An Interview with Scott Vaccaro – Captain Lawrence Brewing Co.

JM – First of all Scott, I wanted to say congratulations on your gold medal at the 2009 Great American Beer Festival for your sour ale, Rosso e Marone and last years win for Cuvee de Castleton.  When did you first have the idea for Captain Lawrence Brewing and how long did it take to make that dream a reality?

SV – CLBC had been a dream of mine since high school, but it always seemed unattainable.  I am sure a lot of 18 year olds would love to own a brewery someday and I just knew I had to find a way to make it happen. I had a few detours along the way, including a brief stint at Villanova studying to be an accountant, but that was just a bump in the road.  I quickly learned that accounting was not my strong point.  From the time I left Sierra Nevada to the time we broke ground in Pleasantville was about 4 years.  In that time I did some traveling, worked at a small brewpub and formulated a business plan for what would become Captain Lawrence Brewing Company.

JM – Why Westchester? When the brewery first opened, there wasn’t a whole lot of brewing happening, least of all in Westchester County. How has the local community responded to what you are doing at Captain Lawrence?

SV – I am a Westchester local, this is where I grew up, this is where my family lives, and I missed it after being in California for 6 years.  Everyone I spoke with told me that Westchester was a wasteland for craft beer.  All I kept thinking to myself was that with all the good restaurants all Westchester locals just needed a quality local brew to get behind.  And get behind us they have. The local response has been overwhelming.  In a very short time we have placed our beer into the best restaurants in the county, and the most popular bars, and in a lot of places we are either the number 1 or number 2 selling beer in the establishment.  With out strong local support no business can survive, and we have been blessed with a ton of support.

JM – You seem to have been quite successful in appealing to the local market, certainly your taproom is very busy with locals coming in for growler fills. I assume that opening up the brewery in this way takes a lot of time and effort. What about it do you find rewarding?

SV – The best part about the job is having people tell you how much they enjoy the beers, and how proud they are to bring growlers to far off places to share with friends and family. I never imagined how many people I would meet and how many friends I would make through this industry.  It truly is a great industry to be in….beer makes people happy.

JM – Clearly you have passion and you have skill, but I’m wondering how difficult it was to make CLBC a reality.  What advice would you have for anyone seeking to start a brewery?

SV – The reality of starting any business is that it is a risky endeavour. You can never be sure that it will work and sometimes even when it does work to a degree it will never get to the point of financial security. In hindsight the business plan that I wrote did not come close to covering everything that should have been covered, and many of the assumptions I made did not pan out, while others that I didn’t bother to make became a huge part of our business. It took about two years to really get this thing off the ground, from the first conversation to touching the jack hammer to the floor. I just had a conversation with a potential future brewery owner and the one thing that I repeated again and again was self distribution and a tasting room, without these two parts of the puzzle CLBC would haven been gone very shortly after opening its doors.

JM – You guys have made quite a name for yourselves with your selection of top quality barrel-aged beers and sour ales. These styles have really caught fire in the last year or two with many of us beer geeks going out of our way to get our hands on them. What is it about these beers that make them so popular and do you think that their popularity will last?

SV – I believe the popularity of any beer or any style is based solely on the flavor and the intensity of the flavor.  I have had plenty of bad sour or barrel aged beer, and I have produced some that I have had to dump down the drain for that reason. What sour ales give the beer drinker is an experience and an intensity of flavor that is not found with any other style of beer.  It is the same with an Imperial IPA or a barrel aged Porter or Imperial Stout….intensity and depth of flavor.  So I don’t think the styles will be going anywhere, nor do I think the popularity will diminish. If you want a serious sensory experience then look no further, sours and barrel aged beers are your ticket to flavor town.

JM – Do you have a plan of where you want a sour ale to go when you begin? I know that a lot of wild beer production is a little bit random and tough to control… is the process more art or science?

SV – Sours are tough to make, but you need a clear vision of where you want the beer to go and how you are going to get it there. I have on occasion started without a clear goal in mind and the beer has suffered.  You can’t just throw any beer in a barrel and hope for the best.  You need to take into consideration the base beer, the yeast and bacteria involved, and the type of barrel used…..and then you hope for the best.

JM – You’ve recently begun bottling your very popular IIPA, Captain’s Reserve. Will there be more bottled products in the future, and what sort of opportunities does the bottling line open up for you?

SV – Bottling is the next frontier for us.  It has been three and half years of draft only production of our more mainstream style beers.  It has been the success of our draft beers and the penetration we have made into the on-premise market that has allowed us the freedom to produce some of the more crazy barrel aged beers and sours.  So with the addition of a bottling line we hope to gain an even better footing in the local market and with that we should be able to play even more with the sours and barrel aged beers.  The more we grow, and bottles will bring that growth, the more we will be able to justify playing around and having fun with styles that are not the norm.  So we are very excited for the bottles, the beer we are putting into them, and the possibilities that come with growth and expanded distribution.  We hope to start putting our Porter, Pale and Liquid Gold into 12 ounce bottles sometime in the next 24 months….stay tuned.

JM – Thanks for your time Scott, and I wish you even more success in the future.

SV – Joe, thanks for this opportunity, I always love talking beer and brewing.