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].
ShawneeCraft Brewing Company first opened in March of 2009 at 100 Shawnee Inn Drive, in Shawnee on Delaware, PA. The brewery is located on the grounds of The Shawnee Inn and Golf Resort and was featured in our “Pennsylvania Breweries Who Offer An Overnight Stay” article. They brew on a 10 BBL brewhouse and have 14 beers on tap. The brewery has a wood-fired oven serving farm-to-table, made from scratch Neapolitan pizzas, as well as an outdoor beer garden with fire-pits, lawn games, and stages with live music.
Devin Vogel is the head brewer at ShawneeCraft 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?
The first non-macro beers I had were thanks to some neighbors I lived next to in San Diego. They were older than me and the 2 friends I lived with at the time, and we would frequently ask them to run to the store for us (you know, because we were so busy being productive, not because we were under 21). We would pony up whatever money we could and ask them to grab us cases of Miller Light or whatever was on sale that week, and they would never listen. Instead of letting us drink our swill, they decided to take the opportunity to teach us a little lesson in quality over quantity, instead of ice-cold 30 packs of cans, we wound up with 12 or so bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale, their favorite! This situation went on for a couple of years, and the original feeling of “where’s all the beer!?” evolved into a love for those crystal clear bottles of Newcastle. My first jobs in San Diego were in the restaurant industry, food running, and bussing tables, and luckily the places I worked at always had amazing beer from Stone, Ballast Point, Coronado, and many others on tap. This is where I was introduced to American craft beer, and those West Coast IPAs still have a warm spot in my heart from many years of enjoying them.
How did you get started as a brewer?
Before starting my career here at ShawneeCraft, I spend most of my beer study time blowing up carboys in my parent’s basement haha. Thankfully ShawneeCraft has always been great about promoting from within, and building people up the old-fashioned way, through time, effort, and education. I started off cleaning kegs, doing deliveries, and running errands about a decade ago. Over that time I had the opportunity to learn how every bit of machinery up here works because I was using it every day, and as I got better and more proficient I got to learn how new things worked and so on and so forth. I’ve been the low man on the totem pole, worked my way up to assistant brewer, and from there into my current role of head brewer and production manager.
What style allows you to be the most creative, and why?
I would say the styles that allow me to be most creative are the sours we produce, given the number of choices we have between all of the different processes. We make quick kettle sours with different fruits that are available to us, and those allow for some fun decision making, but the more intricate batches come from the stainless sour tank we’ve named “Prometheus”. Prometheus is a blonde base beer that we use to age a sour/brett culture we’ve kept alive for the past 7 or 8 years. We empty about two-thirds of the tank at a time, this allows us to fill barrels that sound interesting to us, do collaborations with local wineries, and add different fruits towards the end of the aging process.
The possibilities are endless with projects like these and lend themselves to a ton of creative input over the course of the production cycle. Once that beer is gone it won’t ever be produced the same way again, a new batch of base beer will fill up Prometheus and the culture inside of it will transform it into our funky blonde, to be used in a new and exciting way all over again. So for the styles we make, that’s where we have the most amount of creative opportunity, but I should also mention that we have a dedicated line in the taproom named “Brewers Choice” that we use to play with new hops, yeast, or other ingredients from our favorite suppliers. We make more traditional styles on this tap, but the ability to play with new products allows us to have a lot of fun with those one-off batches.
What was the first beer you ever brewed, and what did you learn from it?
Fun one here, the first recipe I ever designed on a production scale was a Cranberry IPA back in 2014. It was not good at all, but there were some lessons learned, mainly don’t try and pair a very bitter fruit with an already bitter base beer. The color was gorgeous, a kind of ruby pink, it looked like something you would want to drink 20 of, then it hit the tongue and left mouths drier than the Sahara Desert. It wasn’t all bad though! That poorly designed monstrosity became the building block that eventually produced our Session IPA, an award-winning local favorite, and one of our best sellers both on draft and in cans. We originally set out to create a lower ABV, crushable IPA for the summertime, and after we took out all of those cranberries, changed the hops around, switched which malts we were using, and started from scratch, we succeeded!
Where do you see the craft beer industry heading in the next few years?
Well, I think we can all agree that the seltzers are here to stay, as well as all of the hazy IPAs and other forms of hoppy beers people are producing these days. Our customers enjoy drinking them, we enjoy making them, and everyone is happy and that’s awesome. That being said, I feel like there’s a pendulum swinging and the momentum is starting to shift. I truly feel like we’re about to start seeing these kitchen sink beers being replaced with styles that are old and becoming new again. I think the lactose heavy, sour, hoppy, 50% fruit puree beers will eventually fall out of favor, while more and more people go back to enjoying crisp, drinkable beers that don’t go nuclear on the stomach. Wishful thinking? definitely, but with all of the interest in low and no alcohol beers that are gaining market share, and a more health-conscious demographic, I believe the tides are turning back towards the refreshing, quaffable ales and lagers of long ago. And I hope I’m right!
Describe what it’s like to be a brewer in Pennsylvania.
In one word, Awesome! Especially here at Shawnee, we have an absolutely gorgeous location next to the Delaware River, surrounded by all of the natural beauty of the Delaware Water Gap. It’s a wonderful place to make beer and our local community is an amazing one to have around. Outside of our little world, I’ve also had the privilege of collaborating with other PA brewers on a few projects and I have to say, we’re a fun group. It seems like the industry here is filled with creative, intelligent, and interesting people that are always willing to lend a hand, deliver some yeast when we’re in a pinch (Thanks Imperial!), or just have some beers and talk shop. I’m incredibly thankful for the brewing community we have here, and I feel like there’s a lot of talent producing some amazing products in this state.
What is the inspiration behind your beer names?
A lot of our beer names pay homage to the areas surrounding us, different roads and properties that have a tie to the brewery. We have such an amazing corner of the world, so there’s plenty of inspiration to be found by just looking around!
What is your favorite beer to drink right now?
So I’m going to cheat here and give you more than one. Right now I have 2 new recipes and an old reliable that will never be off my list. We recently released a beer in collaboration with SMASH for Stache, a 501(c)3 non-profit with an amazing story that I highly encourage everyone reading this to check out. This is a SMASH beer we made with Rahr 2-Row and a few different formats of Strata hops from Crosby. The products those guys are producing are incredible and Strata especially has us digging into future batches to try and find more places for it. We got to use their Hop Hash and T-90 pellets to see exactly what that hop provides, and it was everything we had hoped for and then some. Also for some bonus feel good, 1$ of every pint goes towards funding brain cancer research.
We also have a table beer on draft that’s perfect for these sunny days when you want to start drinking early but adulting still looms in the evening. At 3.3% ABV its an ultra drinkable Belgian amber, and we plan on doing a whole series based on low ABV styles that are fun to make, next up will be a hazy IPA iteration and then maybe a session stout or something along those lines, either way, the low ABV beers are becoming a crowd favorite and mine personally as well. Last but not least I need to give Clubhouse Kolsch an honorable mention, it’s won us some awards, it’s my tried and true go-to, and it has stood the test of time as one of my favorites for as long as we’ve been making it.
What is the most important lesson you learned in the beer industry so far?
The most important lesson I’ve taken with me: Be a man of many hats, and learn to have a good time. The ability to learn and become proficient in as many different things as possible is something I’ll take with me wherever life leads. I’ve had the opportunity to learn about all of the different equipment, maintenance, plumbing, electrical, carpentry, bee-keeping, sanitation, and cleaning processes, chemical handling, food production, people and organizational skills, etc. You name it and we’ve probably done it here somewhere at some point and learned the lessons along the way. Being part of a small team has allowed us to grow in many different areas of life, and inherently all of that growth is going to bring about a little friction, that’s where learning to have a good time (and a little social lubricant) comes into play. Cheers!
Thank you to Devin for talking with us! Make sure you visit ShawneeCraft Brewing’s website to see all the latest beers and news. Also, follow ShawneeCraft Brewing on Facebook and Instagram.
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