Carney Saves the World
Welcome to “Carney Saves the World”. I’m your host, Scott Carney. I’m a former stand-up comedian & actor, with a degree in Political Science. Oh, and I’m an almost 50yr old only-child/ man-child. So, you can probably see where I’m going with all of this.
Each episode, I’ll pick the brains of some of the best & brightest entrepreneurs, artists, and creative minds that I know. We’ll dive into what got them started down their chosen paths, how they actually got their start and what their motivation is to keep going in their massively competitive industries.
The name for the podcast comes from a dig my wife hits me with all the time when I think I’m right about all subjects. “Oh, Carney’s going to save the world again!”
Well, maybe it’s time we did just that. Come on, let's go save the world.
Carney Saves the World
EP8 Todd Bellomy - Exploring Sake with Farthest Star Sake's Founder
Ready to dive into an intriguing world of sake brewing? Today, we have a conversation with Todd Bellomy, founder and head brewer of Farthest Star Sake, who will unravel the complex process of brewing Sake. From linguistics to sword making to brewing, Todd's journey is anything but ordinary. He will share intricate details of the sake brewing techniques involving a special microorganism, Koji, and a double parallel fermentation process.
As our conversation flows, Todd reveals his unique experience with Japanese brewing, the thought behind the Farthest Star logo, and his predictions for the sake industry. He takes us into the fascinating world of sake flavors, discussing the distinctive flavors that can be created. Not stopping at that, Todd explains the significant role his family plays in the brewery and their plans for expansion. We find out more about his swordmaking days in Japan, his interest in food and beverage, and how it all led him to start his own sake brewery.
In the concluding segment, we get to touch on the challenges the brewery faces as they plan to expand to different states and the potential advertising opportunities in winter sports. Todd shares a remarkable story about a high school friend turned cousin, and the social media presence of Farthest Star Sake. Join us as we journey into the world of sake brewing with Todd, a true master of his craft. This promises to be an intriguing, fun-filled, and informative episode you wouldn't want to miss.
https://www.fartheststarsake.com/
Instagram - @fartheststarsake
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My next guest is Todd Bellomy, the founder and head brewer of Farthest Star Sake in Medfield, massachusetts, which is New England's only sake brewery. Enamored by Japanese culture, todd went to the University of Massachusetts Amherst to study Japanese linguistics, but before starting his journey in the US craft beer industry, he apprenticed in Japan as a sword maker. I met Todd while we both worked at the Boston Beer Company, but after almost 10 years there Todd got the itch and decided his heart was in the sake world. He began brewing for the now closed dovetail sake in Boston before turning all of his attention to his own creations and founding Farthest Star Sake. With fewer than 50 sake brewers in the US, Farthest Star Sake is now on the forefront of the sake industry in the US. Todd Bellamy welcome to Carney Saves the World.
Scott:Oh, thanks for having me how you doing man Good to see you.
Todd:Yeah, good to see you too. Yeah, I'm doing okay. I took a day off and, as a small business owner, that means I've been working since 9.30 in the morning and now it's time to do a pocket.
Scott:What's your normal day like?
Todd:Yeah, I'm actually not a morning guy at all. Most of the brewing industry tends to be very morning. Heavy Beer brewers like to go in at 5 or 6 in the morning and get the system going. I've never been a morning guy. Typical day for me is kind of get out of the house by 9.30 and get to the brewery at 10. And then it all depends on what we got to do for that day. So if we're brewing, there's a lot of washing and steaming rice and doing brewing tests, and if we're selling, it's take a quick counting of what's going on and jump in the van and go hit as many accounts as you can.
Scott:Now, how many accounts are you in?
Todd:We're in about 110 accounts, mostly in Massachusetts and we have a tiny number of accounts in Rhode Island, but trying to grow that as quick as we can.
Scott:Wow, 110. That's fantastic, Good for you. So for those folks out there myself sort of included, I kind of have a peripheral knowledge of sake brewing, but would you briefly go through how the process starts, all the way through the finish of it?
Todd:Yeah, that's a pretty common complaint slash question that we get Coming from the beer world. Sake is new to almost everybody who encounters it and because of that fact we've made some very wise choices in setting up our business. But sake is an alcoholic beverage originated in Japan, is made from rice. Many of those out there who know how to make alcohol know that you have to have a sugar source and yeast will eat the sugar and make alcohol and carbon dioxide and a lot of chemicals that we all perceive as flavors and aromas. To accomplish that in the sake world we actually use a second microorganism in addition to yeast, which is called Koji. It is the national microorganism of Japan and is used to make soy sauce and miso and a lot of Japanese food products that everyone has already had.
Todd:So we use a very specific kind of Koji for brewing. We inoculate it before we can brew on about 20% of all of our rice, which takes a separate three day process, and on the second day we have to work around the clock, which means taking naps in the brewery and that kind of thing, because we can't leave it alone Because it'll just create too much heat and kill itself. So we constantly manage it and mix it as part of the process. So after we do that pretty laborious three day process, we can now mix Koji, inoculated rice and regular steamed rice with water and yeast in a tank. And what happens is this really super interesting thing called double parallel fermentation, which, as far as I can tell, is fairly unique in the brewing world. So the Koji breaks the starches and the rice down as a sugar and the yeast eats the sugar and makes all the stuff we love like alcohol and flavors. But that happens simultaneously in the same tank at the same time.
Todd:So it's the balance of those two processes that makes good sake. So if your Koji is really healthy but your yeast isn't, you create too much food and you have a giant tank of sugar water that any errant microbes in the environment would love to jump into. And then, on the flip side, if you have bad Koji but healthy yeast, what happens is that the yeast runs out of food because the Koji can't keep up with the fermentation and then you get a condition called autolysis where yeast cells will starve to death and die and it creates horrible flavors in your sake. So it's the balance of those two processes that makes good sake. So that's what we do, and then, in a very unusual, turn in also in the brewing industry. When we are finished and the sake is complete, all of the stuff is still in the tank. One of the most important things we do is after it's finished. We have to press the entire batch through a very big filter press to get the finished sake out.
Scott:Kind of like wine on the pressing side.
Todd:Yeah, how they remove skins and stuff after fermentation, yeah. So beer brewing, yeah, and a lot of other alcohol traditions remove all the physical material first and you just have sugary liquid. We're making the sugar the entire time, so we can't. There's no day where you're like I'm done brewing and all the sugars in there, we're just making it the entire time we're brewing.
Scott:It'll be nice to have to stay overnight.
Todd:So just for the Koji broth. So one night I have a setup in the warehouse where I have a cotton and air mattress and that kind of thing. I used to just sleep on a cot that someone gave me and then I realized one night that I'm 50 and I should probably up my game a little bit. So I got the largest cot I could find and a really nice air mattress. So, yeah, I usually sleep for I don't know 90 minutes or two hours and then wake up, go in the Koji room, mix the Koji, because we're not only trying to manage heat but we're trying to dry it out slowly over time. So you can mix it, it'll manage the heat and also slough off unwanted moisture. And then I usually go back to sleep for 90 minutes or so and then get up and do it all over again.
Scott:Oh my God, that's crazy.
Todd:It's a long day.
Scott:Yeah, I can imagine. So how long is the entire process to bottling?
Todd:Soke is about six to eight weeks, grained in glass as we like to say. So from the second I scoop rice out to steam it, to make Koji to your drink. And sake is about six to eight weeks.
Scott:Okay, yeah, so it's been a standard beer, but roughly the same. So, from the rice standpoint, for the spent rice, is that a term that's used? Yeah?
Todd:it's called katsu and that's the stuff we press out of the sake. So it's spent bits of rice that didn't get fermented. Kōji yeast obviously all that material mixed together.
Scott:What do you do with that? That's all set.
Todd:So we do a couple of things. It's pretty valuable in Japan. There are only a few people here who know what to do with it, but in Japan it's used to make different confections. It's used for pickling and curing of meats. You can do a bunch of stuff with it, and one of the biggest industries in Japan that uses katsu is the cosmetics industry.
Todd:So some very, very exclusive, expensive cosmetics use sake katsu as the base of the medicine because it has a lot of active enzymes and beneficial vitamins and minerals in it. There's nothing like that here that we can find, so we do give some of it away to chefs or mostly Japanese people who live in the area who want it for cooking. Wow, nice. The rest of it. We are starting to work with a small distiller because you can re-ferment it by mixing it with water and then distill it into a beverage called shōchu, which is super esoteric in the US, but it certainly the cosmetic industry is not going to really get me excited, but making more alcohol is pretty interesting to me, so I'm working with them to see if we can have that as an avenue for it.
Scott:You could just turn it into drywall it actually looks like wet drywall.
Todd:It's like sheets of almost like plaster or something like that. We have a very effective sake press so we get a lot of the sake out of it. Some of the older style presses leave more sake in it, so it tends to look like sort of stiff ricotta cheese, but for us it's very clean sheets all the way.
Scott:So what's the first account to have your sake in?
Todd:So you had mentioned that was the brewer at Dovetail Sake, which was Massachusetts first sake brewery that the owner closed down in 2018. I actually just went back to the people who were really great customers of ours at Dovetail, people who obviously demonstrated that not only would they take the chance on local sake, but actually execute it fairly well and sell a lot of it. So I just pulled up that same list of people and sent it to them, and most of them jumped on board.
Scott:So you built in sales calls yeah absolutely.
Todd:I had spent years generating Dovetail's business and all of their accounts, so it was a pretty easy step to just go back to those same people. Many of them, almost all of them, I had known since before Dovetail and when I worked in the beer industry, so I've had a long relationship with a lot of those accounts and they continue to knock it out of the park.
Scott:So you've had a steady progression towards where you are. I remember you did some collabs with Cambridge Brewing Company for a sake beer hybrid, but I also remember you did one for our Boston Beer Company homebrew contest.
Todd:Yeah, I was constantly trying to make like a sake beer for the homebrew contest. It never quite caught on. It would have been cool to see a sake beer in the long shot pack. That was always a wish of mine. But yeah, will Myers, who's the head brewer still the head brewer at Cambridge Brewing Company sort of fell in love with sake through me, I think. We started hanging out and he started learning more about sake and we would go to like sake festivals in New York so we could taste a lot more stuff. And then just one day it occurred to him you know we should try to hybridize it. I think if it was another brewer or another kind of brewer we would have went in a very different avenue. But Will's got this very holistic kind of approach to beer. He likes to mash a lot of the science together. So instead of making a beer and making sake and blending the two together, which is not very exciting we decided to come up with a way to actually hybridize the two brewing processes.
Scott:So they were done at the same time.
Todd:Right, so together, yeah, so what we would do is make a batch of sake and then use that to basically ferment a tank of beer wort. But the sake was a little different, the beer wort was a little different, so it's a long fermentation. We let it ferment for four or five weeks cold temp, because sake is a cold fermentation. So not a lot of beer brewers would have taken that kind of leap and been like, hey, I'm going to tie up a tank for five weeks. So, yeah, it really worked out. It was nerve wracking at times, especially with filtration or trying to get all the physical rice bits and all that out of the tank post fermentation, but it really worked. The beer is amazing. We made it, I think, two or three different times and it also allowed us. We gave a talk at the Kraft Brewer's conference, I think in 2012, on sake beer hybridization, which was another really cool experience.
Scott:Wow, yeah, I have something to admit to you. It's been at least 10, 15 years now. I don't know if I've ever told you this. We did all the home brews, and all the home brews were brought into cold storage. I was working at the brewery on the weekends giving tours, just hanging out, and I remember grabbing there's a six pack of everybody's and I grabbed like a bottle of everybody's and I grabbed a bottle of yours. It was fucking awesome and I'm not going to lie, but I went back like two or three more times.
Todd:Yeah, all they need is one bottle to judge. That's it.
Scott:There was a six pack and I was like all right, I'm like this stuff is amazing. It was pretty high alcohol. It was like 10, 11 maybe, or yeah, I think so A little higher.
Todd:Yeah.
Scott:Yeah, it was phenomenal. But then I was like, oh shit, what if they don't have enough bottles?
Todd:and I drank it all. It worked out. I never actually, I don't know. I never heard anything about any of the judging on the long shot content. You know I don't. I made a lot of different beers for it, but I never knew of any of the results. Obviously, I never won, but some really great beers did win.
Scott:Yes, you definitely won an award in the the Carney home brewing contest because I loved it. That is a pretty important topic, of course. Yeah, so are there any sake beer hybrids in the US, do you know?
Todd:Uh yeah, One of the problems with that question is that there's no definition of what constitutes a sake beer hybrid Okay.
Todd:I would love to in the future, when I have more time, codify some of that stuff. Some brewers, for example, would just take a regular beer, regular beer, and add a sake yeast and then ferment it. Okay, you know, is that really a hybrid? It's just kind of beer at that point.
Todd:Sake yeast is a different type of brewing yeast, but it's still Saccharomyces cerviciae, which is the classic beer brewing yeast. They tend to like very cold temperatures and then longer fermentation. When I explain it to beer brewers I often explain it that sake yeast are kind of the flip side of a Belgian beer yeast. So Belgian beer yeast, if you ferment them at warmer temperatures you get a lot of flavors and aromas that kick off, yeah, and if you ferment them at colder temperatures it tends to be more subdued and you get a lot less stuff. So with sake it's the flip side. So if you ferment it warm and kind of quickly, you pretty much just get alcohol without a lot of expression, and if you ferment it low and slow, you get a lot of complexity and fruitiness and all kinds of flavors across the spectrum. Okay.
Scott:What are some of the flavors that you're looking for in some of the sake?
Todd:Yeah, I mean I've had hundreds and hundreds of sake over the years but I don't know. There's a fairly wide range of flavor. I would say overall is that sake across the board tends to be fruit. There can be a wide range of that expression, from things like pear and apple to peach. There's tropical fruit flavors, sometimes in there Banana, which is isoamyl acetate. That seems to be pretty prevalent in some sake. So there's a wide, wide range of fruit flavors. Nas can all have to do with water chemistry or the yeast you choose or the recipe, okay. But then you also get a pretty wide range of earthy, earth flavors, like green stuff, like cucumber or some sort of herbal note, to sort of things like black pepper and earthiness, one of the other components obviously. So we talked about koji as being a main ingredient to sake. Koji technically is a fungus, aspergillus or rizzi. So you can in some sake get a wide range of very pleasant fungal-based flavor, chestnut or sort of earthiness, some kind of mossiness. Those are all appropriate too. It just depends on the style.
Scott:You know. So to dig into the flavors deeper, can you add ingredients to spice it up a little, or is fruit added? You know I've seen some sake has pushed the cucumber. Is cucumber in it or is that just a byproduct of what you're doing?
Todd:I mean, obviously you have to read the label pretty carefully. Some of them are not written very well.
Todd:Yeah, yeah but yeah, if it's from Japan, chances aren't. Doesn't have anything in it but rice and koji water. Yes, that's it. That's the standard. That's the sake. They do much less experimentation in Japan than we do here.
Todd:There's, you know, a couple thousand year old tradition of making sake. Some of the brews are very old. There's a lot of that culture wrapped up in the brewing. You will occasionally see some fruit added, but always post fermentation. So yuzu is pretty common, which is a Japanese wild lemon. I've seen a mango sake from Japan, strawberry, but these are all super low quantities. It's not a common thing Amongst the brewers outside of Japan.
Todd:We are doing all kinds of fun stuff. For me, at least in my brewery, it's all post fermentation. Okay, so I'm not throwing cucumbers in a fermentation. Post fermentation, when the sake is finished, I will infuse a keg with fresh cucumber, fresh lime. We've done over 60 flavors in the last 14 months that we've been open. Wow, that's great, yeah.
Todd:So one of the things I really miss about the beer industry is the cask ale thing that people used to do. So they would put on a cask every Thursday night and then it would die during the weekend and then you'd have to wait till next Thursday for a new cast to go on. I was like that ephemeral nature of that kind of mid-90s beer scene, yeah, so I chose to do that at our tap. So we make usually two kegs of a single flavor and then when they're gone we replace it with something else. And we've infused sake with an extremely wide array of ingredients. I mean different teas and coffees, oh wow, all kinds of different fruits. We've made Peanut colada sake, pumpkin spice sake you can spice. Yeah, you know last.
Scott:I mean, we are in suburban Massachusetts, so You've got to do what you've got to do right, which you've got to do so.
Todd:In October last year we put out a pumpkin spice sake and you could get either cold or warm. People had a pretty favorable reaction to it, so this year we're probably going to make three times as much.
Scott:Yeah, I mean it's foot cells and it's addiction that middle America has.
Todd:It is also this whole flavored sake thing. We don't have any designs to put any of it in a bottle yet. That's good, that's way down the line, but it's a fun thing. It gives me an outlet to kind of create new things in the tap room with a lot less risk than is involved in creating a whole tank of something and having to package it and sell in the market and all that. So it's been pretty great and really fun sort of outlet.
Scott:It's got to be a nice draw to your regulars. You know, hey, every time I come there, I know for a fact I'm going to get a new style of sake and it's going to be fun every time, Right.
Todd:Yeah, absolutely. We've also made other Japanese styles. So not just flavored sake, but we have a sparkling sake on right now for the summer. I've got some sort of more traditional brewing methods that I've made that I'm giving some age before we start selling them in the fall. So I also want to expand that list of sort of traditional brewing methods to give people a window into. Hey, you know, sake has this huge wide range to it without adding any flavor, just rice.
Scott:Yeah Well, you mentioned earlier about warm sake. A lot of folks don't realize that sake can be consumed cold, warm or hot. I believe too, right.
Todd:Yeah, but that's a real education sticking point that all of the sake brewers outside Japan kind of deal with. At least in the United States most people have only had warm sake at a sushi restaurant or hibachi place. The problem with that is the sake that they're warming is really really inexpensive, mass produced sake. So it's almost like opening a craft brewery in a market where no one has ever had anything but Budla. It's really hard to say hey, if you were in Japan, a couple of things you might want to realize. Mostly warm sake is only consumed when it's cold outside, which is not really a huge intellectual leap to get over. And then the other thing brewers will brew a sake specifically to be warmed up. So craft brewers will make a sake that's like earthier or bigger alcohol, riceier, and it can stand up to warming it up and not lose a lot of its complexity. Some of these modern sake, like a lot of the sake we make, is very fruity and ethereal. If you warm that up, all of that is gone.
Scott:Disappates on warmth.
Todd:Yeah, yeah, yeah damages the flavor and aroma quite quickly. So only sake that are really meant to be warmed up or really old sake can be warmed up to make them a little more palatable. And yes, the sake that people are serving warm should be served warm, because surf cold it doesn't really taste like that.
Scott:It was funny. I tried it warm and hot and cold. There's definitely a difference in flavor profiles. It was interesting how that changes the flavor profile. If you leave a can of soda in your car in August and you for a couple hours you go back in and take a sip, not realize it, it doesn't taste differently, it just tastes warm. But sake will take on different flavors as temperature change.
Todd:Yeah, there's actually some sort of traditional ranges 30 degrees C, 40, 45, 50. And so the sake will definitely change all the way up. Even sometimes 5 degrees C is enough to make a difference. And then, traditionally, there's this really interesting thing called kanza-mashi, which is you warm it up to 70 and let it cool to 50. And it tastes different than if you just warmed it up to 50.
Scott:That's interesting. Yeah, it's kind of mind blowing. You mentioned the sea, so was it hard when you started brewing to go from metric to English system?
Todd:Yeah, it's not really that hard at all. There's a breakthrough that almost every sake brewer in the US must go through. But once you learn so you're measuring rice and kilos and you're measuring water in liters once you learn that one liter of water weighs a kilogram, and then you're just like oh, so I'm just using equal units. And so when you start talking to Japanese brewers, they all do the same thing, obviously. So they'll express, for example, they're like well, we use 140% water in the recipe, so if you're using 1,000 kilos of rice, it's 1,400 liters of water. It's not that hard of a concept. And so, because everything's equal, so yeah, I would never use Fahrenheit and all that. Also the fact that if you're a sake brewer, there's really only one country that originated sake brewing. If you would like knowledge to improve your sake, you have to talk to Japanese brewers at some point or read Japanese source materials or something, and it's all in metric. Why would you do anything?
Scott:Yeah, it's just funny. Like every time I saw a sea I was like oh shit, I start doing the math in your head.
Todd:Yeah, I've heard some people on podcasts say stuff like that. I've heard people say like oh, I'm using this many gallons and I'm like you're just gonna, I would just bake competition layers all day long, right, yeah, so I just. You know the whole thing's in metric.
Scott:we don't even pretend that it's not Just keep it as it is? For anybody who hasn't checked out your website, I strongly encourage you to check it out, because it is one of the coolest. Do you have the coolest logo? Thanks, and you have some of the coolest pages on it. How did you come up with the Farthest Star logo? I love your science fiction aspects on the pages.
Todd:Yeah, thanks, I had the luxury. I fought about the brand for kind of a long time While I was writing the business plan. I had kind of a placeholder for the brand and I just kept trying to figure out really what the expression that I really wanted was. I had a couple other things that in the end did not work out, but I just kept coming around to science fiction. I'm a huge science fiction fan, science fan. I read a lot of like science literature and I watch a lot of science fiction and read science fiction. So I just kept coming around to that and I really wanted the company to be a true expression of me, not creating a brand that I think people want. I think you're much better off just creating a brand that you really believe in. That's kind of an expression of yourself. And then if people like it, they like it, they don't.
Todd:And so I kept coming around to the science fiction aspect and then I realized that there were a lot of aspects of some of my favorite science fiction that was true to sake in America, the fact that sake is both this kind of ancient beverage but it's like the next big thing. It's right on the cusp of the future of what people are going to be drinking, and so a lot of science fiction tends to be the same way. Also, I don't know if you know what I mean. So a lot of anthropological background to a lot of science fiction like Star Wars, things like that.
Todd:And I kept coming around to the fact that sake is this incredibly discoverable beverage. It's almost like an aspirational brand sort of beverage. So people discover it. They really want to be the ones to like, turn their friends onto it, because nobody knows about it. You know, I kept coming around to things like the hero's journey and you know all this other stuff that's embedded in a lot of good science fiction. So I tried to make the brand science fiction and fun but also aspirational in that way. Wow.
Scott:And also I mean the Japanese culture that has come over to the United States. A lot of that was, you know, started in science fiction, you know with the Godzilla's and you know awesome monster films, and you know that really comes through with your page. You feel like you're going back kind of in time, but it is still going forward. It's a really cool concept. Where do you see the sake industry going, you know, in the next five years in New England and then do you see it growing in the US along that period as well?
Todd:Yeah, I mean, I think sake is definitely going to grow. It's such a small part of the market that it there's no way it's not going to grow some percentage. There are some things that have been happening recently, like in the last 12 months, in the sake industry that seem to indicate some increased growth. Things like there's a brewery in Brooklyn called Brooklyn Cura. They've signed a cooperative deal with a large Japanese brewery and so they're starting to cooperate. They weren't bought out in the traditional sense, but they are starting to cooperate, use each other's resources so that this kind of large craft in Japan can learn from what's going on in the United States and then, on the flip side, Brooklyn can benefit from you know, distribution across the globe, all that stuff and like expertise and equipment and information. It's a pretty cool cooperative agreement that's never been seen before. Also, the first Japanese East Coast brewery is going to open in the fall.
Scott:Oh really.
Todd:Yep, there's a brand in Japan called Dasei and they're from Yamaguchi prefecture in Japan and they decided to open up a New York brewery. So it's two hours north of the city, okay, and it's in a beautiful area of New York, on the Hudson, and they've built a pretty large brewery Wow. And they're going to start rolling out a different brand instead of Dossai. It's called Dossai Blue and they're going to start rolling out sake out of that brewery pretty soon, wow. So there's things like that that are happening.
Todd:You were starting to see some breweries, some sake breweries, finally start to get bigger and expand. A lot of smaller breweries are opening. There's a lot of people planning breweries. I don't know if they'll actually get to the launch stage, but there's certainly a lot of people trying to plan it. And so at least in New England I mean, I'm the only sake brewery in New England I know that we're going to grow. So I think over the next five years you're certainly going to see our sake spread, so it's in every state in New England. And then, after we've really cemented us as like a New England brewery, then I think we would just look at expansion opportunities to go outside of New England. There's been a lot of states that people have requested our sake. Oh really, yeah, yesterday I got a nice message from Florida. Someone who's like you should distribute your stuff in Florida. You know? Ohio, apparently, chicago, canada I mean, we're right. Next, to.
Todd:Canada. I think there's a lot of interesting expansion opportunities way in the future for us.
Scott:Then you get into the logistics and all that kind of fun stuff and it's a whole other animal.
Todd:Yeah, at that point, hopefully someone I hire will get into the logistics, because it's not my forte.
Scott:So you are self-distributing.
Todd:Right now we're self-distributing. I have two amazing employees. One of them comes from the retail side of beer and so he tends to do almost anything helps in the brewery, works the tap room, deliveries some sales stuff just to help me execute whatever I need to execute. And then we actually just hired a brewer a couple of months ago who has spent seven years working at a famous brewery in Japan and wanted to move back to New England and wasn't sure what he was going to do. But hey, I'm the only sake brewer in New England, so come work with me.
Scott:You got to take advantage of that one.
Todd:Yeah, I mean, I never thought in my business plan I never really outlined a thing where I would say, oh, I'm going to hire someone who knows how to brew sake. That never occurred to me. I figured I would hire salespeople and things like that and I would focus on brewing. But yeah, I mean, I'm not going to take myself out of the brewery anytime soon, but hopefully someday it'll allow me to kind of spend a little more time on sales, marketing, branding, executing everything else that we need to execute and rely on someone really trustworthy to kind of spearhead the brewery.
Scott:So there's three employees and 110 accounts. It's in.
Todd:Yeah, so me obviously don't pay myself or anything. I'm a small business owner, so I work there full time and then we have two employees on the payroll and then my wife, who has a regular Monday through Friday job. She actually tends to do a lot of sort of support things for us social media. She's really been crushing it on Instagram lately.
Scott:Yes, she has and I follow. Yeah, thank you very much. Tell her I said hi.
Todd:Thanks, I will. Yeah, amy's been invaluable taking some of that stuff off my plate as we get busier. So she's been doing some of the social media stuff and getting private events and communicating with food vendors for our tap room and things like that that are like very time-intensive and that I don't really have time to do.
Scott:You had mentioned on another podcast that your daughter is now helping out in interesting ways. What's she doing?
Todd:Yeah, so Lula, she's 13. No way Is she really? Yeah, she's 13. I know it's shocking.
Scott:Oh my God, I remember when she was born.
Todd:Oh, I'm so old. I know Shocking to all of us, but yeah, she's 13. She occasionally comes in and cleans up the tap room with my wife and then the big thing she does for us is we have black shirts in the merch stand and she actually takes a lot of those home and reverse, tie-dye them with bleach and makes these cool sort of bleach tie-dye versions of our shirt and they're all unique, right? Everyone comes out differently.
Scott:That's awesome.
Todd:And so we sell those in the merch stand, and actually they outsell the black ones.
Scott:Good for her. That's fantastic, you know, put the kids to work.
Todd:Yeah, I think you know a family business is. You know, it's not a thing I really thought about years and years ago, but it's been pretty fun and rewarding. It is a lot of work and it creates a lot of stress, but it's nice to know that you know, we all are pitching in and doing what we can to just get this thing off the ground.
Scott:You and I kind of talked, like you know, off mic, about some of the challenges that you know for me putting this podcast together, and you know there was times I don't get to see my daughter as much as I want to, and I'm sure you know, especially if you're sleeping over at the brewery you're obviously not seeing your daughter. But this is a good way to connect when you're not getting that opportunity to be at home as much. She's there hanging out and, you know, so is Amy. That's nice.
Todd:Yeah, it's pretty cool and sometimes if I have a run that's real busy and I haven't been home a lot, they'll come to the brewery and like bring dinner or something like that, especially if I'm working at the tap or Thanksgiving at the brewery. Yeah, no, we close. We're not monsters. We close with Thanksgiving, but yeah, it's pretty cool. They'll bring me dinner sometimes so we can see each other. Occasionally, amy will open the taproom, like yesterday she opened the taproom so that Lula and I could go kayaking.
Scott:Awesome.
Todd:So, yeah, definitely trying to find that work life bounce which you know, I know a lot of entrepreneurs don't seem to put that in the forefront as important, but I've had some people that I admire a lot over the last bunch of years in the brewing space who are just like you need that work life bound. Yeah, because it's you're not going to make it. The brewing industry is not a get rich quick scheme, so hopefully we're building a legacy business that's going to last. You know, outlast me certainly. It's not the sort of it's not an app or something where we can like flip it and make it down to money and so you're in it for the long haul. So if you don't have work life bounce as at least a priority in your top five with the priorities, then I don't know if you're going to make it 10, 20, 30 years in.
Scott:Yeah we've talked a lot about sake, but we also have to talk about one of the coolest things that you've done. You were an apprentice sword maker. Can you tell everybody about that?
Todd:Yeah, absolutely Because it was awesome. Yeah, it's definitely a spot, Definitely a spot that sticks out of my resume quite a bit.
Scott:Yeah.
Todd:But but yeah, yeah, I I've always been sort of a maker. I love to cook. I worked in restaurants for a long time as a cook. But I love to cook, I love to bake, I love to make stuff in my hands, generally create stuff.
Todd:When I was in college, I was working full time at a restaurant trying to afford college, which you know for you American listeners, obviously that's something that's pretty important when you're going to school is like how am I going to pay for all this? And so while I was working, I just got really frustrated with not having enough time to do schoolwork versus work to make money to afford the whole thing. I had an opportunity to go to Japan, sort of a window. I was studying martial arts. I was always really interested in martial arts and swords and so I wrote a letter in Japanese. A couple of friends of mine helped me clean it up and then, sort of in the early days of the internet, we printed out all the letters and physically mailed letters to Japan. So I spent $250 on postage, which seemed like a lot at the time yeah, it was a dollar per letter. So I mailed a copy of the letter to 250 different sword make and I got nine responses. That's a great percentage, it's a really good sense.
Todd:I got nine responses. Seven of them said thanks for the letter but no thanks. And then one of them said, well, you should move to Japan and get a job and get an apartment. Then come see me. And I was like, well, that sounds real easy to do. And then one guy was like, hey, listen, I'm in the middle of nowhere. You'll literally sleep in a tool shed, you know whatever. But if you want to come here for a year or however long, I'll put you up and let you live in a tool shed and do whatever. And so that's what I ended up doing. So I went to Japan very little money in my pocket, which seems reckless, and then spent a year studying sword maker, lived in a tool shed, as advertised. He wasn't screwing around. No, it wasn't screwed, it was not a euphemism. So I yeah, the flip-in tool shed, which was crazy in the winter time.
Scott:Oh.
Todd:And I worked for him and I learned all about chopping charcoal, about metallurgy, about, you know, working the forge, a bunch of stuff Basically. After about a year we started talking about you know what life as a swordmaker would look like. And I was a little older at the time, I think after I had found him, when I was 18, I mean, who knows, I still could be a swordmaker, yeah, but I was 28, you know, living in a tool shed with like very little income, in the middle of nowhere in Japan, and so you know he started throwing stuff around like, well, you'd stay here for like 10 years and then, you know, take all these exams and they could become a swordmaker. I just, the more I lived in Japan it was exposed to Japanese culture directly, not through books or TV shows or whatever the more I just kept going back to sort of food and alcohol, beverages and things like that.
Todd:Before I moved to Japan, I had a lot of interest in home brewing. I worked in a restaurant, obviously cooking food, so I just kept being kind of pulled away and found myself thinking more about food and beverage than the swordmaker thing. And then after about a year I decided to just move somewhere else in Japan and not study with him anymore because he was a countryside swordmaker. It seemed really sort of an abuse of his trust to just take up resources and money if I wasn't serious on becoming an actual swordmaker.
Scott:Do you have any of your creations still?
Todd:I do not. I never got to the point where we may. You know I wasn't making swords by myself or anything. It was more like I was wielding a hammer and he was forging the blade. Yeah, also, let's understand that, like, the blades are like a brand new sword made by the guy that I studied with. You know, you're looking at 15 to 20 thousand dollars, american, you serious, yeah, so I don't think there was any, any illusion that. I was going to be able to own a sword that he made.
Scott:Yeah, Not like you work for a year and you get one sword and see you later.
Todd:Yeah, no, that's not the kind of what happens. So, who knows, if I make my sake millions, I certainly would give them a. I would give them a phone call and have a custom made sword made 100%.
Scott:Well, you could just be building attachment on Saburi and have a little sword forging.
Todd:section A little sword maker shop. Yeah, yeah, but only. I've since only stepped into a forge. One other time, at my previous brewery, I went to someone's bachelor party and the bachelor party was in, like in a blacksmithing shop, a learning how to make like a wrought iron, like bottle opener, and it was a pretty cool idea for a bachelor party, yeah, and so that was the only other time I've ever picked up a hammer and other thing. I was surprised that. How sort of easy itself, you know, given the fact that it's been a very long time since I lived in Japan and studied sword making. So, no, it's cool.
Todd:I occasionally miss it. I wonder sometimes, I mean, like anyone would, what would it have been like if I just stuck with it? And you know, certainly that world has changed just as much as the beer industry or other industries I've sort of run across but introduced to people who make swords for the movie industry and like all kinds of stuff like that. So who knows, you know, if I had set up a sword shop somewhere in America, maybe I could be doing sort of jobs like that. So I think about it occasionally, but I'm pretty happy you could add your own reality show.
Todd:Yeah, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't know, I don't know. There is certainly a smithing reality shows like Forge and Fire. You've ever seen that? It's a pretty great show. Yeah, maybe I could have gone on there. So far, there's no sake brewing reality shows.
Scott:Wow, there you go.
Todd:Somebody could hit me up.
Scott:Was it the Magnolia Network? Do you could have a show on with Chippa Joanna?
Todd:Oh, that's right, that's right. Chippa Joanna could come make sake. Roll those cameras.
Scott:For the tap room. You are open on the weekends. Folks come in. What can they expect when they come into the tap room?
Todd:We built our brewery from scratch so we didn't have it some other space, we built the entire space. So we gave thought to sort of the tap room integration with the brewery. So when you walk in we've got about a 1500 square foot tap room and our bar sits in a 20 foot shipping container inside the warehouse Wow. But then we left most of the everything open so you can see the brewery. It's right there, there is a sort of half wall bar that you can sit at that looks straight into the brewery, and then we have a seating for about 70 people and we constantly have stuff going on at the tap room. So we are open Friday, saturday, sunday. We're in the suburbs and we tried being open other days, but it doesn't really seem to work out for us.
Todd:Yeah, I think a beer brewery might be able to be open a couple more days, but for us we're fairly niche On the weekends. We do really well. Yeah, I don't think anyone's coming to a sake brewery on a Wednesday, yeah, so we have food pop ups all the time. We've had a bunch of classes that I think we're going to pick up some more in the fall. We've had cheese class, like how to pair cheese and sake. We had bone side classes, so how to clip little miniature trees.
Todd:Wow nice Standup comedy is coming back in the fall.
Scott:Very cool.
Todd:We have a really great group called Hubbub Comedy, and they do pop ups at the tap room and have about three to four comics each night. It's great, and so, yeah, we do a lot of the stuff that our regular brewery would do Awesome.
Scott:Definitely got to get home and check that out. I'm trapped down here in Wilmington with just the mass sake that we were talking about and not getting any real interesting flavors and craft sake from the US. The ones we have are pretty standard. Yeah, those are standard ones, kind of the Bud Lights of the sake world.
Todd:Yeah, there's some good sake down there. It's just the problem is it's very hard to find and unless you know about sake, you don't sort of stumble across it, and so that's something that I think small breweries like mine have going for them is. We say, hey, you know, all we're doing is sake. I'm not trying to sell sake as like part of a catalog of beverages, that's all we have. So we're doing tastings and dinners and education stuff. You can come to the tap room. All that outreach hopefully will grow sake, but also it'll just allow someone to have a place to go.
Scott:Yeah, you haven't been open that long so it's hard to see any growth. You know long term, but do you think that the sake industry is picking up any growth from the decline in the beer industry?
Todd:That's a good question. I am not 100% sure we are seeing growth. I've made some choices in the early days of our business that would allow us to kind of fit in with other beverages. The one thing I realized is that no one really goes to a store specifically to buy sake. There are some sake only retailers in giant markets like San Francisco and New York and LA.
Scott:Seattle.
Todd:If you're where I am, no one really buys sake specifically. That's not a trip to the store. So for us we decided to go with single serve packaging, so all of our bottles are seven ounce bottles. It's a good, healthy single serve. You could also split it with someone as like a trial, and so that keeps the price low, the cost of entry low, and I understood that someone's going to the liquor store and they're buying a four pack IPA and some seltzer and a bottle of wine. We have to be in a form factor where people are like oh, I'll just take two of those and hook them in the basket, and so the single serve really helps us do that. I don't think the growth that we see is coming from the decline of any beverage. I don't think people are jumping to sake from something else. But we're providing a ton of education, a ton of content, a ton of opportunity for people to go. Oh, hey, I've always wanted to try sake. Oh, it's nine bucks a bottle, I'll just throw two of those in, yeah.
Scott:So what's the alcohol range for sake?
Todd:Yeah, so for me, I like to play in the 15 to 18% range.
Scott:Okay.
Todd:There are some sake from Japan that are as low as I want to say 12. And then the highest one I know from Japan is 21.
Scott:Oh, really Okay.
Todd:But there are some breweries, obviously in Japan, that could pull it off. And then there's some ultra low alcohol sake that, frankly, I don't really understand. So there's some sake from Japan that's carbonated and is only 5% or 6% alcohol. I don't think it really tastes like sake. I think it, I don't know, it doesn't really taste like sake. So to me and so I like to play in that range it's a little stronger than wine and because of that, you know, a full pour of sake is for us in the tabernum is five ounce Okay. So obviously we're not trying to get anybody extremely inebriated, but you know, basically it's certainly one of the first education points that we have to cover with people who come to the tabernum is that you know this little glass should be savored and enjoyed and experienced. It's not a shot, it's not a whatever.
Scott:Yeah.
Todd:Because a five ounce glass is the exact same as drinking a full 5% alcohol beer.
Scott:Yeah, so they just have to be cautious with it.
Todd:Yeah, so we do five ounce full pours and then we have a six ounce flight. That's three, two ounce pours.
Scott:It's awesome.
Todd:I tried some other stuff in the past when I was developing the business and you know everything we have is on draft. I just I can't pour less than two ounces.
Scott:Yeah.
Todd:It's like really hard to physically pour less than two ounces. So yeah, I would need like a pipe at or something. So we thought three, two ounce pours is like a really nice flight. Three different and currently at the tabernum we have five things on draft, so people have some choices.
Scott:It's awesome. So you mentioned earlier that you're self-distributing. Do you have any plans to expand that distribution to companies and allow them to take over that aspect, or are you still pretty okay with self-distribution?
Todd:We've been extremely happy with self-distribution, but as a three-person shop, yeah, we've decided. We've started working with distributors. We haven't signed on anyone yet, but we're looking over agreements and talking to different distributors to see who would be a good fit for our beverage. One of the things about fresh local sake, compared to mass produced sake, is that our stuff requires refrigeration all the time, so you have to store it cold, you have to sell it to an account like a restaurant or store. They have to keep it cold and sell it to the drinker cold, and so that might be a barrier for some distributors.
Todd:But yeah, we're currently talking to distributors for our home state of Massachusetts and Maine, although I didn't know this from working at Boston Beer. But Maine is an extremely difficult state to get your out-of-state produced beverage distributed in. It's not impossible, is it really? Yeah, I was surprised. It's not impossible, but some of the laws are very interesting and some of the paperwork is very challenging. So we're going to focus on Massachusetts first so that we can least go statewide in our home state. I don't know anyone who hasn't been to. Massachusetts is an extremely wide state and so with two people it's very hard to get, let's say, to western Massachusetts and the Berkshires, and it's very hard to get to things like the Cape of the islands, so I think a distributor is going to have to help us with that. So hopefully we'll get some movement on that pretty soon and then you'll see our stuff in a lot more places.
Scott:You mentioned you were in Rhode Island. Any farther star sake. In Patucket, Rhode Island, my hometown.
Todd:We're mostly around Providence because of the distributor we work with and so, yeah, I would love to expand to a lot more of Rhode Island.
Todd:That's one of the challenging things as a brewery owner talking about going to places like Maine or Vermont, new Hampshire, rhode Island, whatever. I think first I really had to just really look at those states and try to understand what it even looks like. Connecticut is one of those states where I don't really understand it very much, but I understand it enough to know that it's almost like three separate large markets. You have Hartford, you have New Haven, you have Greenwich and Stanford. I think those markets seem to. It seems to me like they probably take a very different approach to sell sake in all of three of those markets. So I think that would be a challenging state to go into, but I'm trying to understand every state and where the opportunities lie. We're even talking to distributors in Vermont, new Hampshire. Don't think there's a large sake market up there, but certainly there are sushi restaurants and noodle places and adventurous chefs who would take a chance on a locally made sake.
Scott:You didn't want to do any. Elk hunting sake advertising.
Todd:Yeah, I mean I've thought about. I don't ski personally, but I think a warm sake ski promotion in the winter would be kind of nice or snowshoeing or some kind of winter sport. I come from like the deep woods of rural Maine so we certainly did a lot of snowmobiling. It would make me extremely happy to do it's like a snowmobiling sake commercial or something of that nature, just to mesh the two sides of my existence. But yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunity. I mean the other thing about New England we just have really marvelous food here. You have all the inland stuff, the dairy, the cheese makers, amazing locally grown meats and raised meats and stuff, and then on the other side you have this huge coastline with tons of fresh seafood and you know that kind of thing. It's always been in my bucket list. I certainly want to do a sake lobster roll promotion next summer. Things like fried clams and sake are really great together. So that'd be, awesome.
Todd:I'd like to see a lot more of that integration.
Scott:I'm just waiting for the Farthest Star logo to be on the Green Monster in Fenway.
Todd:That would also be amazing. Yeah, so we're in small bottles, which are obviously made of glass. But one thing I did think about in the future, I would love to get in cans instead of bottles. There's ecological reasons for that. Cans are much less fuel intensive to ship and things like that. But I would, I thought about, if we were in cans, it would be really cool to be in Fenway or to be in the garden or to be at like Tanglewood or someplace like that where you could have a can outside because it's not breakable.
Scott:You and I have mutual, not friends, but you are friends with my cousin Ellen. I have to give Ellen a shout out to see if she's actually listening.
Todd:Yeah, I'm not sure, I'm not gonna. I didn't look at your metrics yet so I'm not sure if she's listening. Yeah, so actually I have a good friend from high school, andy, and he married your cousin. And it was a very odd revelation when we were working at Boston Beer that he was like, oh yeah, I know this woman, she knows Scott Carney, and I was like, oh, that's really cool. Oh yeah, they're cousins and I'm like, wait, that's just so random and so far from where I went to high school. It just seems in problem, pretty ridiculous.
Todd:Yeah, I've often run into some people that it just blows my mind. So a couple of days ago I was doing four hour tasting at Volante Farms, which is like a big farm store in here in in Metro West in Massachusetts, and this guy walked by that I knew from Tokyo Really. So he lives in Tokyo, yeah, he lives in, he's from Massachusetts and we first met at UMass, but I only have ever spent time with him in Japan. And he just walked by me in a store so I got his attention, poured socket for him, you know, talked to him for a bit and then he's like, yeah, my dad lives nearby and a home visiting, so he was literally just home for like two weeks, wow From Tokyo, and I just ran into him and tasting. So that stuff happens to me all the time, much to the annoyance of my wife, but it happens all of them.
Scott:Anybody show up at the brewery and know you, but didn't realize that you were the owner. Founder.
Todd:No, we've never had that. This has been such a herculean task to open that anyone who knows me or knows about me or whatever has, knows that I'm opening a brewery. No, we have had some people you know we've had. I had a group of guys from high school that came by.
Scott:That's awesome.
Todd:You know which? I went to high school quite a long time ago, so I had a group of guys from high school. I had some old college roommates.
Todd:stop by unannounced mind you, oh wow really, which was, yeah, they were like heckling me. I was in the brewery cleaning kegs and they were heckling me from the taproom and I was like who the hell are these guys who are like heckling me in the brewery? And then, as I got closer, I realized who it was. But we haven't seen each other in decades. That's awesome, and so we've had some people like that, some Boston beer alum who've come by. Yeah, been pretty cool.
Scott:Well, Todd, this has been fantastic catching up with you. It's great to see you, man. I'm really happy and proud of all your accomplishments. What is doing my due diligence as podcast host? I was Googling you and you're all over the internet, and that's a good thing, yeah.
Todd:I'm trying, actually, somebody that you and I used to work with, andrew Teeman. He gave me some of the best advice I've ever been given. I was going to start a blog, which is still up on the internet BostonSakecom. I don't post it anymore, but it has a ton of info on sake, so I just left it up there. But he gave me some of the best advice ever about social media and branding.
Todd:He just said, look, do the thing you want to do and just consistently put out content. That's the same thing all the time. We're talking about sake, we're talking about this, we're talking about don't flip all over the place and try to grab likes or views or attention by doing other stuff. That's not true to your core mission. And so I've always just kept that in mind with I just look, I'm just a sake maker and so I make sake and I talk about sake and I just I love sake. I want to grow the industry across the whole thing. I want Japanese people to sell more, I want us to sell more, and so, yeah, I've just been consistent as far as I can, and so far, people are loving what we're doing.
Scott:Where can everybody find you on social media?
Todd:So everything is linked through our website, farthestarsakecom, and certainly we're very active on Instagram, facebook, whatever I'm supposed to call Twitter now.
Scott:Big X.
Todd:X, that's right, and we also have an amazing link in bio attached to all of our social things which is constantly updated with food, pop-ups at the brewery and events and podcasts like this one will be on there, and so that's a good place to start. We have also just started a YouTube channel. Really, I haven't linked it to anything yet, yeah, so I realized that we're doing all this like kind of visually interesting stuff in the brewery and I thought I would try my hand at some short videos just to give people another kind of content. And so we just started Farthestarsake on YouTube and I've started uploading some videos to that as just a different way to get people's attention.
Scott:Folks definitely check out Farthestarsake, All of the social medias. Stop by the brewery, check it out. If you see it in your stores, grab a bottle, try it. I have not got a chance to try it, but I am looking forward to it when I come home and I'm sure it's going to be fantastic. Thank you again, Todd, for hanging out with us today. It's been a pleasure to catch up with you.
Todd:Yeah, my pleasure. It's been awesome to catch up with you as well. I never realized that working at the Boston Beer Company would gain all of these friends, like across all this broad spectrum of industry, so it's been real cool.
Scott:It's been awesome. All right, ben, take care and folks go check out Farthestarsake.
Todd:I don't right now. I personally have the skill to make a 21% alcohol sake that doesn't taste like jet fuel.
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