World Beer Festival 2012: Triangle Brewing Company, Durham, NC

Diversions: Is there any beer Triangle Brewing Company is especially excited to be showcasing at the World Beer Festival this year in Durham?

Andy Miller, owner: We’re going to showcase our three year-rounds; it’s a great opportunity for us. Obviously, Durham is our back yard. It helps me to promote to Durham. About 70 percent of people in Durham know who we are already, but it’s just a good way for us to try to get that fringe person who may not have heard of us yet.

Dive: Do you have any special beers out this season?

AM: We’ll be debuting our Abbey Dubbel this Thursday and behind that we’ll do a bourbon-aged version of the same. Then in the wintertime we’ll bring out our stout. We’re very excited
about it, we haven’t done the Abbey in two years. I was sipping on it this morning. It’s great.

Dive: Who is Rufus?

AM: Rufus is the dead guy that we found in the basement. When the building was purchased and was renovated – a lot of people don’t know this but the brewery actually sits on the second floor – they actually found the guy in the basement underneath us. The basement is half concreted – a solid, standard basement like you’re used to – and the other half is a crawlspace. He was in a trash bag in the crawlspace, up on a ledge. All we know is that he was fully decomposed and broken down and that the trash bag was tied from the outside, so we’re pretty confident that he didn’t crawl in on his own.

But he is the patron saint of Triangle Brewing Company. He does haunt the brewery. He weighs in on a lot of our new beers and any new employees or anything else that we may have in the brewery. He is fiscally responsible, makes sure everything’s rolling solid and going well and he’s been an asset to the brewery. We have a coffin that we take out with us to events. Rufus will be at the festival this weekend, he loves getting out of the building. All of our beers at all festivals are poured out of Rufus. He just really enjoys it. If Rufus is happy, we’re all happy.

Dive: Why is Triangle Brewing devoted to ales as opposed to lagers?

AM: For a number of reasons. First and foremost, we’re big ale fans. From a business standpoint lagers take a lot longer to make and there’s some great American lagers out there. They literally own the market. Eighty percent of the market is lagers. You can see them in the Bud / Miller coolers. But for us as Triangle Brewing Company we look to make full-flavored ales. We want to have the nice flavor profile that we set out for, and traditionally, ales are going to give you what we need. From a business standpoint it’s strictly cost. It’s not worth it to me.

Dive: Do you have a favorite beer at the brewery?

AM: Asking me for a favorite beer is like asking for my favorite child. So much of it, honestly,with the beers that we make, depend on where I’m at, what I’m doing, who I’m with. In the
summertime, my white ale, if I’m mowing the lawn, is a fantastic complement to mowing the lawn. Love my IPA at the finish. Mowing the lawn, sitting out at a picnic, the white or the IPA
are fantastic. My Golden Ale if I’m having a nice dinner, like a blackened tuna, or a nice, like, in the wintertime if I’m doing like a stew or a chili or something heavier, a nice steak dinner,
the golden pairs so well with it.

After dinner, if I’m sitting out with some buddies having a nice cigar, my Golden or my Imperial Amber or my Abbey in the fall time are great beers to kick back. It’s dependent on the situation. You can really, at this point now, start to compare beers to wines. Each wine has a spot where it is justified to have that. I think beers are much the same and even beyond that. I always joke about “give me a good wine to pair with a hotdog.” Because I can find you a beer to put with it. I did hamburgers and hotdogs last night at the house and had a great beer to pair with it. You couldn’t find a wine to do it.

Dive: What was the inspiration behind your Habanero Pale Ale?

AM: The habanero came about for a couple of different reasons. For one we had a really good contact – a regular who was coming to the brewery and we really got to know well – who had a pepper patch. He’s just a pepper geek. We had talked with him about some different ideas and some different opportunities and played around with it. We kind of built our business on cask ales. They’re basically what people refer to as traditional ales. They’re served in a cask where the beer actually conditions and carbonates and everything in the cask.

As the brewing industry has advanced and grown, now breweries can do it on an individual basis, where they were doing it all beers the same way in the past. So when we do it now we’re able to do it in a small setting and dress it up however we want to. So we started playing around with the idea of habaneros, and we had a pale ale out there, so we went ahead and said “let’s put some habaneros into this cast,” which is a 10.8 gallon vessel. Rave reviews on it. Then we did a couple of other casts, same way, rave reviews. So then one summer we had an empty tank and some free time and some extra grain on our hands and said “let’s see about doing a full batch of it and actually kegging it up and selling it.” And we did it and it sold extremely well.

So based on that, we took that information, brought it in, and right now we’re looking at making it something that’s out – like right now it’s been out twice a year, typically in the spring and in the fall. I’ve got people waiting for it, there’s a waiting list for when the habanero comes out. So we’ve taken that information, built it up a little bit more, and now we’re actually looking at putting it into cans and making it year-round. Hopefully you’ll see that within the next six months.

Dive: I know lambics are getting popular right now, can you tell me a little about your lambic?

AM: Yeah, so we have two of them that we’ve done in the last year and a half. One was our Belgian, our Abbey. We did it, once again, more on a whim. We had an extra tank and said, “you know what, we’ve got an extra tank, we’ve got some time, let’s go ahead and do it and see what happens.” It’s just one of those things where the timing was right, so we went ahead and soured it out and sold it and it went extremely well. So then about six or seven
months later we had a very similar scenario come up where we had an excess of our golden ale. We had some time on our hands and we’ve always said, “man, how great would it be to sour out the golden and see what happens with it?” So we did it. A lot of it was mainly for ourselves. We said “we’ll drink it ourselves if nothing else.” It absolutely has taken off. To the point where we’ve done six batches of the golden soured out to date. Tim, you can speak on that more than I can, what’s the word on the street?

Tim Harvey, sales: The reaction to the lambic on the market has been that, as the North Carolina beer scene has taken off over the last ten or fifteen years, especially since pop-a-cap and the repeal of the alcohol content limit, you’re able to do so much more with flavors and profiles. As that’s grown, so has the beer palette in North Carolina. Go back to the sixties and seventies before Chapel Hill had liquor by the drink, Chapel Hill sold more Natural Light per capita than any city on the East coast. At least that’s the urban legend I’ve always heard. So 35-40 years ago, that was what we drank in North Carolina – Natural Light, Bud Light, Coors Light, Miller Light. Since the microbreweries have started to explode, not just here but nationwide – it’s been incredible here, the reaction – the public’s beer palette has evolved with it.

AM: I think the beer palette for North Carolina has also been very inquisitive. It’s what we in the brewing industry like to refer to as “beer-curious.” So they’re willing to try it. If it is
unique enough and it’s different and it’s got a quality flavor to it, you’re starting to see people go, “wow, I’ve never had it but I really like it.” And then try to build on it for them. And I
think a lot of breweries – not just ourselves, but a lot of breweries in the state – have really tried to latch onto that and bring in things to North Carolina that North Carolinians have never seen or had before. Or that they’ve heard about, maybe they’ve had it – you know, North Carolina’s such a transient state – it’s like I remember when I was in Pennsylvania or Colorado or California or wherever and I had it and I think they’re coming back to it. They’re really, you know, grasping onto the idea of different flavor profiles and looking at and pairing them up with different things.

TH: And in the case of the lambic specifically, it’s got a broader appeal than you would expect a niche beer like a sour beer to have, because as Andy was saying, you can’t always find a wine to pair with certain foods, but you can find a beer. And you can bring wine drinkers into the fold because the lambic is bright, it’s dry, it’s crisp, it’s citrusy. People who generally
don’t necessarily like a heavy beer like an IPA or a porter or a stout, it’s dry enough. And the sour aspect I don’t like calling it a cidery characteristic because they’re two wildly different
things, but people who enjoy ciders can relate to it and they take some enjoyment from it in that regard.

The fact that it’s a higher alcohol content is a built-in selling point. When you combine the three or four different characteristics that it’s got, you reach across several different market segments and people respond to it. It’s something they’ve never had before, it’s something, like Andy said, it’s something very unique, something they’re willing to try, and once they’ve tried it they hopefully develop an appreciation for it and they go, “you know what, that was great, I want more of that.” So not only are they buying more of our unique flavors, but it’s encouraging them to try more stuff. They try the Triangle lambic and then they go into a bottle shop – Bottle Revolution or Tasty Beverage in Raleigh or Sam’s Quick Shop here in Durham – and they’re like “yeah, I had that Triangle lambic,” so now they have a frame of reference for what a lambic is. Whereas before, they might’ve walked in there and seen a bottle that said ‘lambic’ and said “I have no idea what that is, I’m not buying it.” Now they’ll try something, and they can try beers from Germany and Belgium that are cranberry lambics and blackberry lambics and things like that. And it’s not just good for us, it’s good for anybody and everybody that’s trying to move beer in this state.

AM: And our goal with Triangle is to educate as much as to sell our own product. That’s why you’ll notice all of my taps have got my Triangle brewing logo on it, but it’s a Belgian golden, it’s a Belgian white, it’s an Abbey dubbel, it’s a winter stout, it’s an IPA. We don’t do clever names. We are what we are, this is the product that I’m selling you under my label, with the hope and the understanding is that if you find my Belgian golden and you really like it, if you are in a bottle shop or somewhere else and maybe my beer’s not available, you can at least be like “I like the Belgian goldens.” You can at least say, “do you have a Belgian golden?” We try to educate as much as we can as well, in addition to, obviously, I’m in business to sell beer. But if I can help other people out and educate people while I’m doing it I think it’s a good thing.

Dive: Why do you prefer cans to bottles?

TH: In North Carolina, especially in central North Carolina where we are, you’re three hours from the mountains, four hours from the beach. You’ve got dozens of world class golf courses all over the state. You’ve got state and national parks where you can go hiking and camping and fishing. And every single one of the places and activities that I just listed is a place where you can’t take a bottle. You can’t take bottles to the beach, you can’t take them to the pool deck, you can’t take them on the golf course, you definitely don’t want to carry them on a hiking trip. Cans go everywhere. We buy our cans from a North Carolina manufacturer, so it’s a local company and we’re putting money back into the local economy, spending it here in North Carolina. So people that live here and buy our beer: their money isn’t leaving us and going to a can manufacturer in Iowa, it’s staying here in the local community. So we’re keeping that invested here in North Carolina. It’s a lower carbon footprint because it’s shorter shipping distance.

Energy-wise, cans are cheaper to manufacture than bottles. They’re also easier to recycle than bottles. And the two worst things for beer are light and oxygen. Cans keep out 100% of both. That doesn’t mean canned beer lives forever, but it’s much more shelf stable than bottles. The American preconceived notion for decades has been that bottles equal import therefore expensive therefore good; cans equal domestic therefore cheap therefore bad. A lot of craft breweries across the country, especially in the past ten years, have been making that conscious effort to make the switch. New Belgium brewing out of Colorado has started doing almost half of their catalog in cans. Sierra Nevada has introduced two or three beers in cans. Sam Adams will never go to it, because Jim Cook has spent 25 years getting people to recognize Sam Adams from a hundred yards. So that’s not likely to ever happen.

AM: And, to be fair, he also said that no self-respecting brewery would ever put their beer in
a can.

TH: Yeah, so that’s a great quote. But for somebody like us, it’s outstanding. You can take them to a picnic, you can take them to the beach, you can take them to the pool deck, you can take them tailgating. Anybody that’s ever been to a college football tailgate, odds are, they’ve had to step around broken glass in a parking lot. Find me somebody that’s had to step around a broken metal can. Cans are better for the beer, they’re better for the environment, and in our case they’re better for the local economy because we buy them locally.

AM: And to be fair, they’re pretty fucking cool.

TH: Yeah, they’re awesome. We love our artwork.

For more information visit Triangle Brewing Company online.