EPISODE S.3, E.12

[VETERANS HOP BLEND]

Toby Tucker: (00:09)
Well, hello, and welcome back to another episode of The BrewDeck Podcast. I am your host today, Toby Tucker, and I am with a solid crew. We got a full house today. Grant Lawrence, who’s on with us most every episode. How you doing, Grant?

Grant Lawrence: (00:30)
I’m doing great.

Toby Tucker: (00:31)
Heather Jarret, how are you?

Heather Jerred: (00:32)
I’m doing pretty good, Toby.

Toby Tucker: (00:35)
And Cheyenne Weishaar. No, yes?

Cheyenne Weishaar: (00:40)
Yes, absolutely. You nailed it.

Toby Tucker: (00:43)
And those three are solid sales folks over at Country Malt Group, and participants in helping us put together these awesome podcasts, so great to have y’all on. And for the group, today’s Tuesday, and for those that subscribe to The BrewDeck Podcast, this is a little bit different day that we’re releasing these, but now we’re going to move forward on Tuesdays, so we’re not bailing on anybody, we’re still around. Happy Tuesday, everyone.

Heather Jerred: (01:14)
Happy Tuesday.

Toby Tucker: (01:16)
I feel like I miss this group. It’s good to be back.

Grant Lawrence: (01:21)
Yes. Good to have you back, Toby.

Heather Jerred: (01:23)
We missed you.

Toby Tucker: (01:25)
Thank you. So one quick thing too, the Euro Pils, it launched.

Grant Lawrence: (01:31)
It did.

Toby Tucker: (01:32)
Yeah. It’s been a long time coming. Grant, you actually did some brewing at home with this, and it is brand new as of what, this past week or two?

Grant Lawrence: (01:45)
Yeah.

Toby Tucker: (01:45)
Nice. Well, it is available now in limited quantities in select CMGDCs, and it’s pretty cool because it’s got a malt analysis targeted at reducing modification and really beefing up extract, and it still produces this wonderful, bready, high mouth feel character.

Grant Lawrence: (02:11)
Absolutely.

Toby Tucker: (02:13)
Yeah. Grant, you shared a picture of the home brew that you did here recently, and just the head on that looks unreal.

Grant Lawrence: (02:20)
It really is. I would describe it like meringue, if you’re familiar with meringue on a pie. Just really this dense, rocky, white head that stays around. Not that other malts don’t have as good of head retention, but this one is just stand out to me. Really, I think the Canada Malting team nailed it. It’s a lot like an imported pils malt from Germany or somewhere else in Europe. It uses imported barley and targets the same specs, it’s just malted here in North America.

Toby Tucker: (02:55)
Yeah. It looks like some great stuff, and we’re excited to have it. So for the listeners out there, if you’re interested in taking a peek at it and learning a little bit more, just reach out to us or your sales reps, and we’ll be happy to get that info in your hands.

Grant Lawrence: (03:07)
I’d say it’s pretty crazy how fast it’s moving. Down here where I’m at, I didn’t get as much as some of the other warehouses because I’m pretty far west, but gosh, in this one week it’s flowing, so it’s impressive. We’re going to need to malt another batch real soon.

Toby Tucker: (03:22)
Yep. Yeah. Cool. Well, excited for today because we have a couple guests on to talk about the topic of the day, which is the Veterans Blend through YCH, and they do it every year. And we’re excited to have Bri Vaughn with YCH here, as well as Chelsey Simony, who’s with HunterSeven. Welcome, y’all.

Chelsey Simoni: (03:46)
Thank you so much.

Bri Vaughn: (03:48)
Hello.

Toby Tucker: (03:49)
Yeah. Really excited to have y’all on to talk about this year’s Veteran Blend. And as we talk and for the listeners that want to have a little bit more information or for the pre-order form, we’re going to provide a link in the episode. You can contact your sales rep or the pre-order form through CMG, so happy to talk about it. And the varieties that are in this year’s blend, I’m looking at them now, HBC 586, Ekuanot, Triumph, Idaho 7, and Chinook, just a really kick line up there.

Heather Jerred: (04:26)
That’s a really nice blend.

Toby Tucker: (04:29)
Yeah. Looking at a lot of berry, bubblegum, stone fruit. It looks wonderful, it really does. So let’s start with Bri. Tell us a little bit about what you do and how you got started in the industry, and specifically there at Yakima Chief.

Bri Vaughn: (04:48)
Yeah, for sure. Thanks, Toby. I’m Bri Vaughn. I am our inside sales division lead at Yakima Chief, so with that title, what I do is I have a team of seven based in Yakima, Washington. We’re called, as you might guess, the inside sales team, really focus on customer orders, customer interaction, helping out with accounts and day-to-day type things. And along with that, we work in collaboration with our outside sales team, really having the full, round experience for our customers throughout North America, Canada, and actually, worldwide. So what I do is I assist the team. Another thing I do is work directly with our director of North American sales in just overall sales strategies, and assisting the teams with their day-to-day goals and tasks.

Toby Tucker: (05:50)
So Bri, can you tell us a little bit about how the Veterans Blend got started? How long have y’all been doing it, and a little bit of history on it?

Bri Vaughn: (05:59)
Yeah, totally. So we’ve had the Veterans Blend going on since 2018, and the really neat thing about this community blend that we have is it was employee initiated. We had some YCH employees that are veterans themselves, and it was initiated by them, just an idea that was brought up one time, and in collaboration with other brewers that are veterans as well. And this is something that YCH really supported that group with, and it just took off. So 2018 was the launch year, and throughout the years, it’s just been organically growing.

Bri Vaughn: (06:41)
It’s a very grassroots program that we have, and it started out with just a handful of veteran-owned breweries, and every year, more and more breweries are getting involved. And they don’t necessarily need to be only veteran own breweries. We’re really encouraging veteran brewers or veteran employees at breweries to get involved as well, and so it’s just been growing. And every year we change what nonprofits we’re working with, so for example, last year we worked with Canines For Warriors, and as we all know listening to this podcast, this year we’re working with the HunterSeven Foundation, which is why we have Chelsey here with us.

Toby Tucker: (07:30)
Yeah. Awesome. Hi, Chelsea.

Chelsey Simoni: (07:34)
How are you?

Toby Tucker: (07:35)
Great, great. I think it’s a great time for you to tell us a little bit about HunterSeven, what you do there and how that got started.

Chelsey Simoni: (07:43)
Yeah. I appreciate you guys having me on, and Yakima Chief for choosing us. We’re a small organization, and actually, around the same time they began their Veterans Blend, we were formed. So at the end of 2018, we decided that we were going to give it the old college try and form a non-profit, and as a nurse, it’s a lot different than nursing, so it was a learning curve as we went with it, but it blew up. So HunterSeven was founded based off of my husband’s sergeant major who passed away from a rare form of bile duct cancer called cholangiocarcinoma. And myself and my husband, we both served. He served eight years, I served 10, and his sergeant major was 44 years old when he passed away.

Chelsey Simoni: (08:40)
And so my husband told me this, and he said, “A lot of my friends died in Iraq,” and I said, “Well, unfortunately that’s combat. That’s war.” And he said, “Well, yeah, but most of them died when they got home.” And so the typical belief is that suicide’s a huge problem in the veteran community, and it’s definitely a problem, but it doesn’t claim as many lives as cancer. And so when he said to me they died from these rare cancers at young ages, 24, 36, 44, and when he said to me, “Half of my platoon has passed away in a platoon of 19 guys,” my heart sank. And I said, “Well, why?” And he said, “I don’t know,” and that was kind of the initiative.

Chelsey Simoni: (09:25)
So being in the medical field, I jumped online and I did a literature review of the data and current studies out there, and there were none. And so I was like, “Okay, this the problem, and there’s no research on it.” So we were founded as a research organization, and so we published internationally. We’re one of the few organizations that are nonprofits that do that. But then we realized without the research, there’s no education, and without the education, these providers that are caring for these veterans have no insight of what to do or where to go or how to care for them.

Chelsey Simoni: (09:58)
So that’s kind of what happened. We decided okay, we’re going to educate people too, because that’s one of the biggest problems we see is misdiagnosis, lack of diagnosis in the healthcare community. So once we started doing that and we got on social media, we saw the need was immaculate, and the immediate needs program was created based off of that. So we do a lot of immediate needs care, so second opinions, cancer screenings. Being that we’re medical providers, we have the capability to do a lot of those things behind the scenes and the nonprofit pays for them. So that’s a lot of what we do, because we want to identify risk factors early on and save as many lives as possible. So research, education, and immediate need support, that’s in summary what we do.

Grant Lawrence: (10:48)
It’s a important cause. That’s kind of crazy to hear that there was no real studies into that at all. Due to some of your research, what kind of exposures are we talking about here?

Chelsey Simoni: (11:09)
It drives me up the way, and I say this as a veteran and as a healthcare provider, a lot of people see mainstream news media covering burn pits. And of course, burn pits, it’s not great to breathe in burning trash by any means, but those pictures aren’t an accurate description of what actually goes on at war. And so the things you don’t think about because you’re in a combat zone is the IEDs. IEDs are full of chemicals and leads and all that stuff. The airborne hazards, the sand storms alone are extremely toxic. Depleted uranium, and it’s not just in combat. That’s the most concerning thing, so it’s stateside too. You look at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the water is full of jet fuel, so that right there is a known carcinogen that causes leukemia, lymphoma.

Chelsey Simoni: (11:59)
So everything can be toxic, but not everything if you’re exposed, you won’t necessarily get cancer, but there’s always a chance. And so what’s unique about veterans or service members is that when you’re deployed, your body is chronically stressed, so your sleep is terrible, your diet’s poor, you’re drinking a ton of energy drinks. You’re stressed out about your family back home and your safety, and so your cortisol increases. Your body has this thing called you have chronic inflammation, and then once those two things happen, your immune system tanks so it’s like the perfect storm for an exposure to take effect, if that makes sense.

Grant Lawrence: (12:44)
It does make sense. I had heard that before, but a lot of this is news to me, the jet fuel thing. I am thinking about these burn pits now and breathing that in, and how carcinogenic that could be, I just never put two and two together. It sounds like a tragedy, really, the way it works out that way.

Chelsey Simoni: (13:05)
It is, but the thing is, I was talking to a Medal of Honor recipient, Ron Shurer, before he passed away, and Ron was misdiagnosed for over a year. He was a Green Beret in the Army, Medal of Honor, young guy in mid-30s, and he was misdiagnosed as having musculoskeletal pain, and come to find out it was actually metastatic lung cancer that traveled to his hip. So with him, when I said to him, “Ron, if you could go back and do anything different, would you change, knowing what you know now?” And he said, “Absolutely not. I loved serving my country.”

Chelsey Simoni: (13:42)
And that’s the thing, we know there’s a risk no matter what your job is, just like firefighters. They’re running into a burning building, you know the risk factors, and it’s that selfless service thing. I broke my back in the military, and knowing what I know now, would I do it all over again? Absolutely. I loved serving my country. And a lot of these veterans, they don’t want to be seen as victims, and so that’s a lot of what we do, we enable them to take control of their own health.

Grant Lawrence: (14:11)
Right on.

Toby Tucker: (14:12)
Gosh, thank you so much for service, and for everybody out there. I’m getting choked up over here. The amount of folks that are out there supporting our country and putting their lives at danger, and they want to be out there and do it, it’s good to know we live in a country that people absolutely support and want to get out there and fight for the freedoms that I have every day, and that I know I don’t have to worry about, so thank you.

Grant Lawrence: (14:43)
Yes, thank you.

Bri Vaughn: (14:45)
Yeah. Thanks, Chelsey. That story, hearing your story never gets old. Not to sidetrack, but Chelsey and I first met at CBC, which I’ll talk about in a minute, but hearing your story there really hit home and really tugs at the heartstrings, and hearing it again, same response. So I’m going to reciprocate what the guys are saying, and thanks for what you do and your service, and I’m happy that we have this relationship.

Toby Tucker: (15:13)
How was this year’s Veterans Blend chosen, and how does it typically work every year?

Bri Vaughn: (15:19)
Okay. So, how we chose this year’s blend, I’m just going to jump through the process if that’s okay, and just give you some insight, and we can go from there.

Toby Tucker: (15:30)
Sure thing.

Bri Vaughn: (15:31)
Okay, cool. Yeah. You could say it’s almost a year-round process. It seems like once we choose the blend and get it out into the world, we’re starting back up again on the next year’s blend. So everything begins in February, and this is when we have a Veterans Blend team here at YCH that is composed of people throughout different departments, so there’s myself and our Southeast regional sales manager, Jonathan Sykes, who represent the sales team. We also have a couple people from marketing, production, and also our planning team as well, and then also, including our veteran employees who aren’t necessarily on any of those teams, but we still like to loop them in the process in making sure that we’re getting their voice involved as well.

Bri Vaughn: (16:22)
And so we start in February and we go through our list of varieties and availability, and just determine from there what varieties have characteristics that could really lend themselves to an amazing blend for the year. So we go through that list, hand pick I think it’s anywhere from 15 to 20 different varieties that we then send out a list to veteran breweries, veteran employees at breweries that are going to be involved with this voting process. And one thing that I wanted to speak on here is in years past, and I don’t know if I can say the C word, but before COVID times, this was a process that just the entire thing happened at CBC. We brought in all these varieties, had people come into person, smell them all. It was a whole day process.

Bri Vaughn: (17:20)
And once 2020 hit, we really had to pivot and move into, as you could probably guess, an all virtual model, and that’s where we sent out these different varieties to every brewery that is participating. I believe that year, it was a little over 10 breweries. We virtually went through a selection of the varieties, building out the blend and all of that, and it went great. It was actually our very first virtual selection type program, and based from that, we actually were able to use that type of program with other community blends, like our Pink Boots Blend and also our Selection Program. So with that being said, this year we actually took that approach plus what we’ve done in the past, and we now have a hybrid model where we are still milling out the selected handful of varieties to breweries that sign up to choose what are going to go into the blend.

Bri Vaughn: (18:21)
So this year we mailed out 20 kits to different breweries throughout all North America, and from there the breweries get their kits and we have a set date where we all come together and vote on what varieties we want to mix up and include in the three final blends that we’ll vote on. And some fun facts, every year, so five years, Ekuanot has ended up in the blend in the last four out of five years, and then also, Idaho 7 has ended up in the blend in the last three of the five years. So those are the only two consistent varieties that have always shown up in these blends, which is kind of fun. And I’m just going to say it, Idaho 7 us my personal favorite hop. I lean towards that pineapple aroma and smell. It’s a rock star.

Grant Lawrence: (19:18)
It seems the popularity of Idaho 7 has just blown up. Anybody who smells it or brews with it, it’s like once you try it, you just want to keep using it, for sure.

Toby Tucker: (19:30)
Grant, I think I’ve heard you talk about Idaho 7 a lot on our past podcasts.

Grant Lawrence: (19:35)
It’s one of my favorites as well, if not one of my favorite hops right now. It is a rock star, like Bri said. The other thing that’s really interesting to me about this blend is the Ekuanot in it, because I feel like there’s so many brewers that have a bad image or a bad thought of Ekuanot in their head, and then when you do the rubbing and sniffing, the typical hop selection stuff out of these core samples from the bales, it’s just funny that Ekuanot will get chosen as awesome, and then you’ll find out it’s Ekuanot. I don’t know, I just wish people would give Ekuanot more love. It deserves some more love in the brew world.

Bri Vaughn: (20:20)
Yeah. I totally agree with that. It definitely flies under the radar, and like you said, people get really surprised by it, and myself included, so they’re two very fun, unique and growing varieties.

Grant Lawrence: (20:36)
Can you tell us a little bit about… The only one I’m not familiar with is the 586, the experimental one, I guess easily confused with 582, but my understanding is 586 is real big on the mango. Is that true?

Bri Vaughn: (20:50)
Yeah. Yeah. One of the experimental varieties. Heavy on the mango, and with all of our experimentals, they’re not necessarily guaranteed to always be around, but such as 586, it’s one that’s really growing and starting to get that popularity. And also, one of the reasons we wanted to throw it in this blend, like I was saying, YCH didn’t necessarily pick it to be in the blend itself, that’s what our veteran brewers voted on, but something that we really want to push out there and really show its great characteristics and usage in blends and in brews as well.

Grant Lawrence: (21:32)
Absolutely.

Bri Vaughn: (21:33)
Yeah. So once we get the feedback from those 20 breweries, our planning team and our sensory team as well take that feedback with all the different varieties, and from there, they strategically build out three different blends for us to make a final vote on. And so with them creating these blends, it’s a breakout of certain percentages of the varieties within each one to showcase different characteristics or different ways that all these varieties can shine within the blend themselves. And so once we have those final three unique, different blends, those are created and set up in April.

Bri Vaughn: (22:19)
It’s all fun, but that’s when the exciting part begins. So this year, as we all know, CBC, the Craft Brewers Conference was back. We were in Minneapolis. It’s a great time, and that’s where we did our final vote for the Veterans Blend, and Chelsey and her husband joined us as well. And so we invite, of course, all the breweries that were involved with the first round of voting and blend creation, but we even just organically invite brewers as well who are at the Craft Brewers Conference, bringing up the discussion of the blend and asking if they’re veterans themselves, and if so, we tell them to stop on by and make their final vote count, and that is where we officially announced and launched the blend for this year.

Toby Tucker: (23:09)
That’s awesome. You know, as we were speaking in there, I thought, thinking to myself, I was thinking maybe Chelsey thinks we’re speaking in a foreign language about all these hops, but it’s awesome that y’all were involved. That’s cool. And I’m assuming y’all are craft beer fans, Chelsey?

Chelsey Simoni: (23:29)
I’m a whiskey person. I like whiskey and tequila/

Toby Tucker: (23:36)
Okay. We all do.

Grant Lawrence: (23:36)
We like that too.

Heather Jerred: (23:36)
There’s nothing wrong with that.

Chelsey Simoni: (23:39)
I’m from Boston originally, so we’re very fast-paced. Our driving skills are terrible, tons of traffic, so I hammer it down and go from there. But I did have the opportunity to try some craft beer, and I was mind-blown. I did terrible in chemistry, so for me, going there and seeing the process, I was like, “Oh my God, this is insane. I want to create stuff,” but then again, again, I’m terrible at chemistry so it would probably be terrible.

Chelsey Simoni: (24:11)
But ironically, every place in the country, I’ve been to a lot of amazing places, and in my work office, I have craft beers from across the country that are full. They’re full. I didn’t drink them. And so Death Valley Pale Ale, all these different breweries, whether it’s Harpoon and the Dunkin Donuts coffee or veteran-owned breweries like Tactical Brewing, [inaudible 00:24:38], it’s pretty cool. So I have about 150 beer cans on the top of my office.

Toby Tucker: (24:45)
That’s awesome. That is awesome.

Heather Jerred: (24:48)
What did you think about CBC… Sorry, go ahead. What did you think about CBC, Chelsey?

Chelsey Simoni: (24:54)
Like I said, I was mind-blown. This is a lot. I didn’t realize how much, of course time and effort, but when I think about brewing, I think about moonshine because I’m very-

Grant Lawrence: (25:09)
Efficiency

Chelsey Simoni: (25:12)
And all this stuff, and to try all these different things and to smell the hops, I was mind-blown, and that’s really hard for me because I’ve seen a lot of things and I’ve done a lot of things, but I was mind-blown. And so when the team brought us out there just to experience that and their passion, I’m a very passionate person, so to see their passion and thrive off that, it was a great experience. I can’t thank them enough. That was my first time in Minneapolis, and Minneapolis is an interesting place, but I had a really fun time at CBC. I was just so intrigued with the science, especially.

Heather Jerred: (25:52)
Yeah. It’s like a sensory overload going there. It was my first one this past year and I was like, “Wow. I’ve heard about it, I had no idea.”

Chelsey Simoni: (25:58)
It was good.

Toby Tucker: (26:01)
It was definitely good to get back. So working in the beer industry, and I’m sure everybody would agree here that craft beer, we love craft beer, but sometimes we want something else, so it’s all good. I like whiskey. Really, I like any adult beverage put in front of me, pretty much.

Chelsey Simoni: (26:15)
Well, I have some friends over at Backwards Flag Brewing, who is one of the veteran-owned groups, and then Tactical Brewing, and I said, “Hey listen, I want to come down and blend something with you guys. I just want to watch.” I was like, “Can we make a coffee blend, because I love drinking coffee and I also love drinking beer, so can we do both?” And they’re like, “You’re crazy. Let’s do it,” and I was like, “All right.”

Cheyenne Weishaar: (26:42)
I think we need to get Chelsey a whiskey barrel aged stout.

Grant Lawrence: (26:45)
Yeah, with coffee in it.

Heather Jerred: (26:46)
With coffee stout. Yeah. We can find you one.

Chelsey Simoni: (26:49)
I would love that, because I love all those things.

Heather Jerred: (26:52)
It’s the perfect combo.

Chelsey Simoni: (26:53)
It’s the perfect combo.

Grant Lawrence: (26:56)
Coffee’s my favorite adjunct, by far. I think it just blends so well with a beer that uses a bunch of roasted malts. Just perfect.

Chelsey Simoni: (27:03)
And see, that’s what blows my mind. I want to know how it happens. Do y’all throw a bunch of coffee beans in there? This is what I want to see. I want to the science.

Grant Lawrence: (27:13)
There’s different ways, but Bri probably knows about dry-hopping is a technique where you just put hops in the fermentor, so in the cold side, and I would say most people just do dry coffeeing, if you will, is the way they add it in.

Toby Tucker: (27:27)
Jesus.

Chelsey Simoni: (27:29)
That sounds intense. I’m good at medicine, but not the other stuff.

Heather Jerred: (27:35)
It’s fun when you get these breweries too, a lot of breweries will use decaf and then a lot of breweries won’t, and just like oh, so this is going to jack me up all night? Awesome.

Grant Lawrence: (27:44)
It absolutely will.

Chelsey Simoni: (27:45)
Those are the nitro brews, right? The nitro ones, is that a real thing?

Grant Lawrence: (27:49)
Yeah.

Chelsey Simoni: (27:50)
Well, if we can get a brewery to do it, I’ll get tons of pounds of coffee from Black Rifle Coffee, and we’ll make it happen. So any brewers-

Toby Tucker: (27:59)
That’s some good coffee, too.

Grant Lawrence: (28:00)
Yeah. I think using cold brew, like you said, that happens well, like cold brew coffee concentrate and then just dry hop with that, put it in the cold side. Keep all of those volatile, delicious coffee flavors intact, the same you would with hops, use it in the cold side.

Chelsey Simoni: (28:19)
I’m very impressed.

Toby Tucker: (28:22)
Bri, so obviously, if we had the opportunity to spread millions and millions dollars around to a lot of different organizations, we certainly would, but how do you go about choosing the organization that the proceeds of this blend go to, and how did you meet Chelsey and decide that HunterSeven where the proceeds are going to go?

Bri Vaughn: (28:52)
So keeping along with the theme of our Veterans Blend program, once again, the veteran-owned breweries, veteran brewers are the ones who tell us what nonprofits they are interested in and want us to help support, so every year we just do a shout out to them. We have a consistent list that we always add people on to reach out to, and we just say, “Hey you guys, what nonprofits are you interested in helping that are obviously veteran-supported? And from there, we do a voting system and provide information on the top three, and we let our brewers choose. It’s all in their hands. YCH is just coordinating and making sure everything is flowing great, but this is all in the veteran’s hands.

Bri Vaughn: (29:49)
So HunterSeven specifically, this foundation has been on our radar for the past couple years. It’s always been in the top three, and this year was the year they came out number one, and so that is how we chose them. And another thing about HunterSeven that we really focus on when choosing a nonprofit is they’re very grassroots, and almost practically everything that gets donated to them is put back into the cause, so that’s something that we’re very aware of as well. We want to make sure we’re not choosing nonprofits that are spreading their money out to a CEO or something like that. We want to make sure that they are truly supporting their cause, and that all the proceeds are going to the purpose of that nonprofit.

Toby Tucker: (30:43)
Fantastic.

Grant Lawrence: (30:46)
Fantastic.

Bri Vaughn: (30:47)
Yeah. Like we heard too, it is a very different and unique focus than what we’ve done in the past, so that was another thing that really I think pushed the brewers towards choosing HunterSeven.

Toby Tucker: (31:03)
I’m going to put you on the spot here. How much money has been raised for different nonprofit organizations since ’18 when this Veterans Blend started? You have any idea?

Bri Vaughn: (31:16)
Oh, I do, Toby. I was ready for that. I was prepared.

Toby Tucker: (31:20)
All right.

Bri Vaughn: (31:21)
Yeah. So far, we have raised over $132,000 for these different nonprofits. And so I guess some insight into that is we are dedicated to donating $3 per pound goes directly back to the nonprofit, so it’s a program that we’re just constantly building upon. And every year it’s getting bigger and bigger, and more and more breweries are getting involved and ordering the blend as well, so it’s really exciting to see it grow.

Toby Tucker: (31:56)
That’s awesome. Very good. So Chelsey, for this year, and hopefully we can just smash any and all monetary donations this year, but how do you see the proceeds coming from this Veteran’s Blend campaign, if you will, supporting HunterSeven?

Chelsey Simoni: (32:18)
Yeah. To piggyback off what Brianna said, as the quote, unquote, I guess I am the executive director, head honcho, but I’m not. I believe in a linear democracy, but it’s important to me, and in theory, a nonprofit should be a nonprofit. And so when I see a lot of organizations taking these massive salaries, it irritates me because as the executive director, and I put in 60 hours a week on top of my other job, my full-time job, I get paid $77 a year. Literally, $77. It’s very humbling. But in the same sense, it’s like all of my needs are met. I’m very thankful for everything I have, and my husband and his health, thankfully, knock on wood, we’re very comfortable in what we do with our civilian jobs.

Chelsey Simoni: (33:09)
And so why not give back? That’s the purpose of a nonprofit? So 95% of what comes in, goes back out to the veteran community. And when I tell people, we’re very transparent, not only when you donate to this foundation are you going to support veterans and cancer recovery, but you’re also going to support a solution. We support the veteran’s immediate needs. We do the cancer testing, we pay out-of-pocket. We cut the red tape from insurance and we bypass everything to get them the care they need, but we also look at things long-term. For example, we just published a study that’s a groundbreaking study, hands down, and we actually sat with the President of the United States a month ago to talk about this study.

Chelsey Simoni: (33:56)
And so we found that one in six post 9/11 active duty service members are diagnosed with cancer. One in six. And so when you have a total of 3.7 million who deployed overseas during that 20-year period, and over a half a million, over 520,000 are diagnosed with cancer, there’s a problem. And so it’s a systemic problem, so not only do we support the immediate time, the immediate need, but we also look at the long-term duration for sustainability. And so we’re very proud of that, and we’re from this community. We’re from this community and we’re for this community, so we’re very approachable, we’re very reachable.

Chelsey Simoni: (34:39)
And it’s a grassroots organization, so considering we didn’t kick off until December 2018, and then being an ER provider getting stuck during COVID, we’ve been very grateful in the traction that we’ve gained. And this donation is huge because not only is the financial piece going to support easily 100 veterans, but the long-term sustainability and advertisement really that we’re going to get from Yakima Chief and all these veteran-owned breweries will actually enable these veterans to ask their provider certain questions, be mindful of their exposures and understand those exposures. And so if we can positively impact one veteran, and hopefully identify a cancer in one veteran early on and save their life, then our mission’s complete. So there’s so many different ways that this donation and this blend will be used, in theory and in financial support.

Toby Tucker: (35:42)
Wonderful. Very, very good. And one thing I will note too, is we’re talking about a lot about Veterans Blends, and we talked about some of the key veteran-owned breweries or veteran brewers, if you will, having a say in the selection, but this is open, and definitely we want to get it out in the hands of every brewer, veteran or not. We certainly want everybody to have the opportunity to play around and brew with this Veterans Blend, but also remember that it is for a great cause. ‘

Toby Tucker: (36:20)
The Veterans Blend is currently on pre-order from Country Malt Group, who are highly supportive of and partners, if you will, with Yakima Chief, and you can always pre-order from YCH as well. Super happy to see how the Veterans Blend does this year, and Chelsey, for your participation and what you do and for your organization. So it’s an awesome cause, really happy to have Bri on from YCH, and Chelsea as well. So thank y’all very much for joining us today, and we look forward to chatting with you soon and seeing how this thing wraps up.

Toby Tucker: (36:56)
But again, the Veterans Blend is available for pre-order from Country Malt Group or YCH, so reach out to your salesperson over either of those organizations and we’ll try to get some in your hands very soon. So I appreciate everybody’s time today, Chelsey, Bri, Grant, Heather, Cheyenne. Cool. And I think we’re going to have some folks on here on the Whirlpool here in just a few seconds and talk to some veterans that are actually brewing, and get an idea of what they plan on doing with the blend. So look forward to hearing that, and stick around and we’ll talk to you in a bit.