MuggleNet Interviews Central State Brewing’s Head Brewer, Josh Hambright

by · April 7, 2017

Yesterday, in celebration of New Beer’s Eve, MuggleNet chatted with Jared Saul, the Creative and Beverage Director at Chicago’s Emporium Arcade Bar. Emporium had collaborated with Indianapolis’ Central State Brewing to create Polyjuice Potion, a Harry Potter-themed sour beer. The collaboration was released with great fanfare on October 21, 2016. (Emporium pulled out all the stops, coordinating things like Quidditch beer pong and handing out special beer glasses that had CSB’s Dark Mark-inspired beer label stamped onto them.) 

Today, in celebration of National Beer Day, MuggleNet interviewed Josh Hambright, co-founder and Head Brewer at Central State Brewing. Josh was the one who came up with the “bits and bobbles” idea for the sour beer, which is comprised of plum and elderberries. Josh’s vast history in experimenting with funky, wild beers came into great play with Polyjuice Potion since he was able to flex his beer geek tendencies with his admiration for J.K. Rowling’s magical world of storytelling.

*Interview has been condensed and edited for readability.

 

MuggleNet: Hi, Josh! Thank you so much for your time. Can you briefly introduce yourself as well as Central State Brewing? What do you do at Central State Brewing?

We use wild yeast in all of our beers, to ferment them, so they have a bit of wild character to them...
Josh Hambright: I am co-founder and head brewer at Central State Brewing. Central State Brewing is Indiana’s only 100% farm-housed and wild-focused brewery. All of our beers are inspired by Belgian traditional, sour, and farmhouse beers; we modernize them and give them our own twist. We use wild yeast in all of our beers, to ferment them, so they have a bit of wild character to them.

 

MN: Do you exclusively make sour beer?

We do make a lot of sour beers...
JH: No, we don’t just make sour beers, but we do make a lot of sour beers. We also make stouts and IPAs but all of them are influenced by wild beers and Belgian beers.

 

MN: What is your background with beer?

Before brewing professionally, I was just a big beer geek...
JH: I started brewing professionally about seven years ago now. Before that, I was just a big beer geek. I homebrewed a little bit, but wasn’t very good at it. I got a job at a startup brewery here in town at Indianapolis that was just starting up. I started by cleaning kegs and they saw some promise in me so they started letting me work on the beer deck, actually letting me make beers with them. About a year later, I started doing recipe development and took over their R&D program and worked my way up to head brewer there. I was starting to experiment with funky and wild beers on my own when I decided to split off. That’s what I wanted to do on my own so I started Central State Brewing. We brewed our first batch about two years ago, but we started working on it about three years ago.

 

MN: April 7 is National Beer Day. How do/would you celebrate this day? What is your favorite/go-to beer?

I celebrate beer day every day, pretty much...
JH: I celebrate beer day every day, pretty much. There’s always at least one shift beer at the end of my day. My favorite beers depend on my mood. I drink a lot of farmhouse beers and saisons. Probably my favorite beers in the world are in that category: things like Orval and Saison Dupont. I really like Goses as well; lightly salted, German beers, those are my usually my go-tos. If it’s not something like that, four out of five days, I’m having a Miller High Lite at some point during the day.

 

MN: What beer would you recommend drinking on April 7?

On April 7, I’d recommend drinking a Central State Table...
JH: On April 7, I’d recommend drinking a Central State Table. [laughs] That’s our go-to blond ale that we make year round. It’s a rustic blonde ale which is super easy drinking. You can have a lot of them, which is something I enjoy about smaller session beers: You can drink a lot of them, but still function as a human adult.

 

 

MN: What is your favorite thing about beer?

I’ve got brewers whom I consider brothers and sisters...
JH: That’s a hard one. My favorite thing about the brewing industry is the camaraderie. I think Jared said the same thing, but it’s true. It’s a great community. I’ve got brewers [whom] I consider brothers and sisters, that are really good friends. I would do anything for them and I know that they would do anything for me. I’ve never experienced that in any other industry. We always refer to “getting our family together” whenever there are festivals. We get people from all over the country that we don’t get to see real often. When we get together, it’s like going to a family reunion. That’s the part I really enjoy. I also really enjoy that we get to bring joy to people’s lives. Brewing is a perfect blend of creativity, science, and letting nature do what it wants to do. A big focus that we [Central State Brewing] have is letting the yeast express itself, and letting the beer tell you what it wants to be rather than force it to be something. Like a chef, we get to give someone an experience with each beer, and create a story, flavor profiles, and aromas, and let people experience something unique.

 

MN: What’s your favorite bar in the city (excepting Koeslchip, obviously)?

It’s really hard to pick a favorite...
JH: In Indianapolis or Chicago? Chicago: I love Emporium. I find myself there quite frequently. Jared is one of my favorite people to party with. I also love Longman & Eagle and Bangers & Lace. There are so many great bars in Chicago, I love going up and visiting. Here, in Indianapolis, outside of Koelschip, Thunderbird and Black Market are some of my favorites. Sinking Ship. Mass Ave Pub. It’s really hard to pick a favorite.

 

MN: How did the collaboration happen between CSB and Emporium? Have you collaborated together before? If not, why Polyjuice Potion?

It started off as a joke at first, but then we were like, “No, let’s seriously do this.”
JH: So it’s Jared’s third collaboration overall. It’s actually the first time he and I have collaborated. He’s collaborated with a few other breweries; he’s done one with Pipeworks and another one with 4 Hands. He and I have known each other for a couple years. We met at a beer festival a couple years ago and we’ve been Facebook friends for a while. He put a post up, basically saying, “Hey I want to make a Harry Potter beer” and I was the first one to respond. I said, “Oh yeah, dude, that sounds awesome, what do you want to do?” We talked back and forth, and it started off as a joke at first, but then we were like, “No, let’s seriously do this.” He had the idea for Polyjuice Potion and as soon as he said that, I knew it had to be purple. I asked myself, “How can I make this beer purple or use purple ingredients?” I decided to put plum in it and use elderberries, so we can try to get some of that color off the elderberries. Elderberries have this super funky, leathery berry flavor. It’s a much more raw flavor than you get out of any other berry. So I thought it’d be a nice component to have in a potion beer. And then we decided to make it a sour beer, because in the books, everyone always comments how terrible it tastes. So instead of making an actually terrible tasting beer, we decided that if we made the beer a sour, then it would be something that stood out more than just a pale ale. The books never specify what it taste like so we had some room to wiggle.

 

MN: Who/what introduced you to Harry Potter?

I had wanted to figure out what the big deal was, so I picked up the first one and was instantly hooked.
JH: I started reading right around the time the Order of the Phoenix came out. My ex-wife was super into them and had read them all. I had wanted to figure out what the big deal was, so I picked up the first one and was instantly hooked. I can remember when the last book came out: I was on vacation with some friends and we were in a car full of people. It was five of us in a minivan, and four of us demanded the guy that was driving to stop at a Walmart so we could buy the book the day after it came out. It was the most quiet ride from the east coast back to Indiana because literally the rest of us just sat with our noses buried in the book the whole way back. There were a couple points when someone gasped and we were like, “Don’t say a damn word, we don’t know where you’re at.” Every time we stopped, we figured out who was the least far, and we could only talk up to that point. I love the stories. I can imagine it’s especially fun for people who grew up with them, starting them when they were younger, because they got to grow up with the characters. The new Cursed Child book, I really dug, because for me, I’m at some of those points in my life, so it’s kind of cool that I’m reading it as a grown up and I got Harry’s perspective as a grownup. I really appreciated that. J.K. Rowling is really great at writing beautiful, in-depth characters that you just identify with so easily. And it’s such a fun world. It’s so irreverent and anything is possible, which I really enjoy about it.

 

MN: Do you think there’s a big Harry Potter community in Indianapolis?

It’s the fastest sell out we’ve ever had on a beer...
JH: I’m not really sure. I know that when we released the beer in Indianapolis, we didn't have as big of an event as Emporium did. But that morning, we sold out of all of our cans that we had to sell here in 30 minutes. It’s the fastest sell out we’ve ever had on a beer. Yeah, a lot of those people were beer fans but I think a lot were Harry Potter fans. Some just wanted the cans.

 

MN: Can you talk a little bit about the Indianapolis beer release?

I actually had to miss the release party in Chicago because I was the one who had to stay here...
JH: The way we did it was: We did the original release at Emporium on the Friday night and then Saturday morning at noon, Central State Brewing opened up our tasting room and we released it here in Indianapolis. I actually had to miss the release party in Chicago because I was the one who had to stay here to open up on time in the morning. My other two partners rolled down from Chicago right about the time we were selling out of everything, hungover, so it was good I stayed behind. I can’t remember how many cases of beer [we sent up to Chicago] but we went through all of time. It was something like 60 cases or something. It was a ton. Jared went through so much beer that night. And on top of [those cases], we sent up two half-barrels, two full-sized kegs, and they went through those as well of that night. It was insane, how much of the beer everyone drank that night. I didn’t have much other than to do with the planning, though. That was all Jared.

 

 

MN: I love the logo for CSB and the design of the Polyjuice Potion label. Can you talk about the design process for both of them?

It’s supposed to look like a microbiology class...
JH: So the CSB logo itself, the actual idea behind that is it’s supposed to look like cells underneath a microscope. That’s why there are the individual segments. It’s a very subtle thing but it’s supposed to look like a microbiology class. That’s the original inspiration for why the letters are broken up as they are. Also, they have a the stencil-y look, rustic and old-fashioned but at the same time modern and clean. For all of our packaging, we’re really about being clean and simple but with bold colors, bold designs, or bold illustrations that stand out but aren’t busy or cartoony. We don’t want cartoony stuff, we want it to be clean and sophisticated. We work with Good Beer Hunting which is a design studio up there in Chicago. We worked with them since day one before we launched anything. They do all of our graphic design for all of our packaging. Jared gave them our idea and worked with those guys so that it fit in our system; as soon as Jared said Dark Mark, I was totally on board. I’m a huge Death Eater fan. And plus, you know, it’s Polyjuice Potion, so it’s got to have negative connotations with it. It’s used for not the most upstanding uses in the books so I thought the Dark Mark was pretty suitable for that. Plus, it’s, like, the most badass symbol in the books. I was not mad about having the Dark Mark on the can. And it wasn’t a direct copy from the books or movies. We have an illustrator that works with Good Beer Hunting and he drew it from scratch. It’s an original illustration.

 

MN: Do you have another collaboration with Emporium in the works?

Polyjuice Potion is one of the most asked-about beers we’ve done...
JH: We might. We’ve talked about it, we’ve kicked the idea around. We’re in the process of building a new production brewery, which should be open later on this year. When we do, we’ll probably do Polyjuice again at some point, especially because Polyjuice Potion is one of the most asked-about beers we’ve done. I love working with Jared and Emporium. We’ll do something with them in the future, maybe with other movies. Polyjuice will come back at some point, though, because it’s too tasty of a beer not to try again.  

 

MN: What is a food or drink you desperately wish existed in the Muggle/No-Maj world?

It’d have to be one of the Weasley boys’ ridiculous prank candies...
JH: Man, it’d have to be one of the Weasley boys’ ridiculous prank candies. I don’t know how you’d make any of those real but I love seeing those scenes in the movie when we got to see all the different students try out the candies. I have yet to go down to Universal to try their butterbeer, but I’d also like to have butterbeer exist. That was actually an idea we kicked around at one point, to do butterbeer. We might revisit that at one point.

 

MN: Is there anything else you’d like to say?

JH: I’m just glad people got as excited about the beer as we did. That was pretty cool.