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I know for Steve at Lanikai, he likes to use some local ingredient in every beer he creates, like coffee or guava; that’s kind of his hook. Whereas, we only use fruit when it makes sense because not everybody wants fruit in their beer. You look at Beer Lab, they have an entirely different take on brewing and they have a very niche market as well. Everybody is doing something a little bit different, and we try to focus on our roots and make beers that are palatable by many. But, we have a wide enough array of beers in our repertoire --arrows in the quiver, if you will. We’ve got our funky beers, we’ve got our big beers, and we’ve got our more approachable, mainstream beers. That just comes from years of brewing experience and our ability to take risks that other breweries can’t, which our size and success permits us to do. Second to that, we are Hawaii’s most sustainable brewery. We recover 100% of our CO2. We will be grid- independent next quarter when we complete Phase Three of our solar op (meaning that we will produce 100% of our electricity on-site), and we continually work on solutions that
make us more eco-friendly and more sustainable. We were the first brewery in Hawaii, and tenth in the country to put beer in cans. Today, there are over a thousand canning craft breweries. So, we’re definitely front-runners in the beer scene as we forge paths that just didn’t exist prior.
HBG: What is your philosophical approach to creating a beer? Where does the inspiration come from? Is there any particular person on the team that comes up with ideas for new beers? How does that process work for you guys? How do you go from a seasonal to a canned?
GM: I think for this team, there’s no one person that handles one specific task. Kim is our brewmaster and she’s ultimately responsible for recipe development and creation, but it is very much a team approach. We’ve got guys like Pete Cumbo who love the hazy IPAs and big imperial stouts, so he likes to brew those when there’s room in the brewhouse to do one-offs. We don’t brew the same beer every day, and we like to give the brewers
some autonomy to be able to brew a multitude of styles, so that they feel they are getting that artistic expression of themselves in the beer. Even our market manager, Dustin Gomes, loves beer and developed a recipe to brew, and it was a fantastic homebrew. We brewed Gomes’s recipe at the production level, and it has become a staple for us; it’s called the Coconut Wireless. So you see, it really is a team approach. From the sales side, we have to look at the marketplace and say, “Okay, while we love our Lahaina Town Brown and we love our Valley Isle ESB (ESB just took the gold medal at the World Beer Cup in April), they’re not a sexy style on the market and we’re probably not going to sell a lot of it out there if we put it in cans, so they might be better as draft- only beers.” Basically, we have to take into account market conditions, but ultimately, we brew beer that we want to drink and we know enough people out there would want to drink, too. We’ve built the company based on our ability to brew a multitude of styles. We brew our core beers, but outside of that, we’ve got the capability to