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Jen McDonald
Bailey Spaulding | Jackalope Brewing Company
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Jen McDonald
Christian Spears | Tennessee Brew Works
Michael Kwas, a Nashville native with a hobby of beermaking, was nearing the end of the road in Denver.
Mild-mannered accountant by day, he’d been haunting the homebrew stores by night and volunteering at whatever craft breweries would let him inside. He’d even made business cards.
“I was looking for something else,” Kwas says. He eventually returned to his hometown in 2010 and founded Little Harpeth Brewing in 2014.
Fast forward to January 2018, and an employee of Kwas’s was raving about cannabinoid oil’s effect on his daughter’s epilepsy. (CBD oil is a non-psychotropic derivative from hemp plants that has long been lauded for its medicinal benefits. In the last decade, with its legality in all 50 states clarified, it has experienced a boom.) It jogged Kwas’s memory: Prior to leaving Colorado, he’d experimented with it in some of his homebrews. Its flavor profile was similar to the hop plant (the two are in the same taxonomic family), making it a compelling additive in a cluttered craft brew scene.
Sourcing CBD oil from an Ashland City grower and a Joelton extractor, Kwas added it to a near-finished Doppelbock, in a way that was similar to how he’d add hops. The new creation, internally called Two Birds, One Stone for lack of a better name, would be offered at a brewery event later that spring.
The only question was: Would his longtime fans like it?
Kwas is like many in Nashville’s burgeoning craft beer scene: committed to the city while bringing influences from diverse backgrounds and far locales. They are collaborative and creative, and their offerings have moved well beyond the standard IPA.
Tennessee Brew Works president and founder Christian Spears spent his youth roving the world, before settling in Nashville in 2011 to be around longtime friends. His brewery’s latest offering, Tenn. No. 12 Belgian Style Quad, is also based on relationships.
Whiskey connoisseurs might recognize the reference: No. 12 is one of George Dickel’s most famous products. In 2017, the brewery sourced 20 barrels from Dickel’s Tullahoma home to age a small batch of beer, and the resulting Tenn. No. 12 displays the resulting character, with tobacco, toffee, and vanilla notes from the charred oak.
“You want a relationship, you want a partnership, you want a collaboration that celebrates both businesses and what they’re doing,” Spears says. “We really don't need to go outside Tennessee culture to do really cool things.”
The first run sold quickly, and the brewery is upping its production by 50 percent in 2018, in part because Dickel, so pleased with the results, wants to give every tourist that visits its headquarters a bottle—all 26,000 of them.
“There won’t be a hell of a lot [left over], but there will be enough to have fun,” Spears says.
Other Nashville brewers have found a similar success with experiments. Three years ago, Jackalope Brewing Company owner and brewmaster Bailey Spaulding sourced an order of peaches from Nashville’s The Peach Truck with a mind to do a beer for a small Friday event. After all, how many people could possibly like fruit beers?
Seven hundred showed up. The Peach Yo’Self Festival was born.
This year, Spaulding and her team are releasing four different peach beers for around a thousand attendees, with the debut of an eponymous offering. The saison, which uses 300 pounds of fruit to flavor two 15-gallon kegs, gets its yeast through the city’s Bootleg Biology. Asked why she buys local, Spaulding is quick to answer: “It’s more fun to have a partner who’s excited about it.”
But, even with the creativity on display in Nashville’s offerings, maybe its epitome is Jubilee Craft Beer Company. Launched by Mark Dunkerley in 2010, Jubilee has no brewery, outsourcing production to Mayday in Murfreesboro, and it only makes one beer, a near-session IPA called Randy’s, which its creator describes as “middle of the road.” What is distinct about Jubilee is its purpose.
Right around the time Dunkerley started, he began volunteering at the Oasis Center, walking the streets of Nashville to connect with at-risk youth and point them to its services. A year later, in 2011, Oasis hired Dunkerley full-time, and, today, his side-project beer business donates 50 percent of its profits to the same organization.
Dunkerly readily admits that it’s strange to be giving one’s money to an employer. But, then again, it’s a mission he believes in, and his beer connects the craft-beer drinker to a mission.
“I think that’s more value than the 50-percent check that I give to them,” he says.
On April 20, or, affectionately, 4/20, Michael Kwas tapped the first keg of Little Harpeth’s Two Birds, One Stone, that CBD oil-infused beer, budgeting the six pony kegs to last a few weeks. All 30 gallons sold out that night.
“Nashville’s beer drinkers are aficionados,” Kwas explains. “They want to know the backstory, where it came from, and they’re going to tell their friends about it. It’s an educated customer, and the educated customer has a more developed palate, so they’re always wanting to try something different.”