Wicked Barley Brewing Company

Wicked Barley site layout

9. How big is the tap room going to be?

The total building is going to be 7,000 square feet. The brewery itself will be around 4,000 square feet and the tap room will be a little over 2,000 square feet. We’re going to have a large, covered patio that will have heaters and coolers to allow people to sit out there comfortably for a lot of the year. In total we’ll be able to seat about 200 people - 75 inside and the rest on the patio. We’ll also have a beer garden, but it won’t be covered.

10. Will the dock be there on day 1?

That’s the plan, unless something comes up to destroy our budget.

11. Will you open in phases or all at once?

Bang! All at once! We’re not doing it half-assed. We know what we’re doing and we’ve been testing our beers for a long time. We want to start out of the gate with 10 different brews. We’ll have a full food menu, including sausages we make in-house, sandwiches and hearty food that goes well with beer.

12. Is your goal to distribute your beers to other bars?

Yes, definitely. At the core we’re a brew pub, so our biggest ambition is to sell beer in our tap room. But, we’re also looking to get into as many bars and restaurants around town as possible. We want our taps to be next to Bold City, Intuition and the other great local brewers. We’ll start locally but also want to eventually branch out geographically. Our goal is to put in a canning line in year 3 or so. The ultimate goal is to move production to an offsite warehouse while keeping our 15 barrel system for the pub with the production site servicing areas outside the pub.

13. Do you have your recipes in place?

The recipes we have are all scaled to a one barrel system and we’re working to scale them to a 15 barrel system. It’s a process of repetition - brewing over and over to get things right on a consistent basis. That means drinking a lot of beer. Unfortunately our beer guts are getting bigger, but fortunately we have a lot of friends who are willing to take our beer. For the past two years it seems like we’ve been brewing nearly every Sunday. It’s been nuts.

14. Your tagline is “Naughty Ales for Noble Souls” - what do you mean by that?

“Naughty Ales" is to give it a punk rock feel. I was in a punk band in college and I want our whole being to have an edge to it. I don’t want to play it safe. I don’t want to have the same staple beers as everyone else. I love our local breweries so I’m not putting anyone down, but I want our beers to be different, to have an edge to them. Our logo is of a devil with a halo above him. We wanted to have an edge but we also have a kind side, a good side. Our beers are going to be off the wall - I think we’ll be like a Dogfish Head, Florida version, where we do off the wall projects. It’ll be crazy beer - naughty beer for good people. That’s where it all comes from.

15. Will each of the owners have specific roles?

Ultimately, everyone on the ownership team will do whatever it takes - if we have to clean bathrooms, we will. Besides that, I’ll be the brewmaster. I’ll work on the recipes and formulation and I’ll run our yeast lab, along with quality control. Tobin will be the brewery operations director. He’s like Bob Villa - he can fix anything mechanical and he can work as a general contractor. Brett will be the tap room director, running the front of the house. My Dad, Bob Maple, will help me with brewing and recipe formulations and will also help Tobin with the operations side of the recipes. My Dad at the core is really what got all of us into craft beer one way or the other. He started brewing beer in the 90's out of necessity as everything sold on the store shelfs back then was crap. He's been a beer geek before that term was cool; having him in our corner is huge.


Future Location

16. Who will do the cooking at the restaurant?

Brad Sueflohn. Brad grew up in Jacksonville and went to culinary school here before moving to Las Vegas. He’s done really well for himself. He’s worked at Le Cirque and under celebrity chef Joel Robuchon. Now he’s at Sage, which is a world class restaurant in Las Vegas. Way back, Brad and I had a dream to open a gastropub together. We were both burned out and wanted to do something different. That early plan morphed into the brewery. It was Brad who came up with the name Wicked Barley. When the plan for Wicked Barley Brewing came together it was a no brainer to call up Brad. He’ll move here in May [2015] to start preparing for when we open. We want to do what a lot of great restaurants like Black Sheep are doing, and that’s to work with local farms. He’ll need time to build those relationships before opening.

17. What’s the biggest worry you have between now and next summer in terms of what it will take to get opened on time?

There’s a lot! Nothing can really start from the brewing side until we get our licenses in place. Suppliers won’t talk to us without a license because they don’t know if we’re serious or if we’re just home brewers looking for a better deal on our ingredients. Hops are a pretty coveted item and we have a lot of recipes that call for the most popular hops. We need to get our hop contracts in place in order to guarantee our supply for the year, along with a known cost for that supply. That’s my biggest stress point currently because hops and water are our two most important ingredients.

On the building side many people have told us to expect 2 - 3 months of delay for something of this size, so that’s another stress point. We’ve done our due diligence on phase 1 but you never know what’ll come up along the way. I guess that’s all part of the adventure!

4100 Baymeadows Road
Jacksonville, FL 32217
info@wickedbarley.com

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About the writer

EatDrinkJax.com interviews are conducted by Jacksonville Beach resident Gerry Glynn. When Gerry isn't talking with restauranteurs he is working for a local software company, training for his next road race, and hanging out with his wife and dog.