INTERVIEW CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE

What’s your top selling beer, and why do you think that’s the case?

Top selling beer, depending on where. Hawaii – I’d have to look at the exact percentages – but blonde and IPA are within a few percentage points of each other. Coconut porter is a lagger compared to the blonde and IPA, but not by far, but at least a good 20% behind. The mainland is the other way around. Coconut porter is our lead dog, and blonde and IPA are behind that, but on the same keel. Mana Wheat is slower for sales, but the velocity of sales are equal to the rest in that we can only brew a certain amount of wheat based on the pineapple harvest. We’re not willing to bring in Costa Rican pineapple juice to make our Maui Gold pineapple wheat. We are limited in the amount of production, so when we have it, it’s gone, but the numbers don’t really give the accurate story there because if you could only brew 1000 cases every few months. At this point it’s about 1000 cases every six weeks. You can’t sell 20,000 cases of something and have it not sell. It’s a little bit difference.

Maui Brewing Company also makes a root beer with Maui honey, vanilla and cane sugar.

What do you look for when you’re hiring somebody to work in your brewhouse?

In the brewhouse in particular, right now, experience in a brewhouse, but passion for beer is one thing you can’t train. You can train how to do certain processes, you can train recipe creation, you can train even culture, but you cannot train passion, so if you don’t love what we do here, your brewing style, or your ethos about what you want to do with your life is the antithesis of ours, then you’re not going to work out here. It really has to be with quality and innovation, got to be a team player, and it’s got to be passion for beer above all else. Because if you’re not excited about it, let’s face it, it’s just a punching the clock type of a job.

How do you go about naming your beers?

We drink beer. That’s how we name beers. Some are based in stories. Liquid Breadfruit, we brew it with ulu – breadfruit – so it was natural because beer has historically been referred to, in some cases, as liquid bread. A little play on words there, Liquid Breadfruit. Sam is quite the wordsmith. He came up with a lot of the language on that beer as well. Aloha Baktun, Aloha is hello and goodbye, Baktun is the Mayan long count calendar, so is it the new era or is it goodbye and it’s the end of the world? We don’t know, but you’ll hopefully have a great beer in your hand when we find out. It’s a Belgian style beer with chipotle, cinnamon, basically a Mayan chocolate, which was historically cocoa nibs, cinnamon and chile. We’ll have the three of those in there, in the Belgian style of stout. It will be very unique. Bikini Blonde, it’s a blonde lager and makes sense. Coconut Porter is an obvious one. I think we like to name things that we can either have a story to tell about them or make people laugh.

What’s the recent beer that you brewed?

Here as a company, or myself?

Either.

Most recent one, here at the facility, would be Sobre Humano Palena’Ole, which means superhuman, with unlimited boundaries. That was our collaboration with Jolly Pumpkin. It’s a red ale with cherries from Michigan as well as lilikoi from Hawaii. Lilikoi’s passion fruit. So that was the newest beer for us. The next one’s going to be Liquid Breadfruit.

For me, it’s probably been a year but I did a strawberry mead last. I had a bunch of strawberries from a friend of mine, and we figured we’d make some mead.

How are you able to maintain balance in your life?

I’m still working on that. I’ve got a great staff. Maui Brewing Company is not me. Maui Brewing Company, although the vision is directed and created by myself and my wife, we have 57 team members who make it what it is. When we first started, we didn’t have a lot of the support we have now, and certainly not the quality of the support we have now. So we realize that we needed to take some time for ourselves, and recently we have started doing that. I think I’m very quick to drop my personal life in sacrifice for something the brewery needs. I’ll be the first to walk out of a movie theatre or walk out of a dinner if I’m having a birthday dinner. I’ll sacrifice that to fix a leak somewhere if that needs to be done. I still have a little bit of overkill on the do whatever it takes side of things to learn balance better, but that’s one of my objectives.

If you could only drink one more beer, and you couldn’t brew it, what would it be and how come?

If I could only have one more beer, I’d have to make it count. That’s for sure. In a lot of ways. Flavors. Calories. ABV. All of the above. Right now, because we were talking about Liquid Breadfruit, Sam was on my mind. I’d probably have to say Midas Touch. I’ve always loved that beer. The saffron and Muscat grapes, I love the way those flavors go together, plus my family’s Spanish, so I think saffron’s in my blood. Plus it’s a high ABV beer with a lot of flavor.