In The Kitchen Brewery: MUCH TO BREW ABOUT AKRON

Fred Karm. Photograph by Sarah R. Sphar.

By Ivan J. Sheehan

In the 19th century, Akron grew along with its thriving rubber industry. Laborers toiled day and night, and they solidified northeast Ohioans’ commitment to working hard and playing harder. In those days, numerous breweries dotted the Akron landscape, providing after-work refreshments to the masses.

Among the most beloved of those early breweries was the Burkhardt Brewing Company. According to Dr. Robert A. Musson’s Brewing in the Buckeye State, Volume 1, the company was originally founded by German immigrant Frederick Gaessler as the Wolf Ledge Brewery in the 1860s, when Akron was incorporated as a city. The wooden brewery burned down in the late 1870s, and was later rebuilt. At that time, Gaessler opened a pub and sold the brewery to his second brewmaster, Wilhelm Burkhardt, who rechristened the brewery with his name. Burkhardt passed away at an early age, leaving his wife Margaretha the first female brewery owner in the United States. When a tornado devastated the area in the late 19th century, the brewery was gone with the wind. City and state officials offered aid to redevelop the area, but Margaretha refused the assistance and donated her own money to rebuild the neighborhood. She also rebuilt the brewery – with 4-foot-thick brick walls – and greatly expanded the complex. With the help of her son Gustav, the brewery flourished until Prohibition forced its closure. With the repeal of the 18th Amendment in 1933, the brewery reopened, becoming one of the first breweries in the country to have air conditioning and refrigeration, and in its heyday, delivered more than 150,000 barrels of beer per year. By 1956, competition from major breweries had hurt the Burkhardt’s business, and it was sold to the Burger Brewing Company of Cincinnati, who soon closed its doors. For nearly three decades, the imposing Grant Street complex, occupying more than 100,000 square feet, lay fallow. That is, until John Najeway, co-owner of Thirsty Dog Brewing Company, bought it.

“We started in 1997 with three brewpubs, and then by 2003, decided we wanted to get into distribution and bottling – and out of the brewpub business,” says Najeway of his brewing company named for the founders’ fondness for dogs. “We had multiple partners – it was a group of four of us back then, some were restaurant guys and some were beer guys – and we just saw the future of being able to distribute beer. We’d weathered the storm of the craft breweries that went away in the late ’90s. Northeast Ohio has been good to craft beer.”

In 2003, after the move to distributing, Thirsty Dog beers were contract brewed at a facility in Frederick, Maryland (now home to Flying Dog Brewing), while Najeway scoured the region for a suitable brewery location and a brewing system large enough to handle the output they hoped to generate.

The old Burkhardt facility was the first that piqued his interest, but he could not find the owner. He worked with the city and other landowners on a location, a former icehouse, in Akron’s Northside neighborhood, but the renovations proved cost prohibitive. Najeway finally inked a deal with the now-located Burkhardt property owner, taking possession of the space on December 16, 2006. From then until August 2007, Najeway and company worked on the building, doing incredibly extensive renovations, bringing the brewery dream back to life.

“We went to the city for zoning, because any new enterprise needs to check with them. They gave us a little bit of a hard time, saying, ‘It’s zoned for storage, and you can’t put a brewery in there,’” recalls Najeway. “And I went: Wait a minute – the city is trying to get businesses, and it was a brewery for 100 years, so I’m going to make it a brewery again! They came around, saw the light on that.”

The next step was locating suitable brewing equipment. The former Brew Works in Covington, Kentucky, was housed in a location similar to the one Najeway and his team were renovating: a historic 160,000-square-foot brewery once operated by the Bavarian Brewing Company.

Together with a group of friends, Najeway traveled to Kentucky armed with an array of tools to dismantle the brewery. Tim Rastetter, who had worked for Great Lakes as a brewer in the ’90s, and owned Liberty Street Brewing in Akron, had designed the system in Kentucky, and had been brewing for the last eight years at Hofbrauhaus in Newport, Kentucky (the first Hofbrauhaus outside of Munich), offered to come and help dismantle it because he knew the system. The crew returned to Akron with rented moving trucks and pickups filled with the makings of a full-scale brewing operation.

“I asked Tim when we were down there, ‘You want to come back to Akron and brew on it?’” says Najeway. “He said: ‘No, I’ve been down here for 10 years, I’m settled. I’m 55 years old, and this is where I’m at.’ I kept bugging him about it. Tim’s a great brewer – I think he’s the only brewer to ever win five medals in the same year at the Great American Beer Festival, in the ’90s.

“We started work here in January, and Tim called one day, asking was I serious about him coming down there.” Eventually, the pair hammered out a deal, and in April, Rastetter started commuting to Akron a couple weeks at a time. By June, he had moved back to Akron and sold his house in Kentucky. “It was great,” says Najeway.

Thirsty Dog brewed its first batch of beer in the new location in August 2007. “It was nice because when we were contract brewing, we were able to brew the four beers we had taken to market at that time,” says Najeway. “But, we didn’t have the freedom to expand our product line, do specialty beers, seasonal beers.”

Najeway and Rastetter first brewed Old Leghumper, the company’s award-winning porter. The brewery then focused on new beers, creating their version of a traditional German Oktoberfest – Barktoberfest – in August. They then moved on to brew a Belgian dubbel – named for the mythological Orthus, a two-headed dog – and a Belgian triple, fittingly named for Orthus’ three-headed hellhound brother, Cerberus.

This year, Thirsty Dog brewed a pumpkin ale, which truly proved a labor of local love. All the pumpkins came from Najeway’s neighbor in Randolph, who thought he was crazy for picking pumpkins for beer all afternoon with his daughter. “We used cow pumpkins, pie pumpkins, hubbard squash, butternut and buttercup squash… we sliced them, gutted them and roasted them,” says Najeway. “We’ve got a pound of pumpkin for every gallon of beer.”

Najeway incorporates 100 pounds of honey into his batch of 12 Dogs of Christmas Ale, due out this month. “We’ve got a honey farmer in Louistown, Pennsylvania, and he drives it over to us every week or two,” says Najeway. “We hand-grind whole-nut nutmeg – with the fresh ingredients that this size brewery can use, it’s been fun.” In addition to supporting local charities (particularly those of the canine variety), Najeway is adamant about supporting local enterprises and maintaining an eco-friendly operation. The brewery recycles all the pallets that come in with grain, reusing them to ship beer. Last year, they sent more than 200,000 pounds of spent grain to a dairy farm in Randolph, and an organic farm that raises egg-laying chickens and pigs.

The inspiration for Thirsty Dog’s beers has come from many places – including Ireland. “I’ve always liked dark, heavy beers. For my honeymoon, my wife is an O’Brian, and we went to Ireland, flew into Dublin, flew out of Galway, and stayed everywhere in between,” says Najeway. “We drank a lot of Guinness and Irish whiskey every day at lunch, and I finally figured out why they do it: so they can drive on those roads. That influenced me as far as my liking dark, full-flavored, full-bodied beers. You had to go to the imports to get that 15 years ago. Now, if you go to ratebeer.com or beeradvocate.com, our imperial stout is rated one of the top 100 imperial stouts in the world.

“We didn’t get any medals this year at the Great American Beer Festival, but Fred Karm, who’s got Hoppin’ Frog Brewery, just got a gold medal for his B.O.R.I.S. the Crusher [Oatmeal- Imperial Stout]. He brewed for us and developed our imperial stout. My favorite [of our beers] that I can drink on a regular basis is our Siberian Night, it’s our Russian imperial stout. It’s a beer you only drink one of though – it’s 9.7 percent alcohol, it pours like motor oil, it’s chewy, but you know you’ve had a beer.”

The camaraderie among those working in the industry is imperative for the region’s brewing companies to succeed, and like Najeway did with the Burkhardt’s facility and vision, return the region’s brew scene to its former glory.

John Najeway. Photograph by Sarah R. Sphar.

“When we were setting up this brewery, if we needed something or we needed advice, we could reach out to Fred at Hoppin’ Frog, or call Luke Purcell, who is head of brewing operations at Great Lakes Brewing,” says Najeway. “We all try to help each other. Everyone says: ‘Isn’t that your competition? Is Great Lakes your competition? Do you want to knock off Great Lakes tap handles?’ The answer is no. I want to knock off the other mass produced beers or imports.”

Najeway doesn’t skimp on praise for his fellow brewers: “I think Great Lakes [Brewing Company] laid the groundwork for northeast Ohio to educate the consumers, and it’s been good for everyone in the craft beer industry here. We’ve got 34 breweries operating in Ohio now. This year, we started the Ohio Craftbrewers Association, which I’m president of. We’re trying to get the word out there.”

As a friend of Najeway and an expert brewer, Fred Karm, founder of Hoppin’ Frog Brewery in Akron, is equally devoted to producing top-notch local brew.

Karm’s interest in brewing began in 1994 as a home brewer, first brewing an Irish red before recognizing the myriad other styles he could explore. With assistance from the people at Akron’s Grape and Granary, a home brewing and wine making shop, he began experimenting with a wide variety of beers and ingredients. “I was like a sponge,” says Karm of his early days learning to brew. “Books, friends, the Grape and Granary for advice – those were the three biggest factors. There’s a fourth: just tasting beers and finding inspiration in them. One of the ones I liked in that first year was Old Fezziwig by Sam Adams. My first year, my Christmas beer was that beer, and it was an okay iteration.”

By the end of 1996, Karm was working for Thirsty Dog Brewing Company, where he stayed until 2005. “It was a time when brewpubs were growing quite a bit. So, some guys in the area found themselves saying, ‘We should start a brewpub.’ In researching it, they heard about me from several different people. I was trying to start a brewery myself, but I knew it was a far cry from where I was: I was an electrical engineer at the time. I was in there with 50 other engineers, and I thought, wouldn’t it be great to do something a little more artsy? Beer really involves a lot of science, but also a lot of art and self-expression.”

Karm credits his scientific background with giving him a slight advantage over the average brewer. “ I analyze what I’m doing numerically,” he says. “ I try to represent things numerically, then I can do better analysis on the results than an average brewer who might be using a cooking type of approach – use a little more of this, a little more of that. Instead, I try to figure out what percentage of this or that I may need.”

Karm moved to his current location on Route 224 in Akron in 2006, and it took five months to get it up and running. The first beer they ever brewed was the day after Labor Day in 2006, and it was his Gulden Fraug Belgian ale, which was recently awarded a medal for Best Belgian Ale in the Midwest at the US Beer Tasting Championship. “That was the first one we brewed, only because it took the longest to age,” explains Karm. “I knew I wanted to brew a slew of beers, and then hit the ground running with all four, so the Belgian needed to be done first to age the longest.

“My beers lay a little longer than the average brews. A Budweiser-type brew is actually in and out of their system within a week. My beer is just done fermenting in a week. I have stronger, higher-alcohol beers with more flavors; they require longer to ferment, longer to age. Typically, our beer-aging time is four weeks or so.”

As for his brewery’s name:“I am Hoppin’ Frog! I’m Fred the frog,” laughs Karm. “I’ve become really good over the years at using hops, and my nickname was Frog, so it kind of made sense. At Thirsty Dog, we had made a beer called Hoppus Maximus, and I got a lot of accolades with that one, won three medals at the Great American Beer Festival with it over the years. So, it made sense to build on my hopping talents.”

Brewing styles from all over the world inspire half the beers that Karm makes. He tries to recreate recipes that emerged from communities where the ingredients dictated the beer style, recipes that carried years of tradition and a unique understanding of the impact certain ingredients had in creating distinctive beers. The other half of Karm’s efforts are spent on cutting-edge recipes that are totally experimental – Hoppus Maximus was an example of that.

Inside the brewery, Karm shares Najeway’s interest in recycling. Everything from the brewing system, coolers and all supporting brewing equipment, including the kegs, hoses, sinks, drain grates and water filters and heater is previously used equipment.

Karm purchased the same brewing system that he used at the Thirsty Dog brewpub in North Canton. “This system is an awesome system,” says Karm. “When they were selling off the stuff from the restaurant, this was like gold to me. They didn’t realize how much I would have paid for this.

“I bought it used for pennies on the dollar, but it was actually very valuable to me because I had spent a long time trying to figure out how to make it work just right – and it can process all those grains, so it makes one hell of a beer. I can make all the way up to a barley–wine style of beer with just about any modification, which is nice.”

Getting the gold medal in the imperial stout category at the Great American Beer Festival this year for the B.O.R.I.S. the Crusher Oatmeal Imperial Stout was sweet vindication. “It’s the hardest beer for us to make,” says Karm. “We use the most grain for that of any beer. I knew I was getting a lot of accolades with that before, but to get the gold medal with it just drives home the fact I should be making more beers that have tons of flavor, tons of malt. I think that’s why our Belgian does so well – it’s our second hardest beer to brew!”

Sometimes consistency isn’t quite as important as sourcing the best ingredients to create the freshest, tastiest beer. “With our IPAs and Double IPAs, they will always vary based on the ingredients, much like wine does,” says Karm. “Wine will vary year to year; well, that’s the way our IPAs and double IPAs will be: based on the best aroma hops there are available. I’m always pressing my hops suppliers to know what the best aroma hops are that year.”

Among his favorite IPAs is Pliny the Elder double IPA by Russian River Brewing Company in Sonoma. “Pliny the Elder is a really well respected double IPA, very inspirational,” he says. “You taste this beer and you think: Oh my god. If I could make something half this good, I’d be thrilled to death.” The camaraderie that exists among brewers has also proven beneficial to Karm, who was given a recipe from a friend trying to re-create the Russian River brew. Karm modified that recipe, and the result was Hoppin’ Frog’s Mean Manalishi double IPA. “One of the great things about brewing, is people share their product and their knowledge,” says Karm.

“When I was working for Thirsty Dog, I developed a version of porter for them, which was also based on my original home brew,” says Karm. “ Before you knew it, starting in the year 2000, three years after we started brewing, we started winning medals, and it was crazy. I love those guys.”

At the end of the day – which now comes sooner as the success of Hoppin’ Frog’s beers allowed Karm to hire four new people – the brewmaster finds comfort sharing one of his 22-ounce bottles with others.

“People look at this as a cheap alternative to going out and having a good time: getting an awesome bottle or two of beer and sitting down with a friend or family member, and drinking it,” says Karm. “It is very satisfying.”

For more information about Thirsty Dog Brewing Company, visit www.thirstydog.com.
For more information about Hoppin’ Frog Brewery, visit www.hoppinfrog.com.

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