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
EP21 Grant Wood: Brewing Legends, Revolver's Rise, and Crafting a Non-Alcoholic Future
Grant Wood, a true luminary in the brewing industry, takes us on an extraordinary journey through his storied career. From the moment he first set foot in the Pearl Brewing Company lab in San Antonio to his transformative experience at the Siebel Institute of Technology, Grant discovered a passion that would shape his destiny. Listen as he shares the fascinating stories behind crafting iconic beers like Sam Adams Black Lager and reveals the pivotal moments that led him to co-found Revolver Brewing in Texas. Brewing enthusiasts and industry newcomers alike will find inspiration in Grant's reflections on the mentors and experiences that guided him through the craft beer revolution.
The adventure doesn't stop there. We explore the exhilarating highs and tough challenges Grant faced while building Revolver Brewing from the ground up. Discover the serendipitous creation of Blood and Honey, a brew that captured the hearts of Texans and marked a significant turning point for the brewery. Grant candidly recounts the strategic moves and relentless negotiations that led to the sale of Revolver to Miller Coors, offering a rare glimpse into the complex world of brewery acquisitions. His story is one of resilience, creativity, and the unyielding pursuit of excellence in a rapidly evolving industry.
As Grant steps into a new chapter, he embraces the frontier of non-alcoholic beer alongside Tom Holland with the innovative brand Biro. Uncover the creative process behind launching a brand that challenges the norms, utilizing cutting-edge brewing techniques to retain the flavors beer lovers cherish. With a focus on lifestyle and wellness, Grant shares insights on the growing popularity of non-alcoholic options and hints at what's next for the industry. Whether you're a seasoned beer aficionado or simply curious about the future of brewing, you're sure to find this episode both enlightening and exhilarating.
To order Bero Beers: www.berobrewing.com
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My guest today is Grant Wood. Originally from Irving, exas, grant has been in the brewing industry since 1985. He began his career at the Pearl Brewing Company in San Antonio after receiving his Bachelor of Science in Food Science and Technology from Texas A&M University, a 1987 graduate of the Long Course at Siebel Institute of Technology. From 1989 to 1995, he was Assistant Brewmaster at Lone Star Brewing Company. In 1995, he departed for Boston and was Brewer and production manager at the Boston Beer Company, where we met. He was involved in many roles, including product development of Sam Adams beers, angry Orchard ciders and Twisted Tea. In 2012, he left Samuel Adams after 16 years and co-founded Revolver Brewing Company in Granbury, texas. As brewmaster, he created a variety of award-winning beers, including Blood and Honey. After selling the successful craft brewery to Miller Coors in 2019, he came out of retirement to create the beers for Tom Holland's new non-alcoholic beer brand, biro. He's received his diploma of brewing from the Institute of Distilling and Brewing in the UK, been a beer judge at the Great American Beer Festival, the World Beer Cup and the BIIA in the UK.
Scott:Grant Wood, welcome to Carney Saves the World. Thanks, cott. How are you Good? Good to be here, good to have you. Thank you so much for coming on. You've had quite an interesting last year or so, but I want to get into the early stuff with you first, before we head over to the Bureau talk. Sure, one of the things that really struck me was you started in 1985. That was not the homebrew crazy brew time to be starting.
Grant Wood:Not at all, not at all. Yeah, 85. Well, you know, in the mid-80s I'd just come out of college and got married, needed a job. This is like in 84. Yeah, I got married with no job. My parents never really forgave me for that one.
Grant Wood:My wife and I moved to San Antonio and I had taken a job with this tiny picante sauce manufacturer. They had just been carved off from the old paste picante and so they were trying to start their own brand and anyway it was terrible, terrible first job out of college and worked there for about four months, kind of quit. It was just so bad, so many hours, so little support. And so I did some odd jobs for a bit, taking care of handicapped adults and did some commercial painting of hotel rooms and houses and stuff. I give a lot of credit to my wife, susan, for motivating me in my career and she told me to get off my ass and get a real job. I sent out some resumes in San Antonio and was very fortunate I got one interview and with that interview I got hired at Pearl Brewing Company.
Grant Wood:I had come at beer and brewing as I need a job. You know, to me at the time in the mid 80s, beer was sort of just like alcoholic soda pop. It was great for washing down pizza and hot dogs and chips and salsa, but as a class of beverage it just didn't register much for me. I didn't grow up with beer drinkers. My parents were liquor drinkers and you know it was very rare to see a beer in the house or even at parties that they gave the fortunate thing getting in, you know, getting hired into the laboratory there, kind of learned how beer was made and the composition of it and just fell in love with it. Then it was like, oh, this is what it's about. Oh, this is really cool. You know, you're bringing all these agricultural products together into a cool facility with lots of copper and cooking. And then the fermentation piece kind of the whole magic behind the beers was really neat.
Grant Wood:And so, working in the lab there for a couple of years I asked the Pearl folks to try to get into production. I wanted to get out of the lab and get into the brewing side. They were kind enough to send me to the Siebel in Chicago for brewing school in 1987 to kind of prepare me to become a brewing supervisor and again, as you pointed out, another company that would be in my future. Sam Adams was starting at about the same time as I came out of college, and Jim was putting his whole business plan into motion, and so I went off to school. The craft beer if you want to call it a movement was really just getting started. And so in my 1987 Seabull class there were a couple of guys who are again sort of foundational in craft beer A guy named Dan Carey who built New Glarus in Wisconsin and another guy named Jamie Emerson who went on to start Full Sail. They were in my brewing class.
Grant Wood:It was an interesting transition time from the old old line breweries where Stroh was still around and Heilemann was still around, and Midwestern large packaging breweries that were all over Cincinnati and through the Midwest. They were still alive and so it was cool. I got my three-month degree that was what they called it back then Just did it all in Chicago and then came back and worked as a third shift brewing supervisor at Pearl for about 18 months. I kept going into my plant manager's office and asking for a raise and he would say no, no, no, no.
Grant Wood:And so I bumped into a guy that was the assistant brewmaster at Lone Star and asked him if he had any positions open across town at Lone Star and he said no, but send me a resume. Very next day I actually got a call from him and said hey, how fast can you get me that resume? I'll drive it over Kind of long story short. I got hired over at Lone Star and so jumped across town to the other brewery. I went to work there as an assistant brewmaster. I was usually on second shift. It was kind of a move up in time, so in the afternoons from three to 11.
Grant Wood:Yeah, I just learned a lot more about brewing of things. It's interesting Pearl and Lone Star are very, very similar, similar brew sizes and similar gross capacity. Both could do over a million barrels of beer a year, kind of flat out.
Scott:Oh really.
Grant Wood:Yeah, it's amazing to think of that at the time. But, yeah, great time. You know, work both sides of hot side and cold side, from making the work to fermenting it and processing it for packaging, you know, things might've gone along swimmingly forever. But, as we all learn, market forces and business forces have a influence on everyone's lives. And so one day my boss at Lone Star came to me and said hey, you know, we did that bankruptcy two years ago. Well, we're going to probably do it again, and this time it looks like it's going to be permanent. You know, you might want to think about your options after Lone Star. I'd been there six years.
Grant Wood:Ken Lee great guy, I think I can mention his name yeah, he was my boss at the time and he said two things are going to happen. One is they're going to just go into bankruptcy and insolvency and they're going to shut this thing down, or Heilemann Group will get purchased by somebody and the beer will be taken elsewhere to be brewed. So he said, in either case, this brewery is eventually going to close. And then he was very open with that and went super. I really appreciate that, because when I was still taking brewing magazines, I remember, you know, thumbing through that and going oh, here's an ad the Boston Beer Company Hmm, that's interesting, they're looking for brewers. Okay, sent a resume to Boston. To keep the balance in the force, I sent a resume to California to anchor brewing. At the same time I got a really nice letter from anchor saying no thanks. But I got a call from David Grinnell, sam Adams who interviewed me over the phone for about 45 minutes to an hour and it was kind of awkward because my office mate was sitting right there while this was all going on. I guess David liked me enough on the phone to offer me a ticket to Boston.
Grant Wood:So I flew up, got lost on the way from the airport to the Park Plaza, drove around in north Boston for I don't know, finally made it to the hotel and woke up, met Fabian Rosen for breakfast down in the Park Plaza. I broke all the rules about how you're supposed to interview. I just read this whole book about how to do interviews and you know how to bring a good impression. It says don't interview over food. She meets me for breakfast. Well, great, that's off the bat. You know it's like try not to discuss salaries at the very beginning.
Grant Wood:And Fabian's question was what are your salary expectations? That was her first question. First question yeah, that was her lead and I was like, oh my God, this is just going bad, this is going terribly. And I'm like kind of hemming and hawing and she's like, oh, that's really interesting. Oh, okay, and she asked me two more questions and then she goes.
Grant Wood:She like leaves, let's go to the left. Oh, sorry, I forgot the personality inventory thing. She slides a personality inventory thing across the table to me and I'm like filling it out as fast as I can. I'm not eating. Everything's over here on the plate Not getting eaten. So I fill out the PI, hand it back to her. She goes that's great.
Grant Wood:Thanks, can you get a cab down to JP? That was my introduction to the Boston Beer Company. So I go down, have a great day with David. It's just the day and I've got a 4.30 flight back home and you know we're standing out on the deck at JP. I'm about to get in the cab and he goes.
Grant Wood:I thought it was a really great day, great to meet you. Let's take a next step. Get your wife on a plane, come back, look around, we'll make you a formal offer. You think it's going to go well. Yeah, so the rest is history. I flew back, got off the plane. Susan says what do you think? I said I think we're moving to Boston is what I think she was like. Okay, again, to her credit, she's like Boston. I grew up in the South, I grew up in Texas, and to take that leap and to try to imagine what it was going to be like to move to the Northeast, to the heart of Yankee land and I mean that in the greater sense, not the New York sense, it was a big leap. And again, susan, to her greatest credit, was ready to jump off.
Scott:That's great For some listeners. The production facilities for Sam Adams were not located in Boston. The R&D plant was located in Jamaica Plain. We call it JP.
Grant Wood:Well, the funny thing about it was I thought that I was interviewing B, the brewer in Jamaica Plain. I thought that's what the interview was for. And then it turns out, when I fly back the next time, I'm in the building and there's this other guy over there with a new haircut it was Jim DeBoer. In this period of time, when they interviewed Jim and they interviewed me, I think, they flipped their decision and they hired Jim to be the brewing manager and they offered me the production manager job, which meant that I was going to be managing brewing outside of Boston, you know, with our contractor, our alternate proprietorship partnerships, you know. So, okay, and then so that my job description changed and it meant that another piece of my life was going to change, where I had significant travel to do.
Scott:Yeah, so where were Sam Adams Contract Brewing at that point, when you started they?
Grant Wood:had just expanded and they were really getting serious about the Cincinnati brewery. They had brewed a few things there, like seasonals, like Fezziwig, about the time that I came in, and they had also just opened the Genesee Brewery in Rochester, so they had just started that relationship as well. So when I got there they were still brewing in Pittsburgh. They were brewing in Lehigh already Okay, it was the Stroh Brewery then and they were brewing at Blitzweinhardt in Portland. And so up until 1995, as they grew, they grew into those various locations, they were growing 25% or more a year, yeah, and so they needed more capacity. I think it was David and Richard had opened up Cincinnati and they had opened up Rochester, and so they needed another person to cover those two breweries, and that was me.
Scott:So one of the claim to fame of yours is that you made the Sam Adams Black Lager. That's your baby, wasn't it?
Grant Wood:It was. Yeah, I love that beer. That's one of my Amazing Schwartz beers or black lagers are probably my favorite style. I remember we had been working on this recipe. We had three different recipes that we had tried there at the brewery in Jamaica Plain. I remember walking through the brewery with David and tasting those three. They all had their merits. But we came to the last tank and we tasted them and David turns to me and goes which one of these did you like? Which one's it going to be? And I was like this one. This is the one. It's just a great beer all the way around. It's just got a ton of Munich malt, which gives it that depth of malt character and flavor, and that little bit of Carafa malt about 5%. It's unhulled, so you don't get any burnt parts, you just get the roastiness and Noble Hops man. Just a great all-around drinking beer.
Scott:It's a great, great beer and that is by far my favorite black lager ever. I mean, there's tons of them out there. I live in Wilmington. We've got a lot of small brewers out here and they try, but no one has really knocked it out of the park and that's just one of my favorite beers and it's such a shame that that style has never really gotten big in the US, because it's such an easy drinking beer and people think it's just this heavy black, burly beer. Yeah.
Grant Wood:They think of it like a stout. That's nothing like a stout.
Scott:So you're at Sam Adams. I don't know if you remember this. I opened for you and your improv troupe at a holiday party one year.
Grant Wood:Oh, yeah, that's right, I did bring that improv group over. I'd forgotten about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I remember you did stand upup and uh, yeah, I'd come from doing improv for many years while I was in san antonio. Uh, from like 1989 to 1995, a group called the oxymorons. We played at a couple different venues in san antonio. It was just so fun, did it almost every friday night. Uh, we had 11 o'clock show, two sets, uh, 14 improv pieces. Such a great team, such a great group of people. We were tight. I don't toot my own horn for performance that much but we got to a place that I think few improv groups get to. We just knew each other well enough that you just get subtle signals about something that was about to happen. You could pick it up, you know, just pick it up from each other, pass the idea back and forth, and it was some of the best time I've ever had on stage. Yeah, it really was.
Scott:It was fun watching you guys. So then you did it in Boston. Did they come to Boston or join up with another group?
Grant Wood:We were living out in the Metro West. I lived out in Wayland and met these folks at a little performance venue. They had this tiny theater they had down in downtown. Natick, me and another woman tried to pull together an improv group and we did for a little while we hung in, but for that meeting there was this group. We called it AKA and they came in, came into Boston for that show.
Scott:Yeah, that was fun. So Sam Adams, and then you guys get this crazy idea to maybe start your own brewery. Is that how that worked out? And you started Revolver.
Grant Wood:Yeah, no, no, no it's. So I was sitting at my desk in Jamaica Plain and reading through the morning's emails and we would get this one from the Brewers Association, just sort of a newsletter, kind of top of line things, with some links. They would run want ads or help, wanted ads and stuff like that in the body of the email and I read this one that said looking for a brewmaster for Granberry Texas and I was like Granberry man, that sounds really familiar, google it. And I was like Granberry man, that sounds really familiar, you know, google it. And I was like oh, yeah, that's about. Ok, that's about an hour from where I grew up. Yeah, that sounds interesting. And you know, at this point I'd been with Boston Beer just shy of 16 years. The other thing that runs in cycles are your own career moves and your own cycle within companies. Yes, susan would tell me later that. She said you know, I could see you were kind of coming down into this place with Boston Beer, that you would think about leaving and I said never leave, I'm a lifer. And she could kind of read the signs that I was kind of peeking out I was getting about as far as I was going to get in the company. It just took me two years to realize it.
Grant Wood:I sent a resume to this guy. I emailed him and then I sent a resume to this guy down here in Granbury. I said you know, tony, what you're trying to do. Where is it? What are you trying to do? You know, just kind of, give me your business plan. He emailed me back, kind of laid it out you know kind of briefly, and I emailed him back and I said that sounds really cool, I would like. A few days later we set up a phone call, which was great. He had married a woman from New York. They were still living out on Long Island. He happened to be in New York, so I met him. I decided to drive down, interview him in person and we went to the Ginger man in Manhattan, oh yeah, and sat there for about three hours and chatted with each other.
Grant Wood:How do you see the Texas market? I thought really hard about this because this is like September. I guess I've been with Boston Beer for 16 years and it's a great company. Yeah, I love working for Sam Adams. I love working for those people and just make great beers, all kinds of good stuff. It was a really hard decision. And again, going back to Mrs Wood, you know talking about this, she goes. You know these opportunities are not going to come around very often. Yes, these kinds of windows or doors are just rare.
Grant Wood:And the fact that I was talking to this guy opportunity to go back to Texas, I would get equity in the company, I would get a piece of the action it was like, okay, and the thing I did, when I after negotiating with Rhett a little bit his name's Rhett Kiesler After negotiating with Rhett a little bit, he met my need, which was I would take a pay cut, I got him to agree to a two-year personal services contract, not related to Revolver but to him personally. He would pay me for two years, whether it worked out or not. That plus the equity that I got, kind of put the decision over for me. And the other one was Susan said do it. You really should do this.
Grant Wood:You know what's the, what is actually, what is the very worst that can happen. Yeah, it fails, you know, and Rhett doesn't pay me and she goes. You've been around long enough. People know you. You'll get another job. Yeah, we're not going to starve, you know you. You do you and we'll do this together again and so, anyway. So she's like all right, let's, let's do this revolver thing, but does it have to be called revolver? And I said, uh, it turns out he's pretty solid on that and he wants that branding. I was like, well, okay. And then it was like, who do I tell that I'm leaving? Yeah, um, you know. I was like, oh, this, two and a half months to go. Right, it's the middle of october. Am I going to get shown the door when I say this? And then I'm going to be standing around.
Scott:As soon as you open your mouth.
Grant Wood:Yeah, yeah and so, but no, I ask a few of my closer work friends how they would do this. You know how would you approach. And they go, go to Jim Cook, start at the top, you know him, work your way down, okay, and so I lurked around outside Jim's office. When I finally saw him go around the corner and into his office and Jim has an open door policy it's very rare that that door is closed and so because he wants people to come in and talk to him actually and interrupt his business, I guess, but with good news with good news.
Grant Wood:With good news. Yeah, anyway, I go around the corner and go into his office and I said, jim, have you got a few minutes? And he said, sure, have a seat. I laid it out for him. I'll do the imitation. You can't see it because you're just listening. But Jim has this habit when he's thinking about something, he plays with his hair. He puts his hand up on his forehead, he twists his hair around. He goes oh, grant, you're killing me, you're like a sequoia, how can you leave? And I'm like oh, you know, jim, it's a hard decision, jim. And he goes all right. Well, he called you a Sequoia. Yeah, he called me a Sequoia.
Scott:Oh, that's a hearty nickname.
Grant Wood:That's a nickname. Well, it's a hell of a compliment. I'm 5'7". There's nowhere here, sequoia. But anyway he goes. You know I understand and I wish you luck. The great thing was, again Jim got it. They let me stay until January 1st and I had driven down to Texas to prepare for Christmas, so I had my laptop with me. I would hold on to that and I would do one last email on January 1st and then send everything back.
Grant Wood:And I remember Dave was like I can't believe, I'm letting you drive away with a computer, you're just going to send it back. I said, dave, I'm going to send it back. Yeah, then I did. My whole new life in Texas began, and I guess I went to work January 4th of 2012 at Revolver in a big field that had nothing in it. Really, we had to build in.
Scott:So you guys built from ground up?
Grant Wood:Oh yeah, Wow, yeah, that was the kind of mind-blowing thing about this. For those of you who've never worked for the Boston Beer Company, they used to have a non-compete agreement that everybody had to sign. I figured it was going to take about a year to build this brewery Clear the land, build the building, put the equipment in, get everything set up and get going. We worked very quickly. We didn't break ground. I think we broke ground the first week of March or the very last week of February and then they built the building and it was basically a 6,000 square foot rectangle that looked like a large barn, kind of a chicken coop top. It was very simple and a lot of the preliminary work just leveled the ground, clear off the garbage and get everything out of the way and then they could pour the slab. You built the building. The brewing equipment showed up around the end of June. We're doing most of the stuff ourselves with like a sky track and a forklift, picking up tanks, these 60 barrel tanks, putting the brewery in place. And again, it was very simple. It wasn't a shoestring I mean, we were funded, but it was like keep it simple. Yeah, and that became kind of. My mantra was we had a two vessel brew house. We'd mash into the mash larder ton, we'd transfer it over and boil it, we'd whirlpool in the kettle, cool it and put it in the tank. It was very simple brewing very old English UK style stuff. Everything's manual. There's no automation. We got the brewery up and going.
Grant Wood:Another adage is the first brew always fails, and so in this case it did too. We ran the first brew. The very first trial brew was like July 31st. We came back the next day and, you know, got to clean everything up and brew it again, and that one was successful. So first brew was really August 1st of 2012. Yeah, eight months, right. So from actually less than that, from groundbreaking to the time we're actually making beer a very short period of time. And so I was a little worried about my non-compete because we're going to be selling. We're going to be selling beer like September. We had this conversation about that with my new partners. Part of the old non-compete agreement said that you can't work for a company that produces or sells beer within the United States for a year that is within 20% of Samuel Adams' price point at retail, and so we priced our beer at 20.5% above Samuel Adams' prices. Wow, that's genius.
Scott:Brilliant. Well it was a risk.
Grant Wood:I mean because there was a possibility that we would be overpriced and that we would not be able to compete because the beer would be too expensive. But the alternative was to go lower, cut our margins terribly and not make any money, at least for four months. We made the decision to go higher, which was again, in retrospect, turned out to be a genius move, because we were able to command the price. It was crazy. In fact. You've talked to a few salespeople in your life, scott, I am certain. Oh yeah, they're nothing, if not confident. Until you know their life is difficult. David Grinnell always said I would never want to be a salesperson. They get rejection all the time. It's just hard. You have to have a certain personality for that. I completely get that. The reason I'm talking about that is that I had to go out and sell beer Me and Rhett had to go out and sell beer.
Scott:Again Was it just the two of you just brewing too, like that, was it?
Grant Wood:Yeah Well, so I had an assistant. So I had a guy that hung out at the brewery, andrew Shelton. He did a lot of the stuff clean tanks, filtered beer, brewed beer, kind of went back and forth and then he would stick back, do the kegging and stuff like that, keep the place clean and Rhett and I would go off with growlers and try to sell beer. We were very fortunate we were making friends down here as fast as we could. Rhett had talked to wholesalers about the laws here. They're very particular in the state of Texas. He had had a great conversation with some folks at one of the distributorships around here and at the time it's a very different world now. They were very friendly to Kraft that was growing up, I think. They saw the value of it and they were excited to see Kraft begin to take off in North Texas.
Grant Wood:This one distributor gave Rhett a contact sheet. He basically gave him a list of all the bars and restaurants in greater North Texas and Dallas and Fort Worth who had draft and were interested in Kraft. Right, these are their top 125 craft accounts. And so Rhett and I took that list and started working on it. I wish I had true corroborative evidence that we did this but frankly no salesperson would believe me. But on that first hundred calls that we made to accounts here in Fort Worth and Dallas to sell beer and we're selling beer that I had made on a small system to begin with and then as we moved into production we had our growlers have actually finished beer out of the brewery. Out of the first 100 accounts that Rhett and I called on, we sold into 97 of them.
Scott:Are you serious? Yeah, that's insane.
Grant Wood:Yeah.
Scott:I still can't believe it. Wow, it was amazing.
Grant Wood:Do you think you might be in the wrong industry? Maybe, maybe you're really good at that. I don't think I'm in the wrong business, but I will tell you. It was amazing, though. We made also the decision that we would not just try to sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. We had to understand the balance with production. We didn't want to run out of beer, because that was one of the biggest objections that we would get from restaurateurs and bar owners is like I'm going to give you this thing on the wall You're going to run out of beer. I'm like can't say we never will. We'll do our best not to, and we won't take in on any more customers until we have capacity to cover them, and that was a piece of what we did very well. And then, you know, rhett ran back to Granbury and we started ordering more tanks.
Scott:Yeah, what was the first beer that you developed? Was it Blood and Honey?
Grant Wood:No, I wanted to. One of the things I was wrong on is I thought that Texans wanted a great malty golden ale which had a little bit of hop character, and so my lead on this was something we called High Brass, which was a golden ale brewed with European hops with Saphir it was almost all Saphir with a little bit of Northern Brewer, it was about 6%, it was sort of Dortmunder strength. But it was really a golden ale and with the dry hopping I just thought it had a great balance and it failed. No one really wanted it. Uh, blood and honey came along after those and then that turned out to be the monster, so um had to feed the monster.
Scott:Huge. I went down to Texas for a meeting and we hit bars that we could get blood and honey and it was phenomenal. Then we just sat there for Sam Adams meetings drinking blood and honey the entire time.
Grant Wood:That's right. I remember you guys came down.
Scott:So how did that one come about? Because that was pretty much the horse that pulled the wagon, absolutely.
Grant Wood:Yeah, the uh, the blood and Honey origin story is just super fun. Again, it's in March or something like that of 2012,. Like early March, and we had a guy from down the road from us show up with a bucket like a five gallon bucket and Mr Crisp had this you pick at the time down the road from us peaches and strawberries and stuff, and because of that he had bees just to make sure that everything would get pollinated. He came into the brewery one day so I hear y'all building a brewery? Yep, he goes, would y'all use honey? I was like sure, yeah, you know, yeah, let's see it. He cracks this bucket of honey open and it's a beautiful reddish color. It looks like strawberry color or almost like a very dark ripe strawberry and smells fruity from all the peach nectar and all the strawberry nectar. It was just beautiful. And so I get a little stick out and I'm eating it and it just tastes fantastic. It's so fruity and just great. And he gave it to us. I mean five gallons, serious amount of honey and it crystallized. That's the reason why he's giving it away. He couldn't sell it.
Grant Wood:I thought about a brew to put under this honey. You know, wheat ales come to mind. Honey wheat made sense Again from a lot of the things I'd learned from my time at Sam Adams. I felt like it can't just be honey, it's going to need something else. And we sort of had an idea, you know, from wit beers frankly from Belgian wits, where, where you have this spice and a citrus. Because of the color of the honey, I think I gravitated to blood oranges. It just looked like cut up a blood orange and that's what it looks like. It was fortunately again blood orange season, so I was able to get some blood oranges, get the zest off of them, thought of another couple of spices to go in the beer, kind of a warm pumpkin spice almost, but those sort of warm fall spices you know, made this brew and I was trying to think of what to call it and I thought, well, blood oranges and honey. I'll just call it project blood and honey and I write it on my board.
Grant Wood:One day Rhett comes in and he looks you know he's looking at the projects that I'm doing and he points at the blood and honey. He goes what is that? What's blood and honey? And I said, well, you know, remember, you know Mr Crisp's honey that he brought in. I made a beer with it with some blood oranges, and so I'm calling it blood and honey and Rhett goes. That is a stupid name that's never going to sell Never. So I just like kind of jabbing with Rhett occasionally if we're in public together. That's the one thing he was wrong about.
Grant Wood:He's right about everything else, but we get to ding him on that. And so, yeah, so Blood and Honey was born and it was interesting because, you know, I taste it, I really like it. I give some to Rhett, he really likes it. You know he's happy and on this one occasion his wife was hanging out in the office. She'd come by for something and I asked Jen. I said, hey, jen, you want to taste this new beer, blood and Honey? And she said, oh, you know, I'm not a beer drinker and I'm like I know good. And so she tasted it. She goes that's really good, I could drink that. That was kind of the first little inkling that we might have something here is that people that were not normally beer drinkers would gravitate to it because of the fruitiness and that very mild honey note that we ended up with, you know, and also the fact that it was 7 ABV. It was not an insignificant amount of alcohol inside of that beer.
Grant Wood:We had a couple of festivals that we were doing even before we opened. The one that I remember in particular was the North Texas Beer Festival. It was in May of 2012. And again, I'm brewing on a five-gallon system, so this is like just a step up from homebrew really, and processing the beers, getting them carbonated, getting them right, and our kind of debut was this North Texas Beer Festival in Irving. So we had this rudimentary setup. We had stickers, we had maybe a couple of hats, I don't even know I guess May. We barely got anything except beer.
Grant Wood:And so in this case we had brought Blood and Honey, we had a Bach, we had High Brass, I had a preliminary beer that I called Sidewinder. I think I just called it. I can't remember what I called it. Anyway, it was a agave lime beer with cumin in it. We called it Sidewinder eventually. And then I had a porter. We go to the festival, we're pouring beers and everybody's in the building man, I mean, it's run by a wholesaler or there's wholesaler involvement. So there's international beers, there's beers from everywhere. You know Sam Adams was there.
Grant Wood:We're pouring our beers and we walk around the building and we have the longest lines, we have the most persistent lines and people would get a beer, drink it, go back to the other line, come back, get the next one. They ran their way through all of them. Wow, towards the end of this event, there's a beer blogger named Scooter Hendon that was blogging about craft beer at the time and he came up with a videographer and they're kind of videoing people and doing this promotional bit. They came up to me and asked me if I would talk on camera. I was like yeah, okay. And he said we had this blood and honey and we've talked to a whole bunch of people in the line and this is the best beer in the building. We love this Blood and Honey and we talked to a whole bunch of people in the line and this is the best beer in the building. We love this Really, yeah, yeah. And I was like dang, okay, well, thank you, thank you for the approval, and so that was kind of the first indication that we thought that that particular beer might have legs. It's awesome. Yeah, we go to the Taste of Dallas in July. Again, blood and Honey was a big favorite, weirdly followed by the stout that I finally had, which we called Mother's Little Fracker, and it was another big favorite. With that in mind, we had to narrow down to three beers for our launch, and so we kept the blonde, the high brass. We made a Bach, six and a half percent Bach, a lot of Munich malt, and then Blood and Honey, and again.
Grant Wood:So Rhett and I went out into the world, starting in September. We sold our very first keg September 1st of 2012 and then started going out into the world selling beer and people just wanted it, wanted it back, all draft, and again at the time. It's the very beginning, really, of the true craft beer move making itself seen in Dallas and Fort Worth. And so we were the fifth, I think, to open. I guess it depends on how you count them, but at that time there was RAR in Fort Worth, franconia up in McKinney, deep Ellum had opened oh, okay, yeah, deep Ellum had opened, petacolis had opened, and then it was either I think it was Lakewood and then us, so maybe we were sixth. What ended up was really interesting and would be a cool market study if somebody would do it.
Grant Wood:So, with the introduction, franconia, they struggled, they were undercapitalized and they were selling their beer too inexpensively and they were just making German stuff which I don't think people were really catching on to. Rahr was here. They had been here for about eight years. They were struggling. Their number one beer, I think, at the time was a black lager called Ugly Pug and again, it's a great beer but people trying to get their heads around drinking something dark. And then when Deep Ellum showed up they kind of blew the whole thing wide open. John Reardon, he nailed it.
Grant Wood:The marketing very brash, very Dallas kind of the bad boy. They rode that to the bank. You know, dallas Blonde was kind of the blonde ale that you had to have Really. And so they got their spot on the wall with Dallas Blonde. They had some IPAs and stuff like that, but Blonde was their kind of their main driver. Yeah, michael Petikolis comes along. He makes this strong red ale, 9abv called Velvet Hammer. Yeah, strong red ale, nine ABV called Velvet Hammer. That was their beer. That got them on the walls.
Grant Wood:Very different, the Lakewood guys they made Temptress a stout, kind of a sweet stout, so that was the local stout. They got on on the wall. And then we came along with Blood and Honey, and we had the wheat ale a little stronger with spices and we got our spot on the wall. And so then it was kind of like now the rest of you guys are coming in Good luck. And so there was a very interesting time. I will again never forget that moment when we knocked a Sam Adams tap down which was down here in Granbury. They had Oktoberfest on at the Hofbrau Steakhouse down here, and when we were making the delivery, rolling some blood and honey in, on the whiteboard by it it said no more Sam Oktoberfest, blood and honey, in big letters. That's wild. And I was like hmm, it's a full circle moment.
Grant Wood:Yeah, yeah, I was like oh, man, okay.
Scott:So when I was doing research on blood and honey, I Goog. I was like, oh man, okay. So when I was doing research on Blood and Honey, I googled Revolver in quotes, and then Blood and Honey in quotes, and what popped up was not beer and I don't know if this copyright infringement issues, but what popped up was a Winnie the Pooh movie about murder. Are you familiar with this?
Grant Wood:Yeah, yeah. Well, I've never seen it because I don't really, but someone sent that to me. I was like, oh my God, that's going to be, yeah, with Pooh and Piglet out doing murder, yeah.
Scott:Hatchet style murders and I was like what the hell is this? So I started scrolling. It has a sequel. Yeah, Blood and Honey. So I got something to do tonight I'm going to watch some Winnie the Pooh murder scenes.
Grant Wood:Some slasher horror, oh man.
Scott:And I guess Pooh and Piglet are badasses too. I guess they really do chop some people up. Yeah, let me know how it goes. I'll post a review on Facebook. So you do so well. And then all the big guys start acquiring small regional crapperies, and Revolver becomes one of them. How?
Grant Wood:did that come about? Yeah, it was kind of crazy, and again kind of comes back to Sam and Jim Cook, kind of. So it's 2015. We've launched. We're still in liftoff mode. We're doubling our volumes almost on a yearly basis, wow. So from the time we started in 2012 to fall of 15, we're creeping up on 20,000 barrels a year. Wow, in about three years. That's amazing. Yeah, I still can't believe it. Building the brewery, putting more tanks in, we're expanding capacity as fast as we can. We've launched in bottle. We're kind of out in the market and so things are going great. Just, we're one of the fastest growing breweries in Texas, if not the United States. Yeah, definitely. We've been going to the Great American Beer Festival, so this will be our third year. I'm judging that year and I get an email from Jim Cook, really Kind of out of the blue.
Grant Wood:He goes are you in Denver? And I'm like, yes, yes, how can I help? He says have you got time to meet? And I'm like, absolutely, you tell me where and when and I will be there.
Grant Wood:Sam used to do the rare beer tasting that was done outside of the hall and Jim was at that. He was slinging Utopias, and so he takes a break. We go outside and he says to me you know, I hear your brewery is doing really well. And I'm like, yes, sir, it is Thanks. And he said has anybody talked to you about acquiring you? Have you thought about selling your brewery? And I guess I kind of stepped back. I was like no, frankly, I've been trying to figure out how to make more beer, build a brewery. I hadn't really, we haven't talked about that. And he goes wow, okay, well, you might think about it, you might shop yourself or you know, just be open to the fact, because he said the big boys are hunting. You be open to the fact. Because you said the big boys are hunting. You know they're buying little breweries and a little like right after this discussion, carbock would announce that they were being acquired by abi.
Grant Wood:I go to rat and I said, hey, I just had this conversation with jim cook and he's like was he making us an offer? And I did ask jim. I said is this? Yeah, what are you talking about? Are you? And again, the thing with the hair, he goes no, grant, uh, I can't afford you. And I was like what you can't afford us, that's. I was like okay, calculations in my head how the hell do you? Well, it's, it's really hard to value a growing brewery like that or a growing business like that, because you know what's the future earnings.
Grant Wood:Yeah, so I go back and talk to rhett and I'm like, what do you think he goes? Well, I guess you know, let's, we can try to talk to somebody and put together, uh, you know, just to be ready, and I'm like, okay, yeah, and so we're at the booth, we're at this is 2015, we're at the booth, um, and the way we usually had it set up is red, or I was was behind the table. We're pouring beer and Ronnie Rhett's dad would be just trolling the aisle in front of our booth and he would snag people and drag them over to the booth and make them taste our beer. He's sort of a relentless old man. Grabs this one guy and he drags him over to our booth and says you should taste the beer. And that guy was Dick Leinenkugel, really Just randomly.
Grant Wood:Yeah, and Scott Whitley was in tow with him and he was the head of mergers and acquisitions for 10th and Blake, the arm of Miller Coors.
Grant Wood:He goes oh yeah, we've been looking for you guys Really. Yeah, you want to talk and we'll come down to Granbury if you want to talk about maybe a partnership or you know it's coming together and Rhett's like sure, come on down. You know, and they did so in November of 2015,. We met.
Grant Wood:I had our first meeting with the M&A group and, in typical Rhett fashion, rhett is a really, really smart guy. I respect and admire him a great deal. I like him a lot. He's a relentless negotiator.
Grant Wood:Warning to the world don't go into negotiations with Rhett Kiesler because he will drag you down. You know, like just bears down, keep shaking until you give up. Seriously, he negotiated with them for months and in fact, walked away from the deal once, and then they came back and then finally we came to an agreement. And so almost a year later this was September of 2016, finally came to an agreement and signed the deal for Miller Coors to acquire Revolver. Yeah, so I think it was like September 9th somewhere around there of 2016 when we made the announcement and kind of began that three-year process. It was a three-year deal. There's an equity payout at the beginning, which kind of relieves all the external investors. And then Rhett and Ryan and I held on for another at least three years while we kind of grew the business, and so there'll be a three-year at the end of business payout based on volume of sales. Wow, wow.
Scott:And then you retire and you start traveling the world.
Grant Wood:Well, the whole retirement piece. I don't know if you remember, but since the deal closed out at the end of 2019, kind of go through the paperwork, kind of finish off the agreement and everything was paid out to Rhett and Ronnie and I around the 1st of March of 2020. Remember March of 2020?
Scott:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Grant Wood:With the discussions with Miller Coors, we decided to stop the brewery tour on like the second weekend or the first or second weekend of March. It was like we were a week early because then everything shut down the following week. Yeah, it was the big thing that came out from the federal government and said you really shouldn't be open if you don't have to be and keep minimal staff and stuff like that and there was a whole essential workers thing Anyway. So I worked a lot from home. I would go to the brewery once or twice a week, stayed away through that whole summer and then finally, towards July, my assistant brewmaster transferred out. He went up to Milwaukee and I had to go back in the brewery. So I took back over the day-to-day operation around July of 2020 and then went in search of a new VP of ops or head brewer and eventually found it, but it took a while Completely separately.
Grant Wood:Rhett and I decided to go ahead and depart. They hired in a new GM or president of Revolver. Rhett left in September. We finally found a guy to take over for me who we hired in mid-October, and then I retired. I'm going to put that in quotes. So I left Revolver around my birthday right before Thanksgiving in November of 2020. Retired sort of.
Scott:So then you're just hanging out, chilling out, and then randomly you get a call about some non-alcohol beer. Is that what happened?
Grant Wood:Well, there's a three-year gap in there where I did some traveling and did some consulting with New Zealand Hops and a local brewery here, wild Acre and Bishop Cider. The guy that owns Bishop Cider bought up a couple breweries here and then consolidated them all in Fort Worth and so I helped him a little bit with that kind of consulted on that. I got a call November of last year November of 23, from a guy named Gary Moore who I had worked with. Gary had been the brewing manager at the Lehigh Brewery for us and he left and has done a couple of other things since then. But he had gotten a call from this guy who wants to start a non-alcoholic beer company and he goes. I can't do it right now. I'm in the middle of this thing and I really can't feel like I can leave. He goes. I can't do it right now. I'm in the middle of this thing and I really can't feel like I can leave. He goes. But when he was asking for a brewer and somebody that could formulate, I thought of you I know you're retired, but do you want to talk to him? I'm like sure I'll talk to him.
Grant Wood:So I got a call from a guy named John Herman. He had been CEO at Nutribolt C4 Energy and had helped expand that business exponentially and had left at that time, two years ago, and was looking for his next opportunity. He got approached by a venture capital company in New York who had partnered with, at that time, an unnamed to us celebrity to create a non-alcoholic beer brand. So they hired John, skilled operator and CEO, and he went around looking for people. So he called Gary, really, I think, through a LinkedIn search, and then Gary passed him to me. I talked to John. He told me what they were wanting to do. This is something that I'd wanted to do. I'd wanted to make a non-app.
Grant Wood:It's interesting to think about this because in 2018, we had already been acquired by Miller Coors. I'd gone to Craft Brewers Conference but I went into a seminar that was talking about trends in brewing, what's the future look like, what's generating interest globally and et cetera. And even this 2018, this was talking a lot about non-alcoholic beer, how this guy felt it was the wave of the future. I turned to my friend, jeff Cornell, who was sitting next to me at the time, and said hey, what do you think of this? And he's like I agree completely. And I said me too. I think this is a great growth opportunity.
Grant Wood:People want something like this that's craft, tastes like beer. If they can, they can go kind of moderate with this If they're drinking back and forth. You know, we we we were just generating all these ideas about it and we talked to people in management and Miller Coors where we could, and no one was interested in this at the time 2018, and that group was a non-starter. It was all about seltzer. Well, I guess I won't get to do that, you know, okay. And then when John calls up and says, hey, have you done this? And I said, kind of, I did a little trial stuff over at Wild Acre, tried a couple of techniques, but there's really no interest there. Got an idea how to do it, love to try. And he's like, well, I understand, you're retired, do you want to consult? And I said, well, I'd go back to work full time. You know, just make me an offer. He did. I did. You know, again, with the wife's permission, always ask permission.
Scott:Well, she seems to know what she's talking about most of the time, so yeah, she does.
Grant Wood:Yeah, just a great sounding board and she's again. She's like I know you want to do this and I know you're bored, why not do it? Yeah, you're 60. So there's no good reason to retire.
Scott:Yeah.
Grant Wood:Yeah, so I jumped in. Didn't know who the celebrity was. It was Tom Holland.
Scott:You did know.
Grant Wood:Yeah, I did know, and it was like okay, you know, they have capital, they've got this guy. They've got this guy's girlfriend, who's even more famous than him. Yeah, the smart John Herman, really smart guy, why not make a run at it? Yeah, and so we did.
Scott:And then Bureau Brewing was created.
Grant Wood:Yeah and uh, and I got to see it was that. To me it was also an education. Um, I'd never really. I mean, we built the brand revolver, obviously, but red had, like fully formed ideas. He was the guy you know. He had a vision. He was able to execute that.
Grant Wood:Yeah, this is a little different, where you've got Tom, who has his own ideas and the way he sees things and his own ideas about design, and then John, who's been in the consumer product business for a long time.
Grant Wood:He's got ideas about how things are supposed to work, and me I've got my own ideas.
Grant Wood:And so the kind of interesting thing is about how, using resources, using other companies that do marketing and brand creation, and watching some of them work and how they ideate and they created the ideas for these brands and from colors and imagery and icons and all that kind of thing, and to kind of watch that all come together.
Grant Wood:That's, you know, beer brewing is easy in comparison to that sort of stuff, that trying to mold all these ideas to bring them together and make everybody like them, you know, and get to agree on the way that a brand ethos is supposed to be launched from the get-go, and so you know there were we looked at a couple of different concepts, so I think there were four kind of final concepts that the management team worked through and they they picked Bureau uh, for good reason, I mean, it's it's simple word, it rhymes with other cool things. Uh, we took some elements from some of the other branding and probably kind of brought that into Bureau and fleshed it out. But yeah, watching that creative process was really cool and I think you made the right decision.
Scott:Yeah, it's interesting, I've never, you know, we've been in the beer industry for, you know, 20 plus years, both of us plus years, both of us, you obviously far longer I've never seen a launch of any beer as meticulously done, just so well done, and granted, a lot of the companies don't have a celebrity spokesperson right off the bat, but I mean just from every TV show that it's been on Good Morning America and Seth and Jimmy Fallon, and you've gotten to be part of that. How crazy has that been for you?
Grant Wood:Yeah, it was madness, yeah, and again you nailed it. Jackie Widman, who's our VP of marketing, just crushed it Absolutely, in coordination with our PR teams, tom's people, the Bureau people, the Imaginary Ventures people just felt seamless and just hit all the high notes. We've gotten a lot of compliments from people you know, industry veterans who've seen you know that was the smoothest, coolest, most powerful launch they'd ever seen. And I have to agree, I've seen a few at the Sam Adams days and this was just like you know, just overwhelming almost.
Scott:So for the folks out there that aren't really familiar with it and I'm not 100% familiar with the process either either, how do you make a non-alcoholic beer?
Grant Wood:yeah, we'll get to get in the technical weeds a little bit, um.
Grant Wood:And so when you look at making non-alcoholics, there's three different ways, I think. Okay, one way is to and this is the oldest way, frankly is to take a standard beer, whatever strength it is, and you run it through something called a vacuum still okay and it boils the beer under. A vacuum reduces the pressure on the beer, so it'll boil at a much lower temperature, like, instead of 212 degrees maybe 72 degrees Fahrenheit. What that does is it boils the beer, the alcohol and some water vaporizes off and that gets collected in a receiver and then the stuff that's left behind the sugars, proteins, all that sort of stuff is then collected and then diluted back and carbonated. So the alcohol is removed through the use of heat. You can dilute that back, carbonate it, add things and it'll make a non-alcoholic beer Cool. That's one way, um. The other way is to run it through something called a molecular filter, um, where you run it through the super duper fine filter that lets only molecules, tiny molecules, through, like water and alcohol. The water and alcohol pass through the membrane, the retentate, the beer is held behind and again the same thought collect that and then you can, uh, dilute it, carbonate it, add hop flavors and, uh, you've created a non-alcoholic beer. And those are the ways to get to zero, zero. Okay, right, that's your reducing all the way down.
Grant Wood:And the other way, which is the way that we chose, is to use a yeast and to brew at a weaker wort level, like a low sugar level, and then you ferment the wort with this special yeast. It's called a maltose negative yeast and it only makes a little bit of alcohol, and so you make about 0.5% or just under, and it runs like regular beer. It's a much quicker fermentation. You don't have to age it very long, and so you do a fermentation cool the tank, clarify, make your ads carbonate, dilute if you need to. To make sure that you're legal, you're staying under 0.5% alcohol by volume and you're good to go. And we chose that way, the maltose negative yeast, and it does a great job. And what I really like about it is you're not applying all this force to the beer in the form of sheer forces or in. Even the application of moderate heat can do things to beer. Yeah, boiling it off, you're stripping a lot of the essences and characters of the fermentation.
Grant Wood:Um, there are ways to put them back, but I didn't feel like it was the optimal way yeah it's a way, and in some ways it's a good way, but for what we're doing to try to get those flavors, the delicate pieces of of that, to stick around, I thought it was important that we go this sort of simpler way. And the other thing that benefits, that is, I can make it in any brewery. I don't need a specialized piece of equipment to make it happen. Fortunately, my idea seems to have worked. Beers I really like them. I'm very happy with the formulations that we've achieved.
Grant Wood:A little nod to Tom Holland. He knew what he wanted and would taste critically and has learned a lot about beer and beer making, and he's kind of embraced that too, and he's super happy with the beers. My job is to make beers that people want to drink. It's not to make beers for me, though I do like to drink beer, but the goal is to make beer that people are going to want to drink. A lot of people are going to want to drink.
Scott:Yes, yes, um, just so everyone probably should know. But tom holland, known for playing the character spider-man peter parker in the marvel cinematic universe, I do have one question about that. Okay, um, I don't know. If you can answer, maybe you can guide me. Is there any way that he would let me be in a marvel movie? I could play any character.
Grant Wood:There's a long line of people in front of you I think I could play like the blob.
Scott:He's like a character, he's like big fat guy. I think I could play the big fat guy if you need a big fat guy uh, no well, I'm sure we could find something more creative than that okay, I can get down to weight too, like whatever.
Scott:Whatever it takes, yeah, no, he seems like such a great. I've watched the interview that he did with Jimmy Fallon on the tonight show. I watched the one with Seth Meyers. Uh, seems to get great guys really invested in this and, uh, invested in non-alcoholic, you know, as a lifestyle in general, which is great for him too.
Grant Wood:Yeah, and the you know he has his own sobriety journey and, uh, it's genuine and legitimate. He's a man under a ton of pressure. You know um as a public figure, as a celebrity. I think he realized that, uh, you know, drinking was not working for him and that's a great choice for him, yeah. But the other thing is he doesn't he's not judgy about the whole thing. He's like this is me. I want to make beer for me and for people like me, and also for people that are not like me, like this guy, grant Wood.
Grant Wood:I still enjoy beer, I still have a glass of wine, I might have a cocktail, and the really cool thing about Biro is that it switches back and forth seamlessly. If you're just enjoying the evening and maybe you're at a place where you feel like I don't want to get any more tipsy, I don't want to have that effect Crack open a bureau. Or maybe it's a school night, you're watching Monday night football and you've got to work on Tuesday. You want to drink some beers and eat snacks and watch football. It's perfect, because then you wake up the next morning. It's like man, I had four bureaus, I am fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's, it's just another option for people that are out there having a good time, and what I try to say is it's beer, yeah, beer that doesn't have a lot of alcohol in it, but it's still beer, yeah so you're producing now um your contract brewing, I believe.
Scott:Is there plans to plans to build a brick and mortar, or is that too far down the road?
Grant Wood:That's a ways down the road. Jim Cook proved this model. We're going to embrace that for quite a while. I do think at some points there will be a thing sort of like the Jamaica Plain Brewery where there is a brewery, it's done primarily for research and development. There'll be a tap room. That is within the realm of possibility, I think. I think the real question would be where would you put it? Yeah, we launched nationwide. I'm sure that there'll be again, kind of in the way things launch is they tend to launch in the big cities where there's concentrations of people. And so we, you know, we launched in New York. You know, could it be in New York, I guess. Could it be in California? Yes, who knows? I just that is a ways into the future, but not out of the realm of possibility.
Scott:It's nationally launched, or is it just in select markets still?
Grant Wood:If you have access to the internet and your state laws allow you to ship non-alcoholic beer to your house, then it's available. Oh okay, all right. Yeah, there are a few states where that's not legal. I'm not sure which ones. I think Georgia is one of them. Yeah, if states are open for receiving, then you can order it Okay.
Grant Wood:It doesn't fall into the three-tier system, then you could probably do it like soda essentially, yeah, you could, so we can stand outside the three-tier system again, because it's not alcohol, okay, and you know we're going direct to consumer now. But we want to be in distribution. We want to have distribution partners. We've got a guy named declan who is our vp of uh sales and distribution and is rapidly, as fast as he can bringing distributors on board so we can be in market. We can be on premise, you know, as well as off premise.
Scott:Yeah, if it's anything like anything else you've done, it's got to be amazing. I'm not just blowing smoke up your ass. You're seriously one of the best brewers probably in the country. Thanks, kyle. I've had tons and tons of your beers, as my waistline shows.
Grant Wood:Well, yeah, man, I'm not the skinny dude I used to be, Unfortunately none of us are.
Scott:None of us are, grant. This has been awesome. Thank you so much and I wish you the best of luck, the best of success with Bureau. It's such a great concept. Really looking forward to trying it and seeing it out there and seeing your mug on the TV shows all the time. That's very cool too and continued success with Bureau and with Tom and everything. Congratulations again.
Grant Wood:Thank you so much, Scott. It's been a blast catching up. Take care.
Scott:Yeah, it absolutely has. All right, take care of my friend.
Grant Wood:I didn't even tell you the whole story about moving to Boston and not seeing her naked for six months so much snow. Is ridiculous, oh Lord, um yeah.
