Clay Gentry

Dynamo Brewing & Beverage

No offense to anyone, but Clay Gentry of Dynamo Brewing & Beverage doesn’t look like a brewmaster.

Seriously, we all know the classic brewmaster aesthetic: the trucker hat with their brewery’s logo stitched on it, tattoo of a Cascade hop in the style of Ed Hardy on the forearm or even fist and, of course, the robust lumberjack-like beard. The beard part is so on-brand that a Denver, Colorado, marketing agency published a piece of content asking, “Are beards a requirement for brewing beer?” Even crazier, in 2015, Oregon-based Rogue Ales brewed a beer made from yeast cultured from Brewmaster John Maier’s beard hair.

Gentry doesn’t check any of these boxes, and when he does have a beard, it’s in between stubble, five o’clock shadow and a light scruff. His physique doesn’t seem brawny enough to toss around 50-pound sacks of malted barley or stack kegs of India pale ale. Instead, Gentry looks more like he could be the chief curator at the Hunter Museum of American Art or teach Theater Tech & Design at McCallie.

Originally more interested in research archaeology (think Indiana Jones) than the process of “lautering” (separating the mash from the grain), Gentry was coerced into beer-making by his brother, Rob, who’d just opened Big River Grille in 1993. At the time, they were only the third brewery in the state of Tennessee, and Chattanooga’s beer scene was abysmal.

During a recent interview in the dining room of Hello Monty, Gentry laid out what led him from archaeology to being one of the city’s O.G. brewers.

“I found the same thing [as research anthropology] with brewing beer,” he says. “It’s a physical job on this level of brewing, but at the same time, you’re mentally engaged and constantly thinking. So fast-forward 30 years, and I’m still brewing.”