CEO/Owner Travis Stewart talks to Travel Track about path, location, ingredients and flavor approach in regards to TrimTab Brewing Company in Birmingham, Alabama.
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00:46 What was this, the joy of doing this, sharing this community,
00:48 sharing it with everybody in there?
00:52 Could you talk about the existential element
00:55 of that in the 10 years, and how it has changed you as a person?
01:00 Has it made you see life in a different perspective?
01:03 Or is it just the path that you have to follow through humanity?
01:09 It's a good question.
01:15 Having been with this for 10 years,
01:26 I view the work that I do every day and the work
01:30 that we are doing as a act of gratitude.
01:36 And that may sound strange.
01:38 But to who?
01:39 To yourself?
01:39 To the people?
01:40 To the community?
01:41 I believe this is something even more than that.
01:46 That I believe that there is a higher calling that we all have.
01:53 There is an innate creative force that
01:56 is within every single one of us that is just waiting to be called.
02:03 And it is only dampened by our self-limitations and the constraints
02:08 that we have in our life.
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02:13 The real ramp for me has been realizing
02:21 that building a wonderful team and having
02:29 a incredibly supportive family and investing in those is essential.
02:41 In order to be a highly performing creative person,
02:47 you have to have a strong foundation.
02:53 And I'm very proud of how strong our foundation is here
02:59 as a work family at Trim Tab.
03:01 I'm very proud of the family that I have at home.
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03:10 Why is it important to be here in Birmingham
03:36 since you've been to so many places?
03:38 OK.
03:39 So Birmingham originally enamored me
03:44 with a very specific summer that I moved up here to Clerc
03:52 when I was in law school.
03:54 And I was moving around town.
03:59 I was meeting people.
04:01 And I, at that point in time, had lived all over the country.
04:05 I moved away from home when I was 11.
04:08 I moved away from home when I was 11
04:10 and basically lived on the tour bus from when
04:16 I was 11 until I was 14.
04:19 And then after that, I lived in Asheville, Carolina
04:22 for 10 years.
04:23 And that was home.
04:26 Alabama has always been where my parents lived.
04:28 So technically, it was always home.
04:34 But in reality, Asheville was home.
04:40 But Birmingham is my first chosen home.
04:46 It wasn't a consequence of education or consequence
04:50 of life or general inertia of life.
04:54 I chose Birmingham, or rather I should put it,
04:55 Birmingham chose me.
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05:00 And I believe that what enamored me and still
05:12 to this day draws me into it is the entrepreneurial, the civic,
05:17 and the aspirational spirit that the entire community shares.
05:24 There is a past of Birmingham that we cannot look beyond.
05:31 And it's one that I believe should
05:35 be one that ennobles our community, that doesn't
05:42 stand in front of it.
05:43 That there is a trap, I believe, of looking
05:51 at marred historical events and treating past as prophecy.
06:00 Transcendent.
06:03 We are the authors of the chapters that are to come.
06:07 And so I say, let's write them.
06:10 And let's write them well.
06:12 And let's write them colorful.
06:14 And let's write them with the right people.
06:16 And let's like--
06:19 So--
06:19 You're very much jazz too, man.
06:21 Oh, believe me.
06:23 I was listening to West Montgomery before I got here
06:25 on vinyl.
06:26 Yeah, it's that I think that we all
06:38 have a piece to play in this overall puzzle,
06:41 be it for us in the industry, which
06:44 in the spectrum of the cosmos is the most insignificant thing
06:47 in the world.
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07:17 Yeah, I mean, these are three distinctive beers
07:22 in themselves because of each of what they represent.
07:24 Can you go through each one of them
07:25 in terms of the sort of path of it, the uniqueness of them,
07:28 but also how they fit into your gallery of beer?
07:32 Sure.
07:33 So it's a wide spectrum of beer that we like to explore.
07:41 And Paradise Now was one of the first beers
07:46 that I ever brewed.
07:48 And it was one of the first beers
07:51 we ever brewed in this facility.
07:53 It won a Great American Beer Festival Award, which
07:57 we're extremely proud of for it.
08:01 And it really broke open the doors for the sour beer
08:05 category.
08:06 And we all around here, we're all kind of novice
08:13 to semi-obsessive home cooks.
08:17 And so we love experiment with flavors.
08:19 If you don't know it, there's a great book
08:21 called The Flavor Bible.
08:23 It can tell you great things to connect with different things
08:27 that you would have no idea they would combine with.
08:30 But anyways, Paradise Now was the part of the origin story
08:39 of how we began.
08:41 And we launched it.
08:47 And it really just was--
08:52 there was nothing like it on the market.
08:53 So we really ran with it.
08:56 And we told people that we're looking to put out
09:00 as a new brewery in 2017.
09:05 Sour beer is our core beer.
09:08 They thought that we were crazy.
09:11 But it became, according to Nielsen data that year,
09:14 the fifth highest or the fastest growing
09:18 beer in the whole country.
09:21 So we focus on 12-ounce beers.
09:26 And outside of this, our 12-ounce beers
09:30 are really more indicative of we focus on the things
09:33 that we can replicate very, very well.
09:37 And we do a lot of them.
09:39 And this and IPA that should be sitting next to it--
09:43 And that's the double of Trim's, right?
09:45 No, no, no.
09:46 The Trim's have IPA would account for over more
09:51 the majority of our portfolio.
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10:37 - Now, the gallery series, totally different animal.
10:41 We are looking at beers that we are only producing,
10:45 that we only sell in our four walls.
10:49 And that's it.
10:52 And it's very small quantity,
10:54 and it may be gone in 12 hours, 24 hours, a day or two.
10:59 - So you can only get the strawberry
11:01 creamy out here in Birmingham?
11:02 - Correct, you can only get this here.
11:03 So we've geared our large scale manufacturing
11:08 to getting to a larger scale.
11:12 And we're really focusing what we're doing here
11:14 at very small batch releases,
11:18 so that we can really most importantly,
11:22 show the creative minds of our brewers,
11:24 and let them fully express themselves
11:27 through the brewing process.
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12:05 - But it's also that you can play with ingredients
12:08 like the strawberries, like the marshmallow.
12:10 - Yep.
12:11 - As you said, there's nothing like putting your hands
12:13 in a vat of marshmallow.
12:14 - There is no feeling on planet Earth
12:17 than putting your hands through a 55 gallon drum
12:22 of marshmallow fluff.
12:23 There is truly no feeling like that.
12:27 It's also a long cleanup process,
12:29 but it's worth it.
12:30 Trust me.
12:33 - But then, but you go from there to Language of Thunder,
12:35 and I just love it because there's that story behind it
12:38 with you and Madagascar.
12:39 - So two parts to that story.
12:41 Number one, I studied school in Concord, Massachusetts,
12:46 and studied under an amazing mentor
12:51 that taught me about T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland."
12:56 And it's a fascinating poem,
13:00 and the last chapter of it is called "What the Thunder Said."
13:04 And it is the real culmination of what the whole point
13:09 of what it's all about.
13:11 And it can be viewed as a very dark story
13:14 of where civilization has come, how far can we go?
13:18 But these last realizations are these wake up moments
13:23 where he describes it as "da,"
13:26 and that's descripted on the side panel of it
13:31 to a greater reality
13:36 than what we are currently going through.
13:40 The second part of the story would be involved,
13:45 involved Madagascar.
13:46 So I lived in Madagascar for around six months,
13:51 and while I was there, I became intoxicated
13:56 with the aromas, the aggressive aromas of vanilla farms.
14:01 When I was traveling--
14:05 - That's the big thing over there, right?
14:06 - Oh, it's Madagascar Vanilla.
14:08 It's either Tunisian or Madagascar Vanilla.
14:11 - Wow, wow, wow.
14:13 - And so this is kind of the culmination
14:16 of both my childhood and my hinterlands of growing up,
14:21 and I owe it to the absolute incredible brewers
14:28 of our brewery and the assistance
14:34 of these wonderful distilleries
14:36 that helped bring this to market.
14:39 But it generally takes about a year to make these guys,
14:42 and we put it out once a year,
14:43 and I like there being that amount of scarcity to it.
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