Welcome to our “Meet The Brewer” series! Where we interview brewers in Pennsylvania, from breweries small to large. Let us know if you know anyone who should be featured, email us at [email protected].

Old Forge Brewing Company first opened in 2008 at 532 Mill Street, in Danville, PA. The brewpub features 16 taps of fresh Old Forge beer, with an additional two cask beers on the hand pump. In November 2018, Old Forge opened a second taproom at 58 West Market Street, in downtown York, PA. Here they feature 16 taps with a scratch kitchen.

Darren Stonecypher is the head brewer at Old Forge Brewing Company. Read more to find out his introduction to craft beer, where he sees the craft beer industry heading, and more!

What was your introduction to craft beer?

Drinking a Rogue Dead Guy at a University of Oregon Football tailgater when I was… um… 21. I still remember it being too bitter for my tastes at the time, it’s amazing how tastes change. A few years later, when I was actually 21, I took a tour of the Widmer Brewery in Portland, Oregon, and that’s when I caught the bug.

How did you get started as a brewer?

After the tour guide explained the brewing process at Widmer, I said to myself, “That ain’t so hard!” So I started homebrewing and learned that it was slightly more difficult than a 10-minute explanation of the process.

What style allows you to be the most creative, and why?

I tend to be the most creative when I’m not sticking to a style. We brew a lot of beers to the accepted styles at Old Forge. It makes a good starting point and gives our customers an expectation of what they’re getting into when they order the beer. But it also has a tendency to box you in a bit. When we’re trying to think of something new and unique, I often try to purge the idea of styles from my head and think about what I want the end result to be.

Instead of saying, “I want to brew a 12A British Golden Ale for our beer engine.” I’ll say, “Summer is coming up, I want to try something a little less traditional on the beer engine. I’m thinking light in color with a medium body and a slightly sweet malt flavor. We just got these new hops in and I really like the flavor they gave in the last beer we used with them, so I think I’ll use those for late boil additions and dry hopping. I’d like to keep the malt-hop flavors balanced, so I’m going to keep the boil additions and dry hops subdued, so no one flavor dominates.”

If I end up with something that could fit into the 12A British Golden Ale category, cool, let’s put that on the menu. If not, cool, we’ll think of a new style name for it. Three words are typically enough of a description for people to get the idea.

What was the first beer you ever brewed, and what did you learn from it?

It was a clone of BJ Brewhouse’s Jeremiah Red Ale. I learned that I love the process of making beer. I learned that extract brewing wasn’t for me, so I switched to all-grain after my fourth batch. I learned that bottling is tedious, so I started kegging everything. Most of all, I learned how to do it better the next time. Every batch of beer you brew you gain a little bit of knowledge and experience, even if it’s the same beer you’ve brewed a hundred times. You refine your process, you make small improvements, you make mistakes and correct them, and you continue to work toward making the perfect version of that same beer.

Where do you see the craft beer industry heading in the next few years?

In the next few years, unfortunately, more fads. I understand where it’s coming from, brewers maintain a healthy competition with each other and we have to continually think of something new to keep people interested. But we’re also competing with other subsets of the beverage industry; FMBs, wine, liquor, and craft cocktails. Beer can be a very versatile beverage, more so than most other beverages, and when we find some niche that people become interested in, we have a tendency to beat it to death in the name of maintaining interest. For a perfect example of this, look up the top five beers on Beer Advocate right now, then compare that to the top five from a year ago, two years ago, etc. I look forward to the day when the top five beers on Beer Advocate are lighter craft lagers, where their inclusion on the list is determined by the quality of the beer and not the amount of marshmallow flavor in it.

Describe what it’s like to be a brewer in Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania is an interesting state. We have the second-highest number of craft breweries and the second-highest craft beer production in the country. California is first on that list for both of those metrics, but we have 1/3rd of California’s population. Ask anyone outside of Pennsylvania what the top craft beer states are in the country, and they’ll probably say; California, Colorado, and Oregon. Ask anyone West of the Rocky Mountains about craft beer in Pennsylvania and they’ll probably assume that the “microbrewery fad” hasn’t reached us yet.

With all of that said, I think it gives brewers in Pennsylvania a certain confident humility, “We know we’re good, we just don’t talk about it.” Or is that humble confidence? I think it also gives us as brewers a sense of camaraderie that you don’t see in a lot of other places. I have good relationships with the other local brewers where we can call each other when we need help with something, and we’re always willing to help if we can.

Those metrics also show the appreciation of the Pennsylvania beer drinking community. I think as a whole, Pennsylvanians have greater respect for well-made craft beer than most other places. Our customers are frequently stopping me in the restaurant to tell me how much they like a new beer that we came out with, or how much they appreciate that we have a certain beer style because no other brewery has it. It’s a great feeling to have that constant encouragement to keep doing what I’m doing. So yeah, Pennsylvania is a great place to be a brewer.

What is the inspiration behind your beer names?

Early on, we stuck mostly with the Blacksmithing theme, but that’s a limited pool of terms, and they aren’t exactly coming up with new ones. We’ve done plenty of hop puns, and a couple of tongue-in-cheek jabs at the beer industry. We often like to make traditional European beers and give them names in the language of their origin, but I think our staff is getting annoyed with my impossible to pronounce German compound nouns. I guess Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften doesn’t quite roll off the tongue the way they want it to. Lately, we’ve been sticking to the tried and true adjective-noun with or without alliteration. Ambling Anthracite, Burly Beetlejuice, or Callow Dorie. It doesn’t have to make any sense, but with over 9,000 breweries in the US now, coming up with unique beer names is about as difficult as unique song names.

What is your favorite beer to drink right now?

Helles Lager, hands down. Lagers take so much more time and effort to do properly, and lighter-colored, lower-hopped beers are near impossible to hide off-flavors. When I’m drinking my own, it reminds me of how much I’ve grown as a brewer since that first batch of Red Ale, and how much work we’ve put into perfecting our process over the past ten years. When I drink it from other breweries, it shows me that there are other brewers out there who care about making good beer as much as I do, and have the ability to do it. Besides, it’s extremely refreshing after a hard day’s work, and good to drink year-round.

What is the most important lesson you learned in the beer industry so far?

Beer is the result of performing 1,000 small steps. Great beer is the result of performing 1,000 small steps the best way possible. Consistently great beer is the result of performing 1,000 small steps the best way possible every single time.