Peer Q&A: Muddy Creek Brewery Takes the Plunge, Part 1

Note to readers: This Q&A is part of a series of peer interviews from The Equipped Brewer. Twice-monthly installments will share the key experiences, lessons learned, and advice of owners, operators, and other key contacts at young craft beverage companies as they’ve tackled the challenges of growth.

This month, The Equipped Brewer had the pleasure of interviewing Gregg Wigen and Chris Sherman, two of the three owners of Muddy Creek Brewery in Butte, Montana. Muddy Creek opened its taproom doors in March of this year, right on the heels of launching full brew production in February after many years of home brewing, dreaming, and hard work. The taproom will soon have seven of its own beers on tap, plus its own rootbeer, lemonade, and ginger beer. Wigen and Sherman are starting out with a blonde ale called Dirty Blonde, an American wheat ale called Good Time, an amber called No Paddle, an English-style IPA called Skinny Cow, a chocolate stout named Muddy Creek, and a vanilla porter called Storm the Door. They also plan to introduce an orange-infused American wheat called Clementine and a West Coast IPA called Butte Rat.

Getting to Know Muddy Creek

How long have you been interested in brewing?

Gregg Wigen: I got started about 12 years ago when my father-in-law bought me a home brew kit. The resulting beer was absolutely terrible, but I was hooked.

What motivated you to get into professional production?

GW: I think deep down inside all home brewers harbor a dream of “going pro." Certainly for me, the early phases of brewing were simply trying to get a recipe, any recipe to turn out right. But, later, the goal was to make something that was "my own." A brewer wants to put his or her stamp on a beer. Even when you’re cloning a production beer, the goal is to demonstrate that you can go out and recreate it.

What makes you want to turn that joy of simply brewing your product into a very risky business venture is the pure joy of watching other people enjoy your product 

How long have you been in full production?

GW: We officially opened at the end of February and have been going strong since then. Our first test batches started in early December on our pilot system, and by January we were brewing half-batches on our ten-barrel system. Certainly we’ve had our challenges, but several nearby brewers have been very helpful. That’s one of the great parts of this industry: Brewers generally are more collaborative than competitive. Ultimately we’re all so happy to be making beer for a living that we can’t help but lend a hand to the other guys whenever we’re asked — at least that’s my theory.

Getting Down to Business

How did you end up in your current space?

GW: After 12 years of homebrewing, I was ready to take the plunge. A mutual friend of mine knew that we were looking for a space for the brewery and she owned the building we are currently in. She and her partner run a couple of taverns out of the building. When she heard that we wanted to start up a brewery, she immediately called and said, “I want to talk to you guys!”

Generally, tavern association folks and brewery association folks have had a bit of a rocky competitive relationship in Montana. In the end, for a couple of bar owners to call us up and say, “We want to give you some space to put your brewery in here and run your taproom, and we want to give you a great deal doing it!” is a pretty big deal.

We invested some money into the building infrastructure and in return we got a very favorable lease agreement. Our businesses work out well because as a brewery, we have to stop serving at 8 p.m., which is when the bar next door is getting going. Our patrons can walk across the hall and enjoy another round. We funnel additional business their way and it’s a great symbiotic relationship for both of us.

How big is your new production space? Taproom?

GW: We have access to the entire basement of the building but we're currently only using about a third of the space for brewery operations — 1,700 ft². There's plenty of room to grow, which is one of the great assets of the arrangement.

We brew on a ten-barrel system onsite. It's still early in the game, so we’re producing about 35 barrels a month for our taproom sales and some limited distribution accounts. In order to meet that schedule we generally brew once a week; however, we can certainly increase that as needed.

GW & Chris Sherman: We can seat about 115 people in the taproom. We’ve really worked on a great rustic-chic look and feel. We also went the extra mile to ensure that sound treatment is top notch. When we have live music or when the room is full, people can still talk at a normal volume and hear one another due to the sound proofing. It was very important to us that our guests enjoyed their time in the taproom and didn’t feel overwhelmed with too much sound.

Do you serve food?

GW: We serve some popcorn and pretzels. Under Montana law, what we can serve as a brewery is ambiguous. In May we will renew our license, and when we do that we may apply as a brewpub, which gives us more flexibility. At that point we may begin serving some food.

We licensed our kitchen area downstairs so we could manufacture and serve our soft drinks. So, we do have a licensed food preparation area onsite from which we can make and serve food. In the interim, we have menus from local restaurants that customers order from and the restaurants deliver directly to our establishment, plus we allow our guests bring in food whenever they like.

In Part 2 of this Q&A series next month, Wigen and Sherman will share how they set up their business for success. Follow Muddy Creek Brewery on Facebook.