Strangeways Brewing is not your standard craft brewery–head brewmaster Mike Hiller takes an artistic approach to the process of creating different beers, and talking to him about his process and the ideas behind it is always fascinating.
Strangeways Brewing is not your standard craft brewery–head brewmaster Mike Hiller takes an artistic approach to the process of creating different beers, and talking to him about his process and the ideas behind it is always fascinating. John Reinhold stopped in to catch up with Hiller recently, and got the lowdown on Albino Monkeys, Woodboogers, and dead dudes.
What is Strangeways’ mission, when it comes to beer?
We want to do everything strange; we want to do everything in a weird way. We want to take established styles and turn them on their ear. We don’t ever really want to hit something stylistically perfect where it fits into a nice little box. So everything that we do here is experimental; everything that we do here is taking something a little bit further.
Do you find that these are experiments that you had the idea for before, and now you’re bringing them to light? Is it like a laboratory situation now, where you go, “OK, we’ve got these ideas, I’ve done this in the past from homebrewing, and we’re gonna twist it a little bit”?
No. I honestly never did a whole lot of homebrewing. From my own past, I got a chance to work with Terry Hawbaker, who works for Al’s of Hampden/Pizza Boy in Enola, Pennsylvania right now. I got a chance to work with him for a short amount of time, but still learned quite a lot in terms of barrel aging and working with sour beers and things like that. And frankly, once you work with those kinds of beers, you find out what the potential is. As a brewer, you read about that kind of stuff in books and everything, but when you can put it into practice, see what theories and techniques actually work, and what the results are; once you get into that sort of thing, there really is no turning back. You don’t ever want to brew a pale ale again, because you’ve done that a bunch of times. So now you’re looking for something new and exciting to do.
You’re looking for the twist.
Well, yeah, and it was because of that experience. I mean, I can brew a pale ale, but I don’t really want to.
Do you make small batches to try something out, or do you already know that a big batch is going to work?
I’m actually more comfortable with big batches. I only homebrewed for two or three years, and that was after spending four years for Legend Brewing Company. So I did it backwards: I became a professional brewer and then became a home brewer. But that was just to keep my skills up until I could find a new job. So I don’t really have a whole lot of experience with homebrewing and working on a small batch size. The smallest system I’ve ever worked on is a five-barrel system.
So is this the dream for you? Having your own brew house where you get to–
Oh, sure. Creativity is very, very important to me. I am an extremely creative person. I get an idea, I get an inspiration, and I can’t sit still until it’s actually done. It drives me a little bit nuts. There’s a beer that we’re working on called Vatos Muertos. I had the inspiration for that from about three or four years ago at a beer festival. A guy was wearing a t-shirt that said “Vatos Muertos.” It means “dead dudes,” and it’s a little Day of the Dead skeleton riding a BMX motorcycle across these like desert scenes and everything. I thought it was the coolest t-shirt ever, and for some reason it struck me that I wanted to brew a beer like that. I’ve kept that in the back of my mind until I had the opportunity to do it. And working for Strangeways, because of how we do things around here, I’m finally able to brew that beer. Inspiration hits me at different times in different ways, and if I can’t brew it right away then it stays in the back of my mind until I can actually do it. It’s in me; it’s gotta come out.
Strangeways has a lot of selections. It’s one of the things that most people I introduce Strangeways to would say.
Right. We wanted to do something that married the brew-pub concept with the production-brewery concept. I had come up as a production brewer and had seen what it’s like to produce the same beers over and over–which is fine. I don’t have anything bad to say about that. But I saw some brewing friends of mine who were doing all these outrageous beers. They came up in the brew-pub system, meaning they had opportunities to try new beers and experiment and go through that process where they make mistakes, or make really great discoveries, and so on. Whereas I came up brewing the same beers over and over again. So I was kinda jealous of those guys and their experience. And I started to get into this with my brewery. I used to own Bavarian Barbarian Brewing Company in Pennsylvania, and I started to get into this concept where you take that experimental brew-pub feel and start cranking out specials and seasonals, different kinds of beers other than your main lineup, at least once a month. That started to work for us very well. Every time you produce a new beer, it reintroduces you to the market. It gives you more attention.
So going into Strangeways, I talked to Neil about that and said, “I’d like to something that varies the brew-pub concept with the production brewery.” That way, we have our four beers that we brew continuously, but we also have a really great selections of seasonals that we’ll do every year. And then on top of that, we’ll just continue filling tanks and barrels, and just keep producing beers. I mean, that’s the thing: we don’t wanna have any empty tanks. So if we get caught up on the regular production of the beers and there’s an empty tank sitting over there, let’s put something in it. It’s partly a marketing concept, where we want to try to introduce ourselves to the market every month, but it’s also a production concept, where we’re trying to keep things full.
The whole concept has interesting names that go along with the Strangeways brand, too, with Albino Monkey and Woodbooger and Wampus Cat. You have these kinda conceptual ideas that then have conceptual drawings and artist drawings. I like the marriage of the art and the beer, and I consider brewing an art as well, because it is, on some level. I know there is science too…
No, I appreciate somebody else saying that. I feel the same way. I think brewing can be an art, depending on the brewer’s approach to it. And I do get slammed sometimes. Sideways glances, like, “Yeah, you’re an artist?” It depends on the brewer’s approach. And whether the final product, the beer itself, is a work of art or not is arguable. I really don’t wanna argue the merits of that sort of thing, but as a brewer you can choose to approach brewing the way an artist would approach any other form of expression. I get inspirations, and goofy things come to me at different times. What’s the genesis of the idea a brew? Is there something that you want to express? You can do that through the flavor, you can do that through the packaging, the labels and the naming and things like that. So you can actually create a process that is self-expressive and that tells some sort of a truth.
Now, whether the audience gets it when they’re sitting there drinking out of a glass or not, like I said, that’s arguable. But that doesn’t stop any brewer from thinking about it the way an artist would think about their work of art. It’s just a way of approaching brewing, you know? Some guys get off on the scientific aspect and the engineering stuff, and that’s fine and dandy. They make some great beers, too. But I know plenty of brewers who will out-and-out tell you that they are absolutely an artist, and they make some really terrific beers. It goes back and forth. Everybody gets to choose how they approach brewing. You don’t really need to make a judgment of somebody if they call themselves more of an artistic brewer or more of a scientific brewer. The final product is the judge of that. If it’s good, drink it.
What type of beers do you personally like? What turns you on in the aspect of, “Oh, this is a cool beer?”
I don’t know. I like to see other brewers be creative, add the ingredients in ways that marry well with the original beer or something. You know what I’m saying? I like subtlety; I like nuance, so when a brewer adds something that is an atypical ingredient to a beer. If they can get that ingredient, that special flavor to kinda mix and blend very well with the beer itself, work with the interplay of the hops and the malt and the yeast and everything like that, I think those things are brilliant. Those are the ones I really find to be lovely beers.
I really enjoyed the Room 237, which is like… clove?
Actually, it was cinnamon and some brown sugar. That might have come out with the yeast. That was the Beer DeGard yeast.
Okay. Because it was a really different beer to try, and I like stuff like that.
Absolutely. Well, here’s a perfect example, and I just told Sean Humphrey about this. He has [Lickinghole Creek’s] Rosemary Saison out there. Honestly, I’ve had beers with those savory herbs in them, and they just beat you over the head. And it’s [like], “Oh great, a beer that taste like sage,” or “Oh wonderful, a beer that tastes like oregano.” It’s like, “Why? Why would you do that?” But what Sean and Dave and everybody else out at Lickinghole Creek were able to do–and this is what I love, this is what turns me on about brewing–is to lay that rosemary flavor right in there. It blended brilliantly with the yeast character of the saison and the malt and the hops-
That’s gotta be a fine balance, to get that correct.
Yeah, absolutely. It’s tough to do.
Because rosemary can take over anything. I know this with meat and food.
Yeah, it can be very powerful. So when you find that really fine, nice touch, that’s the hallmark of really great brewing. Anybody can brew a saison and throw a shit-ton of rosemary into it. “Hey, we made a rosemary beer!” But it’s a finer rubric-
Can you do it right, can you make it without making people upset.
Yeah, they can hit the right nuance or the right subtlety.
I know that you guys do special things in here where you have a large selection, and you have them broken down with different tastings.
It started out where every Wednesday, we would introduce one or two new curiosities. I think now we run it as a special, and we make sure we have plenty of Curiosities on tap at all times now. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday to come in and try something new, because we’re constantly changing those kegs. It’s actually become very popular.
It’s cool, because you can try different flavors. It’s like the one beer has three different flavors.
Yeah. We screw around with tea most of the time. We found a company called Rare Tea Cellar, and I believe they’re out of Chicago or Detroit. They get exotic teas from all over the world and we get tea from those guys. For instance, we have a tea that’s picked by monkeys. This tea grows in trees that are on this really steep side of a mountain range. I guess monks or somebody trained a bunch of monkeys to climb up those trees and pick the tea leaves. So it’s monkey-picked oolong tea, and we use that in our Wallonian Dawn quite often. It’s weird stuff. Another very popular one here is the Caramel Woodbooger, and it’s a caramel tea. I don’t remember the origin of that one. There’s another one called lapsang souchong that we use. They actually take this stuff and smoke it. They hang it over old growth pine trees in the forest, and all the smoke goes up there and they smoke the tea that way. So it imparts a really strong smokey flavor to the beer. We have a lot of fun playing with those sorts of things. We did also find organic, fresh-made juice concentrate, and they send us cherry, grape, blueberry, and things like that. We add those right to the one-sixth barrel kegs, the little five-gallon jobbies. We put some high concentrated tea, this concentrated juice, add the beer to it, and mix it all up. It helps us to keep twenty-five beers on tap.
You guys do creative beers. I think people enjoy that, you know? It’s nice to be able to go in somewhere and have lots of different creative tastes and have people try them. They can mess around and see what they like.
Well, that’s part of what we wanted to do here–people coming in and trying new things. We want to challenge the beer drinkers around here. We want to challenge their concept of what a beer can and should taste like, and I think that’s important. It keeps it interesting for the beer drinkers, and hopefully they find it to be a lot of fun. Even if you don’t like something that we’ve made, at least maybe you had a good time, came in, gave it a shot, and enjoyed yourself. I think people like to be challenged a little bit. It’s the same thing [as] going into a restaurant and trying something new you’ve never had before. Why not?
This article is taken from the latest print issue of RVA Magazine, out now. To read a digital version of the full issue, click here.
