Airway Heights brewers looking to draw both craft beer enthusiasts and major brewery devotees to their craft lagers in second year of business
By RYAN LANCASTER
Staff Reporter
Sessionability, drinkability, more-ness.
However you might describe that central quality in an easy-drinking glass of beer, two local brewers are looking to infuse their creation with as much of it as possible.
Bernie Duenwald and Jim Reiha are president and brewmaster, respectively, of Golden Hills Brewery, which operates out of a red pole barn in Airway Heights. Both men grew up in small town Eastern Washington, both are in their mid-fifties, but each brings years of wildly different know-how to the business, which celebrated a first birthday last month.
Duenwald conceived the business model behind Golden Hills when he realized the beer he was looking for didn't exist. “I wanted a little more malt character in a beer – body with an easy finish. The ales that most of the craft brewers are making out there don't fit that bill,” he said. “I wanted the flavor I'd get in some of those ales, but in a lager style beer and nobody was really making it.”
Duenwald came at brewing from outside of the pint glass, after decades as a farmer and grain industry insider. He completed a degree at Dartmouth before moving to Reardan and a 15-year career farming wheat and malting barley. Duenwald then served as a charter commissioner on the Washington Barley Commission, marketing both feeder and malting barley out of state, before signing on with Great Western Malting Company in Vancouver, Wash.
“I spent 10 years selling malt to brewers all over the world so you'd be hard pressed to find a beer I haven't had,” Duenwald said.
To help him better understand the needs of his customers, the company put him through brewing school in Chicago, where he met Graydon Brown, who would ultimately become Golden Hills' first brewmaster.
After spending a few years in Washington D.C. promoting grain exports with the U.S. Grains Council, Duenwald and his wife returned to Reardan, friends and family in 2005.
It was then he decided to zig when everyone else in the craft brew industry was zagging. “I wanted to brew the lagers because this is good lager country,” Duenwald said. “Quite frankly, I don't think I would have been brave enough to try and start a brewery in the Northwest brewing ales, which everybody else was already making.”
Using borrowed tools in a farm shed, Duenwald built a pilot brewery to produce a keg of beer at a time and started working toward his ideal. It was a long process – over two and a half years he brewed 115 batches of beer. “I knew what I wanted the beer to be like, but I probably could have pilot brewed for 20 years and not made this beer,” he said.
Brown, who was living in California at the time, walked him through the process over the phone, relying on Duenwald's taste buds and giving tips based from the descriptions. The outcome of their efforts was dubbed Clem's Gold, after Duenwald's father. He test marketed the beer at parties, developed a business plan to attract investors, and in May of last year, Brown moved to Eastern Washington and Golden Hills rolled its inaugural keg out the door.
The brewery has since developed two more varieties – Ben's Brown and Lizzie's Lager, named for Duenwald's son and daughter. Another might be on the way soon in honor of his second daughter, Emily, although Duenwald said she's not on pins and needles. “Lizzie and Ben gave her a hard time, ‘don't you feel bad dad didn't name a beer after you?' But her response to them at the time was, ‘no, the only thing I want my name on is a check.' She's a very practical young lady,” he said.
Recently, Brown left the company to pursue more financially stable job prospects, but Duenwald said he's still one of 28 shareholders who own a piece of the company. Another is Reiha, who came onboard in April with a unique set of experiences in tow. After graduating from Washington State University, Reiha worked for Miller Brewing Company until 1985, when he took a job with billion-dollar beer maker Anheuser-Busch, makers of Budweiser. He was assistant brewmaster before the company merged with InBev in 2008 and he took an early retirement package.
Reiha grew up in Sprague and said he was excited to move back to the area to work at a more hands-on operation. He's spent the past few months learning the equipment and fine-tuning the process to turn out a cleaner, crisper beer. “It's a whole different world here compared to the huge breweries,” he said. “I've gone from making from 11 to 12 million barrels of beer a year to making a little over 250 a year here.”
What brought him out of “semi-retirement” was Golden Hills' goal of producing something fresh in the craft brewing world – a so-called “bridge beer” that appeals to both die-hard Bud Light drinkers and connoisseurs of upmarket microbrews. The whole idea of a craft lager goes against the grain of a niche industry that relies heavily on hop-laden ales, but some brewing experts think it's the right direction.
Dr. Michael Lewis is professor emeritus of brewing science at UC-Dais and has led their brewing program for over 30 years. He said craft brewing has stalled for the past three decades at 4.3 percent of the U.S. beer market share. “For me the craft industry should strive to re-invent lagers the way they have re-invented ales and reap the benefit of a much larger market,” he said.
After a presentation at the 2010 Craft Brewers Conference in April, Lewis had the opportunity to taste Golden Hills beers. He said Duenwald's strategy falls in line with his reasoning. “I think his beers are excellent and a good step in the right direction, very tasty yet drinkable, and will only improve as he expands his production schedule and his market,” he said.
Judges at the World Beer Cup 2010, which bills itself “the most prestigious beer competition in the world,” seemed to agree, giving Ben's Brown a third place medal in the American-Style Dark Lager category.
Winning a national award in the first year of business is always nice, but Duenwald said his big wish is to get more Golden Hills beer into the glasses of the people. “Bars typically see us as a microbrewery so they try to sell our beer to the same people who typically buy double IPAs. That's not who we're trying to get,” he said. “Our challenge is to get servers and bar owners and all those people that are between us and the consumer to appreciate who they need to try and give our beers to.” Once that happens, the beer can speak for itself.
Klink's on the Lake, a restaurant near Cheney, was offering two rotating beers on tap before Duenwald convinced restaurant manager Neil Mader to order a keg of Clem's soon after the brewery started selling. The keg was gone in less than a week. “Neil calls me and says, ‘We've never gone through a keg that fast. It's empty.' I was there the next day with another keg and we've been rocking and rolling ever since,” Duenwald said.
Mader said Clem's is one of his personal favorites as well as the preferred beer of many customers, outselling Mac and Jacks, the other beer currently on tap, 3 to 1.
In April, brothers Andy and Glen Gardner opened the Hop Shop on Spokane's South Hill at 3803 S. Grand. They decided when planning the brewpub that they would have no major breweries on tap and saw Golden Hills as a refreshing alternative to beers like Coors or Budweiser. “It's a true American style lager,” Andy Gardner said. “People come in and say, ‘I'll have a Bud,' and we say, ‘no you won't, you'll have a Clem's.'”
His customers, he said, are always ready for another pint.
Ryan Lancaster can be reached at [email protected].
Reader Comments(0)