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that makes an organic extract out of all those ingredients, which allows us to make our sodas with consistency.
HBG: What else are you sourcing locally between the ginger and the pineapple?
GM: Oh God, are we talking about everything now? Beers, sodas, everything? Chocolate, coffee, ginger, guava, lilikoi, pineapple, all kinds of citrus, dragonfruit, breadfruit, papaya, poha berry; if it grows here, we use it. We use a lot of local honey and local vanilla, in the beers and lemongrass and juniper in the sodas. All kinds of stuff.
HBG: How has your lilikoi sourcing been?
GM: It’s been tougher to get lilikoi. It’s one reason why POG was supposed to come back on the calendar for a can, but we couldn’t get enough of the local fruit to brew it in large volumes for the cans. So, it’s going to be a draft-only beer for us this year. That is part of the problem of using local- only fruit. Other breweries’ method of incorporating flavoring extract is
very different from using real fruit. We came out with the POG IPA and a couple of the other breweries started to do that (but none were produced in Hawaii), most notably Kona; no real fruits were used in making that beer whatsoever. For us, we make a better beer out of local agriculture versus taking a jug of lilikoi extract and throwing it into our beer. The flavor from an extract is not even close to the real thing; it’s just like coconut beer that uses an extract and not any real coconut. We hand-toast our coconut chips and we add them to the brewing process, and there’s nothing that tastes like fresh, toasted coconut. You’ve got beers out there that taste like suntan lotion. It’s just disgusting. The beer itself is super sweet, but it literally tastes like someone dumped a bucket of Coppertone into the tank. I don’t think that’s appropriate for beer. The idea of adding fruit to beer, for me at least, is taking a style that is steeped in tradition and enhancing it by adding fruit or pulling out some nuanced flavors by adding the fruit. It goes beyond making juice that has a little bit of beer character. I think there are some fruit beers that have gone way too far. This is why we don’t add
fruit to every beer we brew. There are some beers where a fruit flavor makes sense to be added into, and there are others that it does not. That’s my take on beer. When a flavor doesn’t enhance the beer or create an overall better experience when drinking the beer, then I don’t think it belongs in the product. It would be like a chef adding something to a dish just to say he added something to a dish. No self- respecting chef is going to do that.
HBG: I like the approach of not getting gimmicky. I feel like that’s oftentimes what happens whenever a concept is beaten to death. It’s either gimmicky or it’s a one-trick-pony type of situation.
GM: Exactly. It’s putting glitter in beer. What’s the point? There’s no point. It doesn’t do anything for the flavor, and it adds plastic to the environment as you’re going to drink that glitter, it’s gonna come out of you at some point, and then it’s gonna hit the water; now you have more microplastic in the environment because somebody thought it was cool that your beer was shiny. I don’t get it. I think gimmicky is a good word for what shouldn’t be