This is Beer in Front, part of the Oddpods media Network. Every week
i'll talk about a beer that maybe we've forgotten along the way while we get
those check ins and badges. Some weeks, i'll talk about a new beer
that has potential to be a classic. Being the Chicago beer Guy, I'll
also talk about great craft beer and craft beer news in the city of Chicago.
Remember, sometimes the beer in front of you is the best one yet.
That's Beer in Front, and it's coming up now. Welcome to episode
one hundred and sixty one of Beer in Front. I'm your host, Dave's
allatorus in. Beer in Front is a proud member of the Oddpods media Network.
I have a great show. This week. I talked to Jay over
at Walnut River Brewing in Kansas. That was informative, and yes, there
will be talk of a brothel. This week, I interviewed people from Montucky
Cold Snacks, Great Lakes Brewing, the Cicerone Program, and those shows will
come out in the next few weeks. I'll also be talking soon to Crook
at Hammock Brewing. They're out of Myrtle Beach. George Tomay. He's the
author of the book The shape of brewing, and I'll also talk with Barry
and Abigail from the Pops on Hops podcast. I just came back from vacation.
We were out in California. This was the first time I've been on
a plane since the pandemic. Between the pandemic and our Goofy Dog, I
haven't had a chance to go anywhere. It was nice to be in sunny
California for a few days for my mother in law's birthday. A few things
about California. What's up with all the crows? Everywhere where I went there
were crows. They were dark. I was expecting them to break out a
little remedy or anything else, but no, they didn't sing. Also,
I happened to be at a gas station buying beer and I didn't know.
I'm just looking at the counter killing time. California band menthol cigarettes. As
a former cool mild smoker, that's messed up. To the person who listened
to the podcast in the last month. From the state of Nebraska, thank
you. Beer in Front has now been listened to in every state. Also
to those in Portugal, Singapore, New Zealand and Paraguay. Thank you for
listening. If you'd like to support the show. You can head over to
patreon dot com slash beer in Front for more information. Thank you. In
beer news, Oscar Blues is revamping the look of the iconic Dale's Pale Ale
as well as coming out with the new Dale's Light Lagger. We'll see how
that shakes out. Sales of the new Sam Adams and the new Fat Tire.
After an initial bump, they haven't picked up like they've hoped. Speaking
of relaunches, ConA Brewing is separating its Big Wave from the rest of the
line, and Big Wave gets a new logo, packaging and is now going
to compete in the premium beer category. Long story, but I have the
old ConA Brewing tattoo and I'll be sad to see the lizard go away from
Big Wave. But wait, there's more. Hawker Shore is joining the new
logo trend by releasing a new packaging and logo for Get This, a more
updated look that will appeal to new traditions of drinkers. Cincinnati's Rhineeist Brewing they're
teaming up with the University of Cincinnati for a new Cinse Light Lagger, a
portion of Cincy Lights. The sales are going to support the nil efforts of
Cincinnati Bearcat student athletes. So a beer will help fund eighteen year olds to
get a name, image, likeness, money, compensation to play sports.
I don't get it, but who am I? I mentioned on the show
a few weeks ago that there could be a Purdue Beer canned chicken beer.
Well it's official now, Purdue the Chicken Company. They're partnering with New York
based Torch and Crown and this is a summer ale with Citra hops and seasonings
like time pink, peppercorns and rosemary to enhance the flavors of the chicken as
well standalone as a beer to enjoy. So I guess you could head over
to Torch and Crown or Purdue's website to see if you could get your hands
on the beer can Chicken beer locally here in Chicago. Choose Chicago in partnership
with the Illinois Craft Brewers Guild. They announced the launch of the twenty twenty
three Chicago Friday Night Flights. It's going to open this Friday, June second,
in Gallagher Way in Wrigleyville. There's going to be over thirty breweries from
neighborhoods across the city Food. There's a DJ now. I'm going to be
at this one Friday, so if you're in the wrigley Field area Friday between
five and seven, look for me. But there's also another session later on
the day. You could get tickets in advance for twenty five dollars or thirty
dollars at the door. That's going to include ten three ounce beer samples.
A haunt of breweries here. They all look great. I don't want to
list them all goes. It's a quick show. I don't talk that long,
but there is a lot of great breweries across the city and state,
so please check out Chicago Friday Night Flights dot com. I'm Richie aka Midnight
Agent Raw. I'm Devin aka Special Delivery Dev. We're the Supermedia Bros.
Podcast and each week we give a comedically informative take on movies, music,
television, pro wrestling, and much more. Check us out at Supermedia Bros
podcast dot Com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else that you can
listen to podcasts. Shades on We're off. Be sure to catch the latest
from Supermedia Bros. Wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, welcome,
Walnut River is a brewery located in El Dorado, Kansas, with a restaurant
and brew pub in which it's all. They began operations in two thousand and
thirteen, and in July, Walnut River will celebrate their tenth anniversary. Coming
on now to talk about Walnut River is j Sanderson. He's the head of
sales. Jay, thanks for coming on in an early tenth anniversary to the
brewery. Well, thank you, Dave, And I must say before we
start, I really really enjoyed the podcast. I was turned onto it not
too long ago by a friend and I actually it seems like almost counterintuitive,
counterproductive, but I listened to the podcast when I'm working out, so I'm
thinking about my reward at the gym while I'm getting in my workout. So
thank you. Yeah, Well, most most gym show the food Channel or
something while you're working out, so it's good that you're listening about beer.
Yes, sir, How did you guys start the brewery? How did that
come about? So the brewery, it's actually kind of an interesting story.
So we have three principal owners and they're in the building every day. We're
a small company. We're actually the second largest brewery in the state of Kansas,
and there are eight of us who worked their total. So we get
after it with a small crew. But the three owners, a guy named
BJ Hunt, Travis Rohberg, and Rick Gearing are the owners. BJ Hunt
was his career was he ran a family business. It was a daycare center
that had two hundred and fifty children in it. Rick was a corporate IT
guy for a long time, and Travis was in pharmaceuticals and the ethanol industry.
He got a degree in microbiology. And so BJ wanted to open up
brewery in Wichita, and he didn't know anything about brewing, but he had
a friend who did and hooked him up with Rick and they got together one
day and he said, yeah, all try the beer. And they got
together and Rick had been a homebrewer for thirty years and had a dream of
owning a brewery someday also, and so they got together. They BJ sampled
some of Rick's homebrew stuff and as we say lovingly at the brewery, this
doesn't suck. That's kind of that is high praise at our place. And
BJ said, yeah, this beer doesn't suck. And so they started to
launch a business plan and then not long after they started that plan. Travis
got involved kind of just coming around helping out. He also was a homebrewer,
so he got involved slowly but surely, and then after a short amount
of time saw that this was gonna probably be successful. Invested in the company
in its early days. And that was ten years ago, and we are
now just smooth sailing here ten years later. Awesome. The building that you're
in now, looking at the website, the building itself could be a whole
episode by itself. The building opened up around World War One. In between
then and now, it's been a bakery, a creamer, a market,
and a brothel. Yes, and so it's a two story building. As
you mentioned, it's more than a hundred years old. And in the early
days it first opened as a grocery store, and that was on the lower
level. On the second floor there was a much more sordid operation going on.
A woman named Goldie operated her brothel upstairs, and for years and years
the police left her alone. She was open from basically World War One through
World War two. At that time, Elderado was almost as big as Wichita,
and in fact it was a far wealthier town than Wichita because the oil
boom in Kansas was centered in Elderdo, and so at the time Goldie's service
was two dollars, and a similar service in Wichita was just one dollar.
Because it was wealthier money, wealthier people out in Elderdo, and so the
market was a little higher out there. But the po local police left her
alone because they were far more We're worried about gambling rings and prohibition behavior down
on the first level, and so the police left Goldie alone and she did
her thing for all those years. Any chance of a Goldie's Golden Ale coming
up soon, we have discussed that a number of times. Modern sensibilities are
a smitch different now and so's it has come up where it's not a complete
no, But we just haven't found the right scenario to launch that beer yet.
Yeah, when initially Ben now he's the marketing person, he got a
hold of me and was saying that your flagship beer is an Irish red and
I'm actually drinking war Beard right now. I love Irish reds one of my
favorite styles. And actually when I make my corn beef around Saint Patrick's Day,
I always get in Irish red beer. So Ruby, my wife.
If you're listening and you see a debit card charge at a gas station in
Kansas. Just let it be. It's research and development. How did how
did Irish Red become your flagship? Well, in the initial days of the
brewery, that was not the beer that they had intended to become the flagship.
So Rick wanted to have a California Common being the flagship beer. But
as most people in business find out, you don't decide what your flagship is
the market does. A couple of things happened with war Beard. One,
as you're sampling it right now, it's a damn good beer. It's just
the liquid is fantastic, it's smooth, it's easy drinking, it's it's just
it hits, I mean, the maltiness. It's just on point in every
way possible. That And if you look at the can, the can art
is fabulous. It's it's just beautiful. And when you see that sitting on
a shelf, it stands out. Yeah. Really, So at that time
when when when the brand was launched, it was just a perfect confluence of
everything happening all at once. There was no Irish Red really on the market
outside of maybe like Killions, and that's kind of even dissipated a little bit
in the United States also, and so in Kansas, it's the only Irish
red that is packaged and sold, and we have distribution in Kansas and Missouri,
and it does well in Missouri. Also, your Chicago guy, you
can get it in Saint Louis. If you're ever in that area where we
do really well in Saint Louis, Yeah, take a drive down and pick
some up. That's exactly right. So one of the things that really made
it go well early was it was there was some scarcity to the product in
the early days. The brewery now is on a thirty barrel brew system,
but it originally started just on a modest two barrel system and we actually still
have that and use that as our pilot batch system. But in the beginning,
the the guys they kept their full time jobs and would just brew on
Sat. Friday, nights, Saturdays and Sundays, and they would triple batch
into a seven barrel fermenter. And so they were serving beer in the back
of a flea market, which is where the brewery is now. It was
a flea market right before it turned into the brewery. But they were just
serving it out of a kegerator just into growlers and crowlers to go. They
were they didn't have any on premise consumption or anything like that, but they
went through it quickly because it became well known and popular that people liked it.
And then their first they got a bar in Wichita to take it and
sell it. And the first night they sold through a keg in like an
hour and a half on a night that they had a concert. And then
words started to spread. And so you put in the scarcity of a really
good product with the popularity of it and the cool marketing, and the brand
just exploded. Everything happened in the right place at the right time, and
then Walnut River Brewing was established, and then we've launched the other flagship brands
since then. But war Beard is what keeps the lights on. It kept
them on then and it is absolutely the cash cow, so to speak.
And really war Beard is the number one selling locally made craft beer in the
state of Kansas, and we're very, very proud of that. Yeah,
it's an excellent beer. I'm having it right now. Very good multi profile
here, that's the first thing that I get looking at the specsheet here.
Only five and a half percent alcohol. This is easily crushable. You could
have this all year round. It's not just for Saint Patrick's Day when you
see a lot of the Irish shreds that come out. So this is definitely
a year round beer and delicious. It doesn't drink like a beer that color
you would suspect would drink. It's very very easy to drink. I see
people have this at the lake all the time, you know, I mean.
And yes, we have lighter offerings. We have a Coalsh, we
have a wheat beer, we have some summer beers. We do a rattler
in the summer. But war Beard is all reliable and it just it just
goes and goes and goes. Now, there is a segment of the of
the drinking market that doesn't buy it in the summer. They'd prefer to drink
it in the spring in the fall, but that's not what our market at
large does. It really does sell well year round. You were mentioning some
of the other beers you have. Are you seeing that you have five beers
that are available year round and you have an additional ten that are in the
yearly rotation. Besides what you mentioned, what other styles of beer does Walnut
River put out, So we do a six month seasonal coffee line. We
do a coffee porter called Devil's Blend Coffee Porter that has done in the fall
in the winter, and then we do Angels Blend Coffee coolsh in the spring
and summer, the Coffee Coalsh. This is the second year that we've done
that. We introduce that last year. The Devil's Blend Coffee Porter used to
be a year round beer, but it did kind of fizzle a little bit
in the in the warmer months, and so we pulled that back to a
six months and complimented that with the coffee cools and they've they both do beautifully.
In fact, the Devil's Blend is my favorite beer that we make at
the brewery. I like porters, I like coffee, and we do ours
a little bit differently than a lot of other breweries when they do coffee beers.
Um, we kind of have a proprietary method that we have developed that
I've not heard of anybody else using, and it keeps some of the astringency
and bitterness of the coffee out of the beer and it really smooths it out
a whole bunch and if you're ever able to get your hand on the Devil's
Blend. A couple of tips. It's really really good with pancakes and sausage.
It's just fabulous. So it's like on a Saturday morning, you know,
you're kicking around. I first had it we went camping and somebody offered
it to me with breakfast out on a camping trip. It was good.
And then the other way that it's just blissful is do a beer float and
put a scoop of vanilla ice cream in with the coffee porter and it is
just out of this world as a dessert. So those are our two coffee
beers. And then the rest of the seasons we do a Belgian tripell called
Maniacal Monk. We do a session ipa called day pass Our Rattler is called
Eliminator um so and that has there's a meaning to that. Zz Top is
Rick, our headbrewer's favorite band of all time. And if you look at
the high Beam, can it looks like the cover of the Eliminator album.
Yeah, I could definitely see that, yes, sir. And then uh,
the of course naming Elimon Rattler the Eliminator, that was a no brainer.
To do that. Our october Fest is our most popular seasonal. I
will put our October Fest up against anybody else's in the United States. We
do an imperial version of war Beard. Our Imperial Irish reddit is called more
Beard. And then we do a Russian imperial stout called Kuvalda, and Kuvalda
actually means sledge hammer in Russian and as an imperial stout, it is a
bit of a sledge hammer. And then the last beer that we release annually,
it's a short run and we do a really a kind of a limited
batch of it. But we run a homebrew contest every year and the winner
of that gets to come in and brew on our big thirty barrel system and
have their their beer sold in the market. So those are the ten seasons
that we have in addition to our five year rounds. When does this homebrew
competition run? Like? Is it open now? Can people send in entries
now? So what we do is we have a mug club at the brewery,
and mug clubs sign up day is always Black Friday, the day after
Thanksgiving every year, and so with our mug club we have we have seventy
five members at our main brewery and fifty at our restaurant in Wichita, and
you get to renew every year. We limited we cap it at that number,
but every year we'll have a handful of people who don't renew, and
so on Black Friday, don't announce how many there are available. And so
every year on Black Friday we have a line out the door at nine am
for people wanting to get however many available Mud Club memberships there are, and
so Black Friday has kind of become a big day for us. Even people
who don't get the membership. We still have food trucks out front and we
have kind of a little party to celebrate our town and our customers. And
so a couple of years ago we came up with this idea that we're going
to do this homebrew contest, and so we run it differently than everybody else,
and so we have it goes in two stages. We actually have a
brew Day where people can they reinvite them and they come to our facility and
in our parking lot they set up their homebrew equipment. We supply the water,
we supply electricity, but they bring their entire systems set up in our
parking lot and we have like a group brew Day, and it's kind of
become a festival for homebrewers. And we celebrate homebrewers because I started as a
homebrewer. Most everybody the brewery was a homebrewer before they got into the business,
and so we want to celebrate the heart of where we came from and
celebrate, you know, the craft beer community. You know, the DNA
is homebrewing, and we want to celebrate that. And so we run this
contest. So brew Day is Black Friday. We bring we open up our
taps in the building to them. They get to go out and kind of
have pores of you know, whatever they want of our beers while they're making
theirs. Then they take it home and ferment it, and then we bring
them back on us. We do it seven weeks later. We do it
the Saturday of Martin Luther King weekend because a lot of folks have that Monday
off, and we do that. We do a judging day where all of
it we employees the brewery and we bring in a couple of guest judges from
other local breweries to help judge. And while we're judging, all the entrants
bring their entries back and while we're upstairs in the office doing the judging.
All of those guys and gals are on the first floor basically having a big
bottle share part and so it's like it's become like a two day homebrew party
slash festival, and then we go down, we announced the winner, and
then everybody just kind of hangs out and it just becomes like a big beer
party. And so we do run our homebrew contest goal differently, so that's
in January is when the judging is, and we typically schedule the brew day
for early April to have the beer out into the market on May first.
The winner, they get their beers out in cans and it's all around like
the distribution area as well too. Yes, we do put it out for
distribution. So each year the winner can have a six pack or whatever he
wants sitting on his mantle as a trophy of his beer that he made that
has a label, a professionally designed label, and that's his keepsake in memento
forever. And it's become a really cool thing. We've never had anybody asked,
well, what's my code of the profit. And we don't make a
whole lot on this. We do it more as a labor of love to
give back to the homebrew community. We you know, we assume all the
risk in brewing the big batch and so but the winner they get to have,
they essentially help us design the label that goes out into the market.
Their name goes on it. I mean, it's a whole big package that
they receive, and then they come out on brew day, they come out
on packaging day, and they participate in the process start to finish, so
their hand is in it the entire time. And this year was the second
year we did that. The first year our winner was a black Ipa,
which was fantastic, and this year was it was kind of an off the
beaten path beer, but it was boy, it was delicious. It was
a fruit punch ale and it I mean, if you imagine Hawaiian punch as
a beer, that's exactly what this was. And it was out of this
world. And he did it entirely with hops. He didn't put any fruit
in it. He got the red color from using hibiscus, but the tropical
fruit flavor came from hops. And it was awesome. Oh. I see
for year or four of this, maybe doing a mix pack of all four
winners from the first four years. That's a cool idea. Yeah, I
know what, I'm gonna write that down because as we say in the building,
if you steal from a brewery, you've stolen twice. Yeah, everybody's
stolen somebody else's idea at some point. Yeah, so I'm gonna make a
note of that. We ought to kind of bring back those on like our
two barrel system into a small run of variety packs. That's a great idea.
Well, you know for payment, you could send a twelve pack my
way that we can do that. Yeah, you mentioned the distribution, Like
you said, you're big in Saint Louis, you're in Missouri. Are there
any other like states? I mean besides the two that you could get it?
Or do you do like mail order if people wanted to order your stuff
online? Well we wish we could. So what a lot of folks don't
know is Kansas, and this is a true story, was actually ground zero
for prohibition. Prohibition and Kansas was an active in eighteen eighty and it was
federally enacted in nineteen nineteen, So Kansas had a forty year head start on
the federal prohibition and then after the federal prohibition was repealed in nineteen thirty three,
Kansas held onto it until about nineteen fifty. So Kansas still has some
very very arcane liquor laws, including the inability to ship beer directly to customers.
And it's it's an unfortunate thing because people travel in here, they try
war Beard, they want to take it home or some of our other beers
we get. We get requests all the time to our email inbox for asking
us to mail samples, and we just can't do it. I wish we
could. I wish we could sell beer through the mail, because it would
it would open up a lot of different channels for us business wise. But
Kansas is a deep, deep red state and some of those uber conservative sensibilities
from the past are being held onto very rigidly. Yeah, well even Nooi,
which is pretty much a blue state. But we have the same laws
here where it was on the books for this session and I don't think it's
finally been voted on, But we have the same thing where breweries here cannot
direct ship to consumers. And yeah, like you said, that would just
open up a whole new revenue stream for you know, every small business it
really would, but it also would limit the ability for the governments to tax
it ship directly to customers, and Uncle Sam's going to get his piece of
the pie no matter what. What's funny is between state and federal taxation here
the government writ large in Kansas and the federals they make more money on a
gallon of our beer than we do, which is just insane. And what
about like here, I know between the distribute the distribution channels and the retailers,
you know, if you add them up, they make more than the
brewer. He does too, And that's okay because that's part of the three
tier system. And we are okay with that because we are distribute our distribution
network. We need them because we don't have the band power or the infrastructure
with trucks and whatnot to get everything delivered out to two different states. And
so we do rely on our distributors and it's a wonderful working partnership and we
are so so thankful for them because there are boots on the ground and we
have fantastic relationships with all of them. It's it's part of the business deal.
It's set up the way it is, and it works for us.
I know there are others who have more nuanced views of how the distribution all
works, but we're pretty happy with how that all goes. As we're finishing
up here and I'm finishing up my war beard. You mentioned in Imperial what's
the difference between the Imperial and the regular war beard. So we basically double
the grain bill when we make it. It's it's it's a little bit heavier
on the mouth field. It's so it's it's war Beard, it's our imperial
IRUs red it's called more Beard. And if you've got that little magazine that
I sent you, it's in the back of there. The description of it
is in there. But it's ten point one percent, whereas war Beard is
five point five percent. But it's so it's essentially the exact same grain bill
and hop editions, it's just doubled, and we do that in it's a
little bit smaller run that we do that. But also we do those are
most of our beards were six pack cans in cases, we do this in
four packs of sixteen ounce cans as opposed to six twelve ounce cans, And
so we want you to get more, you know, each time, And
so it is that's a brand that is kind of gained a cult following here
a little bit. People do say, hey, when's more Beard coming out?
This year, we re we adjusted when we release it. It had
previously been like a January February release. This year we shifted it back to
September, and the people who were waiting for like where is it, where
the hell a Dell's going on? And when it didn't come out in the
early part of the year. But now it'll create even more pull when we
let go of it in September. Oh awesome. Well, Jay, I
appreciate you coming on. I really enjoy talking to you. I have to
make a drive down to Kansas and pick some up. Is there anything else
you'd like to tell the people about your brewery that you know we didn't touch
on. Well, first of all, if you ever make it to Kansas,
give me a call and we'll make sure you get a private tour of
the brewery. It's not a big building, but since you talked about the
building, you've got to come see it. So if you're ever down toward
the Wichita, Kansas area for any reason, we would love to welcome you
and host you at the brewery. That would be a great time. You
know, we just check out our website Wallet River Brewing dot com. We
you know, we're just we're just hard working, blue collar guys that like
beer, that work hard, that have fun with what we do. We
don't take ourselves seriously. We take customer service seriously, but we feel like
we're just like every other average Joe out there who just likes to drink good
beer. Yeah. Well, and I'll vouch for their beer because it's all
great. If you listen. Later on in the show, I'm going to
have a few more of their beers and I'll talk more in depth about them.
But everything I've had so far that was delivered via carrier pigeon, I've
really enjoyed. So Jay, thank you again. Brother. I will see
you down the road. Sir, Yes, sir, take care of stay
in touch. Hey. I'm Lauren and I'm John and we host the beard
Ol Podcast, the podcast where we talk about two of the greatest things in
the world, beer and weird al and a lot of other things. We're
funny. Yeah, that's basically what I told him to say. Good job
with yay, But no, seriously, we try and care of beer.
Weird ol song and talk about both things and go through the conversation takes us.
It's fun. I promise you'll like it. Yeah, I mean if
you like talking about random things as well as you know fine craft beers and
some wonderful craft music, please check out my friends at Beard All any place
you listen to podcasts. The next beer from Walnut River that I'm going to
have is their IPA. This is called high Beam. This checks in at
seven point seven percent. It's a West Coast style IPA with sixty five IBus.
So let's crack it open. Ibeam is a really nice color, good
amber color. I'd say to this good two fingers of foam. Good,
the aroma some it's citrus. I'm trying to think what else. Maybe a
little bit floral as well, But the aroma is very nice. No,
that's good. I get some floral notes to the taste as well as not
so much tropical. I get more of the citrus here. But I think
this is a really good West Coast IPA. High Beam uses falconers flight hoops
in the recipe. I think this one's a winner. So if you're in
the distribution area, I would definitely pick up High Beam. IPA. The
next one up from Walnut River is Reo Ranged. This is an IPA with
added orange zest five point nine percent alcohol forty four IBus. Let's crack open
this one. This is a nice light color, really good color, really
good foam here. Yeah, the aroma is good. I definitely pick up
the orange zest and I get a little tropical notes to the But for me,
the orange is the predominant flavor here that I'm getting. That's good.
I'm a big fan of orange in anything, so this is a nice touch
to this. I like this one a lot. So once again, another
great beer from Walnut River. If you see rearranged, throw it in the
carts. All right. That's gonna wrap things up for this week's episode of
Beer in Front. I thank you very much for listening. I want to
thank Jays Anderson from Walnut River Brewing. Please check them out if you're in
their distribution area, which is Kansas in Missouri. Well worth it. Great
beers, great people. Please check them out. Next week's show, I'm
gonna have Monentucky cold snacks, so look for that. A lot of good
stuff happening in the next month or so on Beer in Front. Please remember
sometimes the beer in front of you is the best one yet. All Right,
everyone, take care. I will talk to you next week.