Meet the Brewer – Akademia Brewing

That’s one of the main things that we wanted when we first did this building, was to have kind of the open concept. People, we had people coming back here all the time, just to ooh and all over all the equipment and being able to see us actually do our thing. And they come back and ask us questions all the time, so it’s… we get a lot of really good compliments because of that. We have a huge influx of people into this city every single year for the football games for the University, obviously.

Um, we get people from all over the place, and it’s cool to have people come in from other big beer towns and sit down and try our food and be here and just tell us how we compared to some of the other ones out there. It’s pretty awesome, especially since we’ve won two championships back-to-back. The college town is definitely loving it.

Uh, we just plan on focusing on improving quality beers and making sure every beer that we send out is top-notch. We definitely want to focus on our home market to make sure that after Athens, it’s a very thirsty town, so we want to focus on it and make sure that it’s very well taken care of.

So, we looked at multiple different manufacturers and ultimately decided on Doha for a couple of reasons. One, the system was engineered really, really well. They definitely had brewers in mind when they were engineering it. Um, they’re constantly improving. Every time we get a new tank in, all the new features and just minute detail changes, they’re just better and better, and in my personal opinion, the best in the industry. And also, customer service is top-notch. We love everything about this system, but my personal favorite part is the touchscreen. I can control all the tank temperatures in the brew area. It’s got a really cool trending screen, so we can track all the temperature fluctuations. It’s got a really cool feature where if there’s any kind of alarm that goes off, I get a text message, and it has saved our butts so many times. Like, if the glycol goes down, I have to rush in and get it figured out. It’s been a really, really nice feature to have.

And I feel like IPA is still going to be king down the road, but, uh, lagers have been making a comeback. A lot of the lighter, easy-drinking beers are making a comeback, a lot of the classic styles, which makes me really happy because those are my favorite things to brew, or the classic styles.

Uh, so I started home brewing about 13 years ago. A good friend of mine and I discovered craft beer, found out that beer can actually taste good. Then we found out that we could start brewing our own and just kind of quickly fell in love with it. And then, after going to Germany about two years after we started doing that, we discovered Kölsch and Kölsch and I just absolutely fell in love with it. Decided that’s what I want to do with the rest of my life, really. We went to Germany because we’re both car guys, and we went there because we wanted to drive on the Nürburgring. So we went, uh, the closest place that a train would take us was Köln in Germany, and then we found out the town was known for Kölsch. Should absolutely fell in love with it while we were over there.

My favorite thing about being the brewer is the fact that it’s a good blend of science and art. There’s… you can do so many… so many, you can make such a big difference by changing one small thing to a beer. I just love the creative aspect of it.