Steve Kramling, Mihir Patel, and Sumit Vohra are three everyman working in office jobs until the idea of starting their own brewery moved from the watercooler conversation to reality. LoneRider is a production brewery in Raleigh just around the corner from the Research Triangle Park where they all met. They opened in January this year. We sat down recently and they told Know Your Brewer about their experiences in opening LoneRider Brewery.

KYB: How did you first get interested in brewing?

Steve: When I first started to work for Cisco one of my friends was into homebrewing. He and another coworker were discussing homebrewing, I saw them purchasing ingredients online and it got me excited. I bought my own kit and was brewing in my own kitchen by the next week.

KYB: Where did the idea of Lonerider come from?

Steve: When Mihir and I started to brew a considerable amount at home. There are so many people who want to drink our beer, there was barely enough time to brew enough for yourself much less anybody else. When everyone else loves and you are making a quality product time and time again at home, you think if I just had the resources I could do the same thing on a larger scale. To make the actually move from a homebrew environment to a commercial one is a huge leap. The only reason it happened because we came across some equipment at incredible price. We couldn’t pass it up, we figured if we are going to have a chance this was it.

Mihir: We tossed around a number of ideas. We had discussed the idea of have a very small brewery like 4 barrel in a restaurant in the backroom to get started. There were plenty of ideas we played with.

Steve: It’s capital intensive to purchase all this equipment is an incredible expense, but then when we ran across this equipment it really changed everything. That was the trigger that got us going.

KYB: What is your brewing system?

Steve: The system is a Specific Mechanic 15 barrel brewing house designed for a brewpub environment. Normally a production brewery would not have all the copper our system has in it. There was a considerable amount of vessels as well so without spending additional money we are able to have quite a bit of capacity from the start.

KYB: Did you have the business plan when the opportunity for the equipment came up?

Steve: It was more buy it then, we will figure it out later.

Mihir: That is where Sumit became involved getting the business plan involved, getting the numbers in place. Looking at what exactly it would take to get going.

Steve: Yes, I had a good, solid basis of the brewing and I could learn the commercial brewing but as for the startup experience I had almost none. So we relied heavily on Sumit and brought him on the team. We got him interested in quality beers and he got excited about it, he has been a great resource.

KYB: What is the story behind the name LoneRider?

Sumit: We initially wanted to call ourselves Outlaw Brewing Company, but we realized another company had already started with that name. So we went to hunt for other names. We asked for names from families, friends, even ran a competition for people to submit names. We went through a long list and none of them fit to the philosophy of being an Outlaw. We must have gone through 3,000-4,000 names.

Steve: Everything else seemed easy in comparison

Sumit: But then we got to a point where we realized Outlaws were also Lone Riders. It had the same feel we wanted to back in our operations.

KYB: How long was your startup process?

Steve: I think it was a year and half to two years from the time we got the equipment until we opened the doors. Roughly a year was spent figuring out exactly what we wanted to do with the equipment if we were going to be a brewpub or a microbrewery. This whole last year has been construction on this building, redoing the infrastructure to make it happen. So a year in thought and a year in build out.

KYB: What inspires your approach to brewing?

Steve: We are trying to get our year round beers established, things that people will love, like Shotgun Betty for example and our Porter they are very palatable type of beers. I like beers across the range, I like extreme beers, I like hoppy beers. I like easy drinking session beers, but ultimately having someone walk up saying this Lone Rider is a great beer and you guys are doing a great job is my goal. I want to make something people really love, not just what I love.

Sumit: What we wanted to do is bring the flavor back, we lost it somewhere along the way. The best beer has the highest amount of alcohol and hops, we mean to do something different. The choice of a German Hefeweizen as a flagship beer is controversial and we have been critiqued for it. But we have stuck with it, we have a good product and the flavor profile is amazing.

Steve: Especially with the recent hop crisis it drove the direction of our beer choices as well. So we are putting more emphasis on yeast and the characteristic that brings to the beer. Likewise for the malt and it’s character as opposed to the high alpha hops that are available. Not that those aren’t wonderful, but there are some many other beers that have wonderful qualities that have hops in the background.

KYB: What beers do you brew?

Sumit: Shotgun Betty is a wheat beer brewed in the style of German Hefeweizen with a rich, banana-clove nose and refreshing dry finish.

Deadeye Jack represents our 60 bbl release porter consisting of a strong malty background with hints of roasted chocolate, subtle sweetness and low hop bitterness.

KYB: What beers do you brew in the future?

Steve: We would like to get to the point where we have 3 to 4 year round beers. Right now we have a number of things in development an Ale version of a Vienna style lager. Something in the same family as a Negro Modelo, an easy drinking beer. An Alt, a German version of a brown ale either as year round or seasonally we aren’t sure yet. I am a big fan of the English styles and there is definitely going to be some beers in that vein. Deadeye Jack was an example of this as a Robust Porter. There will definitely be an English Mild or Bitter.

KYB: What is your direction for seasonal beers?

Sumit: We want to change the mentality of seasonal beers, because a good beer is a good beer in any season. There are definitely certain seasonal that lend themselves to a certain style. Our seasonals will be called 60 barrel releases, those are the quantities we are going to brew them in.

Steve: 60 barrels release can be more spontaneous in nature. It’s more we want to make something special

KYB: How are your beers distributed? Currently in kegs, of course, but what are the plans for the future six-pack? Bombers?

Steve: In the next 6 months we are going to implement a small scale bottling line. To start to get a taste of something that goes out to the market not just in a keg. We haven’t ruled anything out yet there is still some work to be done there. We are excited about getting into some bottles soon, so we can appeal to a part of the market that isn’t out at a bar.

KYB: Expansion longterm? Across North Carolina? Regional?

Sumit: Sure.

Mihir: From a CFO perspective we’d like to conquer the world,

Steve: One step at a time, we would like to have success here first.

Sumit: North Carolina is very important to us. It’s our home. If we don’t do well here, the rest wouldn’t matter.

KYB: How often are tours?

Sumit: Alternating Fridays and Saturdays, but when things come up at the brewery we are going to have to adjust that schedule.

KYB: What do you see the future of North Carolina brewing?

Sumit: Quite positive, if other breweries are leap-frogging other states to get here, it shows the craft beer community is very receptive. More so than other states, this a very positive environment.

Steve: You can see the popularity of craft beer when you attend events like the World Beer Festival in Raleigh. After the first few days of sales all the tickets are gone, that speaks volumes when you think about how many people show up at that event. We are hoping to catch that wave and accommodate those folks.

KYB: What was the most surprising thing about opening a brewery?

Sumit: There are a number of things that come to my mind. The enormous complexity to tackling building this facility itself. Making sure we could take this random equipment we happened to find, put it in a new place, and getting it to work with the infrastructure.

Mihir: Cost. Hence my position in the brewery.

Steve: We spent so many hours here in addition to all the contractors, it was just hours and hours. We have to hand it to our spouses for all their support through this time.

Mihir: We were our own general contractors for building this facility. We had to be onsite all the time. We ran the show. We got the inspectors in here and made sure that if they had an issue we got it fixed. We took on a huge task. A lot of the jobs if we could do ourselves we did do, like the plumbing. Anything we could do ourselves we did.

KYB: So you learned a lot of new skills out of that process?

Steve: We got a whole lot smarter this year.

Sumit: One thing I’d say that mattered was the people. We worked together well as a team and that’s very important. If we didn’t work together well we wouldn’t be here. That to me is great. This is one of the few industries where everyone interacts over good times. You meet people over drinks more often than not it’s positive. People were very important.

Mihir: Friends who spent a lot of time and their volunteering to help us get up and running.

Steve: Without those friends we would still be working on getting open.

KYB: Any last thoughts?

Sumit: Ales for Outlaws. That’s us. At every step of way we are we will do things differently.