process, it takes us awhile, so we usually get started in late June, early July on the Octoberfest brewing, and that will be out in mid-August.”
Bradt moves on to the bottling line, where brown-glass bottles of Ad Astra Ale clink together as they move down the belt. The machines whir, vroom and zip, sounding like a NASCAR pit crew changing tires.
“This does about 150 bottles a minute,” Bradt says. “We usually package a couple of days a week, and we sort of build up the beer to do around 1,500 or so cases on a packaging run. … The main manual-labor part of our process is the guy pulling them off and setting them on pallets at the other end.”
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Back in the brewhouse, Bradt motions toward a towering tank that Free State just added to its collection.
“Later this year, early next year, it’ll probably be time for another,” Bradt says. “We’ve still got room to grow. We could easily double our production, almost triple our production in this building before we really start growing into a point where we’re going to have to do some pretty major expansion work with the building.
“We’ve got quite a bit of growth that we can do by simply adding more tanks,” he adds. “The basic improvements are in place. Set up a tank, plug it in and be ready to go.”
Those tanks are helping supply Free State’s expansion into Iowa. Next, the plan is to return to Nebraska in 2016.
“There’s quite a bit of business to be had in that four-state region,” Bradt says of Kansas, Missouri, Iowa and Nebraska. “It’s really nice to keep things as close to home as you can. It really allows us to make sure that we have the freshest stuff out there, and we can support it.”
He’s serious about fresh beer.
“It’s not that unusual that it might come off the line and be out the door and be in our distributor the same day,” Bradt says.
There’s a rebellious vibe to Free State. You can see it in the banners on the walls. One proclaims: “There are still 29 dry counties in Kansas. Their populations are dwindling.”
“Something may have changed since that was posted, but there are still a few of them out there,” Bradt says.
Another banner, in the brewhouse, reads: “FDR repealed Prohibition in 1933. We elected him to four terms.” And, of course, there’s Free State’s adopted motto, a quote from the diary of Brother Epp: “Because without beer, things do not seem to go as well.”
Bradt leads me back to the beginning but stops at a big walk-in cooler. Inside it, aging in Templeton Rye barrels, is Owd Mac’s Imperial Stout, which sold out in minutes during last year’s dock sale at the brewery.
“That’s the majority of the barrel work,” Bradt says. “There’s a handful of others in here as well, sort of long-term barrel projects. We keep some of the vintage barleywine back in here so we have some different things to bring out for the holidays. We still have barleywine in here going back at least four or five years, I think, and a handful of small-batch stuff or stuff we set aside from downtown.
“This is the best tornado shelter in Douglas County,” Bradt says of the walk-in. “If you really have to hunker down for a while, you’ve got some provisions.”
I find myself wishing that the forecast called for heavy weather.
After taking the Free State brewery tour … get a flight at 23rd Street Brewery.
The KU-centric crosstown brewpub (3512 Clinton Parkway, Lawrence) offers a monster of a flight: all nine beers on tap for about $10. Get a taste of the year-round brews with Jayhawk names (Crimson Phog red ale, Rock Chalk Raspberry Wheat, Wave the Wheat) along with specialty beers (Russian Imperial Stout). Brewmaster Russell Brickell works up the beers on a 15-barrel brewing system, and you can see the tanks inside the silolike pub. And if you find a beer you like, there’s a growler with your name on it.
On your way up Interstate 35 … make a pit stop at Ninja Moose Brewery.
Hamilton, Missouri, is a day trip unto itself. The hour drive up Interstate 35 and east on Highway 36 takes you to Scott Falke’s year-old taproom (105 West Bird), where he now has 11 beers on draft. Get on the list to join the mug club or pick up a growler for future trips.
Tallgrass Brewing Co.
5960 Dry Hop Circle, Manhattan
Tallgrass Tap House
320 Poyntz Avenue, Manhattan
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Tallgrass Brewing Co. founder Jeff Gill opens the doors to his new, 60,000-square-foot production facility. This is his $7.5 million vision, what he had in mind back in October 2013 when he set out to build the largest brewery in Kansas.
He did it.
What Gill is about to walk me through is a sleek, modern brewhouse in what was once the headquarters of regional phone carrier Western Wireless. The building’s layout resembles a baseball diamond, with windows wrapping around the brewhouse in 90-degree angles, like a transparent outfield fence with a view of waving Kansas wheat fields and Manhattan Regional Airport.
“We tore out 40,000 square feet of concrete and repoured it,” Gill says. “All of this is brand-new with rebar and able to support forklift traffic and tanks over there and that sort of stuff. So it was a substantial reconfiguration of the building — retrofitting, basically.”
The day of my visit, Tallgrass’s production has ground to a halt, due to a faulty centrifuge. “If the centrifuge isn’t happening, nothing is happening,” Gill says.
Even with the snag, Gill, dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt with an 8-Bit Pale Ale logo on the chest, is in a cheerful mood. And though Tallgrass’s factory isn’t ready for public tours, Gill is showing me around, starting with the “creation station.”
“It’s a pretty tricked-out home-brew system,” Gill says, standing before a trio of kegs. This is where his brewers dream up new beers and try out new worts, hop characters and yeasts, and it has already yielded one success: 16-Bit DPA. It’s just this kind of innovation that wasn’t possible at Tallgrass’s previous facility. Gill says the brewhouse was running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, leaving little time to work on new recipes.
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“It’s hard to retain people when you’re working them that hard,” he tells me. “We were never going to be where we wanted to be in that older facility. We had to upgrade … and make it where we have the capacity and the expandability to grow. We invested a lot of money doing all of that and taking on more risk, but we were also old enough as a brewery and had the right wholesaler partners to be able to feel like that risk is a business risk worth taking. So we pulled the trigger.”
Which means that the 16-Bit DPA soon graduated from the creation station to a release on Tallgrass’s new, fully automated 50-barrel system. It also means that brewers work in 12-hour shifts — the brewery operates around the clock for three or four days, depending on the schedule’s demands.
“It is a far cry from where we used to be, with a 15-barrel, two-vessel system,” Gill says. “We can brew about a week’s worth of production at the old place in a 24-hour period here. Basically everything we moved out here we upscaled about three times,” he adds, “except the brewhouse, which is upscaled about eight times, since it’s a little bit more permanent piece.”
Take the Italian-made canning line, which fills around 60 cans a minute. The previous line could do just 22 cans a minute. “We’re getting ready to get big,” Gill says.
Yup: Gill motions toward rows of towering stainless-steel tanks. “This is our tank farm,” he says. “As you can see, we have spaces for more tanks built in here.”
Each tank is na med after one of the muscled-up hulks and hulkettes from the old NBC reality show American Gladiators: Laser, Sabre, Tank. (“Way more fun than calling it F1, F2, F3,” Gill explains.)
Behind the tanks are several racks of Dark Horse Distillery barrels filled with Buffalo Sweat. “We’re working on lots of barrel aging now,” Gill says. “We’re going to hit that pretty hard the second half of this year, with a lot of cool stuff coming out.”
Tallgrass started the program with a micro-release of Wooden Rooster: the brewery’s Velvet Rooster Belgian tripel, aged in rye-whiskey barrels.
“The biggest thing that we’re going to be doing over the next two years is our Explorer Series,” Gill says. Wooden Rooster crowed first in that new line. “It’s the same thing that I did back in my garage: What sort of cool flavors can I think up and then create?”
Although Wooden Rooster was released in four-packs of 19.2-ounce cans, future Explorer Series beers will be more familiar-looking four-packs of 12-ounce cans. The original idea was to continue with the 19.2-ounce cans, but the can manufacturer decided to make the tallboy cans just once a year.
Gill says the plan is to release from six to eight Explorer Series beers each year. Four Explorer Series beers are scheduled to be released through the rest of this year, with Bourbon Barrel Aged Buffalo Sweat to come in September, and a Berliner Weisse later.
“It’ll be a lot of barrel aging,” Gill says. “There will be other sours coming. Some imperial items, like Russian imperial stout and imperial IPA and some just bigger beers in that regard. Lots of cool stuff within them.”
Farther down the hallway is where Gill plans to open a tasting room, with flagship, barrel-aged and special-release beers on tap. “We hope to have it open sometime before school is out next spring,” he says.
Until then, the Tallgrass Tap House, in downtown Manhattan, is the destination for tasting Tallgrass’s test brews.
“That’s our test kitchen for new beers now,” Gill says. “For example, the Explorer Series — some of these things are not existing recipes, they’re not proven recipes. So we’ll do them here in our creation station and then we’ll take those down to the Tap House and make those on the 10-barrel system there.”
And the Tap House is already producing beers that could find their way into Tallgrass cans. Gill is bullish about Tap House’s brewmaster Brandon Gunn’s Konza extra pale ale. (Gunn worked as a brewer for Tallgrass for two years before moving to the brewpub.) “That could definitely be where something gets started,” he says.
Also in Tallgrass’s future: lagers and radlers. A trip to the hop harvest in Bavaria turned lager-loving Gill on to the idea of making the German-style beers.
“I’d like to do a radler because they’re fun,” he says. “There are lots of things that we want to do. It’s just a matter of ‘OK, how are you going to make sure that you can execute all of those ideas?’ The capacity to come up with new ideas always exceeds the capacity to execute those ideas, so we have to pick and choose which ones we can actually pull off.”
In the new facility, though, all bets and limitations are off.
“We want to be a really strong regional brewery,” says Gill, who has already carved out a 13-state territory in the middle of the country. “That’s Step 1 for Tallgrass’s growth. The decisions that we do over the next two years, at least, are going to be in support of that goal.”
While in Manhattan … drop by Little Apple Brewing Co.
If you’re making the two-hour trip west on Interstate 70, you might as well add Little Apple Brewing Co. (1110 Westloop Place, Manhattan) to your itinerary. Little Apple offers five flagship beers (Wildcat Wheat Ale, Prairie Pale Ale, Riley’s Red Ale, XX Black Angus Stout and Bison Brown Ale) and a seasonal or two. Try a flight of six tasters for $7, or get a growler to go for $15.
On your way back from Manhattan … grab a growler at Blind Tiger.
Topeka’s Blind Tiger Brewery & Restaurant (417 Southwest 37th Street) regularly collects medals at the Great American Beer Fest. Brewmaster John Dean and head brewer Alvaro Canizales’ beers are on-point and worth a detour.
