Prost Profiles: Ereditá Beer owner/brewer Chris Papallo

Connecticut-based contract brewery took part in the last Rochester Real Beer Expo and will soon turn 1.

Note: This newsletter is supported by Rohrbach Brewing Co., a pioneering craft brewery in the city of Rochester.

I feel there was some pull or cue from the universe that led me to invite Ereditá Beer to the Rochester Real Beer Expo this year.

I had never even had a beer from Ereditá when I extended the invite to Chris Papallo, the owner/brewer behind the nascent brewery based at the Twelve Percent Beer Project facility in North Haven, Conn.

(I am pretty sure I was encouraged to follow Ereditá by the Instagram algorithm. It’s exceedingly creepy that the social media sites know us better than we know ourselves. But that’s another story for another day.)

Either way, I was drawn to Ereditá. Early posts from Papallo really struck a chord with me. And then I investigated his background a bit and realized he spent a number of years working at the fabled Hill Farmstead Brewery in Vermont. (More on that journey later.) I just thought it would be super cool to introduce Rochester to Eredita at an event known for rare beer.

So I emailed Papallo and invited him to the Expo. It was a total Hail Mary. Instead of responding to the email, he called me and we chatted for 45 minutes about everything other than beer. It was really lovely and I immediately knew I had made the right call in inviting Ereditá.

Ereditá makes the kind of beers I wanna drink. There is an emphasis on balance and nuance. Nothing overpowers. Traditions are honored. Processes are consistently tweaked. It’s an attention to detail and expression for the love of the craft that really sings to consumers.

“I am making beers that I like,” he said. “…Almost all my beers are pretty dry comparatively speaking to what other people are doing right now.”

If you’ve followed this newsletter for a bit, you know that I highlighted a bunch of the new breweries and folks who participated in this year’s Expo. This interview was supposed to be published before the event. But we all know how chaotic and busy life can get.

(We’ve seen at least one shipment of his beer locally and I’m hopeful Remarkable Liquids, the Guilderland-based distributor, will send more in our market soon.)

So here’s an introduction to Papallo, a really thoughtful and fascinating figure in craft beer, in the latest edition of Prost Profiles:

(Much like our introductory talk, this one meanders beautifully through a slew of seemingly unrelated topics. We started with our thoughts about Milwaukee. These types of interviews really are the best.)

Chris Papallo: Whatever questions you got, now is a good time. I just meditated for 45 minutes and I’m super clear.

Cleveland Prost: How long have you been brewing now?

Chris: I started homebrewing like nine years ago. I’ve been in the industry, professionally since 2016.

Prost: Can you tell me a little bit about your professional brewing history? How did you link up with Hill Farmstead?

Chris: That’s a really interesting one. Back in January of 2016, this post came across in a Facebook group I was in about a small-batch brewing course that was going to be held at Sterling College, which is in Craftsbury, Vermont. The class was being led by Shaun Hill, Anders Kissmeyer (a legendary figure in craft beer and a huge influence on some of the best brewers in the world from his brewery in Denmark), and Jan Paul (another legendary name in European craft beer). The class was like $2,500 and on a whim, I just like, “I’m gonna book this now because it’s gonna fill up.” I impulsively charged that money to my credit card without asking my wife if I could go for two weeks in the summer and live in Vermont or asking work for the time off. I pulled the trigger on it and ultimately those things all aligned. During the class, we spent a lot of time at Hill Farmstead and one of the culminating events of the course was that the class was going to write a recipe to brew on Shaun’s 5-hectoliter pilot system.

I was hanging out a lot with Shaun’s buddy, Jan Paul, and he was playing ultimate frisbee and I just hit it off with him. At one point, we were hanging out at the brewery after hours and Shaun invited Jan into the brewery. I was with Jan, so I got to hang out as they went through the cellar and tasted all these beers. We hit it off, but not like anything crazy. Brew day comes around and Shaun was like, “I’d like everyone to keep the floor as clean as possible and be mindful of your space.” I was one of the only people who showed from the class wearing boots. I made sure to squeegee the hell out of the floor and pay attention to Shaun. On the culminating day of the course, Shaun said, “Oh, I owe you two growlers,” because I had given him two growlers of my beer to try. As we were walking away from the brewery, he said, “If you weren’t going back to Connecticut right now, I’d offer you an opportunity to interview here.” I told him I wasn’t super tied to the job in Connecticut. Meanwhile, I was laughing to myself. I was in the thesis writing section of a four-year master’s degree in public health and epidemiology. I had done 45 of the 48 credits and the last three credits were from the thesis. “OK, I’ve got some decisions to make here if I get the job offer.” Time goes by. We connected a bit during the summer. I didn’t hear back from him for a little bit because he was so busy. It went radio silent for a bit. I just kept following up, politely.

Ultimately, he scheduled me for a first working interview. I went up there and cleaned the tanks and scrubbed the shit out of the floor. In the end, they were like, “OK, can you come back for a second working interview in three weeks?” I figured it out. I went for this second interview and I was racking out wine barrels. (Note: Racking out is emptying a barrel, cleaning it, and filling it.) So I think I was racking out either Clover or Ann (two legendary barrel-aged farmhouse ales in the Hill Farmstead portfolio). At the time I didn’t realize what I was racking out and they didn’t tell me. In retrospect, they must have had some serious faith in me to let me do that. That’s something if I fuck it up, it’s probably thousands of dollars worth of beer that couldn’t be sold.

I did that proficiently and they extended the job offer. I basically was at this crossroads, “Do I want to keep doing what I’m doing in public health with blood research at the Red Cross or do I want to take the jump?” I really doubled down and took a chance. Sometimes opportunities like this only come once in a lifetime. For some folks, it never comes. My gut told me I have to do this. I’m never gonna have another chance to do it.

My wife and I ended up living long distance for a bit. She’s a teacher and couldn’t leave in the middle of a school year. I moved up there in October of 2016. My role was really transferring clean beer, but at the same time, getting trained to be the mixed fermentation and barrel program caretaker. By February of 2017, I was independently overseeing the wild ale program at Hill Farmstead. That was my main role for the first three years I was there. I was cross-trained in a lot of different things. Like I knew how to set up the canning line for clean beer and how to transfer the clean beer. By late October of 2017, I had learned the Hill Farmstead terroir, palate-driven characteristics that we would be looking for in wine barrel-aged beer. Shaun let me blend my first blend without his input and he was really blown away with how good the blend was. That ended up turning into Civil Disobedience 30. I started to have a bit of autonomy in the barrel-blending program. Whereas things like Art or Flora, some of those characters were a collaboration effort with Shaun, because he really had a deep connection with those beers. He was really involved in the blending of those. But a lot of the Civil Disobedience series, some of those orphaned barrels that were not quite Art or not quite Ann on their own, when you blend it together, the sum of the product ended up being these beautiful expressions of mixed fermentation beer. I had my thumbprint on Civil Disobedience 25 to ones that haven’t been released yet.

In February of 2019, my wife was pregnant with our daughter and we lived really far away from family. Despite having lived there in Vermont for three years, we hadn’t really developed a great network of support. It was anything other than the fact that it’s in a really remote location. We made the decision to move back to Connecticut to be closer to family. I gave Shaun like nine months notice. I respect the hell out of the guy and he trained me in some stuff that he has yet to be able to replace. Flash forward to November of 2019, my daughter was born in October, I ended up going to work for Twelve Percent when they started their facility in North Haven as like their cellar and work production person. I did that through June of 2020. I put in my notice there. I went from being involved in this really authentic space to working on these beers where we’re putting hamburgers in it. It wasn’t that I didn’t like what I was doing, it just didn’t resonate deeply with my philosophy on beer. Shaun asked me to come back to Hill Farmstead as basically the first employee he brought back during the pandemic when he started to open the brewery back up. He wanted me to come back to Vermont three days a week and Shaun said he would pay me what I was making in Connecticut. You’ll have a three-day work week and there will be a place for you to stay. It was on the premise that it wouldn’t be long term. We thought it would be six to 10 months, so I could get my project going. At the time it was going to be a brewery in Litchfield County (Connecticut). He was making all the wort and I was doing all the cellar stuff. It was really an intimate experience. I trained another employee in all the clean beer techniques and then I went back into the wild room and ended up doing that for two more years.

Last July, I ended up leaving. My dad had been really sick for a while and he ended up passing in June. Ultimately, I needed to be home full time. This project I had been working on, it collapsed. We had been working on it for a year and a half. This guy I was working with had this angel investor he was determined was going to give us between one and two million dollars to build a state-of-the-year facility. It didn’t happen. All of these other things were just pointing to the fact that this wasn’t going to be a good decision. I backed out of it. It was one of these days where I was visiting my dad at the hospital where I would go to Twelve Percent to have a beer after to unwind a bit. I ran into the three owners of the brewery and they asked me what was going on. They said if there was anything they could do, to let them know. I reached out to them a few weeks later and said, “If I want to make my beer there, what goes into it?” That started the conversation of Ereditá. I had some stipulations. I wanted to be very involved in the process, because some of it is intellectual property and I didn’t want to send a recipe to them and have someone else brew it. I love doing the work associated with all of this. They were OK with that. It’s a bit of a different relationship than they have with a lot of breweries (that also contract there). Most of the brands they produce don’t get to do those things. The only other one that does is Zac (Ross) from Marlowe (Artisanal Ales), because he also worked there.

I am creating all these beers and doing the process my way. I brewed my first beer on October 1st of last year. It was a beer I dedicated to my dad, PapaPils, a German-style Pilsner. He always gravitated toward that style. I wanted to condition it cold for two or three months and the beer was really, really well received.

I know it’s a really long answer to your question. (Note: Yes, it was. It stretched 22 minutes long.) But that’s how we arrived at where we are today.

Prost: Here’s another question that will probably get a long answer. But do you have a guiding brewing ethos, a philosophy? What motivates you? What do you want to be known for?

Chris: I just want to be known for making a lot of styles well and to standards. A lot of people nowadays are focusing on low-alcohol beer or just Pilsners or it’s just an IPA factory or it’s just high-alcohol stouts, I’m just trying to cover a broad spectrum of beers that I like to drink. I love drinking Pilsner, I like drinking Helles. I don’t know if I’ve ever gone on the record and said this, but I also love drinking double IPAs. A glass of a well-made double IPA, I really, really enjoy. I am just trying to take the styles I like to drink and make versions of them that I can execute really well. I like to drink them and I like to see them on tap at different places. And then I enjoy making lagers because it is a challenge. It’s fun when you’re challenged by something. I wish I had the capacity to do some wild beer at Twelve Percent, but the infrastructure isn’t there and it isn’t safe. I am trying to figure something out with them.

I’ve come to embrace where I’m at. I don’t have a ton of overhead of stress. I have creative freedom. I am super involved in this process. I don’t have all this debt. I am able to make the beer I wanna do. Short of canning the beer and distributing, I am involved in all aspects. And I arrived at a place where I’m really happy. I get to be home some with my (3-year-old) daughter. And I get to do a bunch of stuff with my wife. So it’s actually like really fucking awesome, what I’m doing.

Prost: Last question, where did you come up with the name?

Chris: Ereditá is the Italian translation of the word legacy. Last summer when my dad passed away, there was a lot of heavy stuff going on in life. Losing anybody that you’re close to is tough. Outside of losing a parent or a child, it’s a different kind of hurt. I was really trying to come up with something that resonated with me. I wanted it to be different from something like Woodbury Brewing, which is where I live in Connecticut. I wanted it to be connected to me. I really toiled for a long time. It’s really hard. Once you pick something, that’s it. You can’t really change it. I was doing some work and I learned that ereditá is the Italian word for legacy. I am my parents’ legacy, and my great grandparents’ legacy, and all of my ancestors, all of their DNA is in me. I am their legacy. And then I thought about my daughter and she’s my legacy. I wanted it to be connected to me, my family, my heritage as an Italian American. On every can I release, I have the statement of purpose and it says, “Ereditá is the Italian translation of the word legacy. Coming from an Italian American family, honoring my heritage is as much about the past as it is the future. Ereditá is the actualization of teachings instilled in us through life experiences, self cultivation, and the values bestowed upon us by our family and friends.” My tagline is “Embrace the past and transform the future.” Wedged in between there is the present. To me, it’s just really about bringing it back to family.

Title sponsor: Rohrbach Brewing Co.

This work is made possible through support from Rohrbach Brewing Co. Rohrbach features two locations — its Beer Hall at 97 Railroad St. in the city of Rochester and its brewpub at 3859 Buffalo Road in the town of Ogden. Since 1991, Rohrbach has been producing classics and influencing the Rochester beer scene, including its iconic Scotch Ale.

The brewery’s support allows this work to remain free for this audience. So make sure to get out to Rohrbach and support one of the best establishments in our area.

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