Two years after taking over Heineken, Jeremy Marshall continues to guide Lagunitas

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"My cards tell me Brewmaster, but this girl who worked at Lagunitas before leaving for the cannabis industry said, 'You are not the Brewmaster; you are the Brewmonster. It's actually my official title. I think it's important because it allowed cannabis and beer to become something for Frankenstein. "

These are the words of Jeremy Marshall, Brewmonster at Lagunitas Brewing Company. Founded in 1993, the Petaluma brewery in California was considered the fifth best-selling craft brand in 2013. In 2015, the company sold a 50% stake in Heineken, which sought to expand its portfolio and participate in the global demand for hops products. Lagunitas sold the remaining 50% in 2017. However, even today, Lagunitas continues to have an indelible impact on the brewing community, offering new products and new methods of producing alcoholic beverages, not alcoholic and infused with cannabis. Their de facto spokesperson? Brewmonster Jeremy Marshall.

Kenny Gould: Where are you from?

Jeremy Marshall: I'm from Memphis, Tennessee. You do not meet many people in California Memphis. & Nbsp;

KG: And how did you start the brewery?

JM: Like almost every artisanal brewer, I really enjoyed brewing at home at a time when I felt like I did not have a lot of good beer available. I brewed to have the best beer. It was by necessity.

KG: When I think of you and Lagunitas, I think of hops. how did you get in there?

JM: The thing that really opened my eyes was the first time I tasted a beer that had been dry with whole hops. It was a Brewing Anchor Dry hop liberty with Cascade. I will never forget to give one to my father, who was a PBR guy. He said, in his thick southern accent, "This tastes like flowers." I was like, "Yeah dad, that's exactly the point." This profile comes from terpenes. They are also in cannabis. I did not know it at the time, but I was a fan of the late nineteenth-century Emerald Triangle cannabis that was starting to flee and reach the southeast. You can get Mexican brick grass without terpenes and then there was this other thing. He had better genetics, high terpenes, and a small piece stank the room. In addition, cannabis has the same characteristics as hops. & Nbsp;

KG: It's not just the hops you've fallen in love with, but the terpenes.

JM: The way I spend a lot of time now is rooted in the way it all started. I am becoming a terpene scientist, which is the true story of love in the brewing and cannabis movements, if you ask me. Hops and cannabis contain hundreds and hundreds of these terpenes and no machine can demystify them. You can try creating an odor to mimic Amarillo hops or Lemon Pound Cake cannabis strain, but you can not put it together in a synthetic way. This is because there are hundreds of these "miners", terpenes present in small quantities. The combination releases the odor detected by the human nose, but we do not find any machines there. & Nbsp;

KG: Who taught you how to brew? Or did you just pick it up?

JM: I would not want to talk about my calculus teacher in college, who ended up having influence in making the thing less scary. You still think my lot is not good to taste. But he embodied the fact that Charlie Papazian had the spirit "to relax, to have a homebrew". I was in college, a little lost, I was going back and forth. I was exhausted and lived in Memphis. It is never good not to leave the city in which you grew up. I was looking for an excuse to go out. I finished my studies but I was looking for professional brewing colleges. At the moment, they are everywhere. But at the time, there were really only two in the United States. I did some research and found that Chicago and Northern California … coincidentally, both places where Lagunitas has breweries. So it was Chicago for Siebel or California for Davis. & Nbsp;

KG: And you chose …?

JM: A road trip seemed good so I went to Davis. When I arrived, they said that there was no interest in the program, that everyone was fired, that all the breweries were for sale and that I would be lucky to find a job in a small brewery that brought in 18 $ 000 per year. It's hilarious – no more than a few years later, the program that was now famous had a lady charged with preparing the students for the drums telling me not to attend. But I remembered something my grandfather had told me: & nbsp; sometimes the best time to buy something is when everyone says it's a bad idea. So, I was not moved by this person.

KG: Was Davis a good experience?

JM: At the time, UC Davis was really hip with Anheuser Busch. If you have paid the money to participate in the brewing program, you will automatically get a good stable job. I told them I was not drinking Budweiser and they said, "Oh, great, you're another of those boring and iconoclastic home thinkers. After two weeks, they fell like flies because it was really difficult. You had to know your chemistry, take physics and biology classes. My undergraduate studies were very useful because they provided me with the prerequisites for the UC Davis program. But I always thought it was fun. The proximity of Davis to Petaluma was the reason why I found Lagunitas, which at the time was only a phenomenon of Northern California. I shared a room with two other guys from the program and we sort of rented rooms in a late deceased home. One of my roommates was the key to the exhibition in Lagunitas. He said: "I know this brand, they are weird, they are known to be bad brewing boys, they make a good beer with a ton of hops." He planted this idea in my head. I interviewed at a time when Tony McGee … it was like working for Frank Zappa but also for Elon Musk. Avant-garde and intense. Tony was intimidating. After my interview, I wrote her a letter and told her, "I'm at the beer school and I feel like everything I'm learning can be applied to you." It was short and slightly memorable. I probably sent it to him in recent years, he did receive his mail, because most of his letters were invoices and he stopped consulting them. & Nbsp;

KG: In hindsight, this answer may be easy for you, but was Lagunitas the right choice? & Nbsp;

JM: I walked in and the entire walls of Tony's office were covered with Highlights posters. I was shocked that a place of business. Coming from Tennessee, where you fear being arrested for a piece of cannabis, I was shocked to see how open the cannabis crop was. It ended up getting us into trouble later, but that's another story. I started and dude, this place was crazy. It was like being in a punk rock band. It was so different from what it is now. Every day the employees were doing stupid things. I do not mean that the managers told them to do that – I think everyone was just stupid enough. Taking risks was just something we did. Our mentality now is not to be hurt. Not that people got hurt, but it was a small and a small company that had a different mentality. When I entered, I had to work anywhere.

KG: Where did you start?

JM: I was on a team of about 5 or 6 guys working on a bottling line, then I was on a team of 2 people working at the winery. Then I ran D.E. filter. All the brewing equipment was shit. We recycled the dairy tanks. All we had been bought for scrap worth of stainless steel and converted. I have run a lot of wine equipment. I will say now that wine equipment has no place in a brewery. Wine and beer people have completely different mentalities. Wine growers are not interested in dissolved oxygen or hygiene – they just sulphinate their problems. In addition, they only work one month a year, and you can quote me about it. This D.E.I ran for two years and, in the end, oxygenated all our beer.

KG: It sounds like a challenge.

JM: All in Tony's book So, you want to start a brewery is right. It's a good counterpoint to Sam Calagione's book, Prepare a business. The cover of Tony's original book was like apocalyptic visions of breweries in flames. It was very Armageddon-ist. They had to calm him down.

KG: Lagunitas went through a period when the brewing industry was not very prosperous.

JM: I'd like to point out that the fact that Lagunitas overcame this first big collapse in the 1990s and became very frugal, very cautious about debt, using the most mediocre material … it's almost totally irreconcilable with that mindset that you go out of doors with $ 2 million brewery that you've seen at a trades how. I can understand both sides, but many breweries do not know what it's like brewing in the 1990s. I'm from America, I'm not that old, but I'll tell you that every cycle in America knows highs and lows. It's like the real estate market. People's memory is short and there is a sea of craft breweries that have never had a hard time. That's why Tony took the full angle in his book: he wrote it at a time when it was a glorious time for craft beer. I mean, 2002 to 2015 was a golden time. 2015 was the year when the industry did not reach a peak or a plateau, but it slowed down. Those years … I can not even tell you. & Nbsp;

KG: When have things changed for Lagunitas?

JM: Well, I used the filter, and then we started making money and so I upgraded the equipment. We had our first small juicer, and that was a time when 0 person had one. Sierra Nevada had one because they were hiring people from Budweiser to Fairfield. At one point I had a refractory leader, the operations manager, and he was so jaded with craft beer the day he said, "All roads lead to AB". That was his reluctant slogan. But the problem is that … he's a little right. What is happening now is that craft brewers are turning into big brewers. We make the best beer and use a lot more hops, but we turn into big players. At that time, from 2008 to 2015, it was as if you could open a brewery and you did not have to think or plan to succeed. To put this in perspective for you, I like to look at some landmarks. In 2007, I got rid of this lousy D.E. filter. In 2008, we had our first German brewery – in other words, a brewery that made good beer and was automated. Automation was the craziest thing in the world. None of us trusted us. We all thought it was HAL. We call this a barrel of 80, and it was crazy because we went from 30 to 80. Then this crazy growth began to occur in the industry. In economics, you are taught that the more your business grows, the lower its percentage of growth points. It's true now, but it was not the case at the time. In 2011 or 2012, we increased by 50%. It was crazy, we lacked hops.

KG: What does it mean to work at the brewery now? I have to imagine that it's very different from punk rock. & Nbsp;

JM: I like to say that if you stay in a brewery long enough, you will eventually discover it, oh my god, I work in marketing. While Ron Lindenbush, our original salesman and guru, is gone, and Tony McGee was sold to Heineken and finally takes some personal time to focus on the music, without a $ 300 million Wells Fargo loan to crush his soul, I became the face of the organization. And suddenly, I was doing a job. I thought I had to protect Lagunitas from Heineken, but now I'm on the diplomatic side where I have to educate Heineken. At first I was a master brewer, but I am no longer the director of brewing operations. It's the individual brewer. I would be lying if I told you that I made the criticisms of the brewer. I had the habit of being there three years ago. But as Heineken's education began to take longer, and with Tony's sudden departure, I found myself as a spokesman for the company. I was like, damn it. That's true. I am in marketing. & Nbsp;

KG: So, what is your daily life?

JM: We just had a new CMO from Converse and Vans, and I spend a lot of time with her. She needs to be immersed in our culture. That's one of the things I wrote in Tony's book. A craft brewery is nothing without its culture. I like to visit other craft breweries and not just do a tour, but hang out in the back and be a cellar dweller, get to know their culture. There are some similarities, but each brewery has its own culture. If you ever find yourself in a restaurant that seems to have no culture, you have to wonder who will drink the beer. I do not think they will get there. I do not like when a craft brewery paints this well-marketed image. It's discouraging when I'm waiting for something and I have super boring people who are just at work. The craft breweries embark on this adventure because we are gathered by our passions. I have an extreme passion for hops, craft beer, domestic brewing, cannabis, extraction. All those things that live in the big brewing universe.

Kenny Gould: Where are you from?

Jeremy Marshall: I'm from Memphis, Tennessee. You do not meet many people in California Memphis.

KG: And how did you start the brewery?

KG: When I think of you and Lagunitas, I think of hops. how did you get in there?

JM: The thing that really opened my eyes was the first time I tasted a beer that had been dry with whole hops. It was a Dry Anchor Brewing Liberty with Cascade. I will never forget to give one to my father, who was a PBR guy. He said, in his thick southern accent, "This tastes like flowers." I was like, "Yeah dad, that's exactly the point." This profile comes from terpenes. They are also in cannabis. I did not know it at the time, but I was a fan of the late nineteenth-century Emerald Triangle cannabis that was starting to flee and reach the southeast. You can get Mexican brick grass without terpenes and then there was this other thing. He had better genetics, high terpenes, and a small piece stank the room. And cannabis has many characteristics identical to hops.

KG: It's not just the hops you've fallen in love with, but the terpenes.

JM: The way I spend a lot of time now is rooted in the way it all started. I am becoming a terpene scientist, which is the true story of love in the brewing and cannabis movements, if you ask me. Hops and cannabis contain hundreds and hundreds of these terpenes and no machine can demystify them. You can try creating an odor to mimic Amarillo hops or Lemon Pound Cake cannabis strain, but you can not put it together in a synthetic way. This is because there are hundreds of these "miners", terpenes present in small quantities. The combination gives off the odor detected by the human nose, but we do not have any machines.

KG: Who taught you how to brew? Or did you just pick it up?

KG: And you chose …?

JM: A road trip seemed good so I went to Davis. When I arrived, they said that there was no interest in the program, that everyone was fired, that all the breweries were for sale and that I would be lucky to find a job in a small brewery that brought in 18 $ 000 per year. It's hilarious – no more than a few years later, the program that was now famous had a lady charged with preparing the students for the drums telling me not to attend. But I remembered what my grandfather had told me: sometimes the best time to buy something is when everyone says it's a bad idea. So, I was not moved by this person.

KG: Was Davis a good experience?

JM: At the time, UC Davis was really hip with Anheuser Busch. If you have paid the money to participate in the brewing program, you will automatically get a good stable job. I told them I was not drinking Budweiser and they said, "Oh, great, you're another of those boring and iconoclastic home thinkers. After two weeks, they fell like flies because it was really difficult. You had to know your chemistry, take physics and biology classes. My undergraduate studies were very useful because they provided me with the prerequisites for the UC Davis program. But I always thought it was fun. The proximity of Davis to Petaluma was the reason why I found Lagunitas, which at the time was only a phenomenon of Northern California. I shared a room with two other guys from the program and we sort of rented rooms in a late deceased home. One of my roommates was the key to the exhibition in Lagunitas. He said: "I know this brand, they are weird, they are known to be bad brewing boys, they make a good beer with a ton of hops." He planted this idea in my head. I interviewed at a time when Tony McGee … it was like working for Frank Zappa but also for Elon Musk. Avant-garde and intense. Tony was intimidating. After my interview, I wrote her a letter and told her, "I'm at the beer school and I feel like everything I'm learning can be applied to you." It was short and slightly memorable. I have probably received him in the last few years, he actually received his mail, because most of his letters were bills and he stopped watching them.

KG: In retrospect, this answer might be easy for you, but was Lagunitas the right choice?

KG: Where did you start?

KG: It sounds like a challenge.

KG: Lagunitas went through a period when the brewing industry was not very prosperous.

KG: When have things changed for Lagunitas?

KG: What does it mean to work at the brewery now? I have to imagine that it's very different from punk rock.

KG: So, what is your daily life?

JM: We just had a new CMO from Converse and Vans, and I spend a lot of time with her. She needs to be immersed in our culture. That's one of the things I wrote in Tony's book. A craft brewery is nothing without its culture. J'aime visiter d'autres brasseries artisanales et pas seulement faire une tournée, mais traîner dans le dos et être un habitant de cave, apprendre à connaître leur culture. Il existe certaines similitudes, mais chaque brasserie a sa propre culture. Si jamais vous vous retrouvez dans un restaurant qui semble ne pas avoir de culture, vous devez vous demander qui va boire la bière. Je ne pense pas qu’ils vont y arriver. Je n’aime pas quand une brasserie artisanale peint cette image bien commercialisée. C’est décourageant quand j’attends une chose et que j’ai des gens super ennuyeux qui sont juste au travail. Les brasseries artisanales se lancent dans cette aventure parce que nous sommes rassemblés par nos passions. J'ai une passion extrême pour le houblon, la bière artisanale, le brassage domestique, le cannabis, l'extraction. Toutes ces choses qui vivent dans le grand univers brassicole.