Ever since it was announced back in 2014, Richmond craft beer fans have been excited about Stone Brewing’s expansion into the River City, and for good reason. Stone Brewing Company has been producing some of the most iconic craft beers in America since the mid-90s, such as Stone IPA, Stone Pale Ale, and Arrogant Bastard Ale, perhaps the most enduring example of the American Strong Ale.
Originally printed in RVA #30 FALL 2017, you can check out the issue HERE or pick it up around Richmond now.
While Stone Richmond certainly produces plenty of their mainstays, there’s plenty of other cool stuff coming out of the brewery, like Stone’s Throw Down, the festival they recently held on Brown’s Island, and collaborations such as the one recently made with Petersburg brewery Trapezium. While Stone is obviously not native to Virginia, and is one of the largest craft breweries in the country, they are also publicly steadfast against selling to a larger brewery and maintain a dogged support of all things craft. As such, the brewery has released quite a few collaborations with local breweries, and their presence is certainly felt on store shelves, but not to an extent that pushes out the smaller Richmond breweries.
To learn more about Stone’s unique presence in Richmond, and what they have planned for the future, I recently spoke to Jeff Martin, Director of Operations and Interim Quality Assurance Manager for Stone Richmond. He had quite a lot to say about how the brewery maintains quality and freshness, and what it’s been like acclimating to Richmond’s beer scene.
Endres: Could you give me a day in the life of the Director of Operations for Stone?
Martin: I start in the morning — I get here pretty early, around seven o’clock. At that point, we’re getting ready for day shift production. We don’t run shifts overnight, so we start all our production on day shift. Now, we might already be brewing and mashing in on our brewing side. As far as our packaging line, we tend to be getting ready to run right around seven o’clock, so I’ll take a walk around and see how things are going. At 8:30 we have a daily production meeting, so all the highlights are covered that will happen during the day, for example: what our brew schedule is like, what our fermentation schedule is like, where we are harvesting yeast, filtration, and finally we get into details of packaging, any key issues that have come up. Maintenance, what are the key items that will be looked at or worked on that day, quality assurance.
I’m currently the interim quality assurance manager. I’m transitioning from quality assurance over to the director’s position. We are currently looking to fill the position, so I will handle the quality assurance. You know, what’s happening during the day, which includes sensory. We have a taste panel called a brewmaster taste panel, that meets and we do all our fermenter checks around nine o’clock. Of course, I participate on that with some of our key managers, along with our sensory coordinator in quality assurance. So we’ll do a taste panel and check out where our brands are in fermentation, give ‘em a taste, see if they meet profile at that point, which is obviously key. We don’t really do Unitank, but it’s a process of fermentation and filtration into bright beers, so key pieces are where they are in fermentation. You know, “Has it been dry-hopped?” We’ll taste it after it’s been dry-hopped, recirculated one time, then maybe recirculated a second time. Then from there we chill, then we taste post-chill. So, wherever the fermenters are at that point, we’ll give ‘em a taste and see if they’re meeting profile. We use a fairly disciplined sensory methodology to do that.
Then, I have a series of meetings — my schedule is really booked tight with meetings generally every day, whether they’re meetings that involve local issues, or we have WebX meetings with our headquarters in Escondido. Then, we also have an eleven o’clock taste panel where Mondays and Wednesdays, again we have our key taste members that are part of our brewmaster panel. We typically do studies, we’re doing freshness studies, we’re tasting beer in the bright tank, and then package, and then tasting these special releases, so again we make sure the beer meets profile and is true to brand. Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday we have taste panels as well, but then we invite what we call our “tank farm,” which is folks throughout the brewery that have undergone sensory training, they get an opportunity to also taste beer at various parts of the process, typically finished or bright beer, and the packaged. Then again, it’s a series of meeting and conferences, and all that kind of fun stuff. Of course, at the end of the day, the fun part is, we can go down and have a shift or so, and enjoy the product.
Endres: How do you feel you’ve been received by Richmond’s beer-drinking public? What kind of impact do you think Stone has had on Richmond’s beer scene?
Martin: That’s a good question. I would call us kind of “subtly here.” We don’t necessarily advertise out. If you’ve been to our brewery, you notice there’s no signs. That’s just the way our philosophy is: We’re here, but we kind of want {to} be more than the natural state, and that’s kind of the way it is with the Richmond scene. We’re a national brand, we now distribute in all fifty states, and we understand that we also have a lot of neighbors here that we have good relationships with. There’re organically grown breweries in Richmond, and this is their birth-ground, and this is where they rely on, their bread and butter. We like to be present as much as possible. We know we are, from a retail standpoint, on-premise. That’s where it is competitive and tricky in this area. We know there’s a number of local craft brewers. We know everybody wants to vie for tap handles. We do our best to get our product out there, but we’re not overly pushy. I think it was described by [Executive Chairman] Greg Koch at one point like, “We’re all running a race, but if somebody kind of stumbles, we like to just give them a hand and help them up. We want our beers out there, and everybody else does, but we know we also have a neighborhood that we’re in.”
Endres: You don’t want to be seen as an invading species of sorts.
Martin: Yeah, there’s also a cutthroat method, a competitiveness that we don’t agree with. We want to be the neighbors here, and we want to be good neighbors, and I think that our beers are pretty well-represented in a lot of areas of Richmond. We have a lot of fans in Richmond, and I think that was also apparent when we had our recent Stone Throw Down event and musical festival. It was super well-intended. We certainly had our selection of beers available at that festival, but we also had the opportunity for Richmond brewers to have their beers available at that event. I think that everybody enjoyed themselves, and enjoyed the products as well at that festival.
Endres: Speaking of other breweries, can you tell me about some of your favorite collaborations that have been done in Richmond?
Martin: Some of the favorite ones were the Give Me Stout or Give Me Death, and the Give Me IPA or Give Me Death, with Hardywood and Ardent. They were fun because we actually did the collaboration here. So a lot of the collaborations we do are requests that come in from other brewers. We agree to do the collaboration, then we do it on site at their location, so it was fun to actually do the collaboration here and produce the products that we did. Give Me Stout or Give Me Death was one of my favorites. It was a great brew, sourced as much as possible with ingredients from Virginia. It was fun to have our fellow brewers into the facility as well. I certainly made new friends with some of the brewers. I’ve been with Stone for just about a year and a half. I’ve been in the brewing industry for twenty-nine years. Being with Stone fairly recently, and in Richmond around that same time, I wasn’t familiar with the whole set of folks from different breweries, but I made friends and certainly had previous work experiences that I was able to reconnect with, so that was fun. So that’s a couple of my favorites, but we’ve done others around the area. We just got done with a collaboration with Trapezium. I wasn’t quite as aware with that one, but I know that Trapezium is releasing one of our collabs this weekend.
Endres: You mentioned other brewers reaching out to you, so how does Stone choose who to work with, and when to work that out?
Martin: Yeah, that’s good question, because we do get a decent amount of requests, and many of them actually come from outside the Richmond area, generally from Virginia, but occasionally we’ll even get… I know we did one with Heavy Seas up in Baltimore. But generally, they come from Virginia. We have a checklist. I’m sure it’d be understandable for a lot of brewers out there, but we have a checklist of metrics and other things that need to be met. We need to ensure that the brewer has the proper systems to create the beer in mind. We need to detail the exact recipe that they’re looking at, where the ingredients are sourced from. So we have a whole series of checklists, including the final. We have a final approval system through our HQ as well, because a part of it is how the beer is going to be marketed and sold. It’s not a terribly difficult set of criteria to meet, but there is a set of criteria, so we’ll be approached, and we’ll give out this checklist, and as long as everything looks good from it, we’ll set the date. We’ll then send either one or more of our actual brewing crew to that location at the day of brewing, so we can get hands-on with it, which is the true spirit of a collaboration, but that’s generally the process.
Endres: Is there anything else you’d care to promote? Anything people should know about that’s coming up?
Martin: Well first of all, we’ve got the Enjoy By packaging this weekend; that’s Enjoy By 10/31. It’s a filtered Enjoy By. We really like it. We think it’s another big winner. We’ve got another Enjoy By on 12/25, coming, that’s pretty exciting. Here in Richmond, we’re getting a can line installed late November, early December. So that being said, we’ll be setting ourselves up to can not only IPA and Arrogant, but also Ripper, and eventually Tangerine Express. We have our Enjoy By series — I think we had seven this year, but we’re going to drop to four next year. Plus we’re going to have some special releases, not only in Escondido, but we’ll have a few here, during the first few months of 2018. I can’t divulge the details, but we do have a few fun beers on the way early next year.
*Photos by Stone Brewing Richmond
