Parish in Pursuit

It’s 11 am on Tuesday at Calandro’s Supermarket, and there’s a line threading from the cash registers all the way to the pre-sliced cheese.  You might wonder, don’t these people have jobs? And, good gracious, are they all holding six-packs? Well, you must have missed the news that Parish Brewing just dropped the latest batch of its juicy, devilishly hoppy Ghost in the Machine double IPA. 

Parish Brewing entered the state’s craft beer conversation in earnest in 2013, with the expansion of its flagship wheat beer Canebrake from a Lafayette-area darling to Baton Rouge and New Orleans bars and grocery stores. I sat down recently with owner and brewmaster Andrew Godley to talk about his jogs through the canefields, developing one beer for two years, and how he plans to outbrew Abita. Find excerpts below.

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On craft beer culture:

In the early 2000s, the market in South in general was devoid of craft breweries. Here we had nothing local but Abita. You didn’t even have other regional breweries.

You go up into Pennsylvania [where Godley worked as an engineer after college] and they’ve got a much more advanced beer culture. They’ve not only got a bunch of craft breweries but they’ve got these big regional breweries that have existed for a long time like Yuengling and Iron City.

I could see people loving their local beers. It was beyond what people had with Abita. There were big breweries, small breweries. There was Church Brewing Company, which was built in this old church. They had this little brewpub where I could go in and talk to the brewer and watch him make all sorts of crazy things.

I remember looking at a restaurant menu [back in Louisiana] and seeing your basics: Bud Light, Coors Light, Budweiser, then you had a couple of your “ethnic” beers. To show the restaurant was Italian, there was a Peroni. You had Heineken, and then there was Abita Amber. I looked at that menu, and I thought, “Man, I really want a beer that’s like a Heineken or a Budweiser, but it’s locally made. I want another local beer besides Abita.”

On brewing Canebrake:

I hit the Internet and had to figure out how to make beer. No shortcuts. There were no breweries I could go work at it. I was working as engineer. We hadn’t had our kid yet, so I had a little more disposable income and I was sinking it all into this. Our entire garage was a home brewery. I had ten different things fermenting at once. I was making all kinds of stuff. All the beers I was making were beers I wanted to play with making a commercially viable beer.

I had this recipe bouncing around in my head of making wheat beer and using an indigenous ingredient. I lived in Broussard at the time. It was full of sugarcane. The neighborhood we lived in at the time was called Sugar Trace South. I’d go for runs with my Weimaraners and run out into sugarcane fields. If you run south of Broussard, you can run through sugarcane for miles. That’s where I was thinking about the beer and what I was going to do. I was thinking about brand names. What are you going to call it? At one point I was going to call it Fleur de Lis Brewing Company, then I realized that was really lame and came to my senses. I settled on “Parish.”

There are roads that go through the sugarcane fields in Broussard and they have signs that say “Canebrake.” A canebrake, historically, is when sugarcane was planted more haphazardly, it was a break in the forest. Sugarcane doesn’t grow very high but nothing else is going to grow. Cane pushes everything out. As soon as you have sugarcane, you have a break in the canopy.

If you drive around the sugar cane fields, you see these little signs that say “Canebrake.” Now they call the dirt road that goes down sugar cane fields a canebrake. It’s short, memorable, unique, iconic. I thought, I’m going to make a beer called Canebrake.

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On finding local success:

We couldn’t keep up with Canebrake. Everybody was ordering Canebrake. It became a big hit overnight in Lafayette. It was easy and delicious. I see this with lots of products—beers especially—local beers. People will always give the local product a chance. They want to love it. They want to try it . They want to support it. If the product isn’t good, though, they won’t continue to buy it.

People aren’t going to buy it just because it’s local, but they’ll give it a shot and support it initially. We were fortunate in that Canebrake was good. We were coming at it from both angles. It was local, people in Lafayette said, “This is our beer and we love it.”

On throwing out the book:

In 2014, we came out with Ghost in the Machine. It was two years in development. I can guarantee you that most breweries were not developing their IPAs for two years. They’re brewing IPAs like they read how to brew IPAs. They’re brewing hoppy beers like they’ve read or seen other people brew hoppy beers.

People will always give the local product a chance. They want to love it. They want to try it . They want to support it. If the product isn’t good, though, they won’t continue to buy it.

We figured out in a different manner on our own. That’s why it was really different. It was radical. It was hazy. It was opaque looking, like orange juice almost. Like banana orange juice. The beer looked like that—it’s very non-traditional. The textbook way to brew proper beer tells you to make beer clear. You filter it, you do all these things to make it drop clear. You change the pH and the manner to make it drop clear. You add ingredients in a way to make it drop clear. So that there’s no haziness. But we said, “Forget that, we’re going to do what’s delicious. We don’t care about the way it looks.” And we started making Ghost in the Machine.

On the flexibility of having a taproom:

We can sell beer directly to people here. It’s enabled us to focus and continue to go behind Ghost and make beers that are even more radical. We can do smaller amounts of them. We don’t have to be committed to large runs of mass appealing products. It enables us the freedom and flexibility to do something awesome and not worry about whether it’s going to distribute well or not. We can be flexible, we can be very nimble, we can try new things quickly and put it out there.

At the end of the day, it’s very difficult to distribute these small batches, these interesting, limited-release beers. And it just works great out of the taproom. I can make a batch of Dr. Hoptagon and distribute most of it out of the taproom, and I don’t have to make it again for a year, two years. I can make it three times a year, six times a year. I have no commitments to anybody other than making great beer and the consumers can come buy it if they like.

On his future audience:

Craft beer is bottle shares, one or two beers a night at the house, buy a 6-pack for $11 and you’re not buying more because it’s expensive. But I’m talking about 12-packs for $11. That’s where most beers are bought and sold. 95% of the beers that are sold in Louisiana are in that lighter, cheaper category. Budweiser, Bud Light, Mich Ultra, Yuengling, Coors, Miller. They’re all there. I think that’s a big opportunity. I don’t want to sell Canebrake across the country. I’d rather do different things for the Gulf South, with Louisiana as our epicenter. I want to cater to this. I want to be stronger and stronger at home. I want to sell more than Abita sells in LA.

We’re going to make a product that’s even more toward the lighter end of the spectrum. It’s called just “Parish” and it’s a pilsner or a lager. We’re going to try to make it as cheaply as possible so we can sell it for a price that competes with Yuengling or Budweiser or those kinds of beers. We want to make a legitimate, local, everyman’s beer.

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On satisfaction:

We’re in Louisiana, and we don’t get a lot of national recognition. We’re not in a beer mecca like Portland. There aren’t beer writers coming here to talk about our beers. We’ve never had an article written about Parish, the brewery itself, in a national publication about beer. There’s a bunch of online resources and publications that go out that profile beers and talk about breweries all over the country. We fly under the radar here. In that sense, our self esteem is a little low. Maybe we feel like we have to do better, like we’re not satisfied.

I want to brew beer—a lot more of it. I want to build a much bigger brewery. And I want to dominate Louisiana. We’re not doing that yet. We’re on the path, but we’re not doing it yet. So I am definitely not satisfied.

parishbeer.com