EP-167 Collin McDonnell of HenHouse Brewing

Published: April 8, 2018, 12:21 p.m.

I was lucky enough to get to the San Francisco and Bay Area for beer week earlier this year, and for the first time, I stayed on the Oakland side. Not only did this give me an entirely different perspective on the evolving scene of the East Bay, it also gave me quick access to the North Bay\u2014and I took full advantage of it.\xa0 I needed to get up to Santa Rosa for a shoot at Russian River for the Pliny release which was just published as part of Alyssa Pereira\u2019s first GBH story. Check that out when you get a moment\u2014it\u2019s a great one.\xa0 And that gave me good reason to make a stop at another brewery up that way,\xa0one I\u2019ve been following mostly through its founder\u2019s Twitter personality for the last couple years. HenHouse Brewing Company started in Petaluma before growing up a bit and moving North into the front of a sauerkraut production facility where they\u2019ve been transitioning a bit. While they started as a farmhouse brewery making some fantastic Saisons and traditional styles, they're now fully embracing the Double IPA and haze craze, working to figure out if that\u2019s an existential crisis,\xa0a business they should openly embrace, or both. Sometimes, especially in small business, existential questions make for poor business, and great business makes for a poor existence.\xa0 HenHouse co-founder Collin McDonnell seems to appreciate the duality\u2014and works through his thoughts more openly than most. His public Twitter account is where I find some of the most intriguing and intellectually honest conversations happening in craft beer. It's a place where he argues about things like independence, the distribution system, corporate and craft beer, and a host of other gnarly discussions, and one of the reasons I think he does it so well is that he doesn\u2019t take any of those words for granted. So often when the rest of the world hunkers down into their rhetorical trenches, Collin swings by with a reframe of the situation, and exposes the impractical flaws in both sides of the argument.\xa0 Does independence matter if everyone\u2019s doing the same thing? Does distribution and access to market need to evolve, or should it be replaced by a new idea entirely? And in the end, who\u2019s going to shut up and take responsibility for the beer?\xa0 This guy is an example of the kind of person who makes working in the beer industry so challenging and fulfilling. And he makes damn good beer. Listen in.