Rooftop Brewery - Washington Beer Talk #1

Recently I had the pleasure of exploring the hidden depths of Rooftop Brewery with the owner and founder Craig Christian. That tiny tap room is just the tip of the iceberg of the brewery, with a surprising amount of bulk hidden just below the surface. When Craig invited me down I was excited to check it out and use the chance to interview him on what’s going on with Rooftop. I recorded the whole thing for your listening pleasure in the first of what might be called the Brewer Interview Series! Ok, the name needs work. This was pretty fun to record and make, so I intend to keep it up

If you don’t have 35 minutes to burn listening to Craig’s and my silky smooth voices talk about his awesome brewery, here’s basically how it went:

The interview jumps right off a little bit after Craig started his tour of the downstairs of Rooftop. Their space is a massive warehouse shared by two coffee roasting companies with brewing and cleaning actively going on while we walked around. We jumped from topic to topic. Craig shared a bit of the history of the brewery, its origin as a small garage with a 1 barrel system, and hiring several Kyles to help out. We talked about their plans to fill out their space, max out their capacity by adding more of their 30 barrel fermenters, and their ongoing construction inside the brewery to make more room. They have plans to expand into the coffee roasting space when those guys clear out. We talked all about his opinions on Untappd (which is a controversial topic among brewers these days), the growth of the beer industry, and ABinBev. In general, he’s optimistic on all these topics! Thank you so much, Craig, for taking the time.

I can't really imagine the room for events down here, but Craig says it cleans up nicely! There's the 15 bbl kettle off to the right and all their 30 bbl ferms in the back behind the barrels.

A little cramped, but not for long! This part of Rooftop is under construction to make room for more offices and clear out space for events.

If you like the format of the audio interview, I would like to hear it! It’s fun to do but as far as I know, it isn’t fun at all to listen to. If there are things you want to hear about or didn’t enjoy hearing about, let me know! This is a serious trial by fire. Editing this interview took an entirely awkward set of skills and don’t even get me started on hearing the sound of my own voice. Thanks for listening!