10 Jul Bier Brewery Setting The Gold Standard For Competitive Brewing In Indiana
Jerry Connor doesn’t just talk with you. In the little over an hour that I sat with him on Bier Brewery’s new patio, the part-owner switched sitting positions numerous times, going between relaxing with his back against the wooden bench to sitting on the edge of his seat staring directly at me through his sunglasses; his hands never seem to stop moving, pointing at you, gesturing to make certain points, or nestling under his legs for a few seconds; he animates nearly every statement with a turn or nod of his head.
His energy and attentiveness to our conversation are a great representation of the energy and drive Connor and his son, head brewer Darren Connor, put into the beer at Bier.
And they have the hardware to prove it.
Jerry grew up with a natural drive for competition, competing as a multi-sport athlete in football, baseball, and tennis throughout high school. Darren, Jerry says, found his drive through other avenues.
“Darren got to IU as a freshman,” Jerry tells me over a pint of the delicious PDG Pale, a”nd decided he was going to teach himself how to play piano and guitar. He became so locked into these creative outlets that we’d call him at 9:00 PM just to say hi and catch up where he’d ask us what time it was. He would have been practicing guitar for 10+ hours without losing focus on it.”
“It’s that same inner-competitiveness (something Jerry attributes more to Darren’s mother than anything) that drives what he does in the brewery.”
As if the excellent beer wasn’t proof enough of Darren’s creative focus, just take a quick glance left next time you stop in the Indianapolis brewery. You’ll see over half the wall covered in awards, medals, banners, and magazine covers with Darren’s face on them. Awards given by or won at the Brew Bracket, the Indiana State Fair Brewers Cup, and the Great American Beer Festival. Awards that carry a whole hell of a lot of weight in the craft brewing industry.
Drink on this for a second: Bier was won more medals at the Indiana State Fair Brewers Cup than any other brewery.
Bier will celebrate it’s fifth anniversary this coming November and is getting ready to expand from a seven bbl system to 40 bbl. More production means you’ll be seeing more of Bier around Indiana, including in bottles and cans at your local shops.
Awesome, right? I thought so too. But in my talk with Jerry, I felt like I was missing something. I kept trying to get Jerry to confess to something that I just couldn’t dig out of him, and I was starting to feel like I wasn’t going to get my story.
You see, any time I embark on a project with my dad, like moving furniture, I cede the captain’s chair to him. It’s not that I don’t find him to be the consummate professional in everything he does; it’s that I either give up all control, or give in to constant bickering over how to get a couch through a tight door frame.
I wanted to know that that same father-son dynamic existed between Jerry and Darren, maybe to make myself feel better, or to even make this story seem better. The truth is, though, that they don’t share that experience. Bier Brewery is a wholly collaborative enterprise between Jerry and Darren.
“I handle marketing, my youngest son works on the customer service side, and Darren makes his beer,” Jerry tells me. “We stay in our lanes and work on putting out the best product we can.”
“We don’t go half-speed at anything,” Jerry concludes. “This isn’t a hobby to us. We take this brewery and our beer seriously. To do otherwise would be insulting to the craft and everyone else out there making their beer.”
Need proof of that mentality? Just take a look at the hardware during your next visit to Bier. There’s all the proof you need.
Donovan Wheeler
Posted at 16:39h, 10 July“We stay in our lanes and work on putting out the best product we can.” That is a great quote. Well written piece which escalates to a solid close in the final sentence. I love talking about good writing.
Hal
Posted at 01:00h, 11 JulyWow. Just wow.
IndyBeerSnob
Posted at 01:46h, 11 JulyYeah what Hal said.