The Locals
With an expansion in the works that will help meet customer demand, the owners behind Main & Mill Brewing Co. will keep their existing brewhouse and begin experimenting with styles.
DENNY FOSTER WAS A
few days into an extended road trip through Florida that saw him and his assistant brewer, Brandon Bischoff, doing collaborations. In theory, it was about the beer and community, but he also wanted to get a closer look at some brewing equipment and see firsthand how other brewers were running their breweries and brewhouses.
Foster, the coowner, with his father Barry, and brewer of Main & Mill Brewing Co. in Festus, Missouri, is getting ready to open up a large expansion to the business that he and his father opened 2 years ago in his suburb just south of St. Louis.
The original plan, designed to cater to the needs of the locals—not necessarily the larger beer universe, revolved around a 7-barrel brewhouse tucked into 420 square feet inside a rehabbed building from the 1880s that was converted into a brewpub model.
Word got out anyway, especially for the pastry stouts Main & Mill was creating, and soon enough Foster had scored an invitation to Other Half Brewing Co.’s Pastrytown beer festival (Brooklyn, New York).
“We met a bunch of brewers, and we talking. Even though our brewery is so tiny right now, they invited us to come collaborate.”
That’s how he wound up brewing with Jupiter, Florida’s Civil Society Brewing and Miami’s J. Wakefield Brewing.
From the start and during the 3 years it took to open his doors, the goal was “to create a place that the locals in the area can be proud of,” he says. “We’re in Anheuserbusch country, so we were still going to be introducing craft beer to people.”
When the brewery did a few small bottle releases—small being about 230 bottles—that wound up on trading sites and getting rave reviews, the outside attention came pouring in, leading to the festival invitations and the collaborations.
“We didn’t have a preconceived notion about how this was going to be,” Foster says. “The market changed. We were making big stouts, and that’s what people wanted, and we’re just going to roll with it.”
Foster, however, still has his sights on making sure the local community comes first. From the start, the brewery offered a mug club program, which quickly sold out and continues to have demand. It follows a traditional method: For a yearly fee, the members get a 20-ounce mug but pay the price of a pint, discounts on food at the pub, merchandise discounts, invitations to try beers that have yet to be released to the public, and of course, the chance to get access to special bottle releases before everyone else.
“It just blew up,” Foster says. “And we have people from outside of the state who signed up just for the opportunity to buy a bottle. There are members in like thirty states right now.”
A Respect for Stouts
Scanning the tap list at Main & Mill, you’re going to see more than just the stouts that the traders and enthusiasts from afar are going nuts about. It has, dare we say it, balstarted
“We didn’t have a preconceived notion about how this was going to be,” Foster says. “The market changed. We were making big stouts, and that’s what people wanted, and we’re just going to roll with it.”
tailor each stout to the ingredients in the process and usually we can meet our end goal.”
To illustrate his point, he points to a recent release of Carpathian, a stout that regularly has high reviews. “Carpathian is our non-adjunct BA imperial stout, and it’s essentially the best barrels in our cellar in a given year and can end up being a blend of multiple base stouts based on what we enjoy most in the barrel cellar.”
Two Blocks Down
When they opened the brewpub, the idea was to draw people in with food. It was a model that worked in the early microbrew days of America and still rings true today.
“We knew there would be people who came in and said ‘we don’t like craft beer,’ so we needed to have a good burger for them. We couldn’t expect to make a 100-IBUS IPA and expect them to adapt to us. We needed a business model that appealed to them.”
With that space firmly established and thriving, Foster has turned his attention to a 20,000-square-foot space two blocks away that will house two new brewing systems—a 20-barrel brewhouse and a 3-barrel brewhouse—that will allow Main & Mill to grow its distribution business and experiment with smaller batches. He plans to keep the 7-barrel brewhouse at the brewpub to service those taps but admits he’s looking forward to higher yields and more space to move around when it comes to brewing those big stouts.
The new space will also house a canning line. Although the brewery currently sends out a very small number of kegs, there’s been demand for more. With cans, “we can push out as much as makes sense.”
He says he’s really looking forward to the experimentation. By purchasing 3-barrel fermentors, he plans to brew full 20-barrel batches of beer and divide them among the smaller fermentation vessels, pitching different yeasts into each one and then trying out different ingredients to find recipes that will really shine and connect with customers.
“We’ll put them on in the taproom and see what people like, but we are going to have a lot of fun with dry hopping, yeasts, and more.” If all goes as planned, the new space will open this October. “Basically, at the brewpub and the new brewery, we’re going to be able to do what people want and what everyone would like to see us do without overextending ourselves.”