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Ray McNeill Being Ray McNeill

Ask
a brewer in New England for a Ray McNeill story and prepare
to either be uplifted or appalled. On one hand, stories
abound of his generosity to other brewers, with heaping
contributions of freely given technical advice or much
needed raw ingredients donated in a pinch. On the other,
darker hand you’ll find a multitude of less glowing reviews,
from angry, self-righteous tirades to allegations that other
brewers have stolen his recipes.

A recent profile
piece in the Boston Globe attempted to gently pull back the
covers on the somewhat reclusive McNeill. While it went far
to capture the engaging ambience of his no-frills pub, it
only provided mere hints as to the moody character that lies
within him.

A common, early
image of McNeill is one where he dressed in brightly colored
Zuma pajama pants, a tie-dyed t-shirt, no shoes, and frizzy
black hair. McNeill’s hair is now cropped short, lightly
graying at the temples, and he sports a simple knit sweater
and jeans. Instead of toiling over mash tuns and bottling
operations, McNeill now makes sales calls from his office
apartment perched in the slanted rooms above the pub that
bears his name. He keeps the books, makes deposits and takes
orders. A classically trained cellist, McNeill – the
bohemian spirit and pub owner – has turned into a
respectable Brattleboro, Vermont businessman.

When he first
considered opening a brewpub, McNeill approached the task
the best way he knew how: by reading every brewing text he
could find. He would select a technical brewing manual, read
it cover to cover, and then start all over again. After
spending time training at the Catamount Brewery in White
River Junction, McNeill eventually started brewing on his
own system at his pub.

When he opened
McNeill’s Brewery in a rundown building in downtown
Brattleboro, a structure that once served as a police
station, a town office hall and a jail, McNeill had a
vision. “I was trying to create a sort of social meeting
house for the town.You know that stupid television show
‘Cheers’? That actually happens here. That’s what this bar
is like.” The bar’s insular atmosphere can prove challenging
for outsiders. “Some of them get it right away and some of
them don’t,” says McNeill. “Some people from out of town
just figure it out right away. I’ve seen people from out of
town, within twenty minutes, were on a first name basis with
another half dozen people. If some people live in some real
cloistered suburban place, they’re probably not going to
figure it out. But a lot of them do. If people don’t know
who I am, I certainly try and encourage that. If I see
someone from out of town, I try and start a conversation
with them right away. I go a little bit out of my way to do
that.”

From the start,
McNeill focused on brewing traditional beer styles. “I’m
really interested in beer styles, in what makes ‘pilsner’
pilsner,” he says. “And what makes pilsner different than
Budweiser. Then going a little further, what makes north
German pilsner different from south German pilsner different
from Czech pilsner. And I became a pretty serious student of
that.”

McNeill is not
shy about his approach to brewing traditional beer styles.
“To some degree, I know this sounds a little egotistical,
but to some degree with some beer styles, I define them, at
least in the Northeast. The basic premise is that we don’t
make any beers that I don’t like. For instance, I don’t like
Belgian Tripels so I never bothered to learn – well I know a
little bit about them but I’ve never made one. I never went
that far because I didn’t want to. I think it makes sense
that if you’re a chef and hate cake, it’s unlikely that
you’re going to put your heart and soul into becoming a
great cake baker.”

He points to his
Alle Tage Altbier, a beer widely praised among beer
enthusiasts and in beer competitions, as being one of his
best accomplishments as a brewer. “My Alt beer is one of the
best anywhere,” he flatly states. The history of McNeill’s
Alt beer, however, is not so well-regarded. “I had this
palette of very pricey Czech malts and mice were getting at
it.,” says McNeill. “And so I needed to use it while I still
could. I was already throwing some of it away. We used to
have a mouse infestation here but I haven’t seen a mouse
here in years. So the mice were getting into this malt and
so I was going to either have to throw a thousand dollars
worth of malt away or do something with it. So, we we’re so
stressed out for production and there was no time to make a
lager beer, which is what this malt was really made for. It
was Moravian malt from Czechoslovakia, which we still use.
So I had to come up with an ale. I had to come up with
something that I could make relatively quickly, so I
launched a big alt investigation.”

McNeill does
admit that he brews some beers solely for business reasons.
“We make a couple of beers here that I just have no interest
in,” he says. “But there’s some market demand for that type
of beer. So there are like one or two beers that we do it
just because I know it’s going to sell. I don’t even know
why we bother at this point because everything
sells.”

In creating his
recipes, McNeill starts with an idea, and then researches
the style thoroughly before embarking on a batch. “I would
decide, ‘Ok, I’m going to make kolsch. What defines kolsch?’
And I would read anything that I could find about kolsch and
try to determine what raw materials I would be using if I
lived in Koln. I also have a couple of friends who are
skilled brewers who have traveled all around the world and
have extensive notes. So I would often ask them, ‘Tell me
all about all of the kolsches you have ever had.’ They would
just email me their notes. I would talk to anyone who had
ever had it, especially brewers that have been there, and
get any samples I could possibly find. Then I would buy the
raw materials and make kolsch. I’ve been very effective at
doing that.”

McNeill firmly
believes that traditional methods must be employed to
achieve true-to-style results. “There have been other
brewers who have made kolsch, but they were using Ringwood
yeast and you can’t make kolsch with that yeast. You can’t
make it with British malt. You can’t make it with British
hops. It was just all wrong. We don’t do that. We’re lucky
enough that the main yeast strain we use here has a very
neutral flavor profile and allows me to paint what I want on
the canvas with malts and hops. Yeasts with stronger flavor
profiles are more easily identifiable. I think it’s a little
like if you’re a painter and you’re trying to paint, you
want the canvas to be white. If the canvas is pink to begin
with, that’s going to come through somehow in everything
that you do.”

With Ray
McNeill, you just never know what you’re going to get. The
same can be said for his beer. Order a pint at his pub, and
you may have an entirely memorable experience. Beyond the
hype, the beers on tap at McNeill’s Brewery are usually
worth a special trip in their own right. But pop the cap on
a 22-ounce bottle that looks to have been hand-labeled by an
uncoordinated child, and you may find yourself with a flat,
insipid version of that same style. Carbonation levels pose
a continuing problem for the brewery, though concern there
is hardly palpable.

While you can
pick up a few bottles at the pub, the distribution of
McNeill’s beers outside of Vermont is spotty at best.
Outside of the Green Mountain State, you may occasionally
run across an occasional single, neglected bottle of Dead
Horse IPA orphaned on a package store shelf – or an even
rarer pint of draft Extra Special Bitter.

Behind the
facade of the little red house on Elliot Street, with a
deeply slanted roof, lurks the lair of Ray McNeill. Pass
through a door off the main bar room, down a rickety metal
staircase (pause to note the bitterly cold wind whistling
through sizable gaps in the exterior siding) and watch your
step, you find yourself in the scariest brewhouse in
America. The brewhouse at McNeill’s Brewery is a freezing
cold dungeon that, in a testament to the free-spirited,
laissez faire nature of Brattleboro, has not been condemned.
God bless the poor brewers who have toiled in this evil,
inhumane environment to produce a flavorful range of ales
and lagers.

For his part,
McNeill misses spending time in the crowded, dank brewhouse.
“I used to love to make beer,” he says. “The physical act of
brewing was like sex to me. I just loved it. If I had a day
off, if it was Christmas, if it was my birthday, I wanted to
make beer. And that changed. I think it changed when we got
the bigger brewhouse. Everything was more automated. When
the manual labor got reduced, it lost a lot of its appeal to
me. Before, I was doing this by hand. Now, we’re just
throwing switches.”

Following his
lead, I ask McNeill if he misses the loss of intimacy with
the machinery. “It’s more like a loss of intimacy with
malt,” he says. “I liked being a production brewer. I think
I was actually happier being a production brewer. If, and
when I get the new brewery open, I am probably going to head
production for some time until I get things dialed in. This
brewery will continue to operate and I will fire up the new
one. When the new one is fired up and running smoothly, the
people working here are probably going to start working
there.”

Rumors that
McNeill plans to expand his operations beyond the Elliot
Street pub have scored more mileage than a New Yorker in
foliage season. For his part, McNeill speaks vaguely about a
timetable and plans for expanding to a new package facility.
He prefers to talk about what he would like to do with
additional space and equipment. “I’m trying to figure out a
way that I can package all of the beers in 22-ounce bottles
for Vermont distribution, while putting out another six or
eight or ten of these beers in 12-ounce six-packs for wider
distribution,” he says. “Sooner or later, all of the beers
in the new plant will be filtered and krausened. None of the
beers are filtered now. Krausening is remarkably effective
in giving shelf stability to beer.”

During our
wide-ranging, several hour conversation, we switched gears
frequently to discuss a variety of topics. At one point,
McNeill offered his views on the so-called ‘extreme beer
movement’.

“I think it’s a
bunch of hokey crap, by and large,” he says. “With the
exception of Dogfish Head, because I think that Sam
(Calagione) really thinks that getting that spoiled grape
juice out of the refrigerator and throwing it into a beer is
a good idea. He is out there but he is genuine about it. I
think that most of the other ones are just trying to make
money through marketing hooey. They come up with the bizarre
beers in an effort to appeal to a certain member of the
public who thinks that a 21-percent (alcohol by volume) beer
has got to be great. In fact, most of it sucks. So that’s
what I feel about the ‘let’s pour some maple syrup and
raisins and some pineapple juice in our beer, we’ll add two
or three more yeast strains and store it in a Jack Daniel’s
barrel and then we’ll put it in a cutesy little blue bottle
and sell it for twenty dollars each and try and get press
all around the world with it.’ It’s just hooey. It’s PT
Barnum crap. My opinion has always been, ‘if you’re a really
good violinist, you play the violin. If you suck, you get an
electric violin, and a fuzz box, and a wah-wah pedal and
then no one has to know that you really suck.’ For the
record, and you can print this if you want, if you believe
that Sam adds hops every minute for 90 minutes in his 90
Minute IPA, then I’ve got some beachfront property in
Colorado you might be interested in. That’s marketing hooey.
I’ve only met Sam once, and I really like his beers, but
that’s just ridiculous.”

Ask McNeill
about beer geeks, and he launches into a tirade about the
arrogance of homebrewers, complete with several dusty
anecdotes.

“Well, there’s a
yin-yang thing for you. Homebrewers can be very rude and
egotistical and arrogant. Years ago, I was buying a house
and the realtor suggested we get someone to inspect the
house.When I got there, my now ex-wife said to me, “This is
John and he’s a homebrewer.’ And I said, “If I help you out
with your homebrewing, maybe you can cut the bill in half.”
I was just kidding and it was just a joke. The guy
deadpanned and said, “I don’t think I need any help with my
brewing.” So I dropped the subject completely. A little
later, as we we’re walking through the house, I said, ‘So
John, how often do you make beer?’ He said, ‘Well I make
beer about six or eight times a year.’ I said, ‘And how long
have you been doing that?’ He said, ‘Oh, I’ve doing that for
about six or eight years.’ So here is a guy, who by his own
admission has brewed forty or fifty times in his life. At
that point, I had overseen the production of a thousand or
fifteen-hundred brews and this guy thinks I don’t have some
information that he doesn’t have. It was absurd. So they can
be a little like that. I think there’s a difference between
beer geek people and homebrewers. Homebrewers can be
disrespectful and arrogant. I don’t care what anybody says,
there’s a big difference between making beer a few times a
year in your garage and reading thousands of pages of
technical literature and then making thousands of beers.
Beer is a weird thing. It doesn’t come with a scorecard. If
you’re a golfer and you shoot 112, you know that you suck.
But if you’re a homebrewer and you make a third-rate beer,
you probably think it’s great. A a lot of homebrewers think
they are lot better than they really are.”

During my visit,
I watched McNeill play genial host to guests of his pub,
myself certainly included. He occasionally floated between
tables, talking with regulars, hugging friends, buying
rounds, and even sitting down to talk with complete
strangers. Watching him in his own environment, it is clear
that few pub owners in New England are so closely identified
with their establishments. The pub is perfectly named: It is
indeed ‘McNeill’s’ place.

Our conversation
went on at length beyond the above topics. There’s probably
another hour of tape covering a range of topics, from
McNeill’s debunking of the myth that open fermentation
provides different results from closed fermentation, to why
craft beer has limited growth potential, and ending with a
rant on why Stella Artois is worse than Budweiser (you can
save four bucks buying Budweiser). But as with all things
Ray, these are stories for another day and another
visit.