Brian Quinn is the Director of Brewery Operations at Town Brewing Company. Brian discussed with us their mission at the brewery, and how they are trying to make a difference in the industry.
Who came up with the name, and what was the inspiration for the name?
It’s actually a group of four friends who are lawyers, but also long-time home brewers and craft beer fans. They really wanted the name Town, because they wanted to not just brew beer but also make a spot for community to come together, and they wanted it be a neighborhood bar. They want it to be an extension of your living room. I feel like a lot of the locals that come here don’t even feel like it’s going out when they come to Town; it’s just an extension of their backyard.
How long have you been with them?
I came onto the project on day one. We just celebrated our three-year anniversary on September 25.
How long have you been brewing?
I’ve been brewing for nine years. I studied brewing at the Siebel Institute in Chicago, America’s oldest brewing school, and their partner institution, the Doemens Academy in Munich, so I got to train in Germany as well. I did that back in 2015. I worked at a larger regional brewery in North Carolina before getting interested in the start-up side of the business.
What is your biggest seller?
We have a beer called “Broken Tarted.” It’s a raspberry hibiscus session sour ale. That has been our biggest seller since we opened. It wasn’t really an offering that I envisioned would be a year-round core offering for us, but it took off and started snowballing, and now I’m brewing it all the time. It’s been doing well for us since day one, and I think it’s largely because there’s not a lot of year-round sours available. A lot of breweries treat them as one-offs or seasonal releases, and I think that’s really helped that beer find its place in the market.
What got you into brewing?
When I was an undergraduate student, I was going down [the] pre-med path. I was heavy into the sciences and I thought healthcare was ultimately going to be my career path, but after working as an EMS for a little bit, I realized that wasn’t the path I wanted to go down. I ultimately went to grad school for history. Around that time, I started judging a lot of beer competitions and doing a lot of home brewing, and I just found that beer was really the amalgamation of all of my interests. Science, history and creativity. Everything, to me, meshes together in a pint of beer. I love the community that craft beer has cultivated and I really don’t think that you see many industries like this one. If I’m short a bag of malt, I can hit up any of the 40+ breweries in the Charlotte area and somebody is going to have my back, and vice-versa. If they’re short some hops or something, I can help them out.
What sets your brewery apart from other craft breweries?
You might find that to be the hardest question that you’ll ever ask a brewer. I do find that in some ways, while we have so much variety out there, the taproom experience is a little bit cookie cutter. It’s become a little bit “plug and play.” Although the margins are low, and it’s a high start-up cost, it’s a successful model right now. When everyone seems to be doing the same things, how do you make yourself different? I think we, at Town, have tried to differentiate ourselves from the pack in a few ways. For our product, I’m not going to make 90% of what we brew hazy IPAs. I want to explore the full gamut of beer styles. We have some German lagers; we’ve been diving into the lager brewing. I like the return to some beer-flavored beer. I think sometimes we lose sight of that. We’ll do a mix of different styles. Whether we’re brewing a coconut blood-orange hazy IPA or a chocolate/peanut butter imperial brown ale, or just a classic German-style pilsner, approachability is key with us. We’re also putting out a lot of seltzers and hard teas, and there are a lot of brewers that will roll their eyes at that. It just plays into our goal of making everyone feel welcome when they come into our taproom.
Where do you get the inspiration for new beers?
I think it’s important to keep up with market trends and listen to what your customers are asking for. We’re in the process of launching a new membership program where we’ll engage directly with the members of the new “Town council,” as we’re calling it, asking what they would like to see us brew. Because at the end of the day, even if I want to just brew a bunch of English-style brown porters, I recognize that you have to brew what your customers want.
You have to balance out what your customers demand with your passion projects. We recently brewed a collaboration with Lost Worlds Brewing in Cornelius. We did a Polish-style Grodziskie, an oak-smoked wheat beer. Lower ABV (alcohol by volume) hops at that pilsner hopping rate so it has some nice bitterness, and it has some of those campfire smoky notes. While not traditional to the style, we also added a little bit of sea salt to this beer, which really doubled-down on the savory aspect to that smoky beer and made it great in terms of its possibilities for pairing with food.
Do you have anything coming out that you think the readers are going to be excited about?
This year, we’ve got a lot of fun barrel-aged beers that are going to be releasing in November and December. Before Thanksgiving we always release our barrel-aged Imperial stout, and this year we have a few different variants of that. One has chili peppers, cocoa, cinnamon and a little bit of vanilla. We did that one last year and it was very popular. We also have one aged in a Brazilian Amburana Oak, which throws these gingerbread and nutmeg notes to the beer, and is normally used to age the Brazilian spirit cachaça. We also have a barely aged black barley wine brewed with molasses coming out in December.
Outside of the tap house, where can people find your brews?
We’ve been actively working to expand our distribution. We’ve just invested in a canning line, so we should be commissioning that in the next six weeks or so (mid-November). That’s exciting and absolutely frightening. Once it’s done, it will enable us to expand distribution even further. Right now we’ve been getting into more and more Harris Teeter stores in the Charlotte area, and Total Wine, along with the independent bottle shops, which are great places to showcase your product. We’re distributing statewide with Artisan Beverage. We send product to the Triangle, to the Triad, and some out to Asheville, although Asheville is very much an Asheville-centric market. We send a little bit out to the coast as well, but I think 2022 is really going to be the year when we are able to expand distribution significantly.
Is there anything about the brewery that you think people would be surprised to know?
One thing that we’re very proud of is that we won, in 2019 and 2020, back-to-back gold medals for our “Cruise to Nowhere” sour, which features mango, guava, passion fruit, blood orange and hibiscus. We won in the Contemporary Gose category at the Great American Beer Festival. Winning any hardware at the competition is something that breweries really take a lot of pride in. We were kind of shocked to win back-to-back golds with that beer.
Is there anything that you wished I had asked you about that I didn’t?
Yes! One thing that I’m very proud of is our work through the Many Faces Initiative. That is an initiative that we founded in 2020 in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd. We looked internally at our industry, and it is an industry that we feel has some issues with under-representation. Less than 1% of the breweries in the US are owned by people of color. We wanted to see what we could do to make our industry more welcoming and more inclusive, and live up to that community promise. That was a big inspiration for why Town was started in the first place. In 2020, we brewed a beer that was a West Coast IPA, released as the “Many Faces West Coast IPA,” and proceeds from that beer helped to fund a diversity scholarship through the NC Brewers Guild. We’ve had our sights set on expanding that program and this year, over the summer, the Many Faces Initiative hosted a paid internship program for people of color interested in pursuing careers in craft beer. We had Bond Brothers, Archetype, Wiseman Brewing, and Good Road Ciderworks all participating in the program and hosting interns over the summer. Each intern produced a beer and the proceeds of the program will go to continue to grow the program in the years to come. Our intern brewed a chocolate/peanut butter brown ale that we have out now, and each of the other breweries had their interns release a new brew, too.
It’s an effort to make the taprooms more reflective of the communities where they’re located as well. That’s a project we’re very passionate about, and we’ll be pushing in years to come.
Town Brewing Company is at 800 Grandlin Rd, Charlotte. 980-237-8628 townbrewing.com
