132: Dino Funari of Vitamin Sea Brewing on Creating Trendy Styles That Stand Out From the Crowd
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You\\u2019d have to be confident, or crazy, to open a brewery focusing on New England IPA right smack dab in the turbid heartland of the style, but that\\u2019s what Dino Funari, and his partners Peter Kiley, Joshua Sherman, and Richard DiBona, did in early 2019. The brewery got its start, as many do, in the partners\\u2019 homebrewing, and they built a reputation over years of give and take, where friends (and friends of friends, and then their friends, too) would swing by Funari\\u2019s house and drop off a four pack of beer in exchange for a four pack of homebrew. Eventually, the demand grew to the point where they had to go commercial to keep up, and Vitamin Sea was born. Now, not quite a year and a half in, fans line up for can releases and their crowdsourced ratings put them in the top 50 breweries in the country\\u2014big accolades for a crew with modest goals.
\\n\\nIn this episode, Funari talks about the challenges of operating a brewery through the COVID-19 shutdown and the implications for guest and staff safety, sculpting a unique approach to brewing New England-style IPAs, using classic C-hops in progressive IPAs, their aggressive pilot brewing schedule on a fully customized homebrew-scale system, approaches to pastry stouts, and more.
\\n\\nEven though they\\u2019re brewing on a much larger production-scale brewhouse now, Vitamin Sea still approaches innovation like homebrewers, constantly looking for the tweak that will make the next batch better.
\\n\\n\\u201cEvery one of our beers is a work in progress,\\u201d says Funari. \\u201cWe\\u2019ll release a beer, and people will love it, and we\\u2019ll say \\u2018This is OK, this is good, but what could we do better next time?\\u2019\\u201d
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