Beer, Mead and Cider with Michael Fairbrother – BeerSmith Podcast #319
43:38 Share

Michael Fairbrother joins me this week to discuss beer, mead, cider, and opening a restaurant. This is Beersmith Podcast number 319.

This is the Beersmith Home Brewing Show, where brewing great beer is our passion. If you want to take your brewing to the next level, visit beersmith.com, where you can download a trial version of our Beersmith software, subscribe to the newsletter, and get dozens of free articles on home brewing. And now, your host and the author of Home Brewing with Beersmith, Brad Smith.

This is Beersmith Podcast number 319 and it's early February 2024. Michael Fairbother joins me to discuss beer, mead, cider, and opening a restaurant.

Thank you to this week's sponsor, Craft Beer and Brewing Magazine. They recently added a new collection of more than 500 beer recipes from pro brewers to their site. And most of them will let you download the Beersmith recipe file. The new Craft Beer and Brewing recipe site is at beerandbrewing.com slash beer dash recipes. Again, that site is beerandbrewing.com slash beer dash recipes.

And Beersmith Web, the online version of Beersmith Brewing Software. Beersmith through the web lets you design great beer recipes from any browser, including your tablet or phone. Edit recipes on the go with access to the same full suite of recipe building tools as our desktop version. Try Beersmith Web today by creating a free account at beersmithrecipes.com. And finally, a reminder to click that like and subscribe button on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, or whatever platform you're listening on. Clicking those buttons is a great way to support the show.

And now let's jump into this week's episode. Today on the show, I welcome Michael Fairbrother back to the show. Michael is founder and head mead maker at Moonlight Meadery and also launched the Over the Moon Farmstead a few years back, making cider and craft beer. Michael's won numerous Mazer Cup awards for his meads. Michael, it's great to have you back. How are you doing?

Good, Brad. Nice to be back with you guys. Always a pleasure. It's been a couple of years. I looked over my notes. We had you on in episode 248 in August of 2022, which is quite a while ago now. And you were talking about cider. Today, you wanted to talk about your diverse interests, which include beer, cider, mead. But I thought we might start with how you got into homebrewing in the first place. Sure. Just about 29 years ago, I

I kind of, you know, I tasted, you know, Samuel Adams beers and I was interested in trying to figure out how to make them. My father had made his beer in the seventies. And so I found a online shop, bought a homebrew kit, joined the homebrew club, joined the American Homebrews Association and,

And just really started trying to figure out how to make craft beer. And about two months in, I was at a party and somebody offered me a sizer. And I had no idea back then what a sizer even was.

But if you've ever seen a baby try something it loves for the first time, you see those eyes light right up. And I was like, wow, what are we talking about? What is this? And the guy goes, it's an apple mead. I'm like, what's mead? He said a wine made from honey. I was like, I used to be a beekeeper. You're telling me you can make alcohol from honey? Of course. And I went home the next day and I made my first two batches. And I still have that photo of those first two batches in my taproom here now. And it's just...

It's the way I can be an artist. I can't sing and I can't paint and I couldn't draw to save my life, but I can create flavors that people seem to really enjoy. That's what I consider my calling in life. I've been blessed to be doing it now for 29 years and I still love it. I still can't wait to try it. I was going to say, when did you start brewing? It was May of 1996.

And I think, I'm trying to remember, I think you went pro around 2010, about the same time I did, right? Yeah, 2010. Yeah, that's right. Wow, that's awesome. Well, how did you dive into actually opening a meadery? Because that's a big step to go from, you know, making a couple batches at home to opening a meadery.

Yeah, I was pretty serious into homebrewing or mead making back then too. Not at the scale I am now, but I had done 20 different batches of one quart different types of honey so I could taste what each type of honey tasted like for a minute through. And then I did a double blind tasting with the likes of Susan Rood and Gordon Strong and

Steve Fletty and Kurt Stock at a National Homebrewers Conference to get their opinions because I didn't want the bias of the knowledge of what type of honey was into it, but it was all fermented at the same time.

Same temperature, same yeast, same ratios. So I was really serious into understanding everything there is to know about how to make mead and beer and cider. Some of the times I go into the local homebrew shop and they tell me I'm doing everything all wrong. And, you know, I'm not afraid to make a mistake. And I've made some pretty good ones. But, you know, at least I learned a lot along the pathway.

And to start a meadery, I was looking at how many great breweries that existed. And I knew that, you know, being good isn't good enough. You know, being exceptional is what it takes to really get to that next level.

And I had won three back-to-back Meatmaker of the Year awards. And the last one was first place out of 353 entries. And I said, this is it. This is the pushing point that I needed. And because I had talked about opening the meatery for three years, I was just too stubborn to actually do something to make it happen. I was too afraid. And...

So 2010, June, we had our first commercial licenses all in place. I'd converted my garage into where the metering was going to start from. And we started six-gallon batches at first, and then eventually 40 gallons and 60 gallons. And then we outgrew the garage and moved into our old warehouse and scaled up to 410.

300 gallons, then 1,000 gallons. Towards the end of 2022, we're doing 3,100-gallon batches. So it's pretty crazy to think of going from six to 3,100 gallons and your recipes work. They all just – it scales because you do it based on proportion. And I mean, I was terrified. I still am about how much work was ahead of us.

Because most people, if you tell them you're going to offer me, they think, oh, my God, it's that six sweet stuff I don't care for. I'm like, well, it doesn't have to be sweet. That's just an option that the creator has to present a flavor to you.

Some things work better sweet. Some things work better not so sweet. And it's a combination. I mean, I don't drink a lot of soda pop. And I would say that Coca-Cola or anything like that is sweeter than any of the beverages we release into the market. And you had a lot of success early on. I know there was a number of...

Can you talk about the meads, some of the meads that you made early on that were really popular? Yeah, the Kurtz apple pie continues to be our bestseller to this day. Desire, which is based off of a Kurtz stock recipe, was black currants, blueberries, and black cherries. We have Fling, which is our strawberry rhubarb, semi-sweet finish. Embrace, really dry black currant mead. But most of these we sell nationwide, 38 states. Mail order, I think, to over 40 states.

And then we started getting calls from, um, shipping it to Australia and Canada and, and, you know, places in between. I've got pictures of my bottles in Taiwan, you know, in front of a Bruce Lee statue. So it's, it's, you know, and I've taught, uh, spoke at many national conferences, a keynote speaker at a homebrewers conference down in Texas. You know, it's, I've been blessed. I mean, I've told my dad the other day that, um,

I go, I'm pretty famous, just in a very small circle. And the day I get to Tampa, I'm going in to visit one of the breweries I like down there. And I walk to the bar and this guy goes, are you Michael Fairbrother? And I'm like, yes, I am. So I crawled back into that small circle of people recognize me and, you know, nice things to say. So it's humbling.

That's awesome. And I mean, you did expand very rapidly and I think you were distributing through a lot of the major distributors, right? Here across the United States and in Australia, Canada. What was that like? How was it, how was it, how hard was it to break into some of these larger distributors? Well, I got lucky. I found a distributor that owned a lot of other distributors, so they were going to be the middleman, so to speak. Now I say lucky, but

Around that time, I'd also won the Sam Adams Brewing the American Dream Boston Regional or tied for first place. So I got to spend 30 minutes time with Jim Cook and he gave me some really sage advice. He says...

You're going to never make enough money to stay in business because you've got this middle guy in the middle taking all the profits that you need to keep your company alive. He said, but if you fire them, they're going to sue you and you're going to go out of business. So he says, this is the joy of being a business owner. You've got to figure out how to survive this. And I was able to. I was able to read through all my contracts, see that there was words or wording that said best level efforts had to be applied.

And what that means to a small business owner is if they're doing anything above and beyond for anybody else, like, say, buying $100,000 worth of advertising for your brand, they got to do that for you, too. So I was able to unwind all the contracts, and then we reestablished distribution across the country, mostly through a lot of very hard work from Bernice and my son, Benjamin.

through visiting distributors, going on work-to-market trips. I mean, we clocked over 100,000 miles one year just trying to support all the accounts that we'd have. And how it would work is you'd show up in, let's say, Tennessee, and

And you'd meet the distributor, and they'd put you with a sales rep, and they'd drive you around to their best accounts. And for me, it was always somewhat disappointing because every account I'd walk into, they'd buy product. Now, I had samples with me, and I'm a passionate guy, and I can talk well about my brand. And because I look at the distributor, I'm like, well, how come you guys can't do this? But now that I own a restaurant, I know exactly why it doesn't happen like I thought it should. The...

For the most part, I never see a sales rep from any of the distributors we buy from. Even though we have our own brewery, we still try to carry a couple of specialty kegs here and there, like Rodenbach Grand Cru. When that came into the market, I was like, oh, I got to have that on draft. And they send emails. So unless you're a well-known brand that everybody and their brother wants to buy,

It doesn't matter if you get it into the state. You now have to get it into the stores where people can taste it. And there's a saying in the industry, liquid to lips. And that's basically get people to try it. And if they buy it once, it's good. And twice is even better. And third time, you've got a customer for life or something to that effect. And I have that. We were selling 1,200, 1,400 cases online.

of 12 bottles a month. Easy. And at the height, but it's come down the opposite side of the spectrum because I didn't have...

The ability to try to run everything the same without understanding how the debt load that I had incurred by buying this farmstead was going to shift. And I had expected, based on being told that this would happen, that I could refinance the projects, the renovation work, because we put a little over $1.2 million into renovating this farmstead to be the future home of Moonlight Meadery and Hidden Moon Brewing so that we could have our own destiny.

And it was looking pretty scary last year. And I'm thrilled to say we have a very solid plan going forward. We have the ability to make our own meat on property. My brewmaster, Michael Robinson, is back on board full time. He won a World Beer Cup for us, bronze in the American and Russian Imperial Stout category two years back now.

And he does what I do. And we used to homebrew together, which is think about the flavors, think about the trueness to the style and how to make the actual best you can make it. And so I don't go down and tell him how to brew a beer. I've brewed beers with him as a guest brewer with him, as we've flown some other folks around the country over to do a guest beer with us as well. It's amazing to me to...

Try to take the 15 years that have been in business commercially, making mead, beer and cider and think, would I do it again? And how would I do it differently? And the biggest difference, I think, would have been that knowledge up front that maybe more boots on the ground, like a sales team, my own sales team in the marketplace would have gotten us to that tipping point of just continuous success versus failure.

That was a bad month. Yeah, it's a lot of ups and downs. It's not a game to play without a lot of money. You don't have the resources. It can drain you out to the point where you're just making the bad mistake after bad mistake. It takes a blessing to find a way out through it. I've been blessed, so I can seriously say that

I don't know how I would have done it without. I expected it was all gone. Yeah, I mean, from what I understand, there's a long delay. Like if you distribute through one of the big distributors, right, there can be a long delay between the time you send them the product and you actually get paid for it, right? Yeah, it's typically net 30 freight on board. So you're supposed to be getting paid 30 days after the day it ships. Right. Sometimes they want to say, well, when it arrives here, we'll start the clock.

And then you adjust and you try to adapt to that. And then they say, well, we haven't sold any product yet. And so we're not going to pay you until we actually sell it, which means it's a consignment sale and that's illegal in the United States. And they're not sharing their profits with me. So I still want to get paid. Of course.

So there's a lot of lessons and I've talked to almost any professional need maker that wants to get my input on things of what works and what doesn't and how to, how to try to protect yourself with distributors. You know, you don't have really a lot of leverage because you need them more than they need you. And, you know, when you see a distributor's warehouse, it's size of 10 football fields, you know, and, and,

Yeah, they got one pallet to your product. It's like, well, okay, we're not even little fish. We're the littlest thing that a little fish can ever think of. It's like negotiating with Amazon or something, huh? Yeah, that's not always possible. And then just for example, I think you went through a little bit of a downturn with the honey, right? How much honey were you purchasing in, say, 2020 versus 2024?

Yeah. So 2020 was about 40,000 pounds of honey that year. Right. And we had massive backstock. I mean, I had-

tens of thousands of gallons worth of inventory. And by 2022, we hadn't purchased honey at all. And for the last two years, we've been just working our way through all that inventory I had because we were in a peril position. But honey's on order. It'll be here in the next few days. I've got my concentrate coming into stock. We've scaled down. We're going to be making 300-gallon batches for the foreseeable future. Sure.

So not 3,000 anymore, huh? No. Well, I don't have the space or the – I've got the tanks. They're sitting out in the barnyard. Well, the farm yard. But it's –

I still got my 100-barrel fooders, so they're 3,100 gallons each. But right now, space is pretty tight. We've got the brewery and the winery in the same shared vicinity area, which is in the basement of the restaurant. So it's as true to style as ever, and we're working to let our big distributors know that we are coming back into the market with product and products.

We hope they understand and appreciate that sometimes you struggle and you might come through bigger and brighter. Well, so you had a successful business going a couple of years back with Need.

Why did you decide to switch over and open a brewery and then a restaurant and the over-the-moon farmstead? Yeah, I figured out through a quirk in the state taxation system here in New Hampshire that if a meatery makes cider, they pay 5% of sales on the sale price of that cider, but

But if a brewery makes cider, they pay 30 cents a gallon. So it's significantly cheaper to be a brewery making hard cider, which once I started that, then I said, oh, well, maybe we can get somebody to contract. We didn't tell the cider story, but I think if anybody listens to the last episode we recorded, you had switched over and you were actually, I think, selling more cider than me at one point, right?

Yeah, it was crazy volume there for a long time. But there's just massive businesses that have a lot of resources that want to fight to keep that shelf space for themselves. And so having the cider started first, and then we stubbed our toe into getting beer made for us. So I was having my Russian Imperial Stout made, and then an IPA that I –

I like the honey IPA. And the mistake we made was we called it a braggot. And the challenge in the market is don't try to teach customers, you know, so words they don't know doesn't help your sales at all. So brackets are, you know, that was a costly lesson to learn the hard way. But then, you know, when I bought this property up here in Pittsfield with a dream of having a destination brewery, kind of like a –

Go farmstead or... Can you talk real briefly about what the farmstead is and how big it is and what's there? It is kind of a destination.

Yeah, so it's a 100-acre farm, originally built in 1753. So it predates the United States. It's got three hand-dug wells on it. One's actually in the basement. So you can get to it from behind a door type of situations because I don't want anybody falling into it. So I brought on one of the best brewers I knew, Mike Robinson. Like I said, him and I used to homebrew together.

We all belong to the same homebrew club, the same one that Mitch Steele belonged to. Mitch is now at New Realm, but had worked for- Sure, yeah. I've had Mitch on a bunch of times. Yeah, he's a great friend of mine. He's fantastic. And I love how laid back he is on everything. I wish I had that kind of calm some days. So I said, we've got a 6,000 square foot barn on the property that we were going to renovate into being the winery, brewery.

with eventually a wedding function facility on the same property. Yeah. Destination. Yeah. It's just, and I figured what could go wrong. This is my banks had my back and they said they were going to make all this happen. And then the guy that was in charge of my account left the bank and I was like, Oh, everybody assured me everything was just going to be fine.

And my father was giving me sage advice and says, don't trust the banks. I said, no, dad, they got me. They got me here. And he was right. They had me, or I was right. They had me with a knife in my back. Yeah. So it, it got ugly quick. And, uh, well, the interest rates went up, everything changed, right? Yeah. The, the, the model had changed and our profits had plummeted because we didn't have the resources to continue making the product customers wanted to buy. Uh,

But, you know, the restaurant's functioning. You know, I'm the cook. I make the pizzas. I've got some help now and we're looking for a partner chef to come in and kind of, you know, take my destination dream and make it into a reality. So, I mean, all together you have a meadery, right? You have cider. You're making wine there, right? And a brewery or something?

Yeah, no wine. Oh, okay. I thought you said winery earlier. Sorry. Yeah, I call them eatery or winery. Winery, yeah. Yeah, federal government. But yeah, I'm essentially three business owners right now. I've got a winery, brewery, cidery, and we're doing the restaurant too.

And we've got decent – I mean, better than decent. We're doing decent business on all fronts. And customers are very happy to see our beer being back on stock. And our tagline for Hidden Moon Brewing is history never tasted so good because I wanted to really kind of focus on classic beer styles. There's enough –

I don't want to call them fruity pops, but there's enough adjuncts being added to beers that I'm not really too big a fan of. We discussed your ciders quite a bit last time I had you on. Can you talk to me about the styles of beer that you're making and what you're focusing on?

Yeah. So, um, it's a split between like we do Doppelbox. We do a nice lager program. We have a house lager now. Um, so Mike is buying the best ingredients that we can get ahold of, uh, brewing to the style. I don't rush them on any, any tap lines. We don't typically keep the same beer on draft all the time. Uh, we tend to rotate through, um, my, my philosophy is as long as they're great, I could care less what you want to make. Um,

But I do care. What are some of the more popular styles, though? Yeah, the American light lager definitely is popular for the tourist season up to this area. People love that we do Scotch ales. That seems to be pretty popular. The Pilsens. I mean, I think we probably released...

Maybe 100 different beers over the last year. So it's really hard for me to say exactly which one. I know his culture is really popular. We grow some blackberries on the property. And my son, myself, and Bernice were all out there picking blackberries for the whole summer to make a 15-gallon blackberry sour that was Belgian style. So we typically go, I think, a little more Belgian style.

On some of the beers, I definitely did a trip to Munich and brought back a lot of ideas and bottles for Mike to try. So his German...

Beers are fantastic. Bavarians are, you know, everything. It's just, I haven't seen a beer that he's made that I haven't really thought was exceptional. And this 2024, 2023, we entered the world beer cup again, and both the beers advanced to the second round. So we only usually send in two to see two go to the second round. And it's pretty hard. Big competition entries.

And, you know, I still, I love to travel. I love to get out to go see people and talk. You know, I've talked, well, Australia twice, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina twice.

It's oasis of Belgium, and most recently Warsaw, Poland, where I talk to people in 30 different countries about mead making. So it's infectious for me to not be so passionate about everything I do. The pizza oven we have...

We brought in from Italy. It's 5,000 pounds. You know, I can make a pie. It takes me longer to roll a pie out than it does to actually cook it. It takes about 90 seconds, and it's got a rotary deck, and it's wood-fired and gas. Have you tried using brewer's yeast with your pizza? I haven't. Chris White told me it's actually better, believe it or not, than a lot of bread yeast, so maybe give it a shot. Oh, I wouldn't doubt it. Yeah. I wouldn't doubt it.

He told me they used to use brewer's yeast actually for a lot of breads, but they stopped because it took a little more time than using bread yeast. Yeah, it's probably quite a bit more expensive. I don't know. Well, you probably have some, you probably got some left over when you brew the beer, right? Yeah, I could take a look.

Well, tell us a little bit about... You don't want to get the hops into it, though. You'd want to separate it out, you know, from any true brewery. Obviously. Yeah, obviously. Tell us about your brewmaster. I know you mentioned him earlier, but... Yeah, so I met him probably when he was close to 21. I was president of Brew Free or Die, the local homebrew club here in New Hampshire, and was an active member for, I guess, 18 years. Has he been a pro brewer very long?

Yeah. He started over at Newburyport Brewing Company. Well, he worked for Red Hook Brewing Company over in Portsmouth, New Hampshire for a while as a seller, um, jockey working with Mike Sipp. And I think Mike just retired from Stone Brewing Company. Um, but, you know, so we had a lot of really good brewers in our club, um,

And Michael was absolutely one of the best I'd ever seen because I was brewing with him one day in his backyard and I'm watching how he's doing it. And he's adding water to the, to the work at the finish. And I'm like, what are you doing? It's like, Oh, it's too strong. It's going to, it's not going to come into style. And I was like, that's a scientific brewer right there. I mean, I'm the seat of the pants. I come at it from, I've got this sixth sense of intuition on what I want to mix and how do I want it to get to where I want it to get to and

And a little strong is always a little better in my opinion. So, um, and I, I casually mentioned, I said, someday we're going to own a brewery together. And, um,

And here we are, you know, he's my bedrock on the brewery. And, you know, I know I don't want to sell his beer around the world. I want to keep it where people can come get it and enjoy this view and enjoy a great pizza at the same time. So we will upgrade the, you know, it's a small one barrel system right now. And, you know, he's got ultimate control over everything, full, full, full.

I mean, I literally do nothing other than pay the bills. So I'm shaking this table again. That's okay. The floor in this barn is a little rocky. But yeah, it's great to see him light up and give me a sample of a beer he's just releasing. Like the Belgian Quad we have on right now is just...

It's so delicious. You know, I've been a master level beer judge for an awful long time. It's great to be able to see and smell, you know, and taste the beers that come through and the passion that goes into them. It's the same as what I bring to making mead. You know, it just...

I tell everybody making mead is easier than making beer, but it's just harder to perfect, to get to the, to always be excellent. You know, and once you get there that you have that skill and you retain that. And that's, you know, you know, so during the downturn, we, we had to stop production of beer along with the mead and cider. And it's, it's great to see, you know, we've got cider back up and running. Mead's coming back up on run this week.

And, uh, brewery has been up and running since end of October, I believe. So it's, it's warm up a little bit. I was going to say, it's a little cold up there right now in New Hampshire, right? So you're, uh, probably don't have quite the traffic you might have in the summer.

No, and the wind up here, we're on the top of a hill, and I think I can see 75 miles from north to south off our deck. Beautiful. And it gets windy. It does get windy. Yeah.

Yeah, we got a cold winter here in Virginia too. So in the middle of all this change, you also launched a restaurant. Now a restaurant obviously is a whole different set of skills and another very, very competitive market. Why'd you decide to enter the food business? Were you just trying to complete the whole vision there of having a destination place?

Yeah, I thought it was going to be a lot easier than it turns out. Um, so I hired an executive chef. Uh, he brought on a general manager and then we, we staffed up cause I was expecting to get the financing from my banks. And, uh,

That didn't happen. So we, a lot of trials and errors, a lot of, of talented folks giving it their best, but we, you know, with the situation we were in, it was just too perilous to try to, you know, ask people to give up their, their potential for what might not be happening. But here we are, we've made it through. I've, I've learned to make pizzas. I've, I'm making lasagna. I make chili, be stroganoff, um, and people are raving about the food that I'm making. So, um,

I guess my passion for flavor still comes through quite loud and clear. And, you know, we called it over the moon because of, you know, we're over the moon to find this place. I mean, to look out my office window and see a good 40 mile view, you know, it's just, it's incredible.

And customers come here and the first thing they say is, wow, what a view. And then, you know, I want them to say something like, wow, what a meat or wow, what a great beer. And then finally say, yeah, that food's top notch too. Well, while we're on that, why don't you mention where you are and your website as well?

Sure. So we're in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. We're about 13 miles northeast of Concord, the state's capital. We've got three websites. So we've got MoonlightMeetery.com, HiddenMoonBrewingCompany.com, and OverTheMoonFarmstead.com. And all three of them are linked to each other, so you can navigate back and forth. We definitely put a lot more attention into the Moonlight Meadery because it is the –

The mothership, if there is such a thing. A little more broadly recognized, perhaps, at this point. Yeah, I can't go really anywhere with a Moonlight shirt on without people trying to figure out, okay, you're the guy. That's awesome. That's great. Well, what are some of the takeaways? What are some of the things you learned after now working in a restaurant, a meatery, a cidery, and now a brewery? It's a lot of work. It's... Yeah, I think...

Pick your goal and stick to one, maybe, is what I would say. I really don't do the brewery side of the house. I kind of help as needed, but Michael really runs that shop. The restaurant, like I said, I'd be happy, thrilled, tickled pink to have a partner that could manage that part of it for me and let me focus on what I do well, which is

big picture stuff running, running the meads. You know, we've, we've got a lot of ground to recover from like, but we, we could, we could do the more business just in New Hampshire this year than we've done in last three, because we have product coming back into the pipeline. So, you know, the customers are still wanting product. It's just not quite a, you know, they don't wait for it. You know, they, they need something when they want it. So.

Well, and I think, I think it's important too, to discuss that, you know, it is a business. So, uh, a lot of people will get focused on, you know, Oh, I'd like to make beer on open a brewery, but it's, it's a business. You got to focus on the business end of things, right? Yeah. It's a, it's a complex business with lots of regulation. Um,

I mean, having employees, there's, there's, there's challenges to all of this stuff. I mean, I, I miss the days where it was just me, you know, getting up and coming down to take care of everything and get in the back of my car and,

making deliveries and then talking my now wife into quitting her day job to help, you know, keep, keep the ball going. And she got us into Massachusetts and she, she went door to door to every account in Massachusetts and we were self distributing. And then we got a distributor down there and then we had to move two or three other ones. So it's, um,

Yeah, the lessons is it's ridiculous how much work there is to run in your own company. And it takes a lot of money. If I had to do it again, I'd probably find better or find partners. I mean, my parents have been fantastic partners, but it's a deep well that you need to pull money out of when you need it. And the banks aren't always there to help you and you can get caught up. And biggest mistake, don't ever do this, ever.

is borrow money from a payday lender. You know, those merchant credit accounts that I call them? Oh, my goodness. That's the death knell to almost every company that can be. And I'm knock on wood. I'm lucky I got out from under it. Wow. Yeah. Sounds like you had some challenges the last couple of years. Yeah. Well, the good news is it's behind us. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like you're on the recovery now.

Well, you continue to produce great meads, which of course was your original passion. What are some of the meads you're working on now? I know you're always working on new things. The new stuff has been on pretty much, well, I've got a few. There's some definitely barrel-aged meads coming down the pipeline. I like to tinker with like hibiscus and coconut and some of the chocolate meads.

Got me into making chocolate too, although I didn't turn that into a career. Met Pete Slossberg a number of years back and Pete was talking about his chocolate company. So I'm like, he goes, you use cacao nibs, right? I go, yeah. He's like, well, you make chocolate out of that. So I bought a melanger and a chocolate proofing oven and started making my own chocolate to sell at the meadery. And yeah,

I guess I'm addicted to flavors. It's the key thing. You know, like even a good scotch or a good, you know, tequila or something. It's just, I don't know. I got this passion for, you know, excellence. I forgot what you asked me there, Brad. Oh, sorry. No, I was just asking what are some of the new meats you've been working on or what meats are you distributing now?

So distribution is pretty much at a halt till we get product back in stock, but we'll have the fling, the Kurtz apple pie, um, embrace desire paramour, which is similar to desire and blissful. Some of the stores won't carry certain brands based on the name. Uh, like desire was considered too risque, but they sell menage a trois. And I was like, come on, where are you going? Um,

Sorry, my earthquake just be laughing on the floor here. But yeah, I got some ideas for some new meads I want to tinker with. But for the most part, you know, the tap room, it's evolved. So people used to come just to taste the mead and now they come to have dinner and they try the mead with like a flight and then they buy some mead or beer. So I'm looking forward to the day we can have

more of that. You know, it's just right now, it's just a very small scale operation. So, but I usually try to make, you know, five gallon batches. Um, we used to have a mead club that would go out, try to be special one-offs type of thing, but I've had to scale a lot of that stuff back, but I'm looking forward to it. I'll be doing a lot more mead classes this year. I think coming up, given the opportunity for people to come in, ask questions, make a batch of mead, um,

Yeah. I mean, I, I, we've talked about, I love making me. It's one of my favorites actually, but yeah, well, embrace or caress the raspberry ones coming back out, which I think you were fond of. Yeah, no, yeah. It's I, well, I enjoy all your meads actually. Um, so what, what are your thoughts on the craft market? Uh,

which by most measures has entered a slight decline. I think you know, we've talked about it before, but homebrewing has been in decline for over 10 years now, I think, with the possible exception of a little blip in COVID. But we're finally seeing the craft market starting to turn. It was growing double digits for many years. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, big companies are shutting down little extensions they've brought on.

I mean, Cement City, I believe in Florida, was closed down. That was originally built up by Sam Adams. Well, the big brewers, I've talked to a number of people in the business, and they say the big brewers are dumping a lot of these brands that they bought up. These regional breweries that they bought up rapidly, they're dumping them just as rapidly.

right now yeah i learned this weekend or past weekend that cigar city down in tampa is now owned by monster beverage i was just like shocked to think that a energy energy drink company could acquire such a well-known brand um that has phenomenal shelf space throughout florida yeah um and they've put on some great um festivals over the years that i used to participate in and um

Oh, you know, so I hope Jared at Cigar City Mead and Cider is doing all right. He's been there for quite some time. And, you know, I see my friends at Stone Liberty Station. I'm celebrating 20 years at Stone. It's just, you know, you can see it. The market has changed. Not everybody's, I mean...

I didn't think there'd ever be a day where I'm selling something like Truly, but, you know, customers are coming in the door asking for Truly. And I'm like, okay, some Truly is going on the shelf somewhere. And, you know, we don't put it on draft, but, you know, we certainly, we've been stocking more of what the customer wants, but demographic has changed. I think I read somewhere. Yeah, I think the drinking habits have changed, right? People are drinking different things now.

Yeah. Well, it seems like the IPA craze is kind of finally taking a step back. Like we only usually keep one on draft. Yeah. Well, over 50% of the sales for probably 10 years at least.

Yeah, and as I go through the distributor email list of what they got for beer, it's all no dark beers, nothing with any kind of character that you'd want to think about. We'd be getting stuff in from Texas, and some of it was still fresh, not all of it. And that's a challenge, at least with beer in the global market space. It's got a very short shelf life, and –

You want it as fresh as possible. And that's why I stand behind this vision of a destination location. People come in and buy the beer here. We've got growlers that we're selling. Some people show up with seven growlers at a time, though. And when you've got a six still on draft, you're like, oh, no, I've got to go carry another one upstairs. That's okay. That's a good problem to have, right?

Yeah, I appreciate that customers keep coming back and they make it a day. You know, we've got, you know, 100 acres. People can go sledding on the hills out in the back and, you know, snowshoe, cross-country ski. That's awesome. I bought myself a seven-foot toboggan when I bought the property and just to go sailing down that hill is something else. But it's a 600-yard walk back up. Yeah, we've been fortunate to finally – we've had no snow the last two years, so finally some snow this year. So I've been out skiing too, enjoy that very much.

Nice. Michael, I want to get your closing thoughts. What are your closing thoughts after a lot of ups and downs in just a period of a few years? Never give up. Never give up. It feels so refreshing to have...

total control back in my pocket to do what I do best, make me... I've got a mentor now that's sharing with me how to run, do better at being a business owner and manager. Because I always said I was...

Terrible CEO, great meat maker. I need to bridge that gap a little bit. And my friend Paul is making that happen for me. He's giving me a lifetime's worth of experiences to help guide and apply knowledge.

structure to where we need to succeed. I was just, I'm very lucky at being lucky. And, you know, the volume of the meads that we sold didn't mean I had to pay too much attention to the actual structure of how, how much profit were we making on particular things? And was it sustainable? And through going through the hardships that we have, I've learned that they got to pay attention to the big stuff and focus on

doing what I do right and do what I do best, but knowing that I need help and get the help I need. Yeah, that's awesome. Well, Michael, I appreciate you coming on and willing to share your story. I know it's tough when you go through a lot of change, but I appreciate you being here today. Thank you very much for being here. All right, Brad, my pleasure to be here. My guest today, Michael Fairbrother, award-winning meadmaker, founder of Moonlight Meadery, as well as Over the Moon Farmstead. Thank you again, Michael.

You're welcome. A big thank you to Michael Fairbrother for joining me this week. Thanks also to our sponsors, Craft Beer and Brewing Magazine. They recently added a new collection of more than 500 beer recipes from pro brewers to their site. Most of them let you download the Beersmith recipe file. The new Craft Beer and Brewing recipe site is at beerandbrewing.com slash beer dash recipes. Again, that site is beerandbrewing.com slash beer dash recipes.

And Beersmith Web, the online version of Beersmith Brewing Software. Beersmith Web lets you design great beer recipes from any browser, including your tablet or phone. Edit recipes on the go with access to the same full suite of recipe building tools as our desktop version. Try Beersmith Web today by creating a free account at beersmithrecipes.com.

And finally, a reminder to click that like and subscribe button on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, or whatever platform you're on. Clicking those buttons is a great way to support the show. I'd like to thank you for listening, and I hope you have a great brewing week.