Facebook
Twitter
RSS
Tequesta Brewing Co. brewmaster and owner Matt Webster started homebrewing at the age of 21. He has been brewing professionally for the past three years. He keeps siz to seven beers on tap at all times. (Bill Ingram/The Palm Beach Post)
Just four months ago, Matt Webster officially joined the rising tide of this country’s craft beer movement by opening the Tequesta Brewing Co.
He’s been up to his elbows in barley, hops, and thirsty customers ever since.
But of course, I know it didn’t just happen overnight. As a former home-brewer and home-brew supply store owner, I’ve seen many excited young brewers with dreams of ditching their day jobs and opening a brewery of their own, and only a select few who actually did. So with beer in hand, I recently sat down with Matt to learn more about his journey to making “really kick-ass beer” for a living.
Q: When did you first get interested in brewing beer?
A: I lived in Denver, Colorado, one of the beer meccas. My brother home-brewed, so that got me interested. There were a lot of people up there doing it, so it was easy to gain the knowledge you needed, and help and information were readily available.
So at some point you decided to pack up and move to Florida?
I moved down here for work in November of 2000, had a successful venture and when that was over, I kind of kicked around for a couple years, fishing and golfing. Brewing was something I always wanted to try my hand at professionally and the opportunity arose next door with Jim and Lisa Hill at the Corner Café. We put a small 1.5 bbl (barrel) system in the back and put our foot in the market to see if there was enough demand to do what we really wanted to do.
When did you know it was going to work?
It came about six months after we were open at Corner Café. We were getting outpaced on that small system pretty fast. I was brewing five times a week at least and barely keeping up with the regular beers, not to mention having special beers and seasonals on tap. So we knew there was quite a demand for it and that became the question, “what’s the next step? Do we stay where we are and put in a larger system, or come next door where the space had become available?”
Talk about taking an empty space and turning into the brewery of your dreams.
The landlord gutted it to bare bones and we went from there. Most breweries you’ll see the tanks are behind glass, but we left the brewery open here so you can feel more a part of it, touch it, see it, smell it. It just makes you feel more in touch with it.
This particular space, you walk in the door and it’s got a real narrow feeling to it. It reminds me of a Chicago, New York or Boston area brownstone, where you walk by the front and it looks unassuming, but when you walk in the door and see the bar, it’s kind of a wow factor. You look back and see the shiny tanks and stainless steel and kind of get blown away by how it looks in here.
The bar is a unique addition to the place.
This is my friend, Fran’s grandfather’s bar. The bar was built in 1915 in Mount Carmel, Pa. His grandfather purchased it in 1944 for $1,000. There are a lot of nicks and gouges and grooves, and the finish is chipped from the cigarettes from those days, but we just decided to leave it that way for the character. There are a 100 stories in this bar and that’s why we wanted to leave it like that.
How about the system you use to brew on?
It’s a 15-barrel DME system, steam fired so we can do decoction mashing on it to make the traditional German lager style. We have four 15-barrel fermenters, one 30-barrel fermenter. So in one batch we can make about 70 kegs of beer.
You had a huge grand opening party not too long ago, which was packed. Have you been pleased with business so far?
Business has been great. It has been pleasantly overwhelming. On opening night, we poured 1,800 pints in 10 hours . It was a mass of people. We still get a good Thursday through Saturday night crowd.
You’re also selling kegs now and distributing them across the area in how many places?
Right now we’ve pushed into Broward and Dade counties, so I’d say we’re probably on tap in 35 places. And we’ll be rolling out to 10 more places to the north, so we’re hoping to steadily grow as we get more supply. We’re brewing two to three days a week now and it’s kind of a dance with the tanks, moving the beer from one to the other and as soon as one tank is empty it gets filled up the next day.
Let’s talk about the beer. You brought several over from the Corner Café. Which are your favorites or are they all your babies?
They’re all kind of my babies. There’s always one you may nurture a little bit more. Our two flagship beers are Der Chancellor, which is a German Kolsch, and Gnarly Barley, which is our American Pale Ale. I love ‘em all but I’m most proud of the Kolsch because it’s one of the more difficult styles to make. There’s such a delicate flavor in it. Any kind of mistake will shine through that beer like there’s no tomorrow so that’s the one I’m most proud of.
And you’ve been doing some experimenting too?
We have a Saison, which has chamomile flowers, lemongrass, cut lemon peel, grains of paradise … it’s like summer in a glass, real refreshing, spicy, earthy flavors in there. We’ve got a German bock with Tupelo honey from Weeki Wachee . Tupelo honey has a little more spice to it, so it goes well with the German hops, which have some spiciness too. The beer is 8 percent alcohol but doesn’t taste like it. We also have a Double IPA coming out for American Craft Beer Week, a big bold, in-your-face beer and the hops abound in this one.
I take it you’d welcome more breweries in the area?
Absolutely. If they were down the street and making good beer, all it does is give more people a reason to come up here and drink good beer. Business begets business. Good beer begets good beer and that’s how we build a marketplace. If you look at areas like Portland, or Seattle, San Diego, Denver, you can stand on the corner, throw a stone and hit three or four breweries and they can’t even keep up with the demand they’ve got going. I think we can start that and get it going here.
The Tequesta Brewing Company is open Tuesday through Sunday from noon to 11 p.m. Tapas from the Corner Café next door are available for order in the tasting room.p>
Dan Oliver is a member of the Palm Beach Draughtsmen homebrewing club. He can be contacted at doliver@pbpost.com.
