EP-190 Hollie Stephenson + Peter Wiens of Guinness Open Gate Brewery

This week’s episode rounds out our focus on the Baltimore scene where we
talked to folks from Black Diamond, Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot,
Chris Leonard from Heavy Seas, and even made it down the shore to
Chincoteague Island’s Black Narrows.

Its the first time we’ve taken such a comprehensive approach to a single
area with the podcast, and it was a great experiment for us as we learned a
ton from one interview to the next for the context of the stat and city’s
beer scene. In that way, every interview informed the next. And looking
back, it’s an astonishing amount of perspective to gather in a single place
and time.

Our final interview in this set of episodes involves a newcomer in the
Baltimore scene - and a wholly unlikely one at that. Guinness. A couple
years ago it would have been unthinkable that someone like Guinness would
become part of a beer culture in a city like Baltimore. But as we’ve seen
with other elements of beer, nothing stays the same very long.

Guinness had a temporary U.S. presence decades ago with a brewery they
overtook on Long Island, but this brewery, commissioned in an old
distillery owned by Diageo on the outskirts of the city is unique in that
it also serves as a pilot brewery and taproom for the Irish-born but
globally produced brand for their US fans.

Watching this project come together was fascinating, from the way it
catalyzed debate over taproom and distributions laws in Maryland, how it
transformed a brick rick house into a brewery and hospitality center, and
getting our first taste of the American-inspired beers that would come from
it’s bite tanks, but none of that was as fascinating as the team they would
assemble in the brewery itself. And that begins with a feature story the
Bryan Roth wrote for GBH focused on Highland in Asheville, North Carolina
over a year ago.

Hollie Stephenson was the brewer at Highland at the time. She’d succeeded
in transforming Highlands offering, modernizing the styles and bringing
them into a new age of relevance. It was one of the most effective and
well-executed turnarounds I’d seen for a brewery that was already pretty
damn good.

At the time, the lingering question for me was “what happens if she
leaves?”

I never expected that to come true so quickly - but as you’ll hear in the
interview, neither did she. But an opportunity to brew for a world icon
like Guinness, at a new purpose-built brewery in Baltimore, was too good of
an offer to pass up. And the icing on the cake, was that she’d get to brew
alongside her former mentor, Peter Wiens with whom she worked when they
both did a stint at Stone Brewing. a few years back. So it’s a reunion of
sorts. And for Guinness, it’s a helluva team with which to make your U.S.
debut. And I was excited to follow that story.

It’s worth noting of course that Guinness is an underwriting advertiser for
GBH - you may have seen the series of stories they provide the funding for
through their advertising partnership with us called Mother of Invention in
which we explore historical and contemporary technical innovation in
brewing. This interview is not part of that series, but we clearly have a
relationship at the business level. In fact, one of the reasons I was in
town that week at all and able to record all these Baltimore episodes is
because our studio team was coming out to shoot some video as part of that
underwriting, which you’ll see later this fall. So while this particular
episode has nothing to do with that underwriting, it also completely does.
But I’m fine with that as long as you know what’s up and I hope you enjoy
this conversation as much as I did.