In this episode, we're joined by Burial Beer Founder and COO Doug Reiser, and Burial's Head Brewer, Alia Midoun, to learn about how Burial makes new beers. Not the physical brewing of beer, but the creative process of inventing an all-new beer recipe. Where does the initial inspiration come from? What factors are there to consider? Doug and Alia talk about team collaboration, the craft beer boom that propelled Burial to success, and the concepts and stories (including a dead fish) that go into developing a new product. We also discuss the beer that Gear Patrol collaborated with Burial to make: it's an all-new lager called Pursuit.
Where does the initial inspiration come from? What factors are there to consider?
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Nick Caruso:
This is the Gear Patrol podcast. In this episode, I chat with Burial Beer, founder and COO Doug Reiser, and Burial's head brewer, Alia Midoun, to learn about how Burial makes new beers, not the physical brewing beer, but the creative process of inventing an all new beer recipe. Where does the initial inspiration come from? What factors are there to consider?
Nick Caruso:
Doug and Alia talk about team collaboration, craft beer boom, that propelled Burial to success and the concepts and stories, including one about a dead fish that go into developing a new product. Eventually we also discussed the beer that Gear Patrol collaborated with Burial to make. It's an all-new lager called Pursuit.
Nick Caruso:
Thanks for tuning in, and we hope you enjoy the pod. If you do make sure to subscribe. And we'd also appreciate a five star review because they help us get into more years. I'm Nick Caruso, and I'm glad you're here. Let's get started. Doug and Alia, thank you both for being here. I'm really pumped to talk to you. This has been in the works for a really long time, so it's good to finally see you and hear you for all our listeners.
Doug Reiser:
Of course, thanks for having us.
Alia Midoun:
Definitely.
Nick Caruso:
We'll get into the collaboration between Gear Patrol and Burial in a little while. No doubt, all roads lead there, but I want to start with a pretty big question. And that is, what is Burial's process for designing and making an all new beer? Like their logistical scheduling, marketing considerations, there's the brewing process, but I mean, conceiving of a beer, what goes into that? Where does it start? Who's involved? Just walk us through your process.
Doug Reiser:
I'm going to start?
Alia Midoun:
Yeah, you should.
Doug Reiser:
Right, many years ago, I mean, we've been around for eight years now. Next week, is our eighth anniversary.
Nick Caruso:
Oh, congrats.
Doug Reiser:
And Alia has been here for about four years, and I would say the progression towards becoming more of a team driven creative brand has been kind of slow, but it's finally kind of evolved to that point. I would say that for the longest time myself came up with virtually all the beers. Tim, my business partner, who's founded Burial with my wife and I, he would do a little bit, but for the most part that that whole process kind of landed on my plate.
Doug Reiser:
And it was the primary focus of my job was to say, "Hey, this is the product we're making." Which at Burial, the recipe, the formulation part of the beer it's probably like a quarter of what the product is. Our core vision at Burial is creating immersive experiences, which is supposed to be something that is both introspective and everlasting. And so for us, beer is part of the story, it's not just what we do.
Doug Reiser:
And so it goes down to naming the beer and writing the story about the beer, and coming up with the art, and the presentation, and the marketing approach. Those things all kind of have equal appreciation, from my perspective, I think that from a consumer perspective, the beer is probably the vast majority of what the hell they're there for, but we certainly grab eyes and we try to grab eyes, ears and mouths. And so with the total experience.
Doug Reiser:
Oftentimes a beer starts with a beer we really want to make, that happens very often like we tasted something and we're like, "This would be an awesome beer, and now we need to come up with a name and a story and blah, blah, blah." But more often than not, a beer starts with something, like an experience. Now like my kids fish dying, or watching some movie and just being totally overturned with my entire impression of reality and learning something new and just saying something. And you're like, "That's a beer, that's a concept."
Doug Reiser:
A lot of the time that's where it comes from. And historically that's where it came from, I kind of rewrote brand guidelines and killed a lot of things that we did and really focused it in. And it was kind of just something I approached Jess and Tim about first. And we wrote out core values for the company, we wrote out kind of brand guidelines for what we do is as a brewery to focus in on the things that we thought we were really good at and that our audience wanted from us.
Doug Reiser:
That's the most important part, a lot of creators, they call us, I don't consider us that creative, but a lot of brands that are in a product spaces, there's sometimes there's a lot of ego behind that. And they want to do everything, they want to do with what makes them happy. And we started really listening to our customers and our taprooms, our customers through sales that were purchasing things out in the marketplace, and our customers on rating and review sites.
Doug Reiser:
And really listening to everyone, since that point forward, I really felt like I had for five, six years, I had never really been able to tell anybody what Burial was and for whatever reason that made it personal to me. And at that point we had 50, 60 employees, and a lot of incredibly talented people who were making the beer, making the products, telling the stories, being responsible for making it good.
Doug Reiser:
At that point, it made sense, I think to everybody over that, we created this one project, which was the basically brew [surf flox 00:06:08] IPA, which is the beer that we brew the most of pretty much every other week at that period. And every time we brewed it, we changed one thing. And it was kind of a collaborative process, where I was just getting feedback from Jeff, who's our head of brewing ops.
Doug Reiser:
Alia and Ryan, the rest of the brew team were working on efficiency and little things like that and pitching it back to Jeff. At that point, I realized they knew Burial better than I did at this point. They know more about the beard than I do. And so we started becoming a lot more collaboratively, and over the last year or so, I started to really try to share that process, and we've been able to hand off a whole series of this...
Doug Reiser:
We're pretty much trying to craft a whole new line of lagers, which this collaboration is actually kind of falling as part of. What's amazing is that no one just makes their beer, they make Burial beers every time. And the first one that Alia had, the packaging probably made her happy, because this style of beer that she really, really loves, but it was undeniably a Burial beer, from the names and the style, to the story and everything.
Doug Reiser:
And it makes me really happy to have a team who clearly bought in and understands what they are just as much of the Burial brand as I am, I never have to worry that they're taking us outside of our brand, comfort. I know that they're making beers that our customers will be excited about. And I hope that there's a moment in time, where I don't come up with beers anymore.
Doug Reiser:
I really think that it's possible. I really hope a lot of our team members on the brewing team are now picking collaborators. And that's something that's new, because most of the collaborations historically have always been like mine or Tim or just as relationships. But I think that we have an incredible team now that just has taken control of it, and been very supportive of each other, and each other's ideas, which has been really cool.
Nick Caruso:
And just constantly turning out stuff too, which is really impressive. It sounds like the sort of creation funnel, and correct me if I'm wrong. But you sort of revamped how you approach what Burial is as a brand. You mentioned the style in there, the Burial style, and then from that, you're able to sort of have a platform to leap into a new expression, a new beer. In using that process, can we go back to something you mentioned really early on about, you said your son's first fish inspired a beer?
Doug Reiser:
Yeah.
Nick Caruso:
What does that mean? How does it work?
Doug Reiser:
Burials brand is very introspective, that's what it's about. It's about the kind of human experience, the good and bad, the life and death. We're here, we're living now, we're going to die someday. And it's like we all have that story, and we all appreciate that reality. We should, at least some people might still not be there, but most of us do.
Doug Reiser:
And it's not my introspection that's important to Burial, it's anyone's. And so I think that moment, that experience, that one specifically was my kids understanding. I called the beer of the Finite Spectrum of Existence, and the can was this fish bowl. And the fish was rotting laying upside down in the fish bowl. And it was the day I had to watch my son, watch death happened for the first time in his life, that experience to him.
Doug Reiser:
That was his story. You know what I mean? I think that like Alia just had a product, she just pitched her first overall beer, where the only thing was, is it had to be an IPA, because [inaudible 00:10:15] IPA all the time. And she puts her own thing and like it's her story and but it looks Burial, it sounds Burial, it feels Burial, and it'll taste Burial.
Doug Reiser:
As long as all those things are established, this team, this brand is being fulfilled and that's all that matters. It's so cool, the products like with her doing that one, and we have a stout coming out in a couple of weeks that Courtney our director did, that was totally her concept. The art, the way it looks, the way it sounds with, I would've never named something that way, I would have never come up with that our direction. And it's awesome. I love it and appreciate it. And it's so cool to now be an onlooker.
Nick Caruso:
Right, I like the idea that you can drink someone's story. I mean, that's really kind of poetic. Alia then, can you talk us through the IPA that you pitched, and how a story or an idea, a concept translates into a recipe and into what goes into a beer?
Alia Midoun:
For me, it was kind of a timing thing and just kind of fell in place with a lot of turmoil in our industry. I kind of found that, and I felt a lot of people were looking at me for support and answers. And so when I was asked about the beer, it was kind of just perfect timing to kind of take the opportunity to express my experience in beer. The IPA itself, I took a direction on it that was not traditionally something Doug would have done.
Doug Reiser:
I wouldn't have.
Alia Midoun:
But I also have a totally different approach to how I think about the ingredients, because I'm more of a like, touch and smell, like when I'm pulling hops every day, I don't have the diverse knowledge of being at Yakima Mon Valley, or making a lot of beers where I get to a point where I realize how much a certain ingredient integrates into it.
Alia Midoun:
Definitely took a different approach on hops, I chose to use Sabra as my main component only based on my own experience, opening the bags and really enjoying the aroma, and thinking that there was something to be explored there. And then the story like I said, I don't want to get into too many details yet, because we're not releasing it. And I haven't fully delving into my description and story, but it will be pretty symbolic to a really important turn in this industry, that I think a lot of people are feeling and experiencing right now.
Nick Caruso:
Basically, you sort of reflect on the story that comes to mind, or that you're feeling, and you find something in that, that you relate to. You find specifically a type of hops. Is that the basic thing?
Alia Midoun:
Yeah.
Nick Caruso:
Are there any other elements of a beer that you have at the outset as part of that story or any of the stories, not specifically that one necessarily?
Alia Midoun:
The artwork will be a reflection of the name and the story behind it. The beer itself, I think being that it is an angle that I'm taking that once again, Doug, wouldn't take it sort of, kind of part of the story too and its own self. I'm taking approach that, I don't know what's going to happen with this beer, I don't know how well it's going to turn on. New frontier is definitely very much part of the whole journey for this specific brand that I'm creating.
Nick Caruso:
Right, that's super exciting.
Doug Reiser:
She was kind enough to ask for my opinion.
Alia Midoun:
I did, I did.
Doug Reiser:
This is the difference, I go to Yakima and I smell the hops and I almost never smelled the hops again. And she opens the bags every day. So no one's closer to the reality of what those things are, because the way they are on the table and Yakima coming out of bales is way different than they end up being after they're packaged and stored under gas and all this stuff.
Doug Reiser:
I would've never in a million years thought to be like, "Wow, maybe our Sabra is incredibly wonderful and could drive a beer." Sabra was just kind of a polarizing hop, I use it in doses, small doses, it's a complimentary hop. It's amazing, I mean, she clearly has more knowledge about this product, but she also has a totally different perspective of flavor.
Doug Reiser:
I mean, she has one of my favorite pallets on the whole staff. It's pretty easy for me to trust her, she constantly and sensory is offering really cool viewpoints that I miss, and I love you have obviously different pallets than me. It was pretty easy to just let her run with it. But it sounded amazing. And I love the idea of it's got to be her thing, it just has to be, because I know that she knows that she will fulfill what we need as a company always.
Nick Caruso:
Right. And so it was less here's what we're doing and more, here's what we're doing. What do you think about that? Kind of like what the pitch process sounded like?
Alia Midoun:
Pretty much. I mean, obviously there's very specific approaches that we've done traditionally here, but also because of the pandemic, we did a hop selection out on our patio as a team, and we did it with a bunch of other breweries. And they were all smelling the same hops, but it was really interesting to see how different the perspectives we were getting. Some of us were not agreeing on what we were smelling, which ones we liked the most, and some people even liked certain ones that other people hated.
Alia Midoun:
That was also an interesting thing. And I don't know if that can be a pallet thing, that can be a transportation thing, it could be a packaging issue. I mean, there's so many areas of variation that could have happened. But I think that's more the reason to once again, trust that other people have different pallets and hope for the best. That if it doesn't work out, it's also just going to be a good learning lesson and curd more of the direction that I'm looking for.
Nick Caruso:
Right. I mean, maybe this is sort of stronger language and you'd use, but does that mean that some beers that end up coming out are sort of like less successful? I was going to say failure, but like less successful. Like, "Man, we tried that and that was maybe not the right route to go and others are just clear winners from the gate?" And how is that determined?
Alia Midoun:
I don't think any beers are failures, but I definitely think some are more successful than others. Even just if the flavor profile just doesn't hit the mark, or it doesn't stand out, because at the end of the day, you want every beer to stand on its own way. I personally feel you can't have bad beer unless you're making bad beer, so your process is wrong.
Alia Midoun:
There are just some beers that are maybe underwhelming in one way or another. And I think I've seen that my previous brewery, I've seen that here, we've decided to cut brands where we just, we try and try again to improve it and realize that this does not suit our brand and what we're trying to evoke with our beer. And then obviously the end.
Doug Reiser:
I mean, she kind of hit the nail on the head. I mean, I think that at Burial, we try to strive for ubiquitous enjoyment. That's my term, that everybody's probably sick of hearing, but that's it, you know what I mean? You're trying to get something that you think will be enjoyable by the mass. You don't want to hit the polar ends.
Doug Reiser:
We were a polar end brewery for a little while. We definitely put up polar end beers and it's not great to hit one in 10 and be like, "That person was really moved," but the other nine people were like, "I don't want that beer." That's not obviously moving in the right direction. I would say that what's missing from this whole conversation is 90% of the beers is in the process and we can throw any five, three, four, eight hops at a beer, and it's going to be good.
Doug Reiser:
Will it be great? That's the element, because the process itself, the base beer, the grain that we use, the fermentation profile that we utilize, the dry hopping mechanism, the conditioning, the centrifuging, the packaging, all these other specs are pretty much there. And we know we've gotten to a point where like... And this is like, so her bold acts over the last year or so has been working on the efficiency, those minute variables.
Doug Reiser:
And they're so crucial, they're so much more important than the hops that you use, realistically, I think in IPA. The fact that we've gotten to a place from a sensory standpoint, where we're tasting every beer and we're like, "Okay, this is more coconutty that maybe I want, but the body's right, the alcohol's right, it's creamy, it doesn't have any lingering byproducts and particulate, or anything like that." That's what makes a great beer.
Nick Caruso:
Got it. When you come up with a new let's say, a new beer, you're inspired to make a new beer, is all of that part of the vision? Are all of those elements there? Do you have to experiment, do you have to plan it as a team, sort of a process? How's that? How do those other variables come to fruition?
Doug Reiser:
[inaudible 00:20:00].
Alia Midoun:
Well, for me, since I've just recently been undertaking that, it's more based on my experience with previous beers. Depending on the style, I'll try to pull ideas that I liked or executions that I really like to use for the process, whether it's our mashed hemp or oil additions, and just kind of plug and play things. And a lot of times just kind of create the recipe, look at it and say, "Okay, does that look good to me?" But a lot of it is just based on previous experience and taking those ideas to saying, "Oh, I really liked how we did this similar style, how can I kind of take some of those elements and make them something new?"
Nick Caruso:
Got it.
Alia Midoun:
[inaudible 00:20:50].
Nick Caruso:
It sounds like I'm picturing just you with a white lab coat on just grabbing different stuff, just throwing him into vials and things exploding in the back room.
Alia Midoun:
Oh, yes, that would be fun.
Doug Reiser:
I mean, but we have a lab, we have a test brewery and it's weird what we consider experimental is probably so dramatically different than what the public would consider as experimental. We're like, "We're going to try this lot of mosaic hops instead of that lot." And that's experimental, but on the surface it looks like the same beer and we're going to be, "We're going to change the fermentation temperature by one degree." And that's stuff that we do.
Doug Reiser:
And we look at the results, we try to remove variables, but the amount of tinkering that we do via that brewery is really, really helpful to overhear at their production facility. Because it's hard to test, when we know that we've got all these variables in a place that we really like them, it's really hard to take a chance on messing with something here, because those are beers that are going in cans and going out to everybody.
Doug Reiser:
We do it over there where the stakes are a little bit lower, and if we wanted to put a beer down a drain, it would tell us. And that's the decision that we'd... Our standard level is at that point where we're like, "If we don't love it, it would go down a drain." And we're fortunate to have really amazing growing team that doesn't happen almost ever.
Nick Caruso:
That's good. It sounds just like a really meticulous systematic process. That speaks to me certainly, I like that.
Doug Reiser:
A lot of people are involved in that process too, which is cool. To hear everybody's thoughts, used to just be like me and Jeff sitting in a room talking about all the beers. Now it's like we don't even spend our weekly meetings talking about the beers, because the conversation is a team conversation every day.
Nick Caruso:
That's awesome. Who's like the biggest beer nerd. Who's the most intensive walking encyclopedia over there.
Alia Midoun:
Maybe Jeff.
Doug Reiser:
He likes beer a lot.
Nick Caruso:
He likes beer.
Alia Midoun:
Jeff is good at science, breaking down the science behind something. I can tell you what something's going to do, but he can tell you the why. He's definitely able to get that kind of knowledge. I mean, everyone's got their own quirks when it comes to being what kind of beer nerd they are.
Doug Reiser:
Everybody loves something, everybody loves him. Like Tim, my partner loves farmhouse beer, loves and adores it, and he knows a lot about it and he studied a lot about it. She's a lager nerd, I guess. Is that right?
Alia Midoun:
I'm a little all over the place. Definitely, I like a lot of traditional beers. Doesn't have to be a lager, but I feel like American craft beer has a little bit strayed from traditional beers, and I think it'll come back in a more unique way over time as we've kind of wiggled our way out of this fad kind of scene, and people start drinking more varieties, because I definitely would like to see more Belgians come up too. Even in an American take, I guess, everyone does kind of have their own. I mean, Golden's a very big IPA nerd.
Doug Reiser:
I'm glad that we have an IPA nerd on the staff. I mean, I am a hop, obsessed human being so happy Pilsners, happy Paralles IPA's, I mean, that's definitely my wheelhouse for sure. It's awesome, because our sensory team is hope is filled of all these different people. And there are the people that love big sounds like Andrew, our head of quality, he loves being imperial, 15% pastry stouts.
Nick Caruso:
Whoa.
Doug Reiser:
Which is hard to find anyone in the industry that really loves that style, but he does. And so it's great, I tend to like look at the sensory notes of those, I know who loves and drinks the market examples of those styles regularly, and thus their input is a little bit more valuable, probably.
Nick Caruso:
Sure. Alia, you sort of mentioned the fad element of beer and I guess, I don't know how to put a number to this, but it's been a decade-ish of sort of craft beer boom in a big, big way. I think that's safe to say. And Doug you've mentioned that the approach Burial takes has evolved quite a bit, particularly in the last few years. But as Burial got off the ground and sort of changed and rolled as the tide, how did you find yourself navigating the craft beer boom, and adjusting and coming out in a successful way?
Doug Reiser:
You want me to do all? [crosstalk 00:25:50]. Well, I guess, eight years. She can talk about the last four, but I mean, I think that in the beginning of that wave, there was such an interest in... Beer was this new medium for exploration. Putting weird flavor exploration and infusion of things that people liked, that they already knew they liked drinking, fruit smoothies, or eating pie, or whatever, or drinking coffee.
Doug Reiser:
All those things, beer became this medium for giving them alcohol, or the experience in the classroom. I think that the evolution initially that first wave, when we were getting started, we were kind of in that right as it was starting to grow, was about that experience in providing people this exploration elevating moment of like, "I got a flight of beers and one's got coffee and one's got chocolate in it."
Doug Reiser:
And like, "This is a classic Belgian, I've never had much class." Or this is their take on classic Belgian, or whatever it is. That experience I think really grabbed a lot of people. And I think that wave of business ownership came from a lot of us, me included who hated what we were doing for a living, and went to taprooms, and loved the release that we got from the courtroom in my experience.
Doug Reiser:
I was a lawyer, there was something elevating about it and I wanted to be part of it and we had a downtown condo in Seattle, and we had a baby, and Axel to this day forced me into this life here. And I'm really happy he did. He's the one with the dead fish. When we first started out, our goal was to explore, and to provide people with that venues for exploration.
Doug Reiser:
As much as we cared about the beer quality, we cared about the experience even more. And so I think that that was part of that boom, that fad pieces she's talking about as beer started to grab a wider audience of people, because there were so many taprooms everywhere. I think that we kept ramping up, and ramping up, and ramping up until the fad, it started to become mundane.
Doug Reiser:
I don't know if I went totally off track here, but I think that the wave is gone. You can't just start a brewery anymore. There's a lot of us and beers got to be good, the experience has to be enticing, and you need to build a culture within your company that will take the reins because I have gray hair now, I'm not cool anymore. I'm almost 40, I'll be 40 next year. I'm not nearly as cool as most people that work here. If I continue to make the stuff, it's not going to speak to the wider demographic of people who drink beer.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. I hear you. It sounds to me like you launched into the craft beer boom, like any boom in any industry is just a breeding ground of evolution and experimentation. And you came out of that with some like insights and applied it to the business. I think that kind of gets us to the beginning of this conversation. And Alia, you came in what, four years ago, and that's kind of the point where you joined Burial. How have you seen that sort of experimentation and the motivation from the boom, sort of effect the business and how you create beer?
Alia Midoun:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), well, I will say I've been in this industry for nine years and I've seen a lot of like fads, and oops.
Doug Reiser:
[inaudible 00:29:29] the cord, sorry.
Alia Midoun:
I've seen a lot of fads happen. I mean, when I first entered traditional IPA's were actually really hot, the bitter ones, the ones with a lot of bite pallet wreckers. We went through a phase where people really wanted barrel-aged beers, non-adjuncted, before the adjuncting was a thing. And that was a big thing for a while. Sours, sours got oversaturated in the market and everybody was making them to the point where it was like, a sour just sour and they didn't have a lot of complexities.
Alia Midoun:
What I've seen happen is as we go through these different phases, even now with over adjuncted stouts is that, once we kind of shake it out of our system and are like, "Okay, we've over done that." People kind of go back to it and we start seeing more quality coming out of it. We see this a lot with a lot of industries, in my opinion. My husband's a woodworker and reclaimed wood has been really big, but we're starting to see modern design coming back now and reclaimed wood becoming like the old news and no longer interesting.
Alia Midoun:
And I don't think that means those things become outdated and uninteresting, but the details of those are going to matter over time when people look back on the quality of them. Really ultimately I think those fads just kind of forced people to decide what they want to make and what do they want to be the best at? What do they want to provide high quality?
Alia Midoun:
And because you can do it all, but sometimes you can't do it all. And if you can, you still have to be choosy. It's not like every single brand you make is going to be the best. That's kind of the evolution that I've seen happening. And I even feel like we're kind of starting to get to a point where brews like now lagers are getting big again. People want to drink lagers, people want to make lagers.
Alia Midoun:
And I'm excited for that. Obviously, I think it's going to get to a point where we're going to start seeing some lagers that aren't so great. And hopefully that just means that we're going to have more lagers on menus and not necessarily oversaturated with them. But breweries are going to start providing that to their customer because the customer realizes that, "Hey, I don't have to just drink stouts or IPA's, there's once in a while, I'm going to need that light crispy beer, or maybe I want my October fest for the season."
Nick Caruso:
Right on. You find a new place after wandering through the beer desert, you get to finally come out the other side with something new. And speaking of new stuff and the lagers, I don't know, can you tell how-
Doug Reiser:
[inaudible 00:32:16].
Nick Caruso:
Yes, there's a company I know called Gear Patrol and we've collaborated with you to make a new beer. Like we're working with you. And I want to know about it sort of as we kind of wind down our discussion about creating beer, where did this come from? How did it come to be and what is it?
Doug Reiser:
I'll start.
Nick Caruso:
Are there any dead fish involved in this one?
Doug Reiser:
There's no dead fish, no. I would say, I love Gear Patrol. For years now I've been following the publication online and in print, the magazine, photography is always beautiful. And Chris, our head of brand had actually done a shoot abroad for Gear Patrol, and just had been this kind of connection. When he started here, he kind of was like, "Hey, I should introduce you to Gear Patrol at some point."
Doug Reiser:
And so Ryan and I did a little spot, and we were talking this winter. We're coming in 2021, and we were like, "This is the year where we're going to stop, just brewing beer with breweries all the time." We collaborate a lot, collaboration's hugely important to us. Connectivity is one of our core values. It is interwoven into the fabric of Burial through and through relationships and storytelling.
Doug Reiser:
We opened a restaurant [inaudible 00:33:47] camp. That's all about telling stories and makers. And I mean, I couldn't quantify the value of education and elevation that we've got from just meeting other people and learning how they do things and who they are. And those things are incredibly valuable to me personally, but also to Burial as a whole.
Doug Reiser:
And so this winter, when we were sitting down and kind of hashing out collab ideas, I was just like, "I don't want to think about what other brewery to brew with, we're still always going to do that." But I wanted to get outside of this space. And we had done a collab with Brooklyn based band Beach Fossils in-
Nick Caruso:
All right, Brooklyn, shout out. I like that.
Doug Reiser:
It just felt so cool to collaborate creatively with people outside of beer, because these are the drinkers, you know what I mean? This is our eyes, this is like who we are here to serve. For both of us to be on both sides of it, it's like you have your medium and we have our medium, and like let's bring them together in a cool way. It was so much fun.
Doug Reiser:
And we had done a collab with Run the Jewels years ago, when they first started making beer, we were kind of first brewery to do the one outside with Interboro in Brooklyn. And so from the collaboration standpoint, getting outside of beer, we had been in touch with Gear Patrol, and I just kind of spit it out one day. I was like, just fit so well because of the way y'all's philosophy of providing a gateway of access to new and different things in connecting consumers to makers more directly.
Doug Reiser:
Which I think is hugely important and been a huge part of our journey over the last year and a half since COVID starting, of trying sell all of our product ourselves and control the narrative, which just helps this company grow and gets the being honest, gets the revenue back to the people who make the product and all that type of thing.
Doug Reiser:
When I sat down with Gear Patrol, I really kind of let it be wide open. And we pitch a couple different ideas, some of which are awesome and I still want to do, but inevitably the resounding answer was that they wanted kind of like a hop Durban lager that tied together tradition and modernity.
Doug Reiser:
And I think that what we went with this beer, we had a lot of really cool assets at our disposal to tie together kind of a modern and American take on health. And it's very unique that that was the style that they pitched, because I was like, "Wow, this is great." Because we actually have this incredible monster who's German born and German taught, who worked at Iyengar in Germany, and came to Raleigh, and started a craft malt company.
Doug Reiser:
And does source his green from these small farms in Germany, brings it over here and malts it in a very American craft malting way which is totally different. It's German malt kind of, but it's also American malt kind of, but it's neither or so it's not going to be ever the way a wireman Pilsner malt is in Germany, it's killing, malt that is at mass facility is never going to be like the way that American grown barley would be, craft malted, is this really cool middle ground. And so that was that part of it.
Doug Reiser:
And then the other part is just the relationship we have with hop farms in America that grow... That have kind of created their own products and variations from what do you call it? Crossbreeding of old European hop varietals that are classically used in German beers. We focused on Liberty, [Zupper Zaza 00:37:42], which is a Michigan farm called Hotbeds, that made their own kind of version of [saz 00:37:49] that they grow over here. Liberty is kind of a take on old holler towel blends. It's grown by cole, sorry, Coleman Agriculture in Oregon.
Doug Reiser:
And the third hop is [inaudible 00:38:02], so we wanted to use kind of... All three of them are American hops, they're all for the most part originated from German hops cascade. Actually it was a crossbreed of saz, originally when it was grown. But John Siegel, who's actually a native New Yorker has a ranch out in Yakima, that grows just a really unique take on cascade, harvest it really early at high oil. And it's just an incredible hop.
Doug Reiser:
We put a little bit of add in there as well, I think that it added a little dab of Americana to it, for sure. I mean, Alia can describe the beer better than me, because she also knows much better than me, and knows that I probably really just defended it with the [inaudible 00:38:44] born in Germany?
Alia Midoun:
No, just raised.
Doug Reiser:
Raised in Germany and really gets the styles very well.
Nick Caruso:
Alia, tell me what the beer is like, well, it's called Pursuit. I'm not sure, we've actually said that in the conversation, it's obviously in the intro to the thing, but what is Pursuit like?
Alia Midoun:
It's definitely got a lot more malt for biscotti character. It's definitely more dry, typically Helis can be on the sweeter side of malt sweetness. But I find that this one's a little more balanced with little biscuit, a little lemony, and a nice dry finish, very medium body, just generally very crushable drinkable beer.
Doug Reiser:
Where do you think that [inaudible 00:39:35] the style?
Alia Midoun:
I wouldn't say [inaudible 00:39:38], I've had a lot of different houses and I can't say many of them are on point with traditional. And the only thing that I think most of them stray from is the sweetness, but the sweetness is a nuance. It's not overwhelming in my experience. It's just like that hint of sweet bread without being slick or sticking on the palette. But I find that's pretty common with American craft beer executions. So to eliminate that, I'm not exactly sure why if it has to do with the hop choice or just a different approach when making it dryer.
Doug Reiser:
I'm happy with the bear as it came out of sensory yesterday, and it's certainly me, it definitely punches all my buttons. It does all the things that I kind of want out of a lager, but I think we were really trying to find something that would be, I don't want to use ubiquitous again, but I'm going to use it again.
Nick Caruso:
You can do it.
Doug Reiser:
Generally, satiating of everybody's interest in drinking lager, it's definitely light enough to speak to people that drink macro beer. And it's definitely complex enough to speak to classic lager drinkers who want that depth of Pilsner malt through, step mashing, decoction, and spunding and [crowsning 00:41:08] like we did. This is probably the most elaborate of a brewing process lager we've ever done, I would say, right? All the angles we had.
Alia Midoun:
Yeah, I would say so, there's maybe one other beer we've done one or two, but definitely.
Nick Caruso:
That's the mad scientist bit, right? That's in the lab you're pulling on the levers sort of like-
Doug Reiser:
That was me-
Nick Caruso:
Have variables on this one?
Doug Reiser:
Asking permission. I remember pitching the beer to Jeff and I was like, "[inaudible 00:41:37]," And it's kind of like added to, and until we got all the way to crowsing one, and I started to see some resistance. But he believed in the idea and the concept. And I think for us, it's always exciting to add an extra layer to something we've done.
Doug Reiser:
We make a lot of lagers that are step mashed to cocktail and spunded through fermentation, but the crowsning piece was pretty new to us. I think we had done it one time, but it was actually with an IPA. It was a really cool, full, I mean, it's about as your old world, European as we can do to get back to old practices.
Nick Caruso:
I like it. Well, I've taken up a lot of your time and we're coming to the end of what I'm willing to steal from you. But there's so much we didn't cover. I wish we could probably spend another hour just talking about some of the terms you just dropped. Educating people on all that stuff. But also we weren't able to cover in depth, you're in Asheville, North Carolina, a lot of your business is what people in the industry called direct to consumer.
Nick Caruso:
You ship beer all over the place, you're lucky enough to be able to send pretty much all over the country, as I understand it for anybody who's unable to come to your awesome facilities in Asheville. Everybody listening, that's your cue. You got to get online, start ordering. We got to kind of call it quits here, but the very final thing I want to each of your favorite Burial beers of all time, you got to choose one. I know you got to choose one Doug. Like one you'd recommend to someone. How about that?
Alia Midoun:
Well, I feel like a tried and trued one that we make every year that I would always recommend is Hellstar, which is our dark lager. Or on the flip side of that metallic vessels, which is the coffee version. But tried and trued, we make those every year, Hellstar in particularly, we make every year and enough that you could get your hands on it. That's definitely got to be my top choice.
Nick Caruso:
All right, I'll take it, your top hop. What about you, Doug?
Doug Reiser:
Man, I'm going to just also, we're such brewer people.
Nick Caruso:
Oh, man.
Doug Reiser:
We're just simple low alcohol lagers, my favorite beer that we make is Innertube. It's my life preserver for, I mean, [inaudible 00:44:16] it's the beer that I stole from my dad's fridge as a kid, you know what I mean? There there's so much story, so every time I open one of those cans, it just reminds me of my life. And especially my relationship with my father.
Doug Reiser:
And I think that that's what's so cool about the fact that I can connect through a stupid aluminum can is with reflection on my life is really important to me. And so that beer always, I mean, it's three and a half percent, it's dry as a bone. You could drink 100, you shouldn't, but you could, not 100 just say like 10, five response-
Nick Caruso:
Right on.
Doug Reiser:
But yeah, that's a beer for me.
Nick Caruso:
Cool, it all comes back to story and aluminum maybe stupid, but I bet that can's pretty good looking. Cool. Well Alia and Doug, thank you so much. I mean, that is a straight up hour straight of ubiquitous beer conversation, which is-
Doug Reiser:
And only 30 minutes of [inaudible 00:45:25] difficulties.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah, we've been hanging out a lot longer than that. Everybody listening that is it for this episode. Everything we talked about, including information about the New Gear Patrol Burial Beer Collaboration Pursuit is down in the show notes or on the website post, wherever you're listening to this. And wherever you are, I hope you subscribed to the podcast, and when you do, or if you already have, give us five stars.
Nick Caruso:
That's every star you give is a thumbs up for Doug and Alia's ubiquity in the beer space, and it'll help us get into more people's ears. We really appreciate it, you can get at us on social media at Gear Patrol, and you can email me directly with any questions, comments, or beer recommendations at podcast@gearpatrol.com. Once again, Doug and Alia of Burial Beer out of Asheville, North Carolina, thank you a ton for your time and for helping us make this sick beer.
Alia Midoun:
Thank you.
Doug Reiser:
Thank you for having us. It's been a joy to work with y'all.
Nick Caruso:
Right on. Well, thanks for listening everybody. I'm Nick Caruso, and until next time, take care.