Interview with Henry Jager, Brewmaster at Pherm Brewing

We interviewed Henry Jager, Brewmaster at Pherm Brewing, to celebrate American Craft Beer Week. Here's what he had to say.

Q: Do you have a beer that inspired you to be a brewer or anything like that? What's your origin story? 

I would say I've kind of always had an interest, a scientific kind of aptitude, cause and effect, back to as far as I can remember. When I was going to school out in Colorado, Boulder (CU Boulder, go buffs!) I was really taking to all the laboratory environmental sciences with a focus in chemistry so the science of things, but also the hands-on kind of approach to it, was always really appealing to me. That being said, it's college so we're drinking plenty of beer… plenty of shitty beer… not the fun ones. We were in the epicenter of it all and we were loving it so there was no shortage of really good beers to be like, “why don't you try this instead of that?” Obviously, at that time, it was New Belgium Fat Tire, I'm going to say it was Sunset Wheat, was very accessible.

There's two beers that I tried that really blew me away and made me think, “How do we make this? How do we do this?” It was Avery IPA and Avery White Rascal, which I believe was a Belgian White that was extra spicy, but that could just be how I'm remembering it. In a good way, in a good way. 

Those beers being out there and then trying them and thinking, “How do you make these flavors? What is or how are you making these colors? How do we change these things?” 

That curiosity combined with being out there… everything just kind of clicked. I started to experiment with home brewing and kind of got the science. I was trying to read these scholarly articles and just getting lost and then going back and saying “Alright this makes sense. There's *some* transferable info from some of them.” So I just kind of kept going in that direction and sure enough, graduated, and I was looking for a job with my degree. The whole time I'm trying to figure it out, working at a restaurant here and there, and I'm brewing like crazy, and I'm like, “Hey, you got something here.”

I actually got an internship at the Brewers Association for the whole country, and it was pretty cool. So I went in there, and I was doing the American Home Brewers Association side of it. They produced the magazine Zymurgy, and I'm reading all their articles, like Charlie Papazian’s, the godfather of homebrewing. The first day I’m there, they’re like “Let's go meet everyone” and I asked if we could meet Charlie. I remember going in there, and he's like, “Henry, the homebrewer, great to meet you!” I'm thinking, “Yes, this is awesome!” The first Friday, they always do a beer social, and I brought in some homebrew. And I remember opening it for them, being so excited, and I over-carbonated the beer, and just got it everywhere. So it was a “no!!!” moment but everyone was super cool.

Q: What are some challenges that you're facing right now as a brewer? Especially because craft beer has really taken off. It has been for a while, but people are really getting into it. 

There's always challenges from a production standpoint with everything that's happened in the last few years. We officially opened December 30th, 2020 and some major challenges have been the supply chain, shipping, and costs. We're at that 3.5-4 years in production mark now and have the kind of wear and tear where we really have to be on top of maintenance; those are the daily little gripes and grumbles, but you just got to do it. And that's how every brewery is. 

I'm fortunate enough that I can take a step back from the front of house and my wife, Maurirose, kicks butt up there. She handles all the event scheduling and as you walked in, you saw our whole team is so positive and awesome. They’re really good people and each person has their own character and insight. I'm fortunate that I don't have to be as involved or minded in the front, but there's also challenges in keeping it fresh and interesting. With a lot of the industry facing challenges, you gotta keep things interesting and cool. Being able to offer a really nice seltzer or beer alternative but still having an event space even while being a brewery means you have to have something for everyone. I can do that and I love doing that. We all have to evolve but at the same time, you can't lose sight of what you're going for, your identity, and all that, too. 

This year, we've been on the collab front of things, which is really cool. We try to keep it interesting and work with other businesses, local artists, and other breweries. With breweries, it’s really interesting how you always get a refreshing take on some things and also pushed out of your comfort zone. It's easy to get tunnel vision and stay in the back with your head down, and you don't want to have that overall from a creative standpoint. You want to be able to see what everyone else is doing, take it all in, and put your own touch on things. 

We always have a hazy IPA or a sour or two. We have our core beers, our Forman IPA, Divided Sky IPA, Super Hoppy Pale Ale, as well as the Sparkle Pilsner. I love lagers; they’re near and dear to my heart. So we always have some kind of that clean, crisp alternative. But we also have interesting stuff like I Left My Head in Cloud City, one of the two Star Wars beers we released on May the 4th, and the collaboration with Max's in Baltimore, Phorward Collab, and that one was a cool mashup of styles. It made a really, really tasty beer; it’s one of my favorites right now. 

I know we had one with you guys to end the year, which is great. Those two individual single barrel bottles were kick-ass, and we were so stoked to work with you guys on those. 

We've also worked with some great local music musicians for some collaborations, and we’ve done release parties as well as concerts in here at the same time.

Sometimes you just have a batch of crazy ideas. That's the fun and the experimental nature that I think still exists within the industry and certainly what we try to do. Being able to twist styles and blend businesses together has been great. 

Q: With that in mind, is there a specific approach you have to experimentation or development in general? 

I think there's a million great places to get inspiration from, especially in seeing what some other folks are doing. You can go to a restaurant, have something that blows your mind on the flavor side, and think, “How do those flavors transfer over? What's the transferable nature of it to something that we're brewing in here?” Like, “Oh man, I just had this crazy blend of herbs. What if we put that in a Saison?” Things like that are definitely interesting. 

It feels like there's so many new hop varieties all the time that for a while I was always thinking “What's the new hop?” Not that I ever got out of that, but I feel like recently there's been a couple that I’ve thought, “All right, I'll try them out.” I got in a sample and thought, “Actually we want to brew with this.” So there's some of that Pink and Vista in the This Is Not The Haze You're Looking For, as well as I Left My Head in Cloud City. We have some of those going into this next batch of a double IPA, so that keeps it interesting. Not that that drives any one decision, but you're always looking for something else out there that's kind of cool. 

I think there’s seasonality of things and a certain element of, “What haven't we done in a bit? What's an old fan favorite? What's something we want to riff off of that we've done before? What kind of sour is about to go out and what can we do that's seasonally appropriate? What's something that we have never done before?” So there's all those factors that come together. 

At the same time, you get the whiteboard out, look at what we have offered, what we have planned, and then all of a sudden somebody taps you on the shoulder and says, “Hey, let's do a beer for this event and we'll have it be a fundraiser for this charitable cause.” So it keeps us on our toes.

Being creative and having fun with it is probably the most important part. 

Q: What's the most annoying thing you've ever dealt with in brewing as far as ingredients or sourcing? What annoys the life out of you? 

Brewers will get this one - transferring a sixtel from a half keg. Sometimes you need to transfer from a big half barrel keg and sanitarily it takes a little bit of setup. You can transfer into a smaller keg to fulfill an order but every so often you'll have it perfectly ready and that sixtel will somehow work its way out and you're like “No no no!” and on the fly, say on a Monday morning, you're fulfilling an order for a distribution truck and you're like “Let me stop everything I'm doing and do that.” 

Without even thinking twice, cleaning, scrubbing stuff, I don't mind any of that. Confined spaces, whatever. I'll do it all. But then it's every so often, it's like, “Oh I gotta transfer one keg.” That's not that big a deal, but it's the one thing that makes me every so often just be like, “Ugh.”

Q: Is there any ingredient that you've worked with that has been annoying for you? Or irritating or time-consuming?

It's a labor of love with it all. We've done cold pepper beers with our friends Dave Meyer and Brian Hufker with University of Maryland Agricultural Extension growing and cutting 50 pounds of peppers. We worked with a cherry orchard not long ago in receiving fresh cherries; they were incredible orchards and we did them in a barrel aged saison with all the cherries. They had the pits, but you had to bust it open to actually get to it. So we actually cracked them and we knew that would be a quick extraction time so when we took the wine out of the barrels, we basically had it bagged up, but cracked and went through hundreds of pounds of cherries. We kept it as sanitary as possible: sanitary buckets, everything else, and being very careful in that sense. We basically had to work through them, bag them up, put them in the fermenter, and transfer them. Getting them out created a nightmare, but that beer is one of my favorite beers that we have done.

It's always fun to challenge this or that. We've had cookies go in, all sorts of stuff like that. And those are always pretty easy. I'd say that's the biggest difficulty is when you want to take an idea like working with local farms, per se, on a five-gallon homebrew batch or something, and thinking, “This is the ratio. I want to keep this ratio.”

It can be a lot of prep. But I think the results always show, and it's always one of those things you laugh at. Every so often, things just happen, and you're like, “This is going to be worth it. It's going to be worth it. Let me just shut up and keep going.” 

Q: If you had access to anything in the world, where cost or availability wasn't a problem, what would you make with it? 

There's a lot of really cool styles with our 10-barrel system that we have right now. Say, a barley wine or something. The very knowledgeable, hardcore beer fans will ask, “When are you guys going to do one?” I want to do one, but that might be something my dad and I brew at home and I'll bring in a bottle. For us to brew it to a certain scale, it's kind of tricky. If all of a sudden we had too much of it, it could be a very niche style.

I'd say some of those kind of styles are super interesting to me, super badass. I always admire friends at other breweries who are able to brew those styles and make them work. 

We did a collab with Diamondback and made an English Dark Mild. Dave's always got some crazy style that he's working on or wants to do. And I'm like, “That's great, we're going to do it. How's it going to go?” Given our size and limitations and how small of a batch versus how big of a batch we can do, things can get complicated. 

In that direction of if there were no cost parameters, brew whatever you want kind of thing, I think that would certainly be some of the more niche styles to be able to brew a proper size of it.

Q: Are there any beer trends right now that you love or hate?

The off-the-wall ones are cool. I think there's some really interesting stuff going on with smoothie sours. For a while people were doing things where I’d think, “I'm going to fall in love with this.” It's cool to see these trends with such unique ideas and concepts and see people do it so darn well that then they can turn people around. Then, other people just riff off it and keep riffing off it. Things like, “I have this fruit and sour. Now I'm going to make it a puree smoothie sour. Now I'm going to add this fruit, this ingredient, this and that and make it double strong.” 

I really appreciate trends in the sense that I think they spark a lot of creativity where people are all trying to not one-up each other necessarily, but looking and riffing off each other. 

Trends are also cool because you've got to love the memes that come out of them. They're so funny. 

Q: What's your most unexpected source of inspiration for brewing? I know you mentioned restaurants and experimenting with different flavors. Is there anything beyond that?

This might sound kind of cheesy, but even just grocery shopping or something when you’re walking by and you see something that sparks your eye, like, “Oh, what is that ingredient?” 

Or walking through the produce section in the tropical section, and you're thinking, “What the heck is this fruit? Oh, that's what that looks like? I've heard of this.” So I think some of that is definitely kind of sparks you and gets you thinking, “I need to know more about this.” We brewed with some dragon fruit and played around with the dragon fruit pink pitaya powder, which I think is a lot of more of a color enhancement. Little things like that could certainly be a surprise. 

On the dessert side of things, maybe some wacky off-the-wall dessert or concoction you've had in a restaurant. I think maybe there's also an element of something silly. We have the Simpsons beer on now, which sparked from this big concept that we had of doing the Wacking Day beers. Things like that are always interesting. 

Music, too. If you hear a song name that references something or a lyric in a song that makes you go, “Huh, what is that? What could we do?” That's one of those kind of interesting things to me as well. We have a lot of lyrically, musically connected beer names and stuff. 

Q: What beer have you made so far that's made you the most proud? 

That's a tough question. As a dad, it's like, “What's your favorite kid?” All of them. I'll say... it was very cool to have our very first batch of beer brewed here be Sparkle Pilsner and kind of launching into, at that time, a hazy-dominant, sour-dominant industry. Everyone had been whispering, “Hey, lagers are coming back, lagers are coming back” so that was the first batch of beer we brewed here. I'm proud of that, and that we were able to keep doing lagers, grow that strain, and use it in so many beers. 

Q: What sets Pherm apart from the others in the area? What’s your goal with the community?

I'll say the biggest thing for us is, not necessarily separating, but being involved in the community and being able to host fundraisers and give back. We’re very proud of all the beer we offer, but also very proud of all the work that Maurirose does up front with coordinating events, hosting events, doing fundraisers for local schools, the Anne Arundel County Public Library, Pints for Paws, and BARCS Social. We love being able to work with so many different groups, organizations, and causes, but really being able to be community-driven is really great. 

Our location, too. It's pretty cool to see; the vibe in here is always the vibe. 

From young families to older couples to the beer geeks making the rounds to all the breweries, that’s what it's about. I think there’s very much a vibe in the community aspect, especially with where we are and how we’re able to be that hub: having local art on the wall, featuring local musicians, the open mic nights, the craft nights.

Being able to touch on a little bit of everything of something for everyone, but also having it be a chill kind of spot too is also important. I would say peaceful, but that sounds boring. I don't think it's ever really boring. It's always lowkey.

Our good buddy, Ryan Keith and the Ryan Keith Band will come in here and it speaks to how music, beer, community, and community involvement and support gives us the opportunity to be in this together. I think those are always very important things. 

We've got to keep it interesting for everybody, including ourselves, that's for sure. We always have something going on in here with craft nights to trivia to live music to fundraising opportunities so keeping that community vibe is always fun to us.

Having a very cool entertainment hub and open space, doing cool events, and having beers on the board appeals to a lot of folks who want to consume a couple beers responsibly, hang out, and enjoy each other's company, which is what it's all about. 

Q: Is there anything upcoming or recent that you're excited about?

In the short term upcoming, we've got Dismal Fog, a Hazy Double IPA, that’s one of our favorites upcoming. That's coming very soon. Aside from that one, we're loving our Mexican lager, Forgotten Conversations. Super cool label by Tommy Bradle. He does our labels and that’s a super fun one. We're excited to keep that one rolling in the summer. 

Looking ahead, we’re really excited to collab with the Anne Arundel County Library to create a Hazy IPA that will be released June 08 and it’s called Read The Book: Chapter 2. We’ll be doing a fundraiser with them at the brewery that day, so feel free to come and check it out.

We're also really excited for the first all Anne Arundel County brewery collab that we're going to host here and release on June 15th for Pints for Paws. They reached out about doing something cool with the Homebrew Club for ASPCA as well for that event. We’ll have the four breweries from Anne Arundel County working together in here so it'll be cool. We're going to do a hefeweizen, a POG hefeweizen, I think. It’ll be passion fruit, orange, and guava. I've got some cool names kicking around, but I got to chat with the brain trust. I'm thinking I got to get a nineties, like rare slammer, ultra rare slammer. 

It's the first time that we've all grouped together officially, all in one room. The vision was to be able to host a fundraiser here, as well for the ASPCA after the original launch at the event. If the other breweries have space on their draft list, it would be cool to brew it here and go through the proper channels to see if we can get it everywhere. 

We haven't officially done one together, so it'll be pretty cool. I know everyone's always in communication, but it'll be cool to say, “Hey, let's just do this.” We're excited for that one. 

The point of all of this is to foster community. Maurirose and I have both met working together on the same shift at a brewery out in Colorado and when we opened Pherm, Maurirose and I wanted to be able to bring that kind of feel and bring that kind of vibe as well. There's so many great breweries in Maryland and getting to work with everybody has been great. It's cool.