Oral history interview with Erik Lars Myers, 2019

Richard Cox: If we start, can you please say and spell your name?

Erik Myers: My name is Erik Myers. E-R-I-K. M-Y-E-R-S.

Richard Cox: Okay. Today is Monday, August 26, 2019. We're at Fullsteam Brewery in Durham, North Carolina. I'm Richard Cox, talking today with Erik Myers as a part of the Well Crafted NC project. To start, can you tell us a little about yourself?

Erik Myers: A little about myself? I like long walks in the beach. I...

Richard Cox: You're romantic?

Erik Myers: That's right. I am the director of beverage opeFrations at Fullsteam Brewery right now. Ex CEO and head brewer of Mystery Brewing Company which closed this past year, in 2018. My background is of, let's see, I have a degree 00:01:00in acting and directing from Alfred University over in Western New York. I had a 15 year career doing IT, database management, programming and design.

Erik Myers: Then I'm also a writer. I've written several books. I write for a magazine. I used to write for a couple of media magazines. I used to have a beer blog and that led me to opening the brewery that I opened which put most of all of that behind me.

Richard Cox: Yes. How did theater and IT lead you to the brewery industry?

Erik Myers: That's a hilarious question. They represent... the way I see it. This is just me being a little funny, I guess. To me they represent two different sides of my personality. I'm very artistic. I also I'm very technical. I really like art. I really like creativity as the root of my personality is very much in creativity and in performance. But there's something about really 00:02:00exact work, like database management or programming that is very soothing in a lot of ways. I'm going to sneeze and that's a terrible thing to do on camera.

Richard Cox: Nope, that's good.

Erik Myers: Oh gosh. It's real everybody. Okay.

Richard Cox: I'll just slow it down a little [inaudible 00:02:18].

Erik Myers: But I really liked the exactness of it, right? Like I used to say for a really long time, that beer is this perfect synthesis of art and science, because in order to make a really great beer, you need to be a good scientist and a good engineer. You need to be able to follow recipes exactly. You need to be very exact in all of your measurements. You need to know biology and chemistry and physics and all of these things.

Erik Myers: But in order to make a great beer, you really need to be a good artist, right? You need to be able to start with raw ingredients and envision how that's going to end up in the glass after a live organism digests parts of it and spits it back out. I feel like that takes sciences so that you can it exactly every time. But art is how to make it great. Yeah. I've always felt like 00:03:00those are two sides of my personality that worked very well in beer together. That's really where it ended, and how I got there from a very esoteric sense.

Richard Cox: Well and you, from what I understand got to into the brewing industry, not through... though you were a home brewer.

Erik Myers: I was a home brewer for about 11 years before I started the brewery. More than most of the kids today.

Richard Cox: Was it the writing or the home brewing bit?

Erik Myers: Well, both. Right?. I was writing at the time I was home brewing for a really long time, and I will admit that I was not the best home brewer. Right? I didn't have like all this fancy equipment that people have. Like I was literally making beer in an orange cooler.

Richard Cox: How long was that? Sorry.

Erik Myers: I started in 2000 when I started home brewing. I guess I made my last batch of home brew in 2011, and I have not gone back, but yeah, I mean. I made a lot of really bad beer for a long time and based on crappy equipment and everything like that. But over time I got better and learned how to control 00:04:00process because I didn't have the equipment to do it for me. It was pretty good. It was pretty decent.

Erik Myers: But while I was doing that, I got more and more interested in the beer industry itself. That was partially through working with the North Carolina Craft Brewers Guild. I was the original operations director for the Craft Brewers Guild because when it was getting started up by a couple of people who at the time were Sebastian Wolfrum who was at Natty Greene's brewing company at that point is now the founder over at Epiphany Malt here in Durham, Jamie Bartholomaus of Foothills at the time, and David Gonzales, who at that point was the brewer at Rock Bottom in North Carolina before he went to work for Foothills, before he went to work for NODA, before he went to work for Rivermen.

Erik Myers: David's been a fixed in the Greene community here for a really long 00:05:00time. Sean Wilson of Fullsteam, they were all looking to put this Guild together. I was a blogger working on beer at the time and they asked me to come on and help them build their website. I was really interested in the brewers Guild, and so I got myself more ingrained into the industry there. Then I continued to write about beer and started going to national conferences and learning more about what the industry itself was like. I had finally an idea for a business model that I thought should exist in the industry that did not yet exist in the industry.

Erik Myers: I thought that I never was going to be able to convince anybody to open a brewery just by writing great, and try this business model. Went about trying to figure out how to do it myself and did so.

Richard Cox: Okay. We'll come back to that later. Okay. You mentioned you have a background in writing. Can you tell us a little bit about your background in beer writing and your beer history, your story as well?

Erik Myers: Well, sort of a historian. I will admit that I have a lot of help on the history part. I'm the author of a book called this is going to... It's a really creative title. North Carolina Craft Beer and Breweries which has gone through two editions. First edition came out in 2012, right when I opened Mystery and the second edition came out two years ago, three years ago, I believe, which would have been 2016. Then, I mean, at this point it probably deserves a third edition, but nobody has that time, so we'll see how it goes.

Richard Cox: You know small things well as soon as it comes out.

Erik Myers: It was obsolete.... The first one was obsolete by 40 breweries by the time it got published four months later. The second one was obsolete by over 100 breweries when it came out three months after I finished writing it. It's impossible to keep up with. It deserves a website and somebody who can spend full time on it, but not this guy.

Erik Myers: That book contains a lot of history about brewing in the state, about bringing in the South. My wife and I... my wife is a college professor, an 00:07:00English professor and worked with the digital archives at UNC for, while she was a graduate student. She used to work with documenting the American South. With her help, going through both those archives as well as state history archives, we ended up pulling a fair amount of good information about brewing history in North Carolina. I'm pretty basic in the grand scheme of things and I'm sure there's still a whole lot to dig up that hasn't been dug up well. But yeah, we got a pretty good view of what brewing was like pre-1986, which is pretty sparse, but there it is.

Richard Cox: Yeah, right. Do you have any favorite beer history stories?

Erik Myers: I don't have a favorite beer history stories.

Richard Cox: Most come of otherwise.

Erik Myers: I think if you really get down to it, I really enjoy the story of Uli Bennewitz starting up a weeping radish here in the state about his complete naivete about whether or not this was a legal thing and just jumping into doing 00:08:00it because we'll obviously, this should be fine. I mean, it happened in Germany, right? It should be able to happen here. Then just sheer luck of being able to change the law by just changing the words in the bill from wine to beer and going with it. I think it's amazing.

Richard Cox: It's a great story.

Erik Myers: Yeah, it's a great story.

Richard Cox: You mentioned that you were the operations director of the Craft Brewers Guild for several years and president?

Erik Myers: Yeah. I was operations director for a few years, from 2008 to 2011. I resigned when I started Mystery because I felt like it was inappropriate for me, as somebody starting a brewery to benefit from a financial standpoint, from the Guild. It felt really unethical to me. So I stepped down, but really retained my love for it. After Mystery was up and running as a member of the Guild I ran for the board and I was named vice president while Sean Wilson from Fullsteam here was president at the time. Then I followed Sean into the 00:09:00presidency, was president for three years, and then I stepped down in 2017.

Richard Cox: That's a long tenure.

Erik Myers: Yeah. I spent a lot of time at the Guild and it's a fair amount of what I considered my identity in the state for a long time is that I really feel very strongly about the Guild and just the state of beer in North Carolina in general. I care about it and I want to see it better and grow. It's been a fairly important part of my involvement in the beer community in general.

Richard Cox: Is it the advocacy aspect of it you're talking about?

Erik Myers: Yeah. I think we do really great things here and I think that one of the big challenges in North Carolina was our late start in the industry in general. I'm really proud of how this state has grown. I really like being able to be an asset and a resource for the entire state. It makes me feel good to know that a whole lot of great beers coming out of the state and I can do 00:10:00whatever I can to help it get there.

Richard Cox: All right. When you look back to that period, is there anything that really stands out to you that was accomplished while you were there? That you're particularly proud of?

Erik Myers: I think that from my time in the Brewers Guild, I feel like we went through... we had a really great start up. Well I will say this, we had a big start starting the Guild, the first four, five years that the Guild was in operation, it really struggled to get going. I felt like under Sean's leadership as president, we did a really great job of hiring a new executive director, which was Margo Mexico at the time. Really start to coalesce a really strong Guild which is still exists and is thriving today.

Erik Myers: I feel like I got to inherit this like the second wave of that in which when Sean stopped being president. There was this real fear that we were 00:11:00going to get into a sophomore slump. In that time we helped get going the brewers conference that we have. Now that happens every year, which is one of the more successful brewers conferences in the country that happened on a state level.

Erik Myers: The North Carolina Brewers Cup which is our Guild sponsored competition, which I still get to be head judge, which is a lot of fun. In a lot of the education systems that we built in the state as well as a relationship with the NBAA to make sure that we could have really top notch beer in the state coming from trusted sources of education. I feel really proud of being able to put all that together.

Richard Cox: Yeah. Great. Tell me more about judging the Brewers Cup, since you enjoy it so much?

Erik Myers: Oh, it's a blast. I really like judging beer competitions and not because it's like, "Oh, hey, I get to drink a lot today." But it's a really educational experience to try a lot of variations on a single style. It's 00:12:00something that I've really been into for a really long time, not just judging, but I used to run, before Mystery started while I was still working out blogs and silly things like that.

Erik Myers: I used to run a meetup group in the triangle called Taste Your Beer. It was, in every month was focused on a single style. I would go ahead and get together. Here are 10 examples of an IPA. Everybody get together and talk about the differences of these IPAs. There's 10 examples of a brown ale and get the differences of those brown ales, because the breadth of beer's so wide, we have so many ingredients allowable to us across hops and malt and water chemistry and yeast and all of these things. Like literally two beers of the same style can be the exact same style and exhibit completely different characteristics.

Erik Myers: I think that's one of the beauties and magic of the beverage is that it's such a wide and rich tapestry, and you don't really get the sense of that 00:13:00until you try them alongside each other to be able to see the vast differences within that one style framework. So that's something that I've always really enjoyed and taking that into a competition. Like while I get to be able to sit down and say, okay, here's the list of items that define whether or not this beer's to style. It also gives me the breadth of experience to be able to try all of these styles together. It's always a very educational experience for me.

Erik Myers: It's one of the things I really like about it. I feel like it makes me a better brewer and better taster, the more I get to do these things. Even if it's styles that I don't particularly enjoy like, "Hey, here's a flight of 29 double IPA," that's going to be a struggle for me. But I will learn from it as I suffer.

Richard Cox: Yeah. Is there anything that's really stood out to you from judging really amazing or really surprisingly off?

Erik Myers: It's always surprising to me that in commercial competitions you get 00:14:00such bad beer, and that sounds really rough, but there's always a couple of examples of things that hit that are like horrendously infected or just really off base in terms of the recipe put together or their understanding of the style. It's always amazing to me that in the industry that we have today, that people can still be so far off base in a commercial product.

Richard Cox: Right.

Erik Myers: I mean like you can basically read industry level best practices about this everywhere for free right now. There's no reason to make beer that is bad in this industry right now.

Richard Cox: And in this state. Right.

Erik Myers: Right.

Richard Cox: Yeah. Let's move on Mystery Co-op.

Erik Myers: Sure.

Richard Cox: You are, as you said, the founder, CEO, and head brewer at Mystery in Hillsborough. Can you tell us to start off just the overview of the history of Mystery? You like rhyming?

Erik Myers: Okay. So let's see. Let's go with my-

Richard Cox: Because you mentioned your brilliant business plan right off the model.

Erik Myers: Yeah, let's see if we can... I'll just give you, walk you through the beginning of my old tour. Mystery Brewing company was the first Kickstarted 00:15:00brewery in existence. We started off with a Kickstarter that we raised $143,000 over the course of four... I want to say 45 days on Kickstarter. We're the first brewery to successfully fund on the Kickstarter in the first period to open in stores from that Kickstarter.

Erik Myers: The idea of the brewery at base was a seasonal only brewery. That changed a little bit from startup to actual operation when we got into the nuts and bolts of it. But the original idea behind Mystery was to be like way back, was to be a gypsy brewery a la ... People, I'm not going to remember the name of now. Stillwater Artisinal ALS, or something like that. Right? Where I wanted to go and brew in other people's breweries as a... not a contract brewer, but the other type of contract brewer that I'm going to remember the name of, I got this, it's alternating proprietorship brewing.

Erik Myers: The way those laws work is you basically are renting out a brewery for the day and you make the beer in their system and you hold the taxable license on it. But you are technically renting the space for fermentation. So you as the brewer visiting brewer go in and take a full legal responsibility and ownership of that product as it comes through.

Richard Cox: It's like an equipment rental, in a way?

Erik Myers: Essentially. It's a law that was designed for the wine industry to be able to have more startup wineries because the equipment in a winery isn't used very much. Right? It's typically just the barrel space and aging space. It's designed to be able to have multiple vendors working under the same winery under different brands, but without having to share the taxation through the core brand that owns the space. They basically made it as a business incentive to wineries to get more wineries opened in the US and therefore wider tax bases.

Erik Myers: That's how a lot of alternating proprietorship breweries that you see working in the US which are, there are like four, but back when Pretty Things was open, that's how they were doing it. Still Water does it that way, that kind of thing. I think Evil Twin does it down at a Westbrook.

Erik Myers: But that's how we wanted to start originally. At the time it looked like it was going to work. I had agreements with four or five different breweries in the state that, we were going to go in and brew at. But at the time we were also going through just an extraordinary amount of growth. By the time I got the Kickstarter finished and started doing fundraising all of the people that had agreed to allow me to go in and brew had capacity that was absolutely filled up and they were struggling to keep up with their production.

Erik Myers: It ended up that I could not do that as I had originally planned and we had to hit the ground running really fast to start our own brewery. That's where we started settling in on this idea of a regular seasonal rotation. What 00:18:00we ended up being was an all seasonal brewery. By all seasonal, what that really means is that we brewed in a seasonal schedule. We had four lines of beer. We always made a session beer. I was an IPA, I was a saison and I was a stout, and then what that was rotated throughout the seasons.

Erik Myers: In the winter, our session beer was a light Scottish Ale, our IPA was an English IPA. Our saison was a black saison. Our stout was the Chocolate Breakfast stout. On March 15 when we moved into spring or March 18, we would move over to our spring line up, which was, we started with a rye wit for our spring beer and then ended up being ordinary bitter.

Erik Myers: We had a black English stout IPA for our spring IPA. We had a beautiful white pepper saison for our saison. Our spring stout was actually a 00:19:00porter. It was Jack Thorn, our London Porter. Then so we did that every year. Every winter we'd made the same four beers as our core. Every spring we made the same four beers as our core. Then alongside that we tried to make a lot of one offs and an exciting side beers. So that in general, at Mystery, we were probably rolling on average 12 to 15 beers on our draft list at once all the time. Tried to keep up, our bar had 24 taps when we finally got it open and we tried to keep those full all the time.

Richard Cox: Yeah. So how did you manage all that and be CEO?

Erik Myers: Well it was a really small brewery. We had a seven barrel brewhouse. Our distribution to begin with was self-distribution in the Triangle out of our brewery. To be honest, I didn't manage it well. I was the head brewer, head salesperson, and delivery guy for when we started out, we had three people working at Mystery for almost the first year, and we worked our butts off.

Richard Cox: That's not uncommon. Honestly.

Erik Myers: No, not at all. But we saw enough growth where it started to get really difficult to manage. I didn't have a delivery truck. Right? I was delivering out of the back of my station wagon. I would end up getting into the brewery in the morning, brewing a batch, having somebody start working on getting kegging going and working on the cellar. Then I would load my car up with orders and head out into the field and both deliver and do sales at the same time so that I can come back to the end of the day and get ready for the next day's batch and go do it again.

Erik Myers: It wore me. I was a lot younger then. That probably is why I have all the gray hair that I have now. That and closing it. But yeah, I mean it was really difficult work. After about eight months of doing that we switched over to a distributor for the first time and then started going through distribution, and really relied on distribution for the vast majority of our external sales 00:21:00from then until the year before Mystery closed, when we finally pulled our rights back from my distributor. So-

Richard Cox: That's probably a story all in its own.

Erik Myers: Here, it is a hell of a story.

Richard Cox: Why Mystery Brewery?

Erik Myers: Mystery is based in the original meaning of the word mystery, which was the art and craft of a trade? The very first Guild of businesses ever in the world was a Guild of Breweries in 12th century London. Their mission was to protect the art and mystery of beer. I really enjoyed the idea of beer as both an art and a craft in a trade, right? It's a like my synthesis of art and science there. It's a vocation and an art at the same time.

Erik Myers: It felt right to me for the name of the business and in the grand scheme of things it lends itself to a lot of really good marketing that we didn't take advantage of it nearly as well as we should have.

Richard Cox: Okay. Now you already mentioned that you chose Kickstarter as the 00:22:00funding platform to fund the brewery first in the country, first period. Can you talk a little bit about that process, why you chose to do it?

Erik Myers: Sure. The reason that I chose Kickstarter is because I am not in and of my own resources as a very wealthy person. But had a lot of friends at the time who were like, "I would love to invest in this, but I don't have the resources to invest, but if only there was some way to do like an NPR model, I would definitely throw $100 at you." Right? I kept on thinking, I mean, "There are a lot of people that keep saying this to me and I feel like if I could just collect $100 from everybody who tells me this, I could probably get a brewery off the ground." As I was talking to about to a friend of mine, he was like, "Have you heard of this website Kickstarter?"

Erik Myers: Kickstarter had been open for like, maybe six months or so. I looked it up and thought, "All right, cool. This is an interesting way to go. Let me 00:23:00put a project together and see what I can do in worst case scenario, it fails, then I'm back to square one. Maybe I shouldn't be starting a brewery." I did a lot of outreach about it. I felt like it made a really good business article at the time. I reached out to my alumni networks from where I went to college. I reached out to local business pages and the Triangle Business journal and all kinds of stuff like this, and managed to get a fair amount of good media coverage in a lot of different ways as well as reach out to pretty much every network that I had.

Erik Myers: It worked we, put together, we exceeded our goal not by a lot, I think our goal had been $140,000 and we ended up getting like 8% over that. Then you pay all that back and their fees. But at least we were close to $140,000. It 00:24:00was pretty decent in harrowing and it worked as a really good proof of concept. Right? Doing that Kickstarter allowed me to make the connections that I needed with people who also then followed up and became my primary investors outside of the Kickstarter project. And they were equity partners and partners in the brewery to begin with. It was helpful in a number of different ways.

Richard Cox: Awesome.

Erik Myers: Also it really worked as a good basis of our first marketing pitch. Right? People were really looking forward to having it open after throwing 20 bucks at it. The people who were Kickstarter backers ended up ... I mean, to this day I run into them and they tell me how proud they were of being a part of it. They would show up to brewery tours and walk around like they own the place because they'd given 15 bucks and gotten a tee shirt. I'm glad that they were. It was the absolute most wonderful experience. I met a lot of people that I consider friends now, that I never would've known that were Kickstarter backers.

Richard Cox: That's awesome.

Erik Myers: It was cool.

Richard Cox: Yeah. Did it bring any specific challenges you didn't expect?

Erik Myers: Kickstarter?

Richard Cox: Yeah.

Erik Myers: It is a really hard thing. It seems so easy, right? Like, "Oh, I just made up a video. I put it on the web. People love this idea. Here's money." No, I mean, it was incredibly stressful and I had to work really hard to keep pushing it. Like every other Kickstarter project that I've seen it goes through to a huge push right at the beginning, and then it's completely quiet until like three days before it ends, and then it gets a big push again. It was incredibly stressful. We were pretty close and I didn't think we were going to make it, but I had pledges from like a hundred thousand dollars from people, and I was like, we have to get this done. It was hard.

Erik Myers: Then the worst part about that is it took me months if not years to fulfill the rewards. In fact, I'm still not sure that all of the people that gave money got all of the rewards that they should've gotten because it was such 00:26:00a long term complex reward system at the time, and quite frankly, we lost track of it with business.

Richard Cox: Well, I was going to say, and then at that point, suddenly you're starting the business, and you have all that going. Which I'll come back to that, but how would you compare when you, and maybe some of the other earlier breweries, which on Kickstarter to like now with a more recent efforts?

Erik Myers: I can't believe that there are people who are still trying to start breweries and Kickstarter. A, because I started that brewer with $140,000, and there's no way that anybody should be starting a brewery with that little money right now. It's ridiculous to think about. Right? And so in order to compete in the market today, the amount of money that is available to you via Kickstarter in the crowded environment that it has become, should no way, in absolutely no way be used to start a brewery. There. That's what I have to say about it. If 00:27:00there are people who are still starting breweries on Kickstarter, you're crazy.

Richard Cox: There you go. Let's go back to challenges. When you were first opening Mystery, what challenges did you face as opposed to with Kickstarter? As to actually opening the place?

Erik Myers: We had a really difficult time telling our story about the seasonality. The prevailing feeling in the marketplace when we were going out is that, like, "What do you mean the beer is not going to be the same all the time? If you're just going to keep on making different beers, how do we know the beer's any good?" The story in the marketplace was largely about consistency and having, like making sure that this one tap was the same all the time.

Erik Myers: It's laughable to think about it now because now in the marketplace, it's like a rotation nation, right? It's difficult to find a bar that has the same draft list two weeks in a row. That seems tailor made to my business model now but-

Richard Cox: This was 2012, right?

Erik Myers: Yeah.

Richard Cox: Which sounds recent.

Erik Myers: Yeah.

Richard Cox: Is it?

Erik Myers: No, no. I mean, we were really ahead of the curve in a number of ways, and that's one of the ones that I feel really like, I know that I had the right idea, but I definitely got it out too early to take advantage of what the market would become. Then by the time the market became that, I didn't have enough resources to capitalize on it.

Richard Cox: You think it was like, because 2012, I think by far more of a brew pub type environment?

Erik Myers: Well that's it. Yeah. I ... My bad. Originally I started a production brewery because I felt like the vast majority of the breweries in the country were brew pubs and that the market was oversaturated with brew pubs. But I did not see a lot of production breweries pushing out onto shelves, particularly with variety in mind. Right? Like it was very, very flagship heavy and you didn't really see one offs coming out in the marketplace, particularly in North Carolina.

Erik Myers: I started a production brewery with the idea to take advantage of that dearth or production breweries and sort of like not really think about the brew pub model. In fact, my original idea was to not have a tap room or brew pub at all. That ended up changing pretty significantly over time. So yeah, it was really... Sorry, I'm watching a delivery happen.

Richard Cox: That's fine.

Erik Myers: We're going to be okay.

Richard Cox: You're on the clock. Without a tap room, how were you doing? Using this as a distribution?

Erik Myers: I thought I was going to be able to handle everything distribution wise and I've quickly learned that I was wrong.

Richard Cox: Stationary? Okay.

Erik Myers: Yeah. We worked on getting a pub opened as swiftly as possible once we realized, "Man, that was a dumb idea. Look how much money we would make over the bar." We worked really quick on getting... we used to run little open tap room nights at our brewery even though we weren't really technically supposed to have a bar there. We opened it up on like Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights for 00:30:00a few hours so people can come in and have a drink at the brewery.

Erik Myers: It was really cool. We worked on renting a space next to us and renovating it into a pub pretty swiftly. We ended up getting that open about a year after the brewery. Ah, I guess it wasn't even a year, eight months or nine months or something like that.

Richard Cox: Cool. Yeah. Why Hillsborough?

Erik Myers: Well, at the time, and I still believe this is true, Hillsborough was a growing community on the outskirts of the Triangle. It had a really cool artistic community, right? Like highest number of published authors per capita in the country or something like that. It's a really artistic community. It's a bedroom community for a lot of RTP, which means that there's a lot of money that sleeps in Hillsborough, if not dines there during the day, and it didn't have a brewery, so I got to be somebody's hometown brewery.

Erik Myers: That to me was really important. There's two things, you can be in the business, you can be best or you can be first, and so you should probably 00:31:00try to be one of them. I thought in that case I had the chance to be both, right? Like the best in the first brewery in town.

Erik Myers: I mean, it worked really well. The community really had a huge affinity for us. In fact, for a little while in our first couple of years, we sold 70, 80% of our volume right inside Hillsborough, even though we were distributing outside of it. It was pretty cool.

Richard Cox: That's very cool.

Erik Myers: Yeah.

Richard Cox: So what was Hillsborough like in 2012, compared to now?

Erik Myers: Now, it's a really coming into its own and there's a lot more food and beverage going in there. But when I moved in, there was a gastro pub downtown with a couple of restaurants. Where we moved our brewery in was like the disused West part of town, abandoned factories, that kind of thing. We moved into a factory that didn't have a whole lot going on in it. There was like a massage table manufacturer and a tuxedo warehouse in there and not much else.

Erik Myers: There's a lot of open bays. The building that we moved into had recently had a barbecue restaurant open in it, but outside of that there was really it was like the old black main street of Hillsborough in which there was like the other hardware store, the other laundromat, that kind of thing. But that had been disused since the '60s, and there had been a biker bar where a bunch of people had gotten shot and it was like this place where people didn't go. Right?

Erik Myers: The building is built in like 1910. It was really dilapidated and not the best place. We ended up getting really nice cheap rent and doing what I thought it was a pretty good job renovating the space and it was a good home for us. It was really good. I think really sparked it or helped spark or it was part of the wave of a really good renovation in that part of town where the Mill Village went from being like poor housing to being, still poor housing, but 00:33:00young, like graduate students and their families and that kind of thing, there's only so many people that will move into a 600 square foot house.

Richard Cox: Right. So you're working on that?

Erik Myers: Yeah.

Richard Cox: You just touched on this, but can you describe the location space? The tap room and the food were pretty separate from the brewery, if I'm remembering buildings?

Erik Myers: Right. Our brewery was in the Old Eno River Mill in the West part of Hillsborough. That was it was an old denim mill, that was on the other side of the river actually from ... No, it wasn't, sorry, it was on the other side of a brook and a bridge. But it was right in the side of the Eno river. Our pub and restaurant were around the corner from that about a quarter mile walk or so, from that location in that old, it was like the old train depot/black main street I think.

Erik Myers: The mill itself was a really large old brick mill, really beautiful 00:34:00old building, that had not been terribly well kept up or at least parts of it hadn't. It was across the train tracks. That's what it was. I mean, you cross the train tracks over to where our pub was. That building was like this old, also brick, but it was this great building that had been obviously built in one space and then added onto and added onto and added onto and then added onto, because all of the bricks were different, like age of brick and different quality brick and they were set at different heights and foundations were slightly off from one another. It was that great thing where somebody had started with one building and then made a bigger one. It was pretty cool.

Richard Cox: That's awesome. I think we touched on this one too. How would you describe Mystery to people who are unaware of it? If you were like trying to introduce someone to Mystery?

Erik Myers: Oh, I mean, I would've introduced it as a seasonal only brewery that really put a lot of work into creativity, creative styles. Supporting local economy was really important to me. We worked really often to work with our 00:35:00local maltsters and local farmers and whatnot, to use local ingredients as often as possible. That was a really important part of who I was as a brewer. One of the reasons that I'm so happy to have blended it Fullsteam where it's their one of my main missions. I think that's probably the best way to describe it is that seasonal only concept. Just with a real look at inventive beer.

Richard Cox: Great. Actually this ties a little bit into what you were just saying. You've been very involved in community engagement, and fundraising. Can you give us some examples of some that work that you've been involved with?

Erik Myers: Sure. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, we really like having causes that we went after. To me, brewing in breweries have always really been at the center of communities throughout its history, right. Since brewing was essentially invented thousands and thousands of years ago. There's thought that 00:36:00it was the reason that people settled down into, or one of the reasons that people settled down to a farming lifestyle versus a nomadic lifestyle because it's hard to walk around the liquid.

Erik Myers: But it also gave people the exam of the excuse to farm grain so they could get both food and this wonderful beverage. It's at the center of a community there and it tends to be at the center of community events through our entire existence of like beers at the middle of funerals and weddings and wars and revolutions and on all of these wonderful things.

Erik Myers: To me, Mystery, and it was really important for Mystery to be a community center. I want it to be a community center for Hillsborough. I wanted to support the community as well. Part of that is finding the right charitable work and causes to put our fortunate soapbox behind, right? Because in a lot of ways brewers and breweries in our culture right now are treated in this very 00:37:00rockstar-ish kind of way. I think in where we are in society breweries are treated like team sports. I lived in Boston and I became a huge Red Sox fan because they were my local team. It's not that I'm not a loyal Red Sox fan or anything like that, but it was really easy to be a Red Sox fan when they're local to you in there and everything around you is permeated by that team.

Erik Myers: I feel like breweries have that same feeling to them in which when you are local to a brewery and you can see and participate in that brewery all the time and you find a certain amount of allegiance to it and in our fan culture you tend to treat the people who work in that brewery in this undeserved, rock star kind of way. We're given a soapbox and it seems like a waste to not use it. Right?

Richard Cox: Right

Erik Myers: To us it was a matter of finding causes that were important to us. 00:38:00We did a lot of work with the Conservators Center, which is a large cat rescue up in Mebane in Burlington that we had a really good relationship with. We worked with them a lot. We worked a lot with animal rescues. Partially because everybody that worked at Mystery had some amount of pets. It was just a really important part to all of the people who worked there. It helped us from an internal community standpoint to help an external community that we believed in.

Erik Myers: We ended up working with a lot of charities for art in and around Hillsborough and really trying to a local community that way, as well as having like a trash pickup and an adopt the highway in Hillsborough and stuff like that. That's another type of community involvement there. The big one that I'm very proud of what we did was the Don't Be Mean to People campaign. That we did in conjunction with particularly Ponysaurus Brewing here in Durham as well as another 40 plus breweries around the state.

Erik Myers: When the HB2 bill came out a number of years ago, that was the bathroom bill, right? The thing that it didn't allow people who identified with the gender other than the one that was on the birth certificate to use the bathroom that they felt most comfortable being in. We felt like that was a real embarrassment to our state, and we were really irritated at the time about how North Carolina was being cast in a national stage as being, backwards and ignorant. And it felt really important to me to be able to show many people that even though our legislature was backwards and ignorant, that the people who were in the state were not.

Erik Myers: We got to put together a really fantastic campaign. That ended up being a national, international donor base to raise a little over $40,000 to donate to two great causes, one of which is Equality NC, which is the primary 00:40:00LGBTQ fundraiser for North Carolina politics. But the other one which I feel really proud of is this is a small summer camp for queer kids called QORDS. They basically are a summer camp for kids that essentially feel displaced because they're queer and they teach them art and music and a community and give them a place to belong and a place to be and their annual budget every year was minimal, right? There's the kind of thing where there they would basically get donations from a couple of local organizations and put on the summer camp for a couple of weeks a year and it was great. But my understanding is the check that we wrote them like far exceeded their annual budget by a couple of times, and that it was a real game changer at least for a little while for them.

Erik Myers: I hope that that continues to be true. I'm really proud of what we 00:41:00did there. We've got some really good national attention and focused a lot of information around the country towards North Carolina in a really good way. It made it very difficult for me as the President of the North Carolina Brewers Guild to work with our legislators after that.

Richard Cox: Sure.

Erik Myers: For better or for worse. But we did good work there and I'm really proud of it.

Richard Cox: I think it was a saison that came out of the other end of it?

Erik Myers: Yeah. It was actually our saison yeast Mystery had its own proprietary yeast and we use that yeast and making it, and then the rest of it was all done at North Carolina ingredients. So it was 100% North Carolina grown and from sorghum molasses to grain, of course water our yeast, I think the only thing that we didn't use local was hops because, but it just didn't have that many. But yeah, it was great. That's a delicious beer and still being made over by Ponysaurus, which is awesome. Hopefully all of those proceeds are still being donated. But yeah, really proud of that.

Richard Cox: Sounds, yeah that's amazing. What led you to close the brewery?

Erik Myers: It's pretty complex over time. Right? Back when we were in about our fourth year of operation we made the decision to go into cans and start distributing cans. We had not really seen wide distribution at that point. We were doing some amount of 22 ounce bottles into bottle shops and stuff like that. It was starting to become pretty clear that 22 ounce bottles were not going to be the package of the future. We were having... it was having one of those days where we were trying to decide which way to go.

Erik Myers: Like, do we buy a bottling line? Do we buy canning line? How do we move forward and all this. We had a shipment of bottles arrive of 22 ounce bottles arrive on a pallet that was wrapped poorly and the entire thing came off the truck and fell over on the loading dock. We lost 200 some cases of 22 ounce 00:43:00bottles on the loading dock. I swept the glass up for six hours. That's when I said, We're buying a canning line." We set it in mobile canning and while working on raising money to get a canning line, and our distributor was very excited about this because cans at that point were still pretty new in the industry. Oskar Blues was canning and couple of other people were canning. But we were one of the first handful of North Carolina breweries to really put stuff out in cans.

Erik Myers: Our distributor was starting to see a lot of demand coming in for cans which was great. They started putting us out into grocery stores and we got pulled into Harris Teeter and Food Lion pretty quickly as well as Whole Foods and a couple of other places. It really overextended us pretty quickly. We started working on getting additional funding in and it came in the form of a 00:44:00pretty decent sized loan.

Erik Myers: This loan was coming in for a couple of reasons. It was coming in to buy our own canning line because mobile canning was not, and it's still not a money maker. It's like almost break even in terms of the costs. Then we're getting more tanks to increase our production capacity and the money to increase our ... double the footprint of our tavern to make it into both the restaurant and a pub to increase the throughput there as well.

Erik Myers: We worked our butts off to try to get this going and really increased our production capacity just by turning things around. But we were really ended up being overextended by the pull into grocery stores faster than we probably needed to do it to the point where we were pulling in a mobile canner basically every week and emptying almost all of our tanks into almost every week.

Erik Myers: At the end of the day, we weren't a big enough brewery to be able to 00:45:00handle that kind of volume. We ended up having a couple of recall problems because we ended up putting up beer that wasn't finished as well as it could have been, had some exploding cans in the marketplace. Dealt with the fallout from that. I think it's a little bit... it's going to sound awful. I think it's a little bit more widespread now than it was then to have cans exploding because so many small breweries are using canning lines probably before they should be to put beer out into the market that is not perfectly handled. I think it's actually a more common problem now which gave us a little bit of a push back then.

Erik Myers: But anyway, so we finally ended up getting this loan in place and the canning line came in, we started canning on our own. About a month after that we got a call from our distributors saying, "Hey, bad news, you've lost your placement in grocery stores." We got pulled out of Harris Teeter and we got 00:46:00pulled out of Food Lion. That at that point was something like 60 to 75% of our volume. I've gone on to write articles about this, but distributors are really great at chain market sales in grocery stores, especially... distributors are wonderful logistics companies in there and they're really good at what they do.

Erik Myers: But what they do best is grocery. Right? And that's something that is self-distributing breweries cannot do well. They can do it certainly, but it takes an enormous amount of manpower and logistics to be able to go manage those grocery store shelves, particularly because most grocery shelves are managed by distributors anyway. When we lost our placement there, we also ended up losing a lot of our draft sales. When we lost placement and grocery, we went from canning multiple days a week two to three days a week to canning, two to three days a month. Because partially we ended up with all the stock in place that we 00:47:00couldn't move. For both kegs and cans.

Erik Myers: We went through a huge production, slow down and ended up just not making a lot of that money back and really struggled to make sales in order to cover our loan basis for a long time. We finally got our tavern open with the restaurant and it helped an enormous amount, right? We more than doubled our sales at the tavern after that renovation, but it wasn't quite enough. We really had built a plan that was based around both distribution and having that tavern, and losing half of the business there was incredibly difficult for us to keep up with, so we fought to keep it afloat for another year after that.

Erik Myers: At the end of that year in which we lost grocery, we went to our distributor and pulled back our distribution rights. That was at the end of 2016, going into 2017. It was a pretty interesting time. Under franchise law in 00:48:00North Carolina, you can't actually pull back distribution rights without paying for it. I basically went to them and said, "I need these back or I'm going to close immediately and you're going to get stuck with all of this stuff and the reputation of having closed another brewery please give them back to me, so I can try to survive on my own." We did so, after a fair amount of really intense conversations and started self-distributing again in December of 2017 and made a really good fight of it from then until we ended up closing.

Erik Myers: In fact, 2018 was the first year that we were consistently cashflow positive across the year, which is really unfortunate. But the thing that ended up burying us at the end of the year was actually weather, we got hit by two 00:49:00hurricanes right in a row. One of them, we had one weekend, particularly in September. That was always our number one weekend of the year. It was a conflation of Oktoberfest. There was a huge festival in Hillsborough, Hillsborough Hog Day. Then our Tavern was busiest on the weekends when we had our own tourism weekends.

Erik Myers: The hurricane that came through actually dropped power in the town. One of the oldest trees in town fell and knocked out power in front of our pub and knocked us out for the entire weekend. We lost an entire weekend of business plus all of our festival business. At the same time we had a tank burst up at the brewery, so we lost the tank and all of the beer in it and then put us behind them production. Then three weeks later we had another hurricane come through and shut us down for another weekend on another tree falling. Over the course of those weekends and tank rupture, we ended up losing about 60, $70,000.

Erik Myers: I couldn't make payroll anymore as well as pay for all of our loans. We've fallen behind enough we're just skating across the entire year. I kept on telling people like, "We're doing okay, but we're one disaster from really seeing this go wrong." Then we had two disasters, right? It was just a really unfortunate set of happenstances. At the end of the day, we probably could have figured out how to keep going and keep it open, but it was just another snowy weekend away from closing.

Erik Myers: The following winter we had what a foot of snow, two feet of snow or something fall across the weekend. I remember sitting at home after the brewery closed with the snow on the ground thinking, "Well, the hurricane didn't do it, this would've." We closed when we did because we felt like we could let our 00:51:00employees go the right way. Everybody who worked at the brewery had another job lined up before Mystery closed. Because we got to let everybody know we've got to say goodbye to our customers in a really great way and have like our last week of goodbyes and release a whole bunch of beer that we've been holding on to.

Erik Myers: We ended up being able to close it in a way that felt really good from a community standpoint and that was really important to me. Financial end is going to be a mess for years, but that's business. But yeah, it was really... I feel like we did it right even though I didn't really want to do it.

Richard Cox: Right, and when else can you do at that point?

Erik Myers: Right.

Richard Cox: How did you think Mystery reflected your own personal brewing approach interest and philosophy?

Erik Myers: Sure. I feel like the way Mystery worked in terms of brewing is how 00:52:00I really drink, and how I think most people drink, which is why I think we're into this rotation nation now in the country as it is. Because I think that it is ridiculous to think that everybody always wants the exact same thing all the time. Right? We are adaptable creatures that live in a dynamic environment. It's like to think that we all want hot chocolate in the middle of the summer and lemonade in the middle of the winter or either one of those things year round is ridiculous. Like that's not how we consume any of the things in our life.

Erik Myers: But beer had been created in this way in our country with the idea that there is one thing that you will consume all the time. Right? And so Mystery was built around that idea of no, what we drink changes all the time, so 00:53:00why don't we make what people want to drink when people want to drink it? And really change it that way. That really reflects my own consumption tastes. If you look at our global library of beers, like not just the Carrefour, but all of them that were coming around the entire portfolio change throughout the year. We made a lot more dark beer in the winter. We made a lot more IPA, and light beer in the summer that can, all of those things really changed. Sometimes even on the weather or like what was coming out of farms or something like that.

Erik Myers: Yeah, it was very much a reflection of my own personal drinking habits. But also I think how people drink in general.

Richard Cox: Yeah. What resources do you think you've drawn on to help you grow as a brewer? Someone in the industry-

Erik Myers: From Mystery? I've learned a lot. I've learned a lot from my mistakes.

Richard Cox: If we all could only say that.

Erik Myers: I know, right? I mean, I think that from brewing even though we had 00:54:00a small brewhouse, I do think that I tended to experiment with a lot of different stuff, a lot of raw grain, a lot of different fermentation characteristics, a lot of different wild yeasts and known yeasts. We had a really robust yeast program at Mystery. I've brewed with like most of the commercial catalog of White Labs in terms of yeast and what it creates. I think that it gives me the ability to work with a bunch of different fruits and weird vegetables and like, I've brewed with sticks, and sticks that are on fire and I've brewed with hot rocks in and I've brewed with like ... it's a really wide variety of techniques that having an experimental edge allowed me to learn a lot of different cool things.

Erik Myers: Then working through expanding production gave me a really good eye towards scaling in this industry and changing from using growlers as our main packaging to cans as our main packaging has given me a really good view of 00:55:00resources that way. Plus just being in business, I'm a much better business person now than I ever thought I would have been back when I started the brewery. I have a much better feel for what it means to balance a P and L. So, yeah.

Richard Cox: What beer recipe that you've created are you most proud of?

Erik Myers: I'm really-

Richard Cox: The one with flaming sticks?

Erik Myers: Yeah, the one of the flaming sticks was really good. I go back to that one because it was just a really dumb idea that turned out really well. I forget what I had been ... I'd been talking to a chef friend of mine who is really into Portuguese cooking at the time. Like he was into really reading about, or maybe it was Brazilian, but anyway, there was all this great stuff about cooking on charred wood where you actually would char the wood and then you would cook on that charred wood. In my brain went immediately to charred barrels because when you're doing a lot of barrel aging for... this isn't even 00:56:00the story I was going to tell.

Erik Myers: But when you're doing a lot of barrel aging, you're charring the wood first and then getting a wood character out of that charred wood. I thought, what if we just go get wood and char it and then just put it into a stainless steel fermentor? Like did the surface area that you need in order to create that flavor transfer is not that high? Because if you think about it in a barrel, the only beer that's touching the barrels, the stuff on the sides, right? If you put a stick, a charred stick in the middle, it's the beer touching all the way around it. That's why spirals worked for wood aging.

Erik Myers: We went out and cut a bunch of Persimmon and Hickory and something else. It was like four different trees and we literally let them on fire and charred the outside of all these branches. We took all the bark off and then we charred all the wood. Then we made a black lager and put these sticks inside the fermentor from the first moment of fermenting. Some of them were still on fire 00:57:00when we dropped them in. It came out really well. It just tasted like, tasted very woody, like very fresh wood but a really beautiful fruitiness off of it and everything like that. It was a real treat and I had a lot of fun making that, but that's not the beer that I was going to talk about.

Richard Cox: Sorry, I have to ask about the firing sticks.

Erik Myers: It was really good. I would go back to that beer. The beer that I was really proud of is the one that I developed that we actually won a Great American Beer Festival metal for. We made a historic style called the safe beer, which is a historic Belgian style that was made as a true farmhouse ale. It had Belgian... sorry, it had barley, wheat, oats, rye, buckwheat and spelt in it. Most of those were raw grains. Some of them were molten and some of them were raw. Then the base of the style itself was almost, sounded like a gose, in which it, it was salted, and salt can give you a really nice softness to beer right, 00:58:00like on a really nice body, if you put in too much then it is too salty and briny and so this beer we developed, I read a whole bunch of history about how it would have been made and everything like this. We ended up with this really insane, like quadruple decoction mash, crazy beer that had this wonderful full malt character.

Erik Myers: We brewed it with our saison yeast at a really cool temperature so that it didn't really taste like a saison, but really gave it a little bit of fruity overtone. The salt was just enough so that it picked up this really nice, full extra body and assault, really heightened flavors, but it wasn't salty. It just ended up being this really beautiful, complex grain forward beer that we went on to win a medal at the Great American Beer Festival with. I'm so proud of the way that we put together that beer, piloted it, realized what was wrong with it in pilot on like a five gallon batch, corrected it on scale, and then made a 00:59:00batch that was just a truly beautiful beer. It was a little like one of the longest brew days I ever had.

Erik Myers: It was like a 16 hour brew day with a stupid decoction mash. It was just really rough. But boy, it came out really well and something that we were really proud of. There's been a couple of beers like that. We made ... the historic ones in particular, like weird challenges, but being able to go through that weird challenge and coming up with something good at the end is so rewarding. We made a Thai basil and lime ... the air ones that I'm really proud of, how those flavors really came together. Just being able to take, especially culinary inspirations or historic recipes and being able to go through that art step to put it into a glass and have it come out like you wanted it to. It's just such a satisfying step. It's the best part of brewing.

Richard Cox: That sounds amazing.

Erik Myers: Yeah, it was fun.

Richard Cox: You're now the Director of Beverage Operations here at Fullsteam.

Erik Myers: It's true story.

Richard Cox: True story. What does that mean and what are some of your roles and responsibilities?

Erik Myers: Well, that's a good question. I'm not entirely sure yet. I'm the... so the director of beverage operations is a new role started here at Fullsteam that's sort of like an expanded head brewer. Right? Our last head brewer left at the beginning of the summer and we've been as a management staff looking at the future of Fullsteam and like where does it go from here? We've been talking a lot about product development and product diversification as the beverage industry is, the beer industry becomes more and more competitive. I think more breweries are looking at their capabilities and saying, we have all these really big tanks, we have this fermentation capacity, we have the ability to do fermentation and we know how to do it. Why just stick to it to a fermented barley beverage when we could go in other directions?

Erik Myers: We decided that the next step for the head brewer position here is to really be focused on product development and ideation at a wider basis. Right? Not just at beer. I was the director of tavern operations at the time and one of the senior management staff. I put my hat into the ring. As much as I really liked running front of house I'm in charge of education here and making sure that the staff is educated, making sure the customers are educated and that is a real passion of mine and I really like it.

Erik Myers: I'm just much happier being focused in back of house and making beer that it's my wheelhouse and it's what I went to school for again, and it's a little bit more of my passion, so I'm really happy to be oriented back there. It was a really long process with a bunch of different candidates involved and I'm really glad that I was able to convince them that I could come back here.

Richard Cox: You sound excited.

Erik Myers: Yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun.

Richard Cox: Yeah. How would you describe your average week here?

Erik Myers: Well, right now it's not chaos because I'm running both the tavern and I have my fingers in the back of the house, so right now it's running back and forth between the two stuffs and finding out what everybody needs and putting out fires. Typically from a tavern management perspective at the beginning of the week is not slow. It's like get like tasks done thing. Like this afternoon I'm going to go change all the light bulbs in here to have slightly brighter lights. I'm really looking forward to that. Things like that.

Erik Myers: We've been trying to rethink about our tavern and how to make it fresh and how to make it a great place to come hang out. If you've been to Fullsteam again, what makes you walk through the door a second time and go, "Oh wow. Look at that." Right? Those types of thoughts. That's what the beginning of my week is. The end of the week is like roll into the weekend and make sure that my staff is ready for the enormous number of people that are going to walk 01:03:00through the doors on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, because that's our busy time. It's making sure that we're stocked up and everybody's educated about what's going to go on draft and the menus are right and everything like that. It's much more like task logistics towards the end of the week.

Erik Myers: Then the other part of my job right now is making sure that everything is running in back. The forklift just broke down. What do we do about it? How's the production schedule looking? When are beers going to go into package? What beers are going to brew next week and for the next three weeks after that? How's inventory going in the back and how has that change our demand and what does that mean for the production schedule and Yeti? Yada, yada. I can't wait to separate those jobs. That'll be really nice.

Richard Cox: Sure. Yeah. Going macro for a while.

Erik Myers: Yeah.

Richard Cox: How do you feel the brewing industry has changed since you first entered the business?

Erik Myers: Oh my gosh. Enormously, right.

Richard Cox: Again, it feels like it hasn't been that long.

Erik Myers: Yeah, but the brewing industry has been moving really, really fast. 01:04:00When we opened at Mystery, we were brewery number 45 or 48 in the state or something like that, and now we're 320 or so. The competitive landscape alone has changed enormously. I feel like the distribution landscape has changed quite a bit in which back when we opened distributors were looking for craft breweries to align with ... to flush out their books, to make themselves whole and to be able to compete in that marketplace. Now I think they, by and large, have found their partners, right.

Erik Myers: I think if you were a new brewery starting up in the state right now, it is going to be very difficult to find distribution or get involved with a distributor unless you have a lot of money behind you in order to help doing it. The cost of distribution has gone up quite a bit. The cost of sales has gone up quite a bit. I think that there's a lot has changed in a really short amount of time. I mean flagships still rule, but here at Fullsteam, we work really hard 01:05:00at making sure that we've had different beer out every single week so that our distribution staff has something to sell that's new, so they have a reason to go walk through those doors every week. That's really important. I mean, we were doing the same thing in Mystery and making sure that there's always something new. Is that the top of mind for everybody.

Erik Myers: All the way through retail up into the brewery. That's a huge change for the industry in general. It becomes a really difficult task to do when you've got here just in the Triangle, 70 breweries doing the same thing, right? I mean, it's an enormous task.

Richard Cox: It is. What's it like to work in the craft brewing industry today?

Erik Myers: It's not as fun as it used to be. That sounds awful, but I feel like 10 years ago, eight years ago, it felt a lot like the heyday of the .com era, right. Where there was a lot more goofing off. I feel like when we opened 01:06:00Mystery and part of this is because we had three people or four people or whatever, we had a lot more fun at work. It didn't feel as much like work because we were just having a blast every day.

Erik Myers: It's a lot more like work now, right? Like more than anything about the back of the house here. I think about the fact that we have a factory and that we have to run a manufacturing facility. I think about the fact that we have a restaurant and we have to run a restaurant. It doesn't really feel like that cool. Like, "Rob is going to get beers and party, man, it's going to be cool."

Richard Cox: What are we doing this week?

Erik Myers: Right. Yeah, it's a lot more of like, "Hey, these are two really complicated business models. We have to work with them together to make sure that we are cashflow positive and to make sure that we are increasing our customer base and increasing our sales because right now if you're not growing, you're dying." That's the reality of the beer industry, right now.

Richard Cox: Yeah. The kitchen here is relatively new, comparably speaking?

Erik Myers: It's funny. Yeah. The kitchen about two years old, but I will take pride in the fact that when I came on our kitchen numbers have been better than ever.

Richard Cox: Awesome. Yeah. Are there any particular trends today that you really like or dislike in the industry?

Erik Myers: Huh. I think that we're at a really interesting point in the industry where we don't have a lot of new trends, right? The two newest trends that people are working on, hazy IPAs and say like, fruited sours are years old. There's not much in the industry right now, aside from seltzer that is a really big, new thing. Even seltzer is years old, right? It's been three or four years since White Claw First came on the market.

Richard Cox: Yeah. It feels like it's being two months.

Erik Myers: It feels like it's just been this year, but seltzers are... they've been wine coolers for a while now. New recently, are craft breweries getting into the seltzer game and I'm not convinced that it's the right play. I don't 01:08:00think that it is true to what makes this industry tick and true to the niche that is behind this industry. I'm interested to see how that's going to play out, but I don't buy that they're a craft trend so much as a beverage trend and as a beverage trend worth watching and learning from. But I don't know that the craft is necessarily learning the right thing from it right now.

Erik Myers: Yeah, I'm really interested about our industry right now because I don't feel like we're... I don't feel like there's a new trend and it feels a little worrying. It feels stagnant for the first time in a decade.

Richard Cox: Yeah. I think, we hear like lagers are something that people have been talking about fairly recently but that's something that's happened that's come and-

Erik Myers: Yeah. I would argue that lagers are not by any stretch on new trend. They've been here for hundreds of years. Right? Like the most popular beers in the world are lagers. Man, we're not, that's not a trend. I'll buy the craft drinkers are finally coming around to the fact that a great lager is really good. I'm glad you enjoyed Carver. It is a by no means new, just something that 01:09:00craft is finally learning to capitalize on.

Richard Cox: Right. Given that it's not seltzers, where would you see brewing industry going in next three to five years?

Erik Myers: I don't know. It's really tough.

Richard Cox: Which is like forever in this industry.

Erik Myers: Yeah. It's like centuries. I don't know. It's really tough. We're in a really weird spot in the industry. The best advice I got about trying to read the future in a beer was to look back at non-alcoholics 20 years ago, because the people who are 15 years ago or rather, because the people who are then children and drinking nonalcoholic beverages that were popping up in the grocery stores are now turning 21.

Erik Myers: Their taste trends are probably the ones that pay the most attention to, which is why I think we've got a lot of juice oriented beers out now and everything like that. I'm trying to figure out how to translate coconut water 01:10:00into the next beer trend, because I'm sure it's going to have something to do with it, but I don't know how yet. Yeah, I don't know. I know that... I do feel like there's got to be a turn back to classic styles at some point as people get tired of homogeny or homogeneity?

Richard Cox: That works.

Erik Myers: Whatever. But I feel like the... for all the really neat development, and like fun trendiness of hazy IPA A's, they do present a very same face. I don't think that, that will last in and of itself. I don't think hazy IPS are ever going to go away, but I do feel like they will end up being another category. Right? Like you don't see a lot of black IPA anymore. It's still there, but it's not like the prevailing style like it used to be, and I think that's true for a lot of different trends over the past decade or so with beer where those things are still popping up, but they're not like the singular 01:11:00focus anymore.

Erik Myers: So I see that happening with hazy IPA event eventually. It's already starting where there's so much hazy IPA out there that it's not moving the way it used to. Because it's just seems like it's everywhere. So I see us returning to the classic styles a little bit, but I feel like it's not quite right. Just, I don't think we'll ever regress. I think it's a matter of the what... we'll all find a different way to step forward rather than a way to step back.

Richard Cox: Right.

Erik Myers: Not quite sure where that is yet, but that's my job now is director of beverage operations to figure that out.

Richard Cox: Brainstorming. Exactly. There you go. So what do you see as unique about Southern beer or North Carolina beer specifically? If anything.

Erik Myers: Well, I think we have... No, I think it's good. We have a difficult time with hops. I think that we are in a really unique environment in which the South has really good agriculture, and agriculture that can still turn our way quite a bit. Like there's still a lot of tobacco in the field and that could be converted into barley. But I think that we already have a really good malting 01:12:00and barley growing scene in the South much more so than in at least on a craft level than a lot of other places in the country.

Erik Myers: The craft malt houses are popping up all over the place, but I feel like our local agriculture has been convinced to turn in the direction of growing malt we can use for brewing pretty quickly. Hopefully that trend continues now that we have three maltsters in the state, all working with local farms to grow to create more. I think it's amazing. I think it gives us a huge leg up. The prices are a little higher than our commodity malts that we're buying from other places, but the ability to keep our money locally is really important and I think as a huge boom to us as an economy.

Erik Myers: But I also think that in the South we have such a wide variety of fruits and vegetables and like foraged ingredients allowed to us just because we're in a more temperate zone with a lot of huge growing season and in a wide cast of agriculture that we can bring a lot of things like sweet potatoes into 01:13:00our beer in different ways. I think it's a huge opportunity for us to be able to make a very distinctly Southern product here.

Erik Myers: I mean, like I think I said before, one of the reasons that I like that I'm happy and proud to have landed at Fullsteam is because it's something that really resonates with me and something that I'm very proud of the idea of being able to go in and help grow that Southern beer economy. I think that it's great.

Richard Cox: Awesome. Is there anything you see as unique about their Triangle beer industry?

Erik Myers: I don't know. I know like, I've thought about this for a really long time as I was at some point really snarky about the Asheville brewing scene. I mean, I think what makes us unique is our breweries themselves, right? Like the people that we have here are buy in large transplants from other parts of the country. A lot of the people who have started breweries here are also 01:14:00transplants from other parts of the country. So it brings a really wide array of availability into these beers.

Erik Myers: At the same time, we've got a lot of locals on those breweries too. I think it's just the... we have good variety, right? I think that the brewery population accurately reflects the population of people who have moved in here. I mean, like, we're one of the fastest growing metro areas in the country, and I think that's reflected in the beer that we have.

Richard Cox: Sure. Great. Do you have a favorite beer from North Carolina brewery other than Fullsteam or Mystery's?

Erik Myers: No. Is that awful?

Richard Cox: No.

Erik Myers: I'm not much of... This is going to sound like a cup out. I'm not much of a favorite guy. Right? I think favorites are a trap, they are a trap built by marketing companies in the early 20th century to get you to be brand loyal. In the grand scheme of things I have a lot of preferences. I have a lot 01:15:00of things that I like and I want to have all of those things and not tie myself to one. So I think the favorites are a trap. Like, I don't need to have a favorite vanilla ice cream, like Briars can go screw itself. I like easily four different types of vanilla ice cream.

Erik Myers: If you put vanilla ice cream in front of me, I'll eat it.

Richard Cox: Yeah.

Erik Myers: I'm lactose intolerant and I'll eat it, but it's not going to stop me from eating chocolate because that's also delicious. So I think that... I make sure that the beer in my fridge is from North Carolina all the time, because I want to support my local economy. The only reason that I keep track of brands are to know what beers I don't want to buy.

Richard Cox: Right, sure.

Erik Myers: That's largely on, and it's not North Carolina breweries. It's largely based on ... because I think a brewery is doing things unethically or have made wrong moves in the industry or are run by people who are douchebags.

Richard Cox: Fair enough.

Erik Myers: That's it. That's why I keep track of brands.

Richard Cox: So I'm going to rephrase this next question then. Do you have a current go to beer here at Fullsteam?

Erik Myers: Yeah. Good call. Well said. Typically at the end of the day right now, I'm either going for Paycheck or Carver. I think Paycheck is a beautiful Pilsner, it is crisp and it is a fantastic go to at the end of the day. It's refreshing, especially in hot weather, it's like every time it is absolutely satisfying.

Erik Myers: Carver is just a fantastic beer. It has been developed really well over the past nine years that Fullsteam has been open. It's consistently wonderful. Especially lately. Like the sweet potato earthiness has been really coming through and just supporting the little toasted malt characteristic. It's just a pretty beer, it's a really nice beer to drink. So those are the two I go after lately, not to say that they're-

Richard Cox: Let's wait.

Erik Myers: Yeah. I mean, I'm going to go down the lineup every week and make sure.

Richard Cox: Sure. Absolutely. Oh, that's all I have.

Erik Myers: Awesome.

Richard Cox: Is there anything you want to add?

Erik Myers: I don't think so. I talk a lot.

Richard Cox: That's good. We learn a lot. Thank you so much, man.

Erik Myers: Absolutely.

Richard Cox: Appreciate it.