Sig Brewing

Imagine starting up a brand new brewery and all the work, effort, marketing, and costs that go into that process. Now do it in Spring of 2020 right when the Covid pandemic was going global. That’s what the folks at Sig Brewing had to deal with when they were getting started here in Tacoma. Despite that rather massive hurdle, they persevered and pushed through to become an incredible brewery, that just so happens to make some of the areas best pizza too. Recently I was able to have a sit down with brewer Jeff Stokes, who was brought in to captain Sig in 2019 and get it started from the ground up. We had a wonderful conversation and were able to discuss his start in brewing, the mindset that goes into different recipes and brews, and where he sees Sig going in the future. This is a place that you must check out if you like classic and clean traditional beers, as well as letting your wild side open up and experimenting with tastes you’ll not find anywhere else!

Byron: So, you were brought on here to Sig Brewing, in the Tacoma Brewery District, which opened in Spring of 2020, but you came in earlier in 2019 to get things started? 

Jeff: August of 2019 I was brought in. 

Byron: How was opening in the Spring of 2020 and how was it getting from then to where we are now? 

Jeff: Well, to a certain extent it felt like we didn’t really open. Because of all the limitations and the rules changing every single week. Yes, we did open the doors finally in June for people to come in and we had an outdoor area, but any given week it was a new rule with what you can do and what you can’t do. Things looked like they were going to be awesome for a little bit because we brewed our first batches of beers in January, sold our first kegs in February, had a few brewers’ events around town in March, and then mid-March hit and… 

Byron: Nothing. 

Jeff: Yeah, it was a struggle. Nobody was buying kegs so our wholesale department was practically nothing. We had to start canning beer way sooner than we anticipated because that was the only way to get beer to people. Bottle shops were still buying beer for to-go purchases, but nobody was buying pints. 

Byron: Well, I’m certainly happy you made it through, and I’ve been a big fan since early 2021 and coming in ever since. To back things up just a bit, that’s how Sig started, but you came from Three Magnets Brewing and I read somewhere that you had been homebrewing for something like 17 years before that…? 

Jeff: I was homebrewing for about a decade before that. 

Byron: What led to the homebrewing? Was it just a sheer love of beer and ‘I can do this myself’ or was there a science background that got you interested? I’m always curious about what gets people into homebrewing. 

Jeff: Um, a little bit of desire to just tinker around. I’ve always loved cooking, so as far as creating my own flavor profiles or something, that was exciting. But in reality, the reason that I bought my first homebrew kit was because I got a random check in the mail for $700. I wasn’t expecting it and it was from an insurance company and I wanted to spend it as quickly as I could. So, I went out and bought an Xbox, Tiger Woods Golf, and a homebrew kit. 

Byron: Well, those are all the staples that you need right there! 

Jeff: Exactly! I was 22 or 23 and a stupid college student at the time. Seven hundred dollars could have been a couple of months’ rent at the time but instead I had to go spend it on BS. 

Byron: The important stuff though, I like it! Now where did that go, what led to Three Magnets? Did you just find the love of homebrewing through the tinkering and it just grew? 

Jeff: Yeah, I probably brewed 500 beers or so at home before eventually getting a job at Three Magnets. I brewed a wide variety of styles and figured out what was good, what was bad, and learned from reading a lot and learned from talking to people and just wanted to turn it into a career. I had been beer tending at a couple of places before that and just knew that the next step was to make it professionally. 

Byron: My next is about something you just sort of touched on, and that’s experimenting with all sorts of different beers. I know places like Odd Otter and a few others will have those weird, off-the-wall styles; 21st Amendment has their Hell or High Watermelon beer, but Sig has wildly experimental types that you’re not really going to find anywhere. What led to that? Were you trying to push the envelope and see how far you could take things? 

Jeff: To a certain extent I think some of my culinary passions kind of carry over. I try and think of flavor combinations that work well in the culinary world, whether it’s desserts or just even taking a piece of watermelon and dipping it in some spicy salt. You know, stuff like that. So I try to think in that direction and implement it into a beer. That’s how my mind works in creating some of those flavor profiles. I’ve got our next hard seltzer coming out which is going to be watermelon, Sicilian lemon, and spearmint. So it’s going to be really refreshing and I’m calling it the Sicilian Slammer. I just want to make things that I want to drink. Some of the beers I’ll admit are things that I don’t want to drink, but I know that the market wants. We did a Skittles beer once and that’s not my thing, but our former sales director loved those styles of beers, so he pushed them and pushed for me to brew them, and he ended up pushing them to the market and had some good success. Most of those beers up there I do happily drink, but there’s a few I don’t drink but I create because I know they sell. 

Byron: If that’s what the market is asking for then why the heck not? 

Jeff: Yep. 

Byron: Sort of on that note of the market, congratulations on being picked up by River Barrel Distributing and being on their roster now! Is that going to impact or change at all maybe what or how you brew moving forward, being in more places and a in larger market? 

Jeff: Um, to a certain extent it will… because I need to brew in more volume for them. Before, where I would rarely repeat a beer, we’ve now done 240 batches of beer, right now I’m brewing the same beer three or four times in a row to be able to fit the demand of the distributor because they want, say, 50 cases of the same beer. So, I’m brewing the same beer more; and, in a way, I like that. Part of me is always tinkering and brewing something new all the time, but also part of me as a brewer wants to hone in on certain recipes and certain beers and if I’m able to revisit them I’m able to improve them each time I brew them. I’ll see certain numbers that aren’t coming out the way they should be even if I’m brewing it the next day or the next week, I can still tweak ever so slightly that recipe in order to hit what I’m really trying to do. So, it’s been beneficial in that way and in a lot of ways. I do have to be a little more wary of budgets when brewing through a distributor because we’re losing a particular margin. Thirty percent margins are what the distributor typically takes to help move the beer. We don’t have a full-time sales person anymore so we’ve eliminated that salary, but we still need to brew the beer to make a profit. And on kegs there’s not much profit, but with cans there is some profit. So, we are going to probably shift more focus towards cans. The beers that I keg I need to be more cost cautious about though. It doesn’t mean that I’m dumbing them down, you know, I’m just making sure I get better yields. 

Byron: You’re being more efficient. 

Jeff: Yeah, being more careful basically. 

Byron: You’re still going to get to tinker and experiment and go wild with some of the brewery and the taproom stuff though? 

Jeff: You bet. 

Byron: Great! Whenever I meet with a brewer, I always have to ask this question and you may have already answered it: You’re put in a Willy Wonka world of all brewing equipment and ingredients and everything you could want there at your fingertips. Is there anything that you haven’t done yet because you haven’t been able to or for lack of equipment or whatever else that you would want to do, it’s just sitting in your brain, and you would like to do “X”? 

Jeff: My dream would probably be an all cask engine English style beer. It’s a boring-ass beer, English milds and stuff like that, but I would love to do something like Machine House up in Seattle does, they do hyper-traditional beers. As much as I love the experimentation, I also love classic, original styles whether it’s properly fermented Rheinische [sp] German lager or the classic English styles that have been around for hundreds of years. There’s a part of me that really wants to get in that kind of position where Sig can kind of shift in that direction with some of our beers to make very classic, traditional beers but still also have a couple of fun, wild ones in order to try and balance it out and keep that crowd coming in. 

Byron: I love that too. Back to the basics and the Trappist styles or traditional beers are equally wonderful! 

Jeff: I would love to have cask engines, you know, the proper hand-pump beer engines for cask beer, but the market isn’t buying those types in large quantities! It would be nice to educate more people about those styles of beer and increase the appreciation in order to make them more cost-feasible. 

Byron: Sure. There’s a cool Irish pub, the Crown and Thistle, in Coeur d’Alene that always has one or two casks with the hand-pump cask engine at the bar and it’s wonderful. 

Jeff: I’ve been there and yeah, it’s a great spot. 

Byron: So, the pizza is something else I wanted to mention. I write a lot and talk a lot about pizza and the pizza here is absolutely wonderful. Is there ever any pairing or thought given by either you or the chef here towards collaboration? Like, I’ll do this beer and you can make this pizza and we’ll pair them together? 

Jeff: I’ve thrown several suggestions out to our chef here and we’ve yet to come up with something. I think they’re just so focused on their job, and I’m focused on mine, but I try and have a little crossover. At Three magnets we did a chef collaboration on a regular basis, and I pitched that idea here, but it hasn’t yet caught on.  

Byron: Well, what you guys are doing now is working because it’s delicious beer and delicious pizza! I promised that I would try and be mindful of your time and we’ve had some terrific conversation, but is there anything we haven’t talked about that you would like to bring up or mention as we finish? 

Jeff: I guess just where I want to take Sig at this point. I’d like to focus more on the lager program, I’m currently working to get some quotes on some horizontal lagering tanks and also expand the bourbon and spirit barrel-aged line. I’m a huge fan of the barrel-aged barley wines, barrel-aged stouts, and I would love nothing more than to buy the building next to us and fill it full of barrels and oak and have all sorts of long projects going on where we could make some really fun stuff happen. 

Byron: That sounds incredible. 

Jeff: Yeah, that’s what I would like to do next, but it takes a lot of money to do those things!