Rik Marley: Dreams and Serendipity LOCAL BREWER BRINGS CREATIVITY AND EXPERIENCE TO BREWMASTER’S JOB AT FLYING GOOSE BREW PUB & GRILLE
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Rik Marley didn’t plan on becoming a brewmaster and his path to brewing expertise was paved with a combination of serendipitous good luck combined with obsessive research and study. It all started one afternoon in a beer store in Concord, New Hampshire, in the late 1990s. Rik and his wife were home between the fall and winter tours of the Vermont band Phish. Rik estimates he’s seen the band “400 times,” and that lifestyle of following the perennially touring band had a direct connection to his eventual career as a beermaking expert. WOULDN’T IT BE NEAT? At the time, craft beer hadn’t exploded yet, and finding a beer store that carried a good selection of craft brew was not overly common. Browsing the shelves with his wife, Rik was struck by the choices before him. “Wouldn’t it be neat if you could make your own beer,” he remarked. An employee overheard him and brought him into the back room. The store had “a whole laboratory setup back there. It was pretty cool.” Rik bought his first home brew kit then and there. The challenge of learning the alchemy of hops and malt brought out the researcher in Rik. “I did terrible in high school. I did terrible in college. But things that I really enjoyed, I would do a lot of research. I enjoyed home brewing right off the bat. I did a lot of research, read a lot, bought a lot of books.” Rik went from brewing one batch a month to two, then upwards of three and four batches per month, and from using prepared ingredients like malt extract to using actual grains and malting them himself. “Pretty soon I had a little warehouse of homebrewing equipment that went with me wherever I moved. It became an obsession.”
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