Today we’d like to introduce you to Matt Manthe.
Odd Breed Wild Ales is the result of Matt and Dan’s passion for wild beer. Matt and Dan met through mutual friends and quickly realized that they appreciated the same types of beer and shared a similar outlook on life and business.
Founder/Brewmaster Matt has been brewing professionally for ten years, holding leadership roles at both the brewpub and production level. For the last few years, Matt has served as a consultant for the brewing industry, helping others realize their dreams of owning and operating their own brewery. Matt received his degree in Microbiology from Clemson University and later, received his Brewmasters Diploma from VLB in Berlin. Matt’s favorite aspect of beer production is fermentation, which fueled his interest and eventual obsession with wild beer. When not making beer, Matt enjoys surfing, traveling, watching Clemson football and eating good food.
Founder/General Manager Daniel Naumko, a musician/ad agency owner turned home brewer/restaurateur, has been active in the craft beer industry for over six years. Dan is passionate about creating great food, and has a history of using beer in his recipes; one of them won the Brooklyn Brewery’s Houston Beer Experiment in 2011. A year later, Daniel founded the popular Beer Bar and Eatery: The Sybarite Pig in West Boca Raton, FL. When not slinging beer, Dan enjoys playing drums, playing old records, and traveling the country to find the best beer and food available.
Has it been a smooth road?
There’s no such thing as a smooth road when starting a new business, especially a business that is unique not just to the state of Florida, but to the Southeastern United States. Consumer education has been a vital part of introducing new and seasoned beer lovers to our wild ales, as well as converting wine drinkers and other consumers that have never experienced the flavors and nuances of wild, barrel aged beer. Any new business must remain flexible in order to flourish, and one of our biggest struggles has to do with the production timeline of our beer: our beer takes several months or even years to properly age and mature; responding to customer feedback in a timely manner, and making beer that excites the consumer as much as it excites us is crucial. It doesn’t matter how great we think one of our beers is unless the consumer wants to drink it, and sometimes what the consumer loves is not one of our favorite beers. Operating a business that is rooted in our passion must also be profitable and viable, and consumer preferences cannot be neglected.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Odd Breed Wild Ales story. Tell us more about the business.
Odd Breed Wild Ales is one of just a handful of breweries in the country focusing exclusively on producing wild ales that are fermented and aged in oak. While our passion for beer expands to many styles, we view oak aged wild ales as the ultimate, most complex type of beer. Surely, choosing to focus exclusively on wild beer production invites an element of surprise and inconsistency that most brewers prefer to avoid. There are considerably more variables at play with wild beer production compared to production of typical ales or lagers, and the potential for creating a bad batch is considerably higher even for the most skilled brewer. Wild beers take a long time to produce, and working with oak instead of stainless steel is more labor intensive and requires more skill. Choosing to make wild beer, and just wild beer, was not an easy decision and financially speaking, is not a safe business decision.
So why are we doing this? We could be like most breweries and make multiple styles from American ales to German lagers and even dabble with barrel aging. We could make IPAs since IPAs are the most popular craft beer style and we could make some barrel aged wild ales on the side. Surely that would be a safer business model. But if we did that we would have to make compromises regarding the production of our wild ales.
Many of the requirements for producing oak aged wild ales are completely different than those of a typical brewery. Producing typical beers and wild ales at a very high level would be analogous to starting a brewery and winery at the same time and excelling at both. We have chosen to focus all our attention on creating a brewery designed from the ground up to produce nothing but wild ales.
Dan and I are perhaps most proud of our product and the experience we have created in our taproom/brewery. We spent a very long time obsessing over minute details to realize our vision, and because our brewery is so unique, we had to believe in our concept, even when others didn’t understand our goals or believed that we would fail.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
In the next 5-10 years in the brewing industry, there will be lots of mergers and acquisitions, and there will be many breweries going out of business. Trendy breweries will be successful, but their success will be short-lived. Ultimately, product quality will be extremely important as consumer education improves and breweries making inferior products will be shunned.
Contact Info:
- Address: 50 NE 1st St
Pompano Beach, FL 33060 - Website: www.oddbreed.com
- Phone: 754-220-6099
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: instagram.com/oddbreedwildales
- Facebook: facebook.com/oddbreedwildales
Image Credit:
Daniel Naumko
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