Jay Fox – Master of Fun

For years now, Jay Fox, head brewer at The Peddler, has proven himself to be one of West Virginia’s most capable and creative brewers. While he brews all popular beer styles with aplomb, he truly shines in the production of modern, fruited sour beers. If there’s a better quick sour brewer in the state, we’d like to meet them.

Maybe what we love most about Jay is his upbeat, jovial attitude — not just about brewing, but of life in general. He’s a pleasure to be around.

Listen to the Podcast here

Erin and Charles dropped in to sit down with Jay and record another episode of the WV Beer Roads podcast. We get up to date with many things Peddler. We also learn details about the upcoming Rails & Ales Craft Beer Festival, which Jay leads and that is coming up again on August 8th.

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Large brewery equipment cache discovered in warehouse

When you rat around in old city warehouses, you never know what you’ll find. Before our recording session with Jay Fox, we discovered a craft brewery equipment treasure trove in a Huntington, WV, warehouse. Imagine finding a twenty-barrel brewhouse with dual kettles, mash tun, and hot liquor tank; a slew of 40-bbl conical fermentors, centrifuge, and a whole bunch more stuff stashed in building owned by The Peddler brewery proprietor Drew Hetzer. Also in the building is the beginning build-out of large, insulated cold room that could store mucho kegged and packaged beer.

So will we soon see a brewery expansion in Huntington? On the podcast, we ask Jay about this.

(Click on a photo to enlarge)

Ever since it opened, we’ve noticed that The Peddler brewpub could not be a particularly easy place to brew beer on a commercial scale. With its brewhouse on one side of the main public entrance hall and half the fermentation tanks squeezed into a tight space on the other side of the hall, and the rest of the tanks on a small balcony above the entrance, the equipment layout just doesn’t seem designed for ease of use and efficiency. It’s cool for the customers to see the brewers in action, but probably not so cool for the brewers work efficiency. However, Fox and his brewers have worked around these layout inefficiencies and consistently made some of the best beer of any West Virginia brewery. However, there’s a practical limit to how much they can brew there.

When word got around that The Peddler had acquired a bunch of large brewing equipment and placed it in a building just a couple blocks from Huntington’s main downtown business core, the local craft beer community was hopeful. There’s no doubt that the Huntington Tri-State region is not overbuilt with beer production capacity. A large Peddler production brewery would fill that void and even place the brewery in position to distribute more widely in West Virginia and to the nearby areas of Ohio and Kentucky—neither of which yet has much local beer.

After seeing this equipment cache first-hand, we remain hopeful that a larger brewing facility could take shape in Huntington.