By Dick Cantwell

Hopping Around

One of the best things about going to festivals is catching up with friends you may not have seen since the previous year. Once you've been around for a few years, in fact, you even get to the point where you talk about something besides beer-families, travel, aspirations-it's amazing what you can find out about people you've met under the banner of corporate conviviality. But naturally brewing is where the talk generally centers.

And of course there's usually news. Ours is an industry, after all, in which people have moved around a lot, owing to rapid growth and a proliferation of places to practice our craft. It's not uncommon for brewers of five years' experience to have worked for three or so different companies. I've worked for four. I don't know what the record is, but I do know that Erik Jefferts, now happily ensconced-at least as of this writing-at Phantom Canyon in Colorado Springs, has done professional time at five. You've probably heard the same jokes I have about how there should be brewer trading cards, listing the provenance and accomplishments of the various members of the guild, but who would buy them? Well, let's not get into that.

At any rate the word is usually passed conversationally, or simply by noticing a change of uniform. But it's easy to lose track, especially in places like Seattle or Portland or Colorado, where there are simply so many breweries that outside of the area the personnel changes aren't always apparent, especially when the faces in the gang don't change all that much. It can lead to embarrassment, as when a few years ago I was standing on the GABF floor with the guy I had not long before replaced as head brewer at a perennially medal-winning Seattle brewpub. I was trying to put the best face I could on the fact that for the first time in something like a hundred years nothing new and metal-plated would be borne home, when another friend of ours walked up and said, "No medals for Big Time this year, Ed. Wonder why?" He had intended a compliment to past mastery, of course, but when neither of us said anything he noticed the T-shirt I was wearing, remembered, and invited me to punch him in the face.

The brewery I had left to take over Ed's job at Big Time deserves special mention in this department, not only because they make great beer, and have won medals, but because of the many distinguished paths that have run away from it. I call it the Pike Place diaspora. Of the gang that worked at Pike Place Brewery during the two and a half years I was there, eight people now hold head brewers' jobs: Fal Allen, who was and is the head brewer at Pike; myself, at Elysian Brewing; Kevin Forhan, who now commands the Big Time operation; Jason Parker of Pyramid Brewing; Bones Jones at McMenamin's Roy Street in Seattle; Frank Helderman, our driver in those days, is preparing the imminent launch of Lunar Brewing in Seattle; Kelly Miess, our bottler, is heading up Jefferson State Brewing in Crescent City, California; and Shawn Loring, our weekend keg washer, is in charge of one of the Ram Corporation's Seattle brewing locations. And only recently off the list is Bill Jenkins, back from Ireland (and working at Pike again), where he was-what else?-head brewer for Celtic Brewing just outside of Dublin.

And that only begins to outline the incestuousness of the whole Seattle scene. Just of the above group, both Fal and Jason also worked for Red Hook, Bill was head brewer at Big Time between Kevin and me, Bones worked briefly at Elysian, and Kelly worked at both Pyramid and Elysian. We used to joke, in fact, that we had the makings of a brewers' labor pool, where on rolling out of bed the free and easy brewing-type could, with a phone call, be sent off to work one of any number of systems with which he or she was already fairly familiar. I probably shouldn't tell you this, but when Bill decided to leave for Ireland we all had a meeting to decide who should get the Big Time job. And we weren't even doing the hiring. Just for fun a while back Elysian and Big Time had a roving brewers day, where by the end of a particular brewing Friday each of four brewers had worked a few hours at each place in the course of brewing a cooperative pair of beers.

Bill having recently returned to Pike brings things full circle, which of course was kind of inevitable. A few years ago, opportunities were literally all around, and while it hasn't completely snapped shut, some highly qualified people I know have spent periods of several months unattached after having left a particular situation. I maintain that if a qualified brewer is willing to move, the jobs are there, but if roots are down in a specific spot things can be more difficult. Also, with all this movement, it simply stands to reason that people would eventually start to repeat. But of course circles don't always turn only once.