Thursday, January 22, 2009

John Graham is a pretty cool guy

Matt was pretty sick early on this week, and he couldn’t come in and filter on Monday or Tuesday. On Monday we didn’t really sweat it, but on Tuesday we started wondering if he’d be off all week. Our new brewer, Alex, had been training for about 3 months on our filter, but had not handled a filtration solo yet and we really didn’t want to give him a baptism by fire-beer on it.

So I called up John Graham. He’s the owner, brewer, salesrep and sometimes delivery guy for ChurchKey brewing out in Campbelford (he also owns and runs the Stinking Rose pub out that way). After 30 seconds of small talk, I got right to it: “John, Matt is sick and I’m not sure how long he might be out of commission…any chance you feel like coming up for a visit?”

Like the title of the post, John is a pretty cool guy. After explaining that he was about to leave for Toronto, had to brew the next day and had crazy amounts of stuff lined up for the rest of the week, he said “if you’re stuck and you need beer, I can make it to your place for about midnight tomorrow, but I’ll have to filter and be back in Campbellford by morning”.

Turns out we didn’t need to take John up on his generosity…Alex rocked on his first ever solo brew and Matt was good enough to make it in on Wednesday. But it’s good to know there are brewers like John out there, ready to help out if you’re in a pinch and need to borrow a few thousand cups of filtered beer. Thanks, John.

5 comments:

Troy Burtch said...

And that is what it's all about.

Anonymous said...

I stumbled across your blog at random, and I have to say congratulations on all your success! I'm just going to throw this message out there, because I know you have to be very busy... Well, my friend and I have been homebrewing for quite some time, and as our fanbase has grown, so have the demands. Long story short, we have decided to get serious and form a LLC. We are in the planning stages right now, but I can just feel that there are many things we are overlooking. I was wondering if you had any advice, warnings, or common pitfalls you could clue us in on (I'm sure there are many!). At the very least, just a brief account of the hoops you had to jump through would be very helpful. We have numerous outlets (stores, bars, etc.) that have expressed interest in selling our beer, we just need to make the operation official. I am not a part of this website, but my email address is ab345103@ohio.edu if you have the time to respond. Hopefully I'll get to try your beer sometime!
Thanks,
Austin

Gordo said...

Chalk one more up in the coolness column for ChurchKey. That's great.

Anonymous said...

John's like that... he's pretty cool.

Anonymous said...

Mmmm...Beau's
Mmmm...Church-Key