4peaks beers1/2/2024 He came down the next day and stayed for 10 months. A mutual friend gave me his number and I called to see if he wanted to come down and check out a new brewery we were starting called Four Peaks. He moved to Scottsdale, AZ, of all places, in 1995. Second, Barry John, who for 35 years was one of three brewers at the Young’s Brewery in London. When he was in the Navy he once brewed “beer” in a galley sink on a submarine… He was a good boss and a great seat-of-the-pants brewer. First, Clark Nelson, who was Head Brewer at Coyote Springs Brewpub (my first brewing job). Would you say that you have any brewing mentors? I couldn’t believe that they were paying me to make beer and I decided, on-the-spot, to see how far this could take me. The summer before I was about to start school, I took a part time job at a brewpub scrubbing floors. I was set to go to graduate school and get into forensic psychology. What was your path before arriving at Four Peaks? I went to Arizona State University on a football scholarship and I majored in psychology (the psych building seemed to have the cutest girls). Where did you go to college, and what was your major? Despite my efforts to screw it up, the beer turned out great, thank God. I wanted to replicate something I knew to test myself and my system. The first beer that I brewed on my own, with my own equipment, was probably the same beer a lot of first-timers made a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale Clone. What was the first beer you ever brewed, and how did it turn out? It was like some rite of passage but the beer was rough. We talked about football and family and life it was great. I was probably 17, watching a football game, when my Dad came in with two beers one for me. Not known for quality toward the end, A-1 was certainly known for quantity, as in cheap. My Dad drank A-1 which was a local regional beer that died out in 1987. I have an early beer memory (we’ll not talk about the first), and it wasn’t all that good in terms of beer. I fell in love with English beer and English pub culture and on my return jumped into full-scale, take-over-the-garage homebrewing. Years later I went to school in London and discovered what my friend’s dad was trying to do make great beers that you just couldn’t buy in the USA. Although it was horrible, it did spark a small flame in me that maybe there’s something to this “beer-making”. So, we “liberated” his homebrew kit and tried it ourselves. It always fascinated me to think that you could make your own beer because my knowledge of beer-making (I won’t call it brewing because I didn’t know what that was at the time) was that beer had to be made from some concoction of fifteen-letter chemicals. How did you become so interested in beer?Īt a pre-legal age I had a friend whose dad homebrewed. I recently caught up with Ingram, who shared more insight into his background and approach. However, the partners haven’t expanded beyond Arizona, opting to supply their core constituency. Four Peaks is on the upswing, with a recent jump in production from 20,000 to 40,000 barrels per year. Brewmaster Andy Ingram currently owns Four Peaks with Jim Scussel and Randy Schultz, their Tempe brewery named for the quartet of 7500-foot mountains located 35 miles northeast of Phoenix. Most people look at the desert and see cacti, craggy rock formations and swirling sand.
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