Tampa Bay Brewing Company Serves up a Change of Pace from Innovations Pub

So, Doug, you’re the Head Brewer at Tampa Bay Brewing Company’s ​“Innovative Brewing” Pub. From the array of styles you put out, it looks like you have a lot of flexibility in what you brew. We were interested in talking to you about that, and some of the vision behind what you do there.

We’re a 10-bbl brewhouse with five 10-bbl fermenters, and two 5‑bbl fermenters. It actually used to be our main production facility, where we had 40-bbl fermenters, 20s, 30s, a 40-bbl bright, our canning line, and the keg washer, all within its 800 square feet. We were doing over 3,000 barrels a year with just two brewers, so we got quite good at, well, fixing broken equipment and really honing in on our numbers when it comes to what beer needs to hit what Plato. Since then, we’ve built a production facility about 30 minutes away. That location handles all of our core brands, seasonals, and collabs with other breweries and hop farms.

When we opened the production facility, I worked the floor for about four and a half years, and then came back to the original space in Ybor City, which is now dedicated to R&D, pilot, and one-offs. You know, the fun stuff. When I moved to Tampa from New York, I came from working production in Brooklyn. I took the job consciously wanting to work in a smaller environment where I’m close to the customers. I’ve been back at the pub location now for four years. I bought a house, I ride my bicycle to work. That’s what I was looking for. That’s really my passion, the creativity and small batch stuff.

Your location sounds beautiful. And Ybor has a lot of cool history, which makes it kind of unique place to have a brewery. Does it also come with unique challenges?

The Ybor location is very tourism-driven. The production facility is definitely a more local neighborhood business. But in Ybor, we are in an entertainment area. Old Tampa. Tampa is considered Cigar City because of Cuban influence. At one point, a major percentage of all the cigars rolled in the world came out of Tampa, and a lot of them were right here in Ybor. A lot still are. Arturo Fuente is a huge name in cigars. Arturo’s shop is run by 4th-generation family members and he lives like four blocks away from my pub. He has a little house, a casita, that they sell their brands out of. His son is behind the counter. Right down the street is where all the cruise liners dock and we have a free trolley system, sort of like they have in San Francisco. There’s a stop right in front of my pub and one in front of the docks where the ships make port. A lot of people come from all over the world. 

So that being said, we kind of live and die by tourism at the pub. When you have a boat with 5,000 people and 4,500 of them get off, they may come to your place. When COVID happened, this location struggled. This whole area struggled. The way we handled things changed a lot. It was definitely more pared down. I went to focusing on multiple-beer consumption versus the idea of getting people to try four ounces of something. I still did the fun stuff, but not as much as I can now.

Tell us about the fun stuff you’re brewing. What’s an important element in your process when you’re coming up with something new to brew?

Well, I’m a big fan of whiteboards. So I have little whiteboards peppered throughout the brewery. One whiteboard I might use one week to put up different hop compounds and what aromas and flavors come from those, and then I’ll erase it the next week, and put up stuff for malt. Then I’ll do yeast and, you know — keep my academic mind going a little bit and try to reinforce the stuff I went to brewing school for. Then there are another two sitting on my desk. One is just ideas of beers. The other just has ideas of flavors. 

Then I usually look at a few different companies’ yeast banks. I tend to — whenever I want to do something really unique and fun — just immediately open up Omega. I think one of the reasons why is I like the way it’s laid out, so give whoever’s job this is a big up from me. Your own specially-named strains really catch my eye, and I can just go through the list easily. 

Yesterday I brewed with Sundew. I’d never brewed with it before. So, like that; I’ll find something that stands out to me and read about it. I’ll see, okay, this has some strawberry vibe to it, cool. Then I’ll reach out to the Omega crew for ideas and guidance. Specifically, I talk to Bill a lot. He was a brewer so I’ll ask him to tell me — not to sell it, but just brewer to brewer — he’ll explain the different nuances, where it comes from, and what you guys do to it. I start getting a ton of ideas of where to take it. I’ve ordered so many yeast strains from you guys that way. It just makes my job easier.

Having expert, brewing-experienced, approachable people available when you need us is something we work hard at. Another thing that’s super important to us is our R&D strains, so it means a lot to hear that that’s coming across well. What are some of the strains that have stood out to you recently? Are you playing around with anything other than Sundew?

I mean, the speed at which you guys are releasing new strains or strains that you’ve modified is keeping me interested in making new stuff all the time. So, please, continue to do that. 

I’ve used every one of your kveik strains, multiple times. Your Espe kveik strain, that was pretty neat: I used that in a New England style IPA, which was good. I enjoyed the profile before I dry hopped that beer, too, so I harvested and made a blonde ale with it. All I did was a couple of kettle additions just for some bittering units. I think, a bittering unit flame out, and then I just let the yeast be the star. It was one of my best selling blonde ales I made that year. It worked really, really well with the hop that I chose for it, Barbe Rouge, which is a French hop that has a lot of berry in it. The Espe strain and that hop work beautifully together with just a simple Pilsner grist. I’ve been thinking about maybe redoing that one. I try not to make the same beer twice but that one was really enjoyable. And it’s gonna start getting hot again down here pretty soon, so that’s a refreshing one to bring back.

I also started messing around with thiols and your new line of thiol-driven yeast. I went back and forth with Bill about precursors first, did some research, reached out to Scott Janish, too.

For the first one I landed on mash hopping with Cascade to get my bittering units, and then planned on throwing a little Mosaic in the boil. Bill confirmed I’d have tons of thiols with that. Then when I cropped that yeast for a second pitch and a different beer, I went with something Bill had told me about manipulating the thiol intensity by the amount of hops that you put into the beer. So, I decided to go with a more straightforward West Coast style and Instead of doing two pounds per barrel dry hop, I dry hopped a half pound per barrel. Cascade and Centennial, and I think a little Columbus for bittering. I mash hopped with Cascade, then dry hopped with a little Centennial and it kind of calmed those thiols down, but they were still there. They just weren’t in your face like in the first beer. 

I had both beers on draft at the same time. 

I think that means ultimately, that I could use the Thiolized® Chico strain that you have, Star Party, as a clean strain if you’re going to hop the crap out of it anyway. And crop it to make another beer that maximizes the thiols instead. If that works, that’s not even a tool but like a toolbox of ideas. And that’s just from one strain. That’s pretty neat.

You guys came out with the Thiolized lager strain, too, Lunar Crush. I haven’t gotten a chance to use it yet. So I’m like, man, this is going to be fantastic. You can make cold IPAs with this thing now. And it’ll be a monster. Fantastic. Love it.

You said you try not to make the same beer twice on the pub side. I know coming up with new beers is, like, what you do, but I’m always amazed how you can keep things fresh like that so consistently. What’s your take on that? Is it difficult to do?

I take a lot of notes. I have a spreadsheet that has every beer that I’ve made since I came back to this location. And in it is the beer, the name, the type of beer and then the style. Even the BJCP number that it would be if we were to enter it. I do the country of origin of that style, too. So, if I made a Piwo Grodziskie I would put it under Poland. It has got my batch numbers, the date of brew, the days fermented, and like, basically, all this boring stuff — but at the very end of it I have a process/notes column and if something works really really well, I’ll really jot down the notes on it there or on the brew log. That’s one way I can kind of keep track of what I’ve done and what works and what doesn’t. The country of origin makes me look into beers that come from different parts of the world that I might not really know. And makes me want to brew a beer that came from that area. Like Brazil. We’ve done a Caipirinha sour which is very similar to Florida weisse. It’s a fruited sour, which your Lacto blend is wonderful for.

We love that Lacto blend, too. When we were very small and growing, mostly by word of mouth, we used to call it a sort of Omega Yeast gateway drug because it got us a lot of customers. What about it is working best for you?

On my rig there’s no thermal control for heat. It’s either on or off, and I have to do everything manually. So the Lacto blend you guys have can be at basically a warm ambient temperature. And because I’m in Florida, where everything’s warm anyway, it’s great. I can cool my wort down in the kettle to somewhere around 80°F or 90°F and pitch it there if I want to boil it, or I can just throw it in the fermenter and knock out at 90°F. Then if I want to, I can add whatever yeast I want to the next day or so, after the pH has gone down and have something really cool and unique. 

The Lacto blend offers some fruitiness on its own, and then you pair it with a kveik strain or maybe Sundew, that I’m playing with now. I literally pitched Sundew yesterday. So I’ll tell you about that next week. It can be pretty fun to figure that out, or even just leave it alone, and just let it do its thing.

You mentioned kveiks. Is it their flavor and aroma profiles, or do you use them primarily for their production advantage, like is their speed the thing that draws you to them?

Speed obviously is a big advantage with kveiks. I always keep bricks of the dried Lutra around because I might get a request from our production facility for a beer and it might be a quick turnaround. If that’s the case, then I’ll be like okay, well that’s easy: Lutra to the rescue. Maybe something with the Buccaneers is going to happen and they want a lager. So instead of taking two months to make one you can throw in some Lutra, make a pseudo lager which has a beautifully clean profile, and makes a nice and light and a completely drinkable, wonderful beer. But for the most part, I don’t really have to worry too much about speed on my side of things.

You were talking about getting inspiration from other beer styles from other countries. And that your customers come from all over, especially because your location is so historic and it’s a port that brings in cruise ships full of people.

That’s right. Thinking about things that way just kind of forces me to go look stuff up and learn, which I absolutely love. We all know beers from America, Ireland, Germany, England, etc. But, you know, Japan has more than one style of beer. We all know about rice lagers, but there are other beers there that are wonderful. 

Before I was a brewer, I was also a distributor in New York, and one of my brands was Hitachino, which is a wonderful brewery out of Japan. And they made excellent beers. They had a white ale that they put ginger in. It was awesome. In Australia, Cooper’s brewery has wonderful sparkling ale. It’s pretty funny because it doesn’t look that great. It’s got a lot of protein floating around in it, but man, it tastes really, really good. Learning about the Piwo Grodziskie, the champagne of Poland — it’s a 3.2%, very effervescent, oak-smoked wheat beer. 100% oak-smoked wheat in the lauter is not very much fun. But man, it tastes good. Those things help me come up with different ideas for beers. I can make something very traditional, and as I’m drinking it later on, all of a sudden I’ll think, you know what could be really good with this, is if I did this and this and this. Yeast is often a big part of that.

In addition, I know you’ve also got saison, farmhouse, and maybe like some Brett barrel-aged stuff, too. You really do a little of everything.

Yeah, all within my little 800 square foot place. You name it. I’ve got some mixed-ferm stuff that I use a lot of Omega Yeast on, like some white wine barrels with All the Bretts. One barrel has a whole bunch of peaches to help bring out some of those fruity notes. I made a dark farmhouse ale that I use the Saisonstein yeast, and then added black currant in stainless steel and racked over to red wine barrels and inoculated with your Lacto blend, your All the Bretts, and then whatever cool dregs I could find whether it was Cantillon or there’s a great, great brewery in Chicago that makes wonderful mixed fermentation stuff.

How does the fun stuff integrate with what production does — are you trialing things at the pub to see what would be good for core production?

Production comes out with their yearly schedule of beers, core brands, seasonals. We have a set number of those that we all know and love. I’ll look at what they’re planning and then go in the complete opposite direction and come up with beers that are going to work with them, sometimes in contrast.

A great example of something seasonal I love working on that’s very Tampa – we have a festival down here in less than two weeks. It’s called Gasparilla day after a Spanish pirate. There’s a huge parade. Here in Florida and the Caribbean pirates were an actual real thing. Jose Gaspar was considered the last ​“Buccaneer.” He sacked the Tampa area multiple times and apparently he amassed a huge amount of loot, like $30-million worth of treasure. This is 200 years ago. So this guy was pretty prolific. The parade starts with ​“the invasion.” For this festival, if you have a boat, it doesn’t matter the size – it can be a yacht, it can be a canoe – you can invade Tampa Bay with the pirate ship. There are 1,000s and 1,000s of boats that do this, and it’s a big party.

I actually looked into what would be a common beer 200 years ago down here in this area. We had a lot of English, French, and Spanish immigrants. They were all typically fairly big beers back then. So like, the parti-gyle threesome: stock ale, barley wine, and old ale, they’re all quite similar to each other, but depending on where you were, you would blend these to taste. Some bartenders would blend them at the tap, some breweries would blend them to make one beer. 

I made a stock ale and then put it into rum barrels. Rum is made pretty regularly in Florida because we have sugarcane. To make it a little bit more spicy, and throw in some homage to our favorite pirate, Jose Gaspar, I threw in a bunch of Spanish cedar as well. 

When it comes to events to brew around, obviously Oktoberfest is also one of my absolute favorite things to do, too, because I went to brewing school in Munich and got to make a bunch of great beer. So, I love the classic clean styles. 

What is the balance between putting out accessible core beers and clean classics, and more diverse and playful beer styles, maybe some of which were never even planned to be great ​‘sellers’?

There’s so much out there and a lot of styles that people in our area haven’t even heard of. For example, I’m planning to brew a Kentucky Common in the next couple of weeks. On a personal level, I would love it if the first time anyone had that style came out of the pub that I brew at.

I just tapped a Baltic porter yesterday that I used smoked malt in and then back-sweetened with blackstrap molasses, which helps tame those smoky overtones. You still get it but it doesn’t punch you in the face anymore. It’s more raisiny, fig, prune…then the smoke just adds this layer of depth that people might not even realize is there until mentioned. I want to help people get their palates trained a little bit. To reach out to new things.

On the other hand, one of our most popular core beers, Reef Donkey, is over 70% of our total sales. It’s an American Pale Ale with some New Zealand Hops in it and some American hops. It’s nice and bright floral and fruity and tropical, and it’s delicious. It’s a beer, as a brewer, that I’ve had a million times and I still have no problem reaching for a pint glass on it because it’s just one of those beers. It’s a favorite. 

With the small batch stuff, some styles people won’t like and that’s fine. I’ll do five barrels of a Piwo Grodziskie because with smoked beers, you either love them or hate them. Most everyone thinks of smoked beers as like Schlenkerla​’s smoked Marzen, which is just straight up bacon. I adore that, but I know that it’s a little too powerful for some people. The Piwo Grodziskie is very, very, very light, and it uses oak smoke, which is actually sweet.

It’s a dance between craft brewers as a whole and our customer base. Very early on in my career, when I was selling beer, Sierra Nevada was my lead horse. I remember people thinking that that was too bitter. We laugh about that now because people’s palates have developed and they taste things differently. Now they can actually take those bittering units. That’s all education. And it was just all by word of mouth. 

Because the brewery is in our restaurant, I can hear my customers talking when they’re reading our beer list. When I hear stuff like, ​‘have you ever heard of a…?’ That’s when my ears perk up and I’m like, oh, okay, what are they gonna think about x, y, and z. They’ll eventually get a flight and try some things. They might not like something, but a lot of the times they do. There’s a lot of beer out there that I love. And I want to share that with people.

The more unique beers that I introduce at this location, the more this location gets known for something different. That creates a destination for beer lovers. And that’s one reason why we do this. To offer beers that we love to people who have never had them, or to people who absolutely love them and want more.

I saw that you won an award for best brewer recently!

Yeah, that’s funny. The newspaper is called Creative Loafing and it’s one of those hip newspapers that certain cities have, you know, like in New York it’s The Village Voice and in Kansas City (where I’m originally from) it’s The Pitch. Creative Loafing in Tampa has ​‘Best of the Bay.’ As a reader you can nominate somebody for like, best haircut or best tattoo, best Uber driver, whatever. For some reason, this year, I was nominated and won. Hopefully, it’s not my wife voting like every two minutes. It made me feel very good. And I hope that it has something to do with all the stuff we’re talking about here.

You mentioned your brewing school background in Munich, where you earned your Master Brewer diploma, and how you sort of cut your teeth on clean beers there. What’s your take on craft lager?

I think they had a stigma to them earlier on. Like, why would you why would you make a lager? The flavor profile is very focused, versus an ale, with all sorts of cool hops and stuff, which was sort of not what you did with craft at the time. You wanted the big complexity back in the day. 

But you had people who were either classically trained in another country or they just prefer that style, like the team over at Bierstadt. They have three malts and two hops, and they make all these different beers. They’re all classic, beautiful lagers. And they kill it.

Me, like lots of people in the industry I think, if I go to a brewery that is new or that I’ve never been to, the first thing I look for is a lager. If this brewer can make a good lager, everything else on that board should be good. You can’t hide behind a lager. It’s just as see through as possible. There’s a limited amount of ingredients. The process has to be on point.

I think we’re going to keep seeing more and more appreciation for the beers that are well made that are a little simpler. For example, kolsch is an absolutely gorgeous beer that’s very delicate. kolsches kill it down here because it’s 7 million degrees outside. I’ll see people order kolsch over a golden lager that’s right next to it. That tells me that they know what they’re going to get with that kolsch and they like something about it. That something about it is probably the yeast strain, because let’s be honest, the kolsch strain is the star. I made an Altbier last year and the amount of people who flipped out over it was crazy. People loved them.

I know you love all kinds of beers, including big, over the top stuff (with the right balance) because trying new things is exciting, but I think you also said at some point, at the opposite end of the spectrum, ​‘sometimes you just need to go have a beer and not talk about it.’ What are those beers?

I am definitely not a beer snob at all. I have no problems with what our macro friends do. They do it extremely well. If I’m watching a football game I might not want the Kentucky Common that I’m gonna make in a week, because I will dissect it in a way that a lot of people might listen to music. Like they’re talking about the lyrics or maybe the drum sound and acoustics, or what microphone was used here, and all that kind of stuff. Like, I bet I can name you the grain bill on this. This definitely has such and such hops in it, or that’s Columbus for sure, they kind of missed the mark on the water profile, etc. Sometimes you don’t want to do that, right? You just want to go hang out with your friends and drink a beer. 

Our customer base has accepted all these awesome new crazy beers that we’ve done. But now I wonder if more are beginning to look at that list in search for that lager?

Part of it is certainly that craft beer is quite young still. We had the original guys who resurrected classic styles and established craft, and they’d push it with hops. Like, Fritz Maytag who brought back a style of beer that used to happen all the time, steam beer. The industry went through this huge growth and had the need for more brewers. These newer brewers are learning recipes that are handed to them by the brewery that they’re working at and they learn how to brew good beer there, but they have this burning desire to be allowed to do beers that they want to try out. So next those people opened up their own breweries, and then their brewers would leave and open up their own brewery to go do something else that no one else has done. But now, I think we’ve gotten to the point to where everything’s gotten very, very close. As a patron, because there’s a lot of choice, why would you go get in the car and drive 15 minutes when you have quality beer two blocks away. And that’s the thing, that brewery two blocks away had better keep making really good beer because there is a lot of choice out there.

Think about it, a 21 year old customer has always had craft beer. I’m 50. I remember when Pete’s Wicked was a rare find. Craft beer was new and exciting and you had to really train your palate. People thought, too hoppy, bitter or too floral or maybe they didn’t like the big ABV of this barley wine that’s been sitting in barrels. But now guys who are 21 know all about this stuff and it’s nothing that different or new. They have grown up with all of it, and quality stuff.

Doug earned his Master Brewers Diploma from the Siebel Institute/World Beer in Chicago and Munich. Photos used in this article are courtesy of Tampa Bay Brewing co. @tbbc.beer and Doug Clark if not otherwise credited.