Morgantown Brewing finds new level

From talking to Cody Cheesbrough and Chris DeFazio, it quickly becomes clear that they truly appreciate their role as the latest conservators of City of Morgantown’s brewing heritage. While they are the new owners, their brewpub has pretty much continuously operated in the same location since 1992 when it started up as the One Onion Brewery. Since then, it’s gone through at least four ownership changes, three different operating names, and a dozen or more good brewers.

Last year, when Chris and Cody officially took the reins of Morgantown Brewing Company from Art Gallagher, it could have been seen as just a natural progression in the life of a venerable local brewpub. Beer-wise, though, it was a sea change.

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A quick refresher: A few years ago, Chris and Cody were two WVU students who entered their craft brewery start-up proposal in an intercollegiate business plan competition. They won. That momentum and the competition’s cash prize led them to found their Pubstomper Brewing Co. They planned to operate as gypsy brewers, who would not own their own place, but would make their beer in other people’s breweries. Since they were Morgantown guys and because Morgantown Brewing’s then production brewery in Westover had excess capacity and the canning equipment they needed, they inked a deal to have their initial beer brewed there. It’s accurate to say that they struggled mightily with the realities of making and distributing beer. But through the struggles they had a great learning experience. While they may have not made any money with Pubstomper, they learned much about what it takes to brew good beer and move it in the market. They also got a close-up look at the inner workings of Morgantown Brewing Company. Then a year and a half ago, when Art Gallagher decided to put the brewpub up for sale, the two men jumped at the opportunity and become its new owners in the spring of 2018. 

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“There’s a lot of different plot lines that converged to take us to where we are now,” Cody explains. “Needless to say, things with Pubstomper did not go at all how we thought that they were going to. We learned a ton of lessons.”

“That was the genius part about gypsy brewing,” said Chris. “You get to learn the ropes without a ton of upfront investment. We were able to learn so much by watching what everyone else was doing. Buying an already existing business, you have years of sales date to look back on and see what was working and what wasn’t. That was huge.”

The new owners were the apprentices who were in the right place at the right time, They were ready to step up and become the new master craftsmen.

“The stars just kinda aligned,” Cody says. “It was meant to be. It was the best of both worlds for both parties.”

Passing the torch to a new generation

When you are not focused on it, it’s easy to forget just how long this microbrew/craft-beer thing has been around — even in West Virginia.

“This place opened the same year I was born,” says Chris about the brewery. That was 27 years ago.

A whole generation of folks have grown up with local beer in their DNA. It’s only reasonable to expect that when the torch is passed to them, they might have a different take on the industry, a different vision, than my generation did.

The changes Chris and Cody are making to the beer at Morgantown Brewing are monstrous. The brewery saw nothing like this during its first 25 years of operation. Since it’s start-up it featured pretty much the same common flagships of the day: blonde ale, pale ale, amber ale, stout, porter, standard IPA. Sure, they flamed it up now and then with some less common styles and experimentals, but that was the exception, not the core.  

And a new generation of beer

No longer are the brewpub’s stars the malty IPA, porter, stout, amber, pale ale, and pale lager of yore — of the former flagships, only Alpha Blonde Ale remains. In their place you will find fruited kettle sours, hazy-juicy IPAs, Mexican hot chocolate stouts, and milkshake IPAs with names like:

• Magic Juju Beans, a  7.3% ABV Sour Raspberry Vanilla Milkshake IPA with ElDorado and Ekuanot hops;
• Ur Jealous, a hazy, fruity, juicy super tropical New England IPA with Experimental HBC 472 hops. Zero IPU. 7.6% ABV;
• Self Improvement, a 7.6% ABV Milkshake IPA, lactose, super hazy, zero-bitterness, dry hopped with Jarrylo and El Dorado hops;
• Lisa Frank Folder, a new Smoothie Sour made with house souring culture and loaded with passion fruit, apricots and pomegranate;
• Pinky Ring, a tart, crisp, thirst quenching sour ale fruited with over 200 lbs of pure strawberry and pink guava, 4.5% ABV; and
• Liquido Fundito, an 9.5% ABV American imperial stout flavored with cinnamon, vanilla, and habanero.

Changes take careful planning

You may wonder how this drastic beer menu changes affected the brewpub’s business. Cody says that looking back over the numbers for brewpub operations for the past several years, their first year as owners was the most profitable year the brewpub has had. 

“We’re getting people, who totally wrote this place off, coming back.” Chris says. He recently saw an Untappd review that made him super happy. It read something like, Morgantown Brewing Company is having the greatest comeback since Space Jam.

Among Untappd users, their new beers have pretty much all rated a good bit higher than the old MBC line-up. Several have hit 4.0 or above, which was a first for the brewery’s beers.

Of course not all reviews of the brewery’s transformation are so positive. Some older customers miss the more traditional style flagships that used to be.

“As craft beer drinkers, we like drinking what’s new,” Chris explains. “So that’s what we figured our customers would like. I think that’s what craft beer drinkers today want. That’s what I want. We love to experiment. There’s nothing more fun than dumping a ton of fruit or a new hop varietal into a batch. Experimentation is so much more fun than just brewing another batch of the same beer. It’s fun for us and it’s fun for our customers too.”

Cody says their bread and butter is the 25 to 40 crowd. That’s who they try hardest to attract, and they seem to score well with that target market. But they also understand the local beer market is broad in its taste preferences. They try to accommodate more than just the new-style drinkers.

Cody identifies three divisions of beer drinkers among their customers:

(1) those who like all the new-school, cutting edge stuff
(2) lovers of the traditional, brewpub styles, like West Coast IPA & ambers
(3) the purists who are lovers of classics, such as Belgian styles.

His goal at any given time is to have something on tap that each of them will enjoy. Since one of the first things they did was get rid of all the domestic macro-bottles, such as Bud Light and PBR that the brewpub previously sold, they are conscious to try to keep on tap a handful of sessional beers, When I visited, the brewpub had a good Kolsch, a hefeweizen, an American lager, and their Alpha Blonde on tap — all traditional-style beers perfect for summer. They also had a classic West Coast double IPA and a Scotch Ale. The names may be new, but many of the beers are very traditional.

A new marketing strategy

“When we took over, the Blonde Ale was still by far the number one seller.,” says Cody. “Now the low-bitterness IPAs surpass it.” He adds that the fruited sours have been the most successful things that they’ve done as far as sales go. Their new-style beers are consistently their fastest selling ones, with 10-barrel batches sometimes lasting only a few days.

With all of the hot new beer styles they are regularly producing, one of their marketing strategies centers around making Morgantown Brewing more of a beer destination. One tactic employed is hosting more special beer events. They have continued the brewery’s long-standing Oktoberfest and added more. The first new event was Dank Fest back in the spring, followed by this summer’s Funk Fest. For these mini-festivals they brew a number of special beers that fit the theme and then also get some of their favorite beers in those styles from the state’s best small brewers. They close off the back parking lot for the day and create a mini-festival on site with special foods too. The mini-fests tend to bring in folks who often are not regular customers and expose them to the new things the brewery is doing.

They have also added small-batch canning and offer 4-packs of 16 oz. cans of some of their most exciting brews until they are gone.

It’s doubtful that folks in other parts of the state will soon see any Morgantown Brewing beers in their markets. Chris and Cody say they’d love to sell a few kegs to craft centric accounts around Morgantown and other parts of the state, but they can’t. “It’s all because of antiquated laws,” Cody says. The purchase of the brewery also came with all the legacy distributor franchise agreements that are difficult to terminate. Due to these agreements, they cannot self-distribute. They believe that to make any real money selling through distributors would require them to produce at least a thousand more barrels of beer annually than they are now prepared to do. Chris and Cody have decided to first focus on getting the their beer and brewpub business right. Down the road, there could be a time when they would decide to ramp up production to the point that working through distributors might make good business, but now is not that time. 

Learning the new styles

Like a lot of contemporary craft brewers, they are finding success in taking a base hazy IPA recipe and then flavoring it with different varieties of hops or taking a base kettle-soured wheat beer and flavoring it with different fruits. Brewing a lot of new offerings off of the same or similar base recipes is allowing the guys to tweak processes and make many incremental improvements. They are paying very close attention to the little things that add up to significant flavor enhancements. 

“The dialing in never stops,” Cody says. “You never get to where everything is perfect. There’s always something to fix the next time. We wanted to hammer down our strengths and really make sure we were the best at what we were doing.” 

They stress that their brewing is not all about the cool ingredients, like the latest hops or fruit additions. “The process is 90% of how the beer turns out,” says Cody.

Back when they were gypsy brewers, it was hard for them to be consistent. Being on different equipment all the time, you don’t get the chance to really dial in your processes compared to when you are brewing the same recipes regularly on your own equipment. 

One area where they believe they have come a long way is in mastering hop additions for NEIPAs. They follow their whirlpool  and fermentor hopping with a longer than IPA-normal conditioning time. While it means they are slower to get the beer to market, it eliminates the hop burn character that hurts many NEIPA brews.  

Even with more experience, brew days don’t always go smoothly, especially when trying something different. Back in the winter, they had a crazy time brewing their Big Chungus, which was a hemp IPA. All the hemp seed hearts gummed up their mash tun and resulted in a stuck mash, requiring them to use “every trick in the book” to get it unstuck. Nevertheless, the beer turned out to be one of their favorites.

“It seems like the more we suffer in the brewhouse, the better the beer turns out,” Chris says.

Morgantown Brewing’s Milkshake IPAs

Their milkshake IPAs are basically New England-style IPAs with lactose added, typically brewed to have zero IBUs, meaning all cold addition hops/post whirlpool/dry hopping.  The hopping focuses on varieties that are extremely juicy-fruity. The unfermentable milk sugar left behind after fermentation gives it a sweet character and a creamy mouthfeel. Then they add a variety of fruit purees and possibly vanilla or other natural flavors to complete the milkshake profile.

Morgantown Brewing’s Fruited Kettle Sours

They make a fairly light mixed-grain mash containing 2-row barley and wheat malts. Once the wort fills the kettle, they add a proprietary house blend of lactobacillus cultures and let it work to sour the wort. When the target tartness is reached, the wort is boiled to stop the lactobacillus fermentation. The wort is pumped into a fermentor and a standard brewers yeast is pitched in. The yeast ferments the remaining sugars and adds alcohol. Pure fruit puree is then added and mixed in. Depending on the amount of puree added, the beer either comes out a slightly more viscous wheat beer consistency or can go all the way to a thick fruit smoothy. They have used blueberries, pomegranate, raspberry, strawberry, and pink guava, just to name a few of the fruit additions.

Kitchen changes too

Now that the brewing program has found its new direction and the guys are comfortable with it, they have turned more attention to the food side of the brewpub operation. “We recently did a small menu update,” says Chris. They say they hope to feature more menu items including more locally sourced ingredients. They are definitely breaking away from the standard bar-food menu, like they have with the beer list.

For example, recent kitchen features have included:

• Korean style pulled pork, red & black rice, mint, cilantro, cucumbers & green onions tossed in a chili soy sauce;
• Seasoned ground lamb, turmeric couscous, balsamic cucumber & tomato salad & lemon yogurt sauce with toasted pita;
• Brown sugar marinated pork chops, steakhouse potato wedges & ranch pasta salad;
• Cilantro-lime marinated chicken breast, chorizo, Spanish rice, refried beans, queso blanco & flour tortillas; and
• Chipotle chicken, black bean spread, Spanish rice, red peppers, green peppers, yellow onion & flour tortillas.

That is quite an attractive list of foods, which would welcome pairing with something on the beer list, whether your taste leans toward experimental, traditional, or somewhere in-between.

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Morgantown Brewing Company
1291 University Ave
Morgantown, West Virginia 26505
Website

Morgantown Brewing Company, founded in 2009, reopened the historic brewpub after it went through a several month hiatus. The brewery’s heritage goes back to 1992 when it opened as One Onion Brewery; then from 1994 to 2008, it operated as West Virginia Brewing Company.