BREW Five Points

Latte art to go

11. Do you envision roasting your own coffee beans or brewing your own beer at some time?

No, we’d rather focus on expanding to more locations. We compete in the same retail space as Bold Bean but they’re killing it with their roasting and we couldn’t do it better, so we’d rather leave the roasting to them.

12. What’s your relationship with Bold Bean?

In the beginning some of the people from Bold Bean were going to be involved but they had to step back to focus on opening their new location in Jax Beach and Murray Hill Roastery. We’re all good friends with the entire staff and they help us as much as they can. They took an active part in training us when we got started. We’ll be representing their product so it was important to them to make sure we knew how to make a great cup of their coffee. At least 60% of our coffee will come from Bold Bean. We’ll aways carry Sweet Spot which is Bold Bean’s flagship espresso roast and then we’ll rotate a featured espresso. Sometimes it will be a single origin bean from Bold Bean and sometimes it’ll be from another supplier from Texas, Portland, San Francisco or wherever. When selecting who to work with we prefer to go with companies we've established a personal relationship with. When I travel, I make it a point to meet the people behind my coffee. It makes for a better, friendlier business arrangement that goes beyond profit.

13. How will you decide on which craft beers to carry?

At the moment we’re at the mercy of the distributors and the fact that with cans, although things are growing, we’ll only reach our capacity by ordering every single variety available to us. Hopefully that’ll change over time as more craft breweries start to can their beers.

For the draft beers we’ll have a lot more options. We’ll be focusing more on the higher gravity beers and the interesting products that aren’t available in cans or bottles. Our goal is to introduce new things so most of our taps will come from small brewers doing interesting things.

14. You’re also offering beer cocktails. What is a beer cocktail?

It’s like a regular cocktail but with beer instead of liquor. It’s usually between a half to a full beer. I’m from Texas where we have Micheladas, which is a Mexican inspired drink with many, many variations, usually involving a salted rim, lime juice, soy sauce, worcestershire sauce, hot sauce and beer over ice. There are other cocktails that are more Bloody Mary-like with beer and tomato juice. Justin, who’s handling the beer side of things, ended up scouring the internet to see what sort of interesting beer cocktails were out there as well as working on his own creations. We’ve got a few now that we’ll be rolling with. We’ll definitely do the Micheladas. We have one cocktail that’s like a strawberry lemonade with beer. We’ll have a Sangria made with wine and lambic beer. There’s a traditional Cuban cocktail called a bul - it’s like a Moscow Mule but with beer - we’ll be carrying those.



Moscow Bul - Jon Boat Ale, ginger beer, lime juice, and simple syrup served over ice

15. What’s sour beer?

It’s an emerging style that Justin is really stoked on.

Justin: sour beers are usually brewed with a special yeast called Brettanomyces to give the beer a taste almost like a glass of vinegar. They’re based on Belgian style beers and are gaining a lot of popularity in the US. There’s a lot of experimentation going on and people are brewing different styles of sours with things like guava to add a little bit of a fruit note. Sours don’t come in cans and if you serve them on draft you can’t use the tap line for anything but a sour because of how they mess with the line. That means we’ll carry sours in ‘bombers,’ which are 750ml sized bottles, which are about the size of 2 - 3 regular beer bottles. We'll have a few varieties of those with a focus on people sharing a bottle and experiencing the beer that way.

16. Why did you decide to carry so many sodas?

It was my partner, Jason’s, idea. He has a 3 year old and he wanted to be able to bring him into BREW. We also have friends who don’t drink and we wanted to offer something crafty and crazy for them. We found a really awesome distributor who had an amazing selection of the weirdest kind of sodas. A lot of the sodas come from this one manufacturer whose been buying the old vintage brands that have gone out of business and re-bottling them. So, we’re carrying about 22 sodas now. We have some cool varieties like an espresso soda and a cucumber soda.

17. How did you come up with toast as your main food offering?

It’s another trending thing that we thought was really interesting. It's also a function of the constraints associated with our space. We can't operate a full kitchen and a toaster is an affordable piece of equipment that doesn't take up much room. The menu is a collaboration between ourselves, Community Loaves, and Dig Foods. The menu will feature various styles of bread with associated toppings. We cut the slices an inch thick and dress them up. Our most popular topping right now is goat cheese, kimchi jam and arugula - it’s almost like an open faced sandwich. Dig Foods made the kimchi jam - it tastes like a pepper jelly. They also made a marmalade out of calamondins, which are like kumquats, and a spread that’s like Nutella but made with pecans instead of hazelnuts.