EPISODE S.5, E.19

[DON’T CRY OVER SPILLED BEER]

Heather (00:09):
Welcome back to another episode of The BrewDeck Podcast. I am your host, Heather, and I am joined today by Cheyenne and Abi. Hi guys.

Abi (00:18):
Hello.

Heather (00:19):
How are we doing today?

Abi (00:20):
Doing good.

Cheyenne (00:22):
It’s a fun topic. It’s a kind of wacky topic.

Heather (00:25):
It’s a pretty fun little episode, and I know we say that a lot, but it is a fun episode.

Cheyenne (00:30):
We say it every single time, but this one is I think one of the wackier ones that we’ve done.

Heather (00:34):
Yeah, I agree. So today we’re going to be talking to David Lin from Comrade Brewing in Colorado about turning shitty situations into good marketing, but we’ll get to that in a little bit. We’ve got a few housekeeping items. Cheyenne, you want to kick us off?

Cheyenne (00:50):
Yeah, definitely. So first housekeeping item on the list here: we’ve got GABF coming up in a month. I don’t know how that’s already a month away.

Heather (00:57):
That feels crazy.

Cheyenne (00:58):
I know. Time is flying. Our annual industry party with Five Star is on Friday, October 11th. That goes from 11 to three pm at Little Machine Beer, so we hope that we see you there. We also have the Filson Vests for gold medal winners, so that’s very exciting.

Heather (01:16):
It is getting a little chilly in my neck of the woods. I would say in both of you ladies neck of the woods too, all of the [inaudible 00:01:23].

Cheyenne (01:23):
Yes, all of us Northern Gals.

Heather (01:28):
Fall is among us.

Cheyenne (01:30):
Yes.

Heather (01:30):
Those Vests are going to be pretty nice, so hope to see a lot of winners of the Vests this year. Events coming up here in my neck of the woods. My conference run of the fall is upon us. I’ve got the Alberta Craft Brewers Conference in Edmonton on October 9th, and then I’ll be headed back to BC for the BC Craft Brewers Conference, which is also along with the Canada Beer Cup Awards this year as well. So that’s all going to be here in October 17th and 18th. And if anybody’s sticking around, I’ve got a little teaser. I may or may not have one James Fawcett joining me in town for that conference. I know, so it’s going to be a good time. We may or may not have a little event coming up so people can come and meet James because he is a riot to be around.

Cheyenne (02:25):
He is, he’s the hoot. Love him.

Heather (02:27):
So stay tuned for that if you are a Western Canadian or anybody coming into town for the Canadian Beer Cup as well.

Cheyenne (02:35):
Well, that’s awesome. That’ll be fun for you guys. Another housekeeping item here. Speaking of fall, one of our favorite parts of the early fall season is Rising Hope. You may have started to see some buzz recently, but every year we’re proud to partner with the National Pediatric Cancer Foundation on their signature beer, Rising Hope, which is brewed in nearly every single State to raise funds for critical pediatric cancer research. Very important. If you’re interested in getting involved or joining their tap handle program, you can contact your CMG rep. You can also go back and listen to our episode, season two, episode number 18 and season four, episode number 24 to learn more about why this program is so near and dear to us.

Heather (03:19):
It is such an amazing cause and I know every year they have the goal of getting everyone in every State to participate, so please reach out to your CMG rep if you are interested in participating. Lastly, the Veterans Blend from the Yakima Chief Hops will be shipping out in about a month, so if you pre-ordered some, get excited, get ready, get your recipes going. And if you haven’t yet, it’s actually not too late, please contact your CMG rep for some spot availability as well.

Cheyenne (03:45):
And with that, that wraps up our housekeeping. We had quite a list here. And Heather, like you mentioned, today we’re talking about turning shitty situations and good marketing, making the best of bad experiences, keeping a positive attitude, all of those fun things. We have a really fun guest today. You already introduced him. David Lin from Comrade Brewing in Colorado is our guest today. You probably heard their crazy story, but if you haven’t, buckle up. It is a wild story. The whole team, we’ve watched the video at least 100 times at this point minimum, there’s footage of the incident.

Heather (04:30):
And every time we all have a reaction. It’s never not surprising. It’s crazy. It’s absolutely crazy to watch.

Cheyenne (04:44):
The funny thing is that I brewed for seven and a half years and we have some surveillance footage of some of our crazy incidents and they’re not as fun to watch when it’s you doing it.

Heather (04:54):
That’s true. That’s very true. Do tell us some of those incidences, I would love to know.

Cheyenne (05:01):
I feel like I could talk for an hour on this because I think every brewer knows. Abi, I know you know, there’s just so many things that can go wrong. There’s so many things that you have to pay attention to. One that comes to mind for me, I started brewing back in 2015. I was fresh out of college, so I felt very young, and I had just started brewing and we were brewing. I was brewing with the owner of the brewery and we were brewing our winter beer. So of course there’s so much… It was a German Stiegel so it is just packed to the brim with malt. It is a malt-heavy beer, and we were doing a double batch and we had gotten the first turn into the kettle and we had opened up the mash tun to clean it out, get it ready for the second turn.

(05:44)
And so I had taken out one of the grates out of the mash tun, gotten all the grain out, taken one of the grates I was rinsing underneath with the hose, all that good stuff. Drew, the owner of the brewery was off doing something and I was cleaning it out, and I hadn’t finished cleaning it. I hadn’t put everything back together, put the grate back in, shut the mash tun, none of that. I had put the grate off to the side, I had to use the restroom so I walked off and I used the restroom. When I came back, Drew had shut up the mash tun and he was mashing it, and I was like, “Oh, great. You finished. Awesome, very cool.”

Heather (06:17):
Oh no.

Cheyenne (06:20):
As you can guess, he didn’t realize that I hadn’t put the funnel grate in so he started mashing and we didn’t realize until we were halfway through mashing that one of the grates was missing. And I literally remember the feeling because I was the one who noticed. He was standing up on the brew deck so he couldn’t see that the grate was off to the side, leaning up against the wall, and I was standing on the floor of the brewery, and I remember looking at it, and I remember just feeling like all the blood drain from my head. And I was like, oh, no. So that was not a fun day. It was a double brew day, which usually takes us 11 or 12 hours. That one took us, I would say probably like 17 or 18 hours.

Heather (07:05):
Oh God.

Cheyenne (07:05):
And what we ended up doing is we had a little 20 gallon HopBack and those things have a little tiny grate in the bottom of them. And so what we did was we rigged it up to the mouth of the mash tun. We basically tried to whirl-off through that, and we moved all of the liquid into an empty, clean fermentation vessel that we had. We opened up the mash tun, put the grate back in, and then we had to pump all that liquid back into the mash ton, finish the mash routine, do the whirl-off, it was incredible, but I’ll never make that mistake again. I contend that it was both of our faults because listen, I didn’t put it back in, but I also wasn’t the one that shut the mash ton.

Heather (07:52):
Yeah, that was a collaborative effort.

Cheyenne (07:57):
It was a collaborative mistake.

Heather (07:59):
Exactly. But I think that things like that is a rite of passage. I think that if you don’t have a story like this, are you really a brewer?

Cheyenne (08:06):
More like five [inaudible 00:08:09] like that.

Heather (08:11):
I actually posed the question on my Instagram, and I can’t even tell you how many stories I got from folks, and they were all like, “This is how it is.” And it’s anything from… For me, it started when I was trying to learn how to keg, and you don’t get the coupler all the way on and the beer sprays all over you.

Cheyenne (08:29):
Oh, yeah. That’s a fun one.

Heather (08:30):
Yeah. My brew house is like a fishbowl and everybody can watch what you’re doing and people do. They stand there like you’re in a zoo. And I was just like that brewer that they were all watching. And of course, they all got this great view of beer just spraying up my nose and things like that. Otherwise-

Cheyenne (08:50):
It’s always really humbling, isn’t it?

Heather (08:52):
It really is, and there were days where the brew house is that Fishbowl, and then the fermentation tanks are outside of it and then down a step, and so they’re out of view. There was one time when I thought I hooked a hose up to a tank, and it definitely was not. And so I’m in the brew house and I let it open, and here it’s just going straight down the drain.

Cheyenne (09:15):
Oh no.

Heather (09:19):
I wouldn’t say that that really caused any good marketing, but it was a good five to 10 [inaudible 00:09:25], but from working in marketing and from being a brewer, it feels like I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen the trub spills, the dry hop explosions.

Cheyenne (09:39):
That one I got to see, which I never brewed professionally, but I was doing a collab brew with Small Gods Brewing out Vancouver Island, shout out to Johnny and Chris and I was helping him do some dry hopping out of the beer they had my tank and Johnny had a full explosion, and it was this most shocking thing I have ever seen.

Heather (10:00):
Oh, yeah.

Cheyenne (10:00):
And there’s nothing you could do so you just stand there.

Heather (10:05):
You just stand there watching it happen, and you’re just like, “Oh.”

Cheyenne (10:09):
Just absolutely in shock. And then it was like, well, did you take photos? I’m like, “I didn’t even think about it. I didn’t know what to think about.” I was worried about Johnny on the ladder, was freaked out about what was happening and then you just stood there because it just kept going.

Heather (10:24):
Yeah, that one’s always a crazy one. I’ve had that one happen a handful of times. The funny thing is that going back to the very beginning when I first started brewing, when I had gotten hired my very first day, my boss brought me in and it was a brew day. He’s like, “Let’s just get you started right away.” So we started on a brew day together, and then that happened on that batch that I had made. We have surveillance footage of him dry hopping it. It just exploded, it hit the ceiling. Beer got into the lights, it was a whole mess. I think everyone’s gone through that one at least once.

Cheyenne (10:57):
Oh yeah. You have to.

Heather (11:03):
Yeah, that’s definitely a learning experience.

Cheyenne (11:07):
There are just so many things that can go wrong/right, because if you can turn them into funny situations and good marketing.

Heather (11:18):
For sure. Yeah, there’s always a good way to make light of it, I think.

Cheyenne (11:24):
To spin it, yeah. I feel like we didn’t spin any of the funny things that happened, but David Lin from Comrade Brewing, he definitely did because this one is a really funny story. Yes, it is, for sure.

Heather (11:41):
Well, let’s jump right in. We are now joined by David Lin, chairman of Comrade Brewing in Colorado, who has a pretty interesting story to tell us. But before we jump into that story, David, can you give us a little bit of an intro and history of yourself in the brewing industry?

David (12:01):
Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me on. I’m David Lin, chairman and founder of Comrade Brewing here. We’re in Southeast Denver. I’ve been in this industry since 2005, just one little brew pub in town and I think I was like 22. And there was an opening when the previous assistant brewer graduated school and was going to move out of the country and they needed somebody else. And at the time, that was the brewer Marks and he was the head brewer there. So back in the day, I got the assistant brewer job working for Marks, who is now my part owner and brewmaster here at Comrade. We opened up in 2014 and we just celebrated 10 years of operation. We got a pretty big taproom, serving tanks, wanted to do the taproom model, selling a lot of beer over the bar. And our philosophy is contemporary takes on American styles with pretty heavy emphasis on IPAs, the clear IPAs, because that’s what we really like brewing and drinking. I think it’s really important to also enjoy drinking beer. We brew on a 15 barrel. We’ve won seven medals at GABF since we’ve opened, and a couple of World Beer Cup golds as well.

Toby (13:31):
And worthy of all of those accolades, David, the beer is fantastic. I’ve had the opportunity, well, the privilege of spending many a night and day for that matter, up at that facility. And you all do a fantastic job, Just great stuff.

David (13:49):
I mostly just sit in the office and Marks, he runs the entire production side with one other brewer, Rio, who’s doing an awesome job. But I think I do everything except for make the beer and pour the beer.

Heather (14:07):
Anymore.

David (14:09):
Anymore. Well, yeah, that’s true. I haven’t brewed since July of 2014. A couple more things before we got this place going, I worked with another, an out of State brewery that Marks was the head brewer of, I was just helping him here while I moved up to Colorado doing distributor relations, and then I brewed at another award-winning brewery in Aurora too before deciding that maybe I should try to give it a go myself.

Heather (14:44):
Amazing. So today we’re talking about turning shitty situations in the brewery into good marketing, and your story is absolutely insane. So can you please tell everybody what happened?

David (15:00):
So this was October of 2016. It was the week after GABF actually… If you’re going to have a truck crash into your facility, the week after GABF is actually a good week because we had already been busting our asses just getting every single tank filled and all our serving tanks full for onslaught of people coming for GABF. It was a beautiful day, it was a Thursday, I think, one o’clock in the afternoon, 80 degrees, typical Denver day, just sunny, not a cloud in the sky. And we’re still not exactly sure what the guy was doing, but he was just in the parking lot, but he was just sitting on the curb with the front of the truck faced toward the brewery, and he was hopped up on the curb and he was just revving his engine and I don’t know what he was doing and he was there for 10 minutes.

(16:09)
We didn’t know what was going on, so we just ignored it. Of course, we were brewing Superpower IPA, so our flagship IPA here, and it’s about almost 50% of our entire production now. And I guess the guy accidentally put it into drive or got it into drive, and it could have been a lot worse, but it totaled another pickup truck that happened to be driving on the road that passes in front of our brewery. So he totaled that truck, then crashed into a concrete filled bollard and then crashing in through the center of the two garage doors where the brew house is. I was sitting in the office, like I usually do, and I just heard this really loud crash. I was like, “Oh, what are these guys doing here? What did they drop?” And I go out there and you can smell gas. The water was leaking, there was glass, and it was a crazy disaster.

(17:29)
We were in the middle of a boil, and so we ran back to where the utility hookup is, and we actually turned off the gas ourselves while we were waiting for the fire department to come. Later on all the deputies got there and had the EMTs come by and this guy was, I don’t know, I think he was just on a cocktail of pills or something. The EMTs found a pill bottle that he accidentally dropped and dumped him out and was like, “Here’s some painkillers, here’s some animal tranquilizers. I don’t even know what these other ones are.” He wasn’t going nowhere. He also had a boot, so he must had injured his foot and he would just hanging out and just finished up his milkshake that he had just gotten from Sonic, I guess, because he knew that he was going to be going to jail, so might as well take a breather there.

Toby (18:36):
It was allergy medication. That’s what it was.

David (18:39):
Yeah, exactly.

Heather (18:40):
It was the drowsy kind, apparently.

David (18:41):
Right.

Toby (18:45):
I wish we could play that video online.

Heather (18:48):
I hope we could link it.

Toby (18:50):
Give the viewers. Yeah, we probably can. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.

Heather (18:53):
If you go over to Comrade’s Facebook page, it is posted on there. And like I said, we had watched it so many times yesterday.

Toby (19:03):
Yeah. I’m going to tee this one up, David, and we’ll get into the name of the beer a little bit later. But what type of vehicle was it?

David (19:16):
So it was a lifted Dodge Ram 2500 pickup truck. The way that the plumbing was set up, they had run the water line and the natural gas line in the support beam that’s in between the two garage doors. So when he crashed through it, it snapped the water line and it snapped the gas line. And that’s why I went to shut everything off and the fire department came and they just got everyone out. Luckily no one was hurt, but we were open, you could see from the video, I think maybe six or seven people there were drinking and Marks and our other brewer and then our beer tender. So it was a big, big problem.

Heather (20:14):
So nobody was hurt, which is obviously the most important thing. What was the damage in the brewery in the brew house?

David (20:23):
So there wasn’t really too much damage. The bollard and then that other pickup truck took the brunt of it, but the garage doors were both destroyed. If you look at the video, he hit it pretty hard and it actually moved the entire hot liquor tank a few inches, and we had to redo the water lines, the gas lines, and then it bent some process piping, but luckily we were able to just unhook everything and then reset the tank back of place and then put everything back together. So there wasn’t that much damage to the tanks but the big problem was that it just took, I think it took 16 days by the time they could rerun new water lines and gas lines. So that beer that we were brewing to not have natural gas while in the middle of a boil, we were like, “There’s nothing else we can do.” Luckily hadn’t done our whirlpool addition or anything like that, but we looked at the situation like we’re just have to dump it. So just knocked it out cold and then just had to send it all down to drain.

Heather (21:46):
But losing beer is definitely devastating. So then Toby teed it up, so I’ll let you take it. What did you do as your way to make this shitty situation a little bit better?

David (21:58):
So we posted about it on Facebook. Luckily there’s some local news outlets, a little local independent paper, they covered it, so we got some good media coverage about it. The garage doors were also, since they were destroyed, they had come by and they just had boarded up these two commercial size garage doors. So we asked people, come by, we’re still open, don’t worry. We still have beer in the tanks. And we turned that boarded up wall outside to a big sticker wall. So he just invited people to come by and just sticker it up.

(22:45)
After about I think 16 days, the plumbers finally got everything back up connected. We also rerouted it, so if it was going to happen again, it’s not going to break the gas line unless if they hit it in a different spot. But they reinforced stuff too later on. But we were making Superpower and we were trying to think like, oh, this is really bad. Luckily we still have a lot of beer. The taproom side really wasn’t affected, so we were still operating and people came by and they wanted to see the damage, so that was cool. And so we were brewing a beer and I was like, “Oh, maybe we should do something special.” Because of course, the very first beer that we brewed after the gas and water was hooked back up again was we had to brew more Superpower because our wholesale accounts were jonesing for some more.

(23:53)
And they were like, “Hey, sorry, we’re a little behind right now. Can’t brew for a bit, so it’s going to be like a month before we get our next batch on.” And Tyler Brown, who owns Barley Brown’s out in Baker City, Oregon, that’s where Marks brewed before coming to Comrade, his brother came up with the name More Dodge Less Ram in honor of the Ram truck that had crashed in the brewery.

(24:24)
And so what we did was instead of watering it back down, we brewed to gravity, not to volume. So it’s like, oh, let’s not water it back down and then we’ll try to make the beer last a little bit longer in the taproom. So we put some extra hops for additional bitterness and then more dry hops and we put it on as a seasonal, I don’t know how often that we were planning to make it, but we just brewed it for special occasions and called it More Dodge Less Ram and people liked it and we liked the beer as well.

Toby (25:07):
Absolutely genius. That’s funny. Really, really cool.

David (25:11):
That was Tyler Brown’s brother. And then in the end it took a couple of years later but 2019 we put it into the Great American Beer Festival and it won gold for American IPA, which is the most competitive category. Also in 2019 we also happened to win gold for our Superpower IPA for American strong pale and then we won Small Brewing Company of the Year for 2019. And I do remember right after it happened later that day, it’s like, oh, this really sucks, but I’m sure we’re going to look back on this in a few years and then we’ll laugh about it but I feel like that’s the mindset that you have to have when these things happen to you.

Toby (26:08):
Yeah, that is awesome and congratulations on the medal and all the success that year, that’s the epitome of somebody taking what is a shitty situation and flipping it around to make do and then utilize some marketing and some geniuses behind the curtains trying to figure out how you can turn a crappy situation into abetter. So that’s cool, really cool story. And I certainly encourage everybody look at the video, it’s greatness as well. I’m glad everybody’s all right.

David (26:41):
Yeah.

Toby (26:42):
So you all won Filson Vest from us, right? Was it that year or was it in ’19?

David (26:57):
That was ’19 and then in 2022 More Dodge Less Ram won another gold for American IPA, so I think that’s the second beer ever to do it. Firestone Walker Double Jack won Gold for American IPA like 2008, 2009. We’re really happy about that as well and I think got another Vest too so those things are cool.

Toby (27:25):
I think you also were a small brewery of the year in ’19, correct?

David (27:30):
Yep, 2019. It was a really good year. Really great way to end 2019 before the whole pandemic thing.

Toby (27:44):
I never heard of it. What are you talking about? What Pandemic?

Heather (27:47):
Just blocked it from your minds.

David (27:49):
Exactly.

Toby (27:52):
So I’m just curious, we talk about awards and stuff and where do you keep all your awards? It’s not a one-up deal, but I’m just curious how many awards you all have racked in over the time period of you all being open?

David (28:08):
So the awards, they’re just right on our tap wall when you come in. So they’re all framed and we just frame them every year that we get lucky enough to win some. So we’ve won Silver Medal for the fresh hop version of Superpower, so just our super power IPA, and then we put in a lot of wet hops into it. In fact, today it went on tap today, so the fresh hop Superpower on which got 40 pounds per barrel of wet cascade from a local farm here in Colorado. So Superpower’s won gold in 2019, silver in 2020 for American strong pale. More Dodge Less Ram won gold in 2019 and 2022. And our Irish red ale won bronze in 2018 for Irish style red ale and we won two gold awards at the World Beer Cup for our chili beer. It’s our blonde ale with jalapenos. So won Gold awards in 2016 and in 2023.

Toby (29:23):
That’s great. And again, very well deserved because you all are rolling out some very good stuff there.

David (29:30):
Yeah, thank you.

Toby (29:31):
Yeah, no worries. Curious because I’m looking at some of the Ingredients you all used and it looks like there’s a lot of our stuff in there. Tell us about, I say that recipe, but the recipe for More Dodge Less Ram without going into giving it away, but looks like you all are using Pure Idaho from Great Western, which I think is one of the best malts out there.

David (30:00):
Yeah, it changed. When we first opened, we were using another malt. I don’t remember why we had made the switch, but we ended up I think mostly starting out with the Superior Pils, the Great Western Superior Pils. And then over the years, I think there was that one year where it was really bad weather in Montana or something, and the barley was starting to germinate, and I think protein levels really high, extract had gone down. This was a few years ago. And so we swapped over to that Pure Idaho Malt, which was less affected by bad weather, and we liked the results of that, but we’re back to Superior Pils again. So we put a little bit of that in, it’s changed over time. It’s got a little bit of wheat, sometimes it’s light Munich, I think maybe now it has light Vienna, put some Dexter malt.

(31:06)
Our beers here, they just finish super dry, so everything finishes under 2 Plato, and we’ve tried to figure out why it’s happening and we don’t know, but that just helps make it more drinkable. But we have to put in a little bit of Dexter Malt to just keep a little bit of body otherwise if we didn’t put it in there, the beer would finish closer to one degree Plato. And the hopping rate, we do Citrus, Simcoe, and Mosaic, a lot of the whirlpool and heavy dry hop.

Heather (31:47):
Sounds delicious. I don’t get to try any of those beers up here, so nice to get to hear about them. Can I take a quick jump back into talking about the event that happened, the crash that happened?

David (32:07):
Sure.

Heather (32:09):
What would your advice be to another brewery that may have a similar or just a really shitty, outlandish situation like this happen to them?

David (32:21):
I think it’s important to put into perspective, we are not the only brewery that has had a vehicle crash into it. So I know that other breweries have had to deal with a very similar situation, but there’s also other maybe more serious situations. And I think it’s important to of just remain positive. It’s like this tragedy happened and they pulled through and there’re still in operation. So just knowing that yes, it’s a fairly big bump in the road, but just be positive and just know that you can get through. And then try to keep on making that good beer and just know that you’ll be laughing about it later, hopefully.

Heather (33:19):
Hopefully with a gold medal from GABF.

Toby (33:23):
That advice sounds like something I try to tell my kids every day, just general life advice. Really cool that you all pulled through that and made something of it.

David (33:32):
Yep, I think we got lucky and just able to turn lemons into lemonade. When something like this does happen, you have to get the insurance company, you don’t probably want to file a claim and you don’t want to be paying for all the damage in the end. I think the total bill was like $55,000 and that was to redo the plumbing, repair, repair some of the piping on the tanks, replacement of the garage door, clean up like the boarding up, and then the demolition of the wall. When you’re going through a lot of this, it’s also a very stressful time when you still have outside sales going on, you’re still running, your taproom was still operating. And I think documenting everything is super important. Where there was a lot of back and forth with the general contractor or the plumbers or the insurance company or the forensic accounting team had a lot of questions too.

(34:52)
So there’s just so many movie parts. So I kept the spreadsheet and I was like, “On this day at this time I talked to this person from this department and this is what we had covered.” And it’s good to reference things because at first it’s just overwhelming and there’s just not really a great way to… What did that person say? Or what other little detail, was there something else I was supposed to do? So I think if you can write everything down, document and this way at least you can be like, “Hey, remember we did this?” Or this one thing that was supposed to happen and it never did, I got to follow up because they said that this was going to happen. So I think just not being overwhelmed by the situation, then just rely on technology to help you just keep things in order and organized.

Toby (35:54):
Yeah, I think that downtime and not being able to brew beer has got to be a little bit concerning as well.

David (36:03):
We were again, lucky in that regard. We had just filled up all the tanks because we knew that when GABF is in town, it is not a vacation for us. It is a super busy week with people wanting to come and visit. We have events downtown. Back in the day we would’ve been pouring, we are pouring again this year for the 2024 GABF. And so we already knew that there’s no way that we’re going to be able to get any brewing done the week of GABF, so let’s just start filling up all the tanks and this way all we have to do is just monitor fermentation, do some dry hopping, but not take away time from showing the visitors a good time, from attending then events. So we were lucky in that part, but I think Marks definitely took also some much needed time off and when there’s nothing to do, there’s nothing to do. And it didn’t help his golf game, that’s for sure.

Toby (37:16):
I shouldn’t have brought that up and now he’s going to be texting you. “What did you do? Opened a can of worms?”

Heather (37:21):
Toby, whatever he said about him helping customers. You got to keep it together.

Toby (37:24):
It wasn’t an insult. I said that I needed work too on my game.

Heather (37:29):
True. Well, I was going to ask what’s next for Comrade Brewing, but I guess with GABF coming up, is it next month? You’ve probably got a lot going on right now.

David (37:42):
Yeah, we’re already done with all our competition brews, so they were all dropped off last week. What’s exciting for us, this is surprising to say, but we’re actually going to do hop selection for the first time. We’ve never, just due to our size, we made 1,350 barrels last year. So typically we’re too small, but we’re going to be able to do a little selection and pick through some lots. And then we’ll also be, I think, jumping in with a couple other local breweries to make that minimum order. So having better control over hops what we had been doing and just getting whatever was in the spot or whatever lot was picked. And I guess we’ve just been lucky with the lots of hops that we’ve gotten. So I’m hoping that that’s going to really have a positive impact for our beer and make them better than they are, but we’re just trying to improve things here. So I would be on the lookout for hopefully even better IPAs once we get the 2024 crop year here in the brewhouse.

Toby (38:59):
I’m excited about GABF, because I was able to spend a little bit of time with Bart Watson from the BA this week, and he said that the BA was shifting gears trying to change things up a bit for the visitors and try to make things a little bit more interactive and a little bit more fun and mix things up a bit. So I’m curious to see how that plays out.

David (39:26):
We took them up on their offer for the free booth and free GABF entry if we’re going to have a booth. We haven’t poured at GABF since 2017, so I don’t know, let’s go check it out. I’m not super excited about the new themed areas with Beer Garden and Chill and Wilderness or something. I thought they were all lame, and I was like, I don’t know, I don’t have a preference. They all just suck. But I should have put down a preference because we got put into the Halloween section, which is actually the section I really don’t want to be in, but we’ll see what happens.

Heather (40:10):
Do you have to dress for the theme?

David (40:14):
They asked us to, but we’re going to have events before and we’re going to have events after, so I think I’m probably going to have to pass on that, or I’m just going to have something simple that I could just take off or I could just wear for a few hours on the floor.

Heather (40:31):
That’s fair.

Toby (40:33):
Yeah, just go to the Halloween store and rent a giant mustard costume or something. That’s probably the easiest, right? Zip up. Zip down, got your regular clothes underneath.

David (40:43):
Maybe. Actually for one of my kids’ birthday, it was like a little battery powered inflatable chicken costume thing. So I don’t know, maybe I’ll wear that thing, I’m not sure.

Heather (40:56):
There you go.

David (41:00):
I’ll get to recycle that.

Toby (41:03):
More Dodge Less Ram at the end of the day. Really cool story, David, and appreciate you coming on sharing the story and letting our listeners know that you can certainly make good out of some shitty situations. Hang in there, keep your head up, really be creative and knock out some decent product as a result of it in some cases.

David (41:28):
Yeah, thanks for having me on. I’ve had a great time.

Toby (41:31):
And if you all are in town, anyone’s in town, it’s definitely well worth going to see Comrade Brewing. They’re easy to find, obviously on the worldwide web or wherever you call that. Go see them and if you have a chance, check out their Facebook page and see if you can find that video.

Heather (41:48):
Oh yeah. Head to the Facebook page for that video for sure.

Toby (41:52):
Yep. All right, David. Hey, appreciate you coming on.

Heather (41:54):
Thank you.

Toby (41:55):
And sharing your story.

David (41:59):
Yeah, thanks for having me and enjoy.

Heather (42:01):
Well, thank you everyone for listening today and a great big thank you to David Lin from Comrade Brewing in Colorado telling us his absolutely crazy story about how they turned a really shitty situation into some good marketing.

Cheyenne (42:16):
A very shitty situation. But again, like I said in the intro, we watched that video so many times. They’re lucky they got it on camera. I feel like no one would believe you if you didn’t get it on camera.

Heather (42:29):
That’s true.

Cheyenne (42:31):
All right, well thank you again to all of our listeners. Be sure to subscribe to The BrewDeck Podcast so you never miss an episode. And while you’re at it, feel free to leave us a rating and a review. We would also love to hear from you so tell us what you’d like to listen to, what you want to hear more of from us.

Heather (42:47):
We’ll see everybody next time. That’s a weird way to put it, but…