Sapwood Cellars Brewery in Columbia

In this episode of the UnCapped podcast, host Chris Sands talks with Mike Tonsmeire, of Sapwood Cellars in Columbia, about the brewery and the state of the craft beer industry. Tonsmeire was also kind enough to help Sands finally understand phantasm and thiols. Here is an excerpt of their talk.

UnCapped: Let’s start with who you are and a little history of how Sapwood Cellars came to be. I think you’re one of the more well-known brewery owners because of your past life.

Mike Tonsmeire: As you may remember, our brewery focuses on pastry sours and barrel-aged stouts. I’m joking. When we opened, we were all about my partner Scott’s [Scott Janish, Sapwood cofounder] IPAs and my barrel-aged mixed-ferm sour beers.

UnCapped: So much so, that Scott wrote a book about IPAs.

Tonsmeire: And I wrote a book about sour beers.

UnCapped: I still have not read either of them. Sorry.

Tonsmeire: They’re not fun reads. They’re both very technical and brewercentric.

So, both of us had been brewing hobbyists for a long time. I’m getting close to 20 years since I started home brewing, and Scott started a couple years after me. We both had good, cushy, cubicle jobs in Washington, D.C., and decided we could probably keep doing that for the rest of our lives and go to Homebrew Con and do a little home brew consulting on the side.

UnCapped: Scott was a lobbyist. Were you also in lobbying?

Tonsmeire: No, I was an economist for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but an economist in the loose sense. I have an undergrad in economics.

UnCapped: Economist-lite?

Tonsmeire: Yeah. In the same way that Budweiser is a real brewery and we’re like the fun, weird brewery, I was the fun, weird economist. I worked on inflation, so obviously my old coworkers have been having a fun time for the last year or so.

But we both decided that it was worth taking a shot at [opening a brewery] and that we would regret it more if we did not make that jump and sat in a cubicle for the next 30 years and wonder what could have been, what could we have made. So we took that jump and found a space in Columbia that had already been built out for a brewery that just never opened, and that made the financial side of it a lot easier.

Originally we’d been looking at that Rare Barrel, buy-work-from-somebody, focus on the barrel-aged sours to get our foot in the door of professional brewing.

UnCapped: Has that model ever worked for anyone?

Tonsmeire: Rare Barrel just sold to Cellarmaker [Brewing].

I think, sadly, the issue at the moment is that barrel-aged sour beers are not the cool thing that they maybe once were. Now, the people who love them love them and go out of their way to find the best ones. But the average

Sapwood Cellars Brewery

8980 MD-108, Suite MNO, Columbia sapwoodcellars.com consumer, I don’t know if they’re burnt out on it or if, after the last three years, between the politics and the pandemic and everything, when people have a beer, they … want a big chocolate marshmallow with peanut butter hug.

CAN RELEASE: HOPS, LAGER, AND FRUIT Sapwood Cellars will release three new beers at noon Feb. 25: Smüzí Triple Berry Banana (6% Smoothie Sour with Blueberry, Blackberry, Strawberry, and Banana Purees), Pilsner Kopírovat (5% Czech Pilsner), Classic Modern (5% Dynasty and Lost Lagers-collab Historic Hazy IPA), The Dragon (8.1% Rye DIPA with Nelson, Mosaic, and Hallertau Blanc), and Dream Logic (7.2% IPA with Hydra and Mosaic).

UnCapped: They want the mac and cheese of beers.

Tonsmeire: Yeah, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Beer is about escapism and having fun. As a brewery, we very much focused on making the beers that people want to buy.

UnCapped: I feel like everyone I talk to who originally started to go that route, changed their minds right away, last-minute or after they opened, and went the route that you’ve gone, probably because the market isn’t there.

Tonsmeire: I think part of it is the price point, too. A lot of our bottles are $14, $16, and there can be such a range in those beers. You can share it with a couple of friends, you each sip three or four ounces, and it’s fun to try, but it might be the kind of thing where you don’t want a whole one for yourself.

This excerpt has been edited for space and clarity. Listen to the full podcast at fnppodcasts.com/uncapped. Got UnCapped news? Email csands@ newspost.com.

Richard Cohen, shown here, opened Jerk It Smoke It in December in Yellow Springs.