Page 29 - www.hawaiibevguide.com

brew everything from a one-barrel batch to a 50-barrel batch and our team collectively figures out what they want to brew next. Most of the time, I think the craft beer drinkers in Hawaii are the ones that actually pick what beers go to cans. We may vote on what beers go to cans, but it’s usually based on how quickly a particular beer sells in the market after it was first created experimentally. We also listen to the people who are coming to our restaurants and tasting room, and they offer a lot of feedback. It’s one of the reasons Pueo Pale Ale is going to be a year-round beer now. We’ve had a lot of requests for it, and we feel it’s because of the craft beer drinkers saying, “Hey, we want this.” And that’s what we’re able to do.
HBG: How was the original lineup set? I know that there is always the offering of light-to-dark, but beyond that, how did you set the lineup?
GM: Light-to-dark didn’t have so much to do with it as us just wanting to bring a new style to the world. If you think about Hawaii, you think about drinking a beer on a beach. A beer like Bikini Blonde Lager goes a long way. There’s only so much Big Swell IPA you’re going to want to drink when it’s 90 degrees out and you’re sitting in the sun. We had brewed the Coconut Porter since it was very representative of Hawaii at the time because of the coconut. We wanted to launch the Coconut Porter because it was something that was unique and that had never been done before. We took more into account “uniqueness” as well as what wasn’t in the local brewery market at the time. Given that there weren’t many local breweries, we had a lot of options. Bikini Blonde Lager was the answer to, “What beer can I drink all the time in Hawaii?” The Coconut Porter was our answer to “What is representative of Hawaii and super unique?” Then you have Big Swell IPA, which came out when
nobody in Hawaii was even making an IPA. We had a lot of opportunities to experiment with different things, but those were the first three. Then, as soon as we could secure pineapple, we started with the Pineapple Mana Wheat to make something that was again unique and special to Hawaii, but also quite crushable (something you can drink several of when you are out on the beach). Last to that would be having a balanced array of styles of beer that went well with food.
HBG: Digging into the production technicals, what is the current volume of production like? Are you still in a really big growth phase in terms of production at the Kihei facility, or have you almost tapped that out?
GM: This year, we’ll finish somewhere around 56,000 barrels of beer. We’ve just expanded, and added 1000 square feet to the building, so we’ve got the capacity to more than double our beer production now. We would have to add things like tanks, but our infrastructure can handle doubling our volume. We are also growing very rapidly in our non-alcoholic sodas. We have our Island Cola, Ginger Beer, Root Beer, and recently our Tonic Water coming out, so that’s four non- alcoholic sodas. Then, we have our spirits program which is launching in the 1st or 2nd Quarter of next year [2019], so that takes tank space because we need to ferment to be able to distill beverages into whiskey and gin. Then, we have the canned cocktails, which will be ready-to-drink whiskey-cola, whiskey-ginger, gin-and-tonic. So, despite having plenty of capacity for beer, some of that capacity will be gobbled up by these other projects. We also partnered with Origin Coffee and are incubating their coffee. Origin is a local roaster, so we’ve got a coffee roaster on-site, and we’ll be making cold brew for both still and nitro in cans. This year in beer, we’ll grow somewhere around 15-17% from last
year, which is an enormous number given the amount of people who are currently in the industry. When a small brewery that does maybe a 1000 barrels a year grows 15% or even 50%, they’re growing 150-500 barrels. Even when we grow 10%, we’d still be the 3rd-largest brewery in the state of Hawaii. So, although our growth rates have slowed, our production volume is still massive. And that’s a good thing. We’ve dedicated a lot of our focus to sell here, and I think over 80% of our beer is sold in Hawaii.
HBG: Does the Brewery use any particular water filtration techniques?
GM: We have a particulate filter, activated charcoal, and UV. We don’t, however, do any sort of Reverse Osmosis (RO) because RO is extremely wasteful and you’re removing the terroir, all of the natural minerals that occur in the water supply here, which you have to add back into the concoction anyway. Your brewing salts are really important, as well as is the pH of your water, so if you do RO, you have to amend so much.
HBG: For the cola, how are you going about the flavor profile approach?
GM: We’ve worked for more than two years perfecting the cola and each of our sodas. The root beer started back in 2008, and we’ve been doing that for a long time and it’s well-known. Since then, we’ve added these other three sodas. Each of these new sodas has gone through countless trials of adjusting an ingredient here, or an ingredient there. For the specific type of sugar we’ve purchased and used for each soda, we’ve had to change our recipe due to not having the local version of the sugar because it created a slightly different flavor profile. All of these ingredients affect the flavor profile of our sodas, so when you list them, you gotta make sure they’re right. We have a company on the mainland