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Photo by Olaf Growald
The Collective Brewing Project
Excellent Service
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Photo by Olaf Growald
The Collective Brewing Project
Excellent Quality
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Photo by Olaf Growald
The Collective Brewing Project
Excellent Atmosphere
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Photo by Olaf Growald
The Collective Brewing Project
Excellent Taste
Step inside The Collective Brewing Project, and you’re greeted by a 10-foot-tall wooden barrel draped with an American flag. The massive barrel is a foeder (pronounced “FOOD-er”) from Napa Valley, an oak tank traditionally used for aging red and white wine. But here they’re used for aging beer. There are four more in the back, along with dozens of wine barrels and oak tanks from France.
“Barrel and foeder aging is a large portion of what we do here,” says 38-year-old Ryan Deyo, the brewery’s co-founder and a full-time Fort Worth firefighter. “It sets us apart from most of the breweries in the state.” The Collective Brewing Project has earned a reputation for its sour and funky beers, old-world styles that are enhanced by the ancient technique of wood aging. Wood aging gives beer character (with tannins and residual flavors) and culture (with yeast and bacteria harbored in the woodgrain). Tiny bits of oxygen seep through the barrels and stimulate chemical reactions. The result is a beer of deeply complex flavor, mouthfeel and body.
Using a foeder in your brewery requires finesse and ingenuity — but first, you have to get it through the door. Deyo’s firefighting skills come into play when it’s time to move one of the 2,500-pound giants. “I’m a technical rescue technician, so I’m trained in rope rescue, confined spaces and structural collapse. All these things that involve lifting and moving big, heavy objects have come in handy when moving new tanks and tilting them up.” His hazmat training helps him manage the brewery’s tank-cleaning chemicals, and experience on the firetrucks gives him a working knowledge of plumbing and pumps. And knowing how to navigate through the red tape at city hall was definitely helpful when Deyo first opened the brewery with co-founder Mike Goldfuss in 2014.
Deyo and Goldfuss have been best friends ever since they met as high school freshmen in Southlake. “We got in trouble together,” Deyo recalls. “It was not cool trouble. We were dorks, and we just irritated our teachers.” He often traveled to Fort Worth for meetings of the Young Magicians Club and to hang out on Magnolia Avenue. After college together, Goldfuss took a job in New York and an interest in microbrews. Soon Deyo started sipping craft beers as well. “I’m the kind of person that wants to know all about what I’m doing,” he says. “I tend to obsess over whatever I’m learning at that point, and learning about the beer was the next logical step to drinking it. Then after that, I had to homebrew.” The two friends began homebrewing together whenever Goldfuss would visit.
“[Homebrewing] is like small-scale manufacturing,” Deyo explains. “It’s really expressive but can be super technical. If you like machinery and gadgets and hard numbers and using science to make something beautiful, it’s a really cool hobby. And it’s as deep a rabbit hole as you want to go. I love gadgets and building things, so that’s what attracted me to it. And the beer,” he admits. “It’s nice to have beer at the end of it.” A fortuitous trip to Denver’s Great American Beer Festival spawned the friends’ idea for The Collective Brewing Project. “We had a blast. We were very deep into enjoying ourselves and were like: ‘We have to do this.’” What began as a beer-fueled fantasy became real enough three months later when Goldfuss quit his New York job and moved back to Texas to launch the brewery.
The two volunteered at Martin House Brewing Company to learn the ropes from Cody Martin and David Wedemeier. “We went to this homebrewing event and [Cody] and David were pouring beers, and we pretty much forced ourselves on those two guys,” Deyo says. He offered to work at Martin House for free, and he did. He took out the trash and cleaned the bathrooms while learning how to operate the industrial machinery — and discovering just how much work it is to run a startup brewery.
Construction on his own brewery began, and after a “long summer of sweating,” The Collective Brewing Project opened its doors. “We built most of this ourselves,” says Deyo. “There have been all sorts of surprises … things that you didn’t think could break will break. But ultimately, each struggle is mine, which makes it better, if that makes sense.”
The Southside brewery quickly became known for its funky and sour beers. Its most popular beer is the Petite Golden Sour, but its most famous is the Cup O’ Beer — a gose brewed with 55 pounds of ramen noodles, whose release went viral across the foodie world. Another internet hit was Peep This Collab, a glittery purple ale made with sugar-coated Easter marshmallows. Nostalgia inspires many of the brewery’s out-there beers, which have been made with dreamsicles, churros and milkshakes.
“That’s largely how we design … food and good memories,” Deyo says. “And we’re collaborative here. I design most of the recipes, but everything’s roundtable.” Many of the brewery’s nine employees have strong culinary backgrounds, including Deyo, who cooks at his firehouse. “I really love cooking Mexican food … if I could eat a taco every meal of every day, I think I’d be okay with that,” he laughs. The brewery hosts frequent pop-up dinners with Texas chefs, pairing its beer with everything from dumplings to biscuits and barbecue.
The Collective Brewing Project will soon produce its first lager, and this summer you’ll be able to find cans of their IPA and the fruity, hoppy Tropsicle. For Ryan Deyo, he’ll happily continue down the craft beer rabbit hole. “It’s really fun,” he says. “We just do what we do and hope that people like what we do, too.”
The Stats
Est. 2013
# of Labels: 6
Highest ABV: 7.2%, Urban Funkhouse
FW staff Favorite: Funky Thunder