by Greg Teachout Leaving one’s house occasionally is good, I’m told, so I caught up with Midtown Beer Company’s in-house brew maestro, Brandon “Father Time”1 Cook recently, and pinned him down on his ideas about beer.
Saying “I caught up with” my interview subject is a time-honored media cliché, but in the case of Cook, the phrase becomes literal: he is a driven, methodical person holding down three jobs. If you need to meet with Father Time, he pencils you in.
When I finally ensnare Cook at the MBC brewpub on S. Washington, he bursts out of the back room and gives me the best sort of handshake—one that fills my proffered hand with a beer. He skips “hello” and tells me to try it, so I do.
He tells me the beer—”Uncle Scrooged”— contains cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla, cranberries, and ginger. I tell him I’m here to talk beer, not scones. I love unusual food, but this sounds overwrought, even repulsive. (This I think and do not say.)
The beer is wonderful. Really, really good. It tastes like a Belgian, but that’s just the clove coming through. Yes, he also added clove, since five wacky additions were just not enough. Apparently, Frankensteining a spice rack into a beer is genius, because this is the most unique and delicious draft I’ve had since exhausting Jolly Pumpkin of their on-site La Roja supply.
 | |
| The plans for my moon base are almost complete. |
What looks like a classic blue and white composition book filled with algebra scrawlings is actually Pandora’s box, ready to unleash its twisted majesty on the world. This is for our own good, he'd assure you. Cook will show me his vision of brewing, and why this is the way it must be, and I will be transformed.
Cook is an intense guy, perhaps a true alpha; he seems refreshingly devoid of any instinct to posture. He sports a notable beard; he’s opted for volume over length. He seems to be in great shape, though he refuses a Body Mass Index pinch, so I can’t be certain. His vaguely blacksmithish presentation is offset by glasses that radiate “science” above “style."
I’m a bad interviewer, so I come right out and say the first thing I’m thinking.
GT: What do you think about the crossover between beards and brewing/people who are generally involved in craftsmanship? With carpenters and blacksmiths, for instance, all throughout history, big beards, full beards abound. You have a nice full beard.
Cook: Thank you.
GT: Sure.
Cook: “Magnificent” is the word most commonly used to describe it.
GT: I don’t doubt it. I see a lot of brewers, people from Stone, Lagunitas, Dark Horse, and they all look like they could be in ZZ Top. So what is it? Does it reflect that, as a brewer, you’re owned by no one?
Cook: I’ve been able to try a lot of different looks, facial hair-wise. I’ve tried out a lot of different looks over the years.. I like variety—that’s what I’m about. If you notice the stuff I brew, I’ve brewed a wide variety in the short time I’ve been here. Something like 40 different styles have been on tap here with my name on it. As far as the beard: back in late spring, it was brought to my attention that I might look good with a full beard. I’ve done the goatee, the handlebar—for a very short period of time—
GT: Of course.
At this point, we’re interrupted by a young lady from the kitchen who wordlessly offers a cup of hot sauce for Cook. He dabs it, not undaintily, and says, “You could make it hotter.” Then he continues.
Cook: I’m also a sound guy, that’s also another subsection of people that really embraces facial hair.
GT: You’re a free agent with a lot of skills.
Cook: Yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that as a free agent, you’re a manager of your own time. And your time doesn’t always cater to the necessity of shaving your face. With a full beard, I can wake up and just leave, most of the time.
GT: You Lothario, you.
Opening with seemingly idiotic questions is a dangerous gambit. One runs the risk of seeming like, well, an idiot. But my favorite people always build a bridge of their own back to something substantial, and this bridge is often more telling than its destination.
Cook is wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with the logo of Brazilian thrash/tribal luminaries Sepultura. Wait—I know what you’re thinking. But fear not! It’s a capital “S,” replete with thorns, from the Roots era, not the anemic post-Max Cavalera embarrassment of today. So Cook is keeping it real.
GT: I’d hazard wearing this sort of “metal” hat is more common among brewers than most professions. I’ve noticed craft beer culture embraces [the musical genre of] “metal.” There’s always been a relationship between music and beer, obviously, but there’s an amazing amount of “traditional” metal and—I’ll say it—Dungeons and Dragons-style imagery, and Satanic and/or “evil” iconography utilized by the craft beer scene. At this point, it seems natural by repeated exposure. But it’s not necessarily intuitive on the level of combining peanut butter with chocolate to just put a demon or a gargoyle on your beer. You’re wearing a Sepultura hat as we speak. So...what’s up with that?
Cook: I consider beer to be art. Music is art. I don’t know how much it intersects with metal; I know the guys down at Dark Horse are really into metal, but the guys down at the Hideout are into some metal, but they’re also into folk music…
GT: But do those other genres make it into their artwork? Because the guys who love metal really seem to weave it into their labels, their names, and their brands.
Cook: At the Hideout, not at all. Dark horse, yes. The logo of a Double Crooked Tree? Menacing! It’s awesome; it’s what attracted me to that beer in the first place. Seeing that label...it’s just so dark. It just looks dark. And I knew nothing about the beer, the first time I had it. Then that was that. For me, I kind of have to get into metal a little bit, to talk about it.
GT: This is a safe place. Go ahead.
Cook: To me, metal is a genre of music that has more subgenres than any other.
(Note: this is true, with the possible exception of modern “electronic music.” Trying to measure the subgenre birth rate in either case suggests Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.)
Cook: And it is meticulously broken up into those categories. Fans of metal will, more often than not, will say “that’s Industrial, not Goth.” Or, “that’s Pop Metal, that’s Power Metal, while that’s Operatic Metal—not necessarily Power Metal, but almost a subgenre of that.”
GT: Hardcore, grindcore, digital hardcore…
Cook: Exactly. You got it. There are so many subgenres, and a lot of that same level of categorization happens in the beer world as well.
You don’t just have an IPA, you’ve got rye IPAs, you’ve got Belgian IPAs, you’ve got black IPAs, you’ve got sour IPAs now, you’ve got India Pale Lagers. Even though it is technically different than an ale, India Pale Lager happened because of how big IPAs are. You’ve got all these different styles, and they’re so different. The common, or average beer drinker, or music listener, would say, “Oh, that’s just metal. Oh, that’s beer, I don’t like beer. Oh, I don’t like metal.” And I say, “Well, I’m pretty sure you just haven’t found the right metal.” And I’ll tell people, “I’m pretty sure you just haven’t found the right beer.” They’ll say, “No I’ve had a lot of them,” and I’ll say, “No, you probably haven’t, whether you actually realize it or not.”
At this point, the kitchen girl arrives again. Cook dabs and tastes. He stares at the sauce again. The girl says she feels like it can’t get it any hotter. Cook is skeptical.
“It’s missing the slow burn it had before.”
“I know,” she says pointedly.
“Do you have peppers in there?”
“No…”
They settle on adding some crushed red pepper, and Cook continues.
Cook: People who often make those claims, they often just haven’t found the right one yet. People who say they don’t like dark beer—that’s a broad generalization. To say you don’t like dark beer, define dark beer to me. Are you saying dark in color? The Huma Lupa Licious I’m about to drink is a really light-colored IPA, but it’s super bitter. (Editor’s note: At 140 IBU, Short’s IPA is up there, even for IPAs.) Are you associating “bitterness” with “darkness?” Because I’ve had a lot of cream stouts that are dark, but they’re sweet, by nature. So it’s a matter of people just being misinformed. Uneducated, uninitiated.
"Father Time" speaks like a cross between a prophet and a car salesman. He’s simply sure that after you’ve heard the Good News, he can find the right model for you.
GT: I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but it sounds like you feel like an emissary, or an ambassador, by bringing people who thought they didn’t like beer something they actually find palatable?
Cook: Yeah, yeah, a little bit. I’ve been asked repeatedly here to brew a straightforward IPA. I’ve danced around it. A lot! I have done it; it was a very small batch, and it was everything that they wanted.
As he explains this, Cook begins speaking slowly and with an edge, the way you would to a child who just stuck his toy train in your supper. The memory itself seems to try his patience. This is when it truly clicks for me that Cook is no simple mercenary. He has an artist’s soul, of the sort that chafes at being wrangled.
Cook: At that point, I said, OK, I’m going to move forward with this other IPA, because it’s more fun for me to brew. And I’m not saying that it’s necessarily unique, or that nobody had ever brewed this before, because, much like music, somebody has probably tried, or done something very close.
GT: But the innovation sounds important to you. You’re pushing at the fringe as much as you can.
Cook: Yeah, kind of a happy medium between pushing it to the fringe and being socially palatable. I don’t just want to be something people expect and know. If I can be a little outside of that box, while still being able to market it, then my job’s accomplished.
GT: I think that taste, next to smell, is our most animal sense. A person’s reaction to food and drink is often visceral, or involuntary. Taste culture ultimately doesn’t get as much respect, even if it gets as much press, as the visual arts, or music. But it seems like true gourmands and craft brewing culture provide a nice counterpoint to that. It sounds to me like you’re interested in forcing people into acquired tastes for their own good, ultimately.
Cook: Yeah.
GT: Fascist.
Cook: (Laughs.) I’ve got a variety of different wheat beers. I started brewing here, they said, “We want something light, something dark, something different. Well, they want something light primarily for the people who don’t know any better. Or the people who are cautious about getting into something dark. Because they’re afraid of it.
GT: The three-foot end of the pool.
Cook: Exactly. I already knew it was going to be a wheat beer, most likely, but instead of going with your typical “American Wheat,” in the style of...well, Blue Moon is technically a Belgian-style ale, but… basically, what Oberon has become. Not to badmouth Oberon, but...something like Leinenkugel Sunset Wheat. It’s sweeter, and associated more with its garnish than with it being a beer in the first place. The orange, the citrus peel, things like that. I wanted to avoid conforming to that very rigid box and do something different with it, so the first thing I did was brew a German Hefeweizen, where it’s all about the wheat, and the ester from the yeast, you know, something that’s really going to breathe, but that’s still exceptionally drinkable.
G: What was that called?
Cook: That was the Weisen of Eden. When it came to finally do an American Wheat, I brewed something straightforward, and accentuated the spice, the coriander… not terribly inventive. But I took part of that batch, and went a different way with it. People always associate lemon, orange, with those beers, but I went lime. I made a lime wheat with coriander, and it was delicious. It came out back in October. The Cal Cadaver. I coordinated the release with the week of Halloween, alongside our pumpkin ale. The pumpkin ale was for Halloween, but the Cal Cadaver was for Day of the Dead.
Cook puts all his beer on Untappd, the beer social network. He says most have gone over well, notwithstanding the occasional lambasting by a Big Beer loyalist who—mystifyingly—utilizes Untappd.
GT: Do you have any personal favorites that have been universally panned? Something where nobody else is along for the ride, but you know in your heart it's delicious?
Cook: Nothing I’ve put out here has been universally panned. I’ve got a pretty solid batting average. I’m not going to say they've all been home runs. At all. But they start off pretty drinkable, and my process has gotten refined, so the beer has stepped up in quality a lot. The only one that got a straight up poor rating was actually the Scottish Ale that came out.
G: Interesting.
Cook: I thought it was great. Most people here thought it was great. But sometimes the people online they can be brutal.
GT: That’s B-R-E-W-tal?
Cook: (Laughs.) Yeah.
GT: Has anyone done that already?
Cook: I don’t think so.
GT: You can have that.
Cook: Thanks. I’ll name a beer after you.
GT: Thanks. Same to you.
Cook: What?
Catch up with Brandon “Father Time” Cook at:
Midtown Beer Company
402 S. Washington Square
Lansing, MI 48933
(517) 977-1349
2. I'm not really sure what this means either. Like a ghost that is present without being obnoxiously poltergeisty, I guess.
