Ask Chef's Anything Bonus Episode with Carl Meier

00:00Welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio, a podcast for and about the people of the Nashville Restaurant scene. Now here's your host, the CEO of New Light Hospitality Solutions, Brandon Styll. Hello Music City and welcome to Nashville Restaurant Radio. Today we have a special edition of Nashville Restaurant Radio where myself, Brandon Styll, who is typically your host, am going to be giving my hosting duties away to Adam Fleeger, who has won the bidding contest in the Ask Chefs Anything charity event. He will be interviewing Carl Meyer today. Carl is the co-founder and president at Black Abbey Brewery. So we are excited to partner with Ask Anything, Ask Chefs Anything to do this. We are going to be donating all of our proceeds today from our advertisers to the Ask Chefs Anything fund, which helps restaurant workers who are in food insecure situations that are not working. It's a benefit to help restaurant workers, so we're very excited to be part of this. To start off, we will talk today about Springer Mountain Farms Chicken. Springer Mountain Farms Chicken is an industry leader in what they're doing with the humane treatment and quality of life of their chickens. They take extra steps to ensure the health and welfare of their chickens. They're raised in comfortable houses with an unlimited supply of clean water and fresh feed along with plenty of fresh air and room to roam, allowing them to live normal life without the threat of predators, harm from the elements or diseases from other flocks of birds as they be subjected to if they were raised outdoors.

01:49All of their practices and procedures are certified by the American Humane Association as being the most humane possible. This is verified by regular independent audits of all farms and facilities by the AHA, the oldest and most trusted advocate of animal welfare in the country. Springer Mountain Farms Chicken was the first brand of chicken in the world to be American Humane certified. Want to learn more? Check them out at SpringerMountainFarms.com. All this information is there. Join the flock. Sign up, put your email in and get the weekly emails with recipes and up-to-dates on their farmers. We also want to talk today about Faux and Beaux, F-O-H and B-O-H.com. We are in a time right now where there's a lot of people out there that need jobs. A lot of people are out. The government hasn't come up with a new stimulus plan and if you need a restaurant job, Faux and Beaux is the place to be. Go on and create a profile for yourself. Right now, it is free. There's over 200 restaurants looking for employees just like you. If you are an employer, you can go up and sign on to hire. More than 2,500 candidates are available right now at FauxandBeaux.com and it is 100% free through the month of August.

03:05You've got 11 days left to get this done. Go in, sign up, hire as many people as you want for the next 11 days. So I want to say a big thank you to Springer Mountain Farms Chicken and FauxandBeaux.com for sponsoring this special edition of Nashville Restaurant Radio. We're going to jump in right now to pick it up with Adam Fleeger. All right. Hello Music City and thank you Brandon. I'm excited to be here today not only for a really great cause and raising some money for charity but also to talk to Carl Meyer at the Black Abbey Brewery and just a quick little snippet. One of the reasons why I jumped in on this is with all the really fantastic local breweries and restaurants, the current pandemic is really starting to or has hurt a lot of them and anytime that you can help out a local spot like this, it's great. The other side of it is I'm a patron and a Mug Club member at Black Abbey Brewery and so it holds a special place in my heart and anytime I get the chance to talk to Carl on a little deeper level, I'm all for it. So thank you Brandon and Carl, thanks for joining us this morning. I like having the inside line. I feel less likely you're going to drag me into some sort of horror. Why do you do things this way? Why did you do that?

04:38Well maybe you don't know me that well. Here we come. So just kind of first things first, how are you doing? How's the brewery doing? And not on a service level like how are you doing great this morning but I know the pandemic's been really tough so how are things holding up emotionally, psychologically for you guys, for your staff members? That's a really hard question and I think the ultimate answer is the same thing we've said from the very beginning which is we just take this day by day. When everything started unraveling the beginning of March, we didn't know how this was going to affect us, what was going to happen and so I guess we ended up furloughing the majority of our staff the 16th. Well I take that back, the 14th because this St. Patrick's Day was this Monday or Tuesday this year. It was right before St. Patrick's Day and at that point we didn't have any choice. All the bars and restaurants were closed, our tap room was closed, our distributors stopped buying beer, at least keg beer. There was a lot of uncertainty as it related to what they had in inventory and when it was going to be out of date and so everybody did the safe thing which was to just put the brakes on full stop as Captain Kirk would say, full stop. I think every day when I sit down with Isaiah who does sales for us, we ask each other this singular question, what fresh hell are

06:43we going to be faced with today? Every day it's something new and it seems like some days it's not as bad as it could be and other days it's way worse than it has any real reason to be. But to answer your question, how are we holding up? We're holding up, we're still here. The mental stress is significant I think even for certainly for the ownership group and our investors but also for our brewers, our salespeople. Isaiah right now can't really, like where do you go? What accounts do you call on? Who's open? Who's not open? When you go to a place that is open, a lot of times they're short staffed. Like Brandon was saying about front of house, back of house, there's a lot of people that are looking for work and part of that is when you say you can be open at whether it's 25 people or 75% or 25 or 50% capacity, whatever it is, that a lot of times it's the salaried folks, the managers who are still there who are on the floor filling those holes which are the people that I would otherwise be talking to to try to sell beer to. Yeah, doing two or three different jobs, wearing multiple hats just to try to stretch themselves thin at the time. But one of the things that I noticed in the kind of email updates that you send out to people who visit the brewery, signed up for the newsletter, members and so on, for any of the furloughed staff, Carl has included some Venmo handles and things like that so people can get a hold of them, they can help them out.

08:26I know a lot of them are struggling as well and I think that's been a really nice touch. Being in a smaller tap room and so on, the people who visit get to know especially the front of house people really, really well and so just being able to reach out and make sure they're okay has been a blessing as well. It's great to hear that you guys are making it day to day and I think a lot of people are in the same boat at this point in time. We're a really small family. I think we're very grateful to have people who've been here as long as they have. Ben, who's our lead brewer and Isaiah who's in charge of sales for us, have both been here since before we were a brewery. They volunteered their time and helped glue glycol pipe together and seal the brew deck floor before there was equipment in there and so we're really grateful to have long-term, long-tenured staff and it really does feel like a family and that's been the worst part of this whole thing is when you have to say, well, some of the family can't come to dinner because there's nothing for them to do but thank you for asking. I think I can effectively speak on behalf of all of them to say we're doing okay but we certainly appreciate the goodwill and positive vibes. Yeah, absolutely. All right, let's shift gears a little bit here.

10:03I know that you went to Cornell and I'm from upstate New York originally, only a few miles down the road from Cornell and just kind of digging into your background a bit here, you majored in communications, if I'm correct. You worked for a while in a few non-profit organizations and then decided you liked profit and switched completely and went into banking. Sort of, yes. Now you co-own and co-founded a brewery. So can you talk a little bit about this winding path? How did you get into beer? What pulled you into beer from non-profit and banking? So while I was at Cornell as an undergrad, Cornell has one of the biggest well-regarded hotel schools in the country and so part of that hotel school program, they offer a class, a senior level class, that's available to everyone on campus called Introduction to Wine and Spirits and so everybody on campus calls it Wines and all the seniors take it basically. Obviously there's some people that don't care but Wednesday afternoon where you can drink wine in class sounds pretty dope. So virtually all the seniors take it and my birthday is in February so I turned 21 before a lot of my friends did so I took that class first semester whereas a lot of them took it second semester. So the first semester because of the way people's birthdays lay out oftentimes is the smaller of the two semesters in terms of the student population, right? So they got to do sometimes cooler things. We got better wine, we got better lecturers because the class size was smaller. So during that, and I promise I'm

12:06getting somewhere with this, so I took that class first semester my senior year and and like Robert Mondavi came and talked, like it was ridiculous the quality of lecturer that was coming through this class but they did a class on beer and Michael Jackson, the world's foremost beer critic, was one of the lecturers and you know I've got no idea. We're drinking like pictures of Killian's all the time. Like this is, I had no idea who this guy was. We were all laughing like, hee hee Michael Jackson, you know, maybe Collin Culkin will be here and so we, so anyway this guy shows up and I don't know how much you know about Michael Jackson but he looks, he looked like a hobbit. Just big bushy curly hair and a crazy curly beard and great big glasses where he talked with a very English accent and very very sort of like this and so he comes in to do his lecture and he's, I have two refrigerators in my house, one for food, the other for beer and I feel like this was probably a lie. He probably had six or seven refrigerators dedicated to beer but during the course of this class we tried Celis White, we tried Brooklyn Lager and Brooklyn Brown, we tried Sam Smith's Taddy Porter and at this, this is the point where we're like, wow, me and my buddies, like wow, beer can be more than this, right? Beer could be more than just how many natty lights can I slam in an afternoon and so that really sort of piqued my interest in beer. I had a buddy of mine, one of our housemates who was a biochem major and so the two of us were like, I bet we could probably make beer, we should try making beer and so we got, we got

14:11Charlie Papazian's book, The New Complete Guide to Homebrewing and started reading it because you know, that's the kind of nerds we are and this is 93, 94, so access to homebrew ingredients is not, they're not as readily available as they became later in through the 2000s. So we're trying to piece it together, you know, but that, that's where I developed an interest in beer and then even after college kind of stayed with the homebrew, you know, I really liked doing it, it was a lot of fun, you know, every batch of beer probably costs the same as a round of golf but then I got it around for a little while and you can drink it and as opposed to just being frustrated plowing balls into the woods, so I just kind of got interested in it. First job out of college, I worked in Manhattan, I worked for St. Patrick's Cathedral as part of their preservation fundraising department and then from there I, my, we lived in Connecticut, my wife had a job in Stanford, Connecticut with like a two-mile commute and I was riding a train an hour and a half each way into Manhattan every day and so after working there for a little while, got kind of burned out on the commute, went to work for United Way in White Plains, New York, which was significantly closer to where I lived and then my wife wanted to get a master's in nursing, her background is in industrial labor relations, so her degree sort of leading her towards law school and she was working for a big HR consulting firm in Connecticut and really wanted to get involved in something different, so she took a bunch of classes at UNC and then applied for and was admitted to Vanderbilt School of Nursing, so we moved to Nashville in 99 so that she could go there.

16:11I transferred within the United Way system, so I worked for United Way in Westchester County and then we moved here and worked for United Way in Davidson. One of the accounts that I handled, I handled the finance and insurance real estate division, so I worked at AmSouth Bank doing their United Way campaign. At that time, they had a guy down in Florida, AmSouth did, who had been very successful in building a division that specifically provided banking services to not-for-profit organizations and so successful in fact that the bank decided they were going to roll that out in a lot of their footprints and Devan Ard, who was the president of the bank of AmSouth at the time, recruited me from United Way because I had all those non-profit relationships and so I left United Way to go to work for the bank, partially because you figure there's better money in banking than there is in working in non-profit, but also as an opportunity for me to continue those relationships within the non-profit world and provide service to somebody who's not getting serviced. Non-profits don't really borrow money, but a lot of money flows through non-profits and so they require specific and sometimes different banking services than a doctor's office or something would. So that's how I got to work for AmSouth and then AmSouth was purchased by Regions and so I left and went to Cumberland Bank and then Cumberland Bank was purchased by Green Bank out of Greenville, Tennessee and so in the span of a year I moved banks once but had four different business cards and all the while thinking, A, what am I doing? I don't really like this that much and B, home brewing the whole while and so in 2008 during the previously biggest recession

18:21the country had ever seen, my wife was like, all right look, you're brewing all the time you're buying all this equipment, you've got all this stuff in the garage, we've got a family and kids like either quit it or do something with it and so me and a couple of buddies that I knew through Music City Brewers and the Antiax Ped Suckers, which are the home brewer clubs that I was involved in here in town, specifically John Owen, sat down and started writing a business plan so that was 2008. We incorporated in 2011, started raising money to buy the equipment and open the brewery and then we opened in September of 2013 so long answer to your short question but that sort of takes you through the convoluted way that I got here. Yeah, so as you were working with John and some of the other investors getting started up, where does the Black Abbey name come from? What's the story behind that?

19:27So when we first started trying to come up with brand identity for the brewery, our original thought was, Murfreesboro is an underserved community, there's a big college there, largest one in the state, there's no breweries, let's just go down there and make yellow beer and sell it to college kids. So while we were test batching and we got the laundry list, the big legal pad with the pros and cons and different names, so we're trying to come up with names, we're test batching beers like Crossroads, which is our summer eldest, Crossroads was one of the, that was going to be our flagship beer for this yellow beer and Murfreesboro idea. But all the while we're brewing doubles and quads and triples and we like Belgian beer and so when you're brewing, you might as well brew one, you might as well brew two and so at some point we realized maybe we should be more true to ourselves and brew the things that we like rather than trying to do something that we felt wasn't entirely authentic, which is creating something, trying to piggyback onto something that already exists. There's plenty of breweries, many of them very, very large, that are making macro logger. So at that point we decided to sort of shift gears and to take on a more European style brand. At the time, the breweries in town were Yazoo, then the brewpubs, Blackstone, Bosco's, Jackalope had just opened, Fat Bottom had just opened, and so Mayday had just opened in Murfreesboro. So I mean a number of those brands had this really 50s inspired retro branding and we thought well there's not really anything that has a sort of European influenced brand and that really sort

21:29of fits with this Belgian beer idea that we really liked. So again, we started kicking ideas around. Then I was brewing, I used to brew at night, I have three children and so when we were starting the brewery, they were little, little. So I'd bring them out, they'd help me mash in, then I'd put the kids to bed, then I'd come back and brew at night. And so it was late on a Saturday night, I was thinking about, you know, I got to go to church tomorrow, it's Reformation Sunday, wasn't Martin Luther a monk? I'm brewing this Belgian beer. So here we are researching, I'm on Wikipedia at like two o'clock in the morning reading about Martin Luther. So Martin Luther, the founder of the Protestant Reformation, was studying to be an attorney, was nearly struck by lightning in a massive thunderstorm, prayed, God if you let me survive this thunderstorm, I'll join a monastery. So lives through the thunderstorm, joins the monastery, realizes he doesn't really agree with the way the Roman church is administering not just religion, but also government, right? That's one and the same in the Middle Ages, the church and estate are virtually the same, Pope's kind of in charge of everything. And so Luther doesn't really agree, so he starts writing down his issues, which came to be known as the 95 Theses, brings them downtown, nails them to the door of the Catholic church in Bittenberg, sort of sets in motion this massive socio-political religious change. And when that happens, Luther is excommunicated, he goes into hiding, the Spanish Inquisition is trying to kill him, so he amidst all of this comes under the protection of like a feudal lord, like a guy with a castle and a moat and serfs and all of that. And this guy realizes that Luther, they think now reading about symptoms that he showed that they think Luther probably had Crohn's, but this guy's like, man, I don't

23:33know how to take care of the sick guy, but I know when I don't feel well, my wife takes care of me, so we need to marry this guy off, which of course is unheard of, this guy used to be a priest, now he's getting married, so they pair him off with a nun. They break a nun out of a convent to marry Luther, and in the Middle Ages, we're now talking 1517, 1520, during the Middle Ages it was the nuns who did the brewing, not the monks, and so Catherine had been trained in the convent as a brewer, and so as a wedding gift, the feudal lord that was protecting them gave them the monastery called the Black Cloister, which is where Luther first became a monk and wrote the 95 Theses, so they moved back into his original monastery, turned it into their family home, and she brews beer there, so Catherine is effectively financing the Protestant Reformation out of a monastery where Luther started it by writing the 95 Theses, and so that monastery called the Black Cloister, or another word for cloister would be eddy, really began this, like I said, social, religious, political change, but it was all funded out of a brewery, and so we really liked the story, I remember texting John at like three o'clock in the morning, like I've got the name, we should call it the Black Cloister Brewing, and the next morning, John texted me back and said, drink three beers and try to say cloister, and so at that point we're like, well, all right, yeah, that makes sense, so we went with Abbey partially because of this sort of Belgian implication of Abbey ales, we really like doubles and triples, and our flagship beer is a Belgian blonde, and so that gives us the flexibility to be very European inspired by Belgian beers, but then also the flexibility to do kind of whatever we want, the Belgians are known

25:39for creativity and not necessarily dropping everything into a little square box, but that's where the name comes from, it derives directly from Black Cloister and Martin Luther. Very neat, yeah, and Brandon, I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that's the first time you've had a feudal lord discussion on the Nashville referendum, so we're making... I will say that is the longest explanation for a name that I've heard so far, like just like it's not, I'm anticipating, well, I grew up in a neighborhood and there was this place, it was the Abbey, it was a black door, we called it the Black Abbey because it was cool, we've got beer there, like, whoa, there was a history lesson, that was awesome. I'm sorry, go ahead, Adam. I'll let you hop in here in a second, but what's really neat is when you take a look at the names of the beer and the thought process behind it at Black Abbey, you can tell not only just Carl, but the other individuals involved in the brewery, that amount of thought process goes into a lot of these things and it really shows, which is great, so. Yeah, Isaiah says all the time that we like to come up with names that the references are so deep that it's almost impossible for anybody to ever get them and that, you know, a lot of times that works to our detriment. I think that, you know, like our Belgian double is called the special, you know, people will come in and say, you guys have any specials? We'll say no, but we got one special and it's just, and we call it that because Belgian monastery beers, they oftentimes would have singles, doubles, triples, and they would be called especial or special as a very traditional Trappist name and, you know, especial has been taken.

27:34So, you know, we call that beer special and thinking, you know, that's a great name for this beer, not really thinking through the application of what that's going to be like in the market. You know, I think we really just a random marketing idea for you, Carl, to do something like on the socials where you said, okay, you know how they have these like wrong answers only thing, but you could say you get the first case of this beer if you can accurately figure out what it's named for. I bet you get some interesting people submitting some interesting stories as to why you name something and it'd be really amazing if somebody actually nailed the real reason why you named a beer the certain way that it's named. I agree and, of course, I have a story for everything. They should have warned you about what it's like to talk to me. I never shut up, but our IPA is called Five Points and the reason that we call Five Points IPA Five Points is not because of the geography in East Nashville. It's for the five points of Calvinism and John Calvin. That would have been a good one. You're giving away the answer. Well, I did, but the reason that I'm giving it away here is because when you first submit the can label for approval, there's an organization that goes through the TTB. You know, it's all posted for public record and so they'll post out on Twitter like, oh, this brewery's got this new thing coming out and so they posted out the picture of the Five Points label that has a tulip on it and the reason it has a tulip is that's the mnemonic for how you remember what the five points of Calvinism are. It's total depravity, unlimited atonement. That's how you remember it and so I thought to myself, this is going to be great. We're going to post this out and all the people in East Nashville are going to say, oh, they made a beer just for us and it's an IPA because we're all the East Nashville,

29:36whatever. The very first response that we got was, oh, I guess we got a Calvinist brewery in Tennessee now and I was so disappointed because I thought I had this super deep joke and nobody was going to get it, but then you forget that Nashville's largest industry is religious publishing so there's so many religious scholars here that everybody's like, oh, I get it, the Tulip Five Points, right? All right, Carl, I'm going to shift gears a little bit and talk about beer. So I know having the European influence and kind of specializing in Belgian beers, you don't dabble often, not that you don't ever, but you don't dabble often in New England-style IPAs. And New England-style IPAs are maybe the most hotly debated and contested beers, certainly among my friends' circle. And I want to know, first off, what your feelings on New England IPAs are, number one. And number two, after talking with a couple brewer friends, I have one brewing friend who swears by the style and thinks it's maybe the only style, and another who says the only brewers who brew New England-style IPAs are those who aren't good enough to hide their impurities and that it's a very kind of sloppy style that you can cover up imperfections and so on. So just what are your thoughts on that? For the most part, we don't dabble in it. And I think part of it has to do with the period of time when John and I came up as homebrewers, that style didn't exist. If beer was that cloudy, it was considered flawed.

31:32And so I think it's outside of my developmental area. We've got a New England-style sort of beer and ambrosia IPA that's in cans right now, but when you pour it into a glass, it doesn't look anything like Beard and Iris Holden style. While it may not be crystal clear, it's not going to be opaque. And so we haven't really gotten involved in that world, I would say, for a couple of reasons. One, because it doesn't quite fit our brand identity. We've said from the beginning that we want to make beers that are unique but still approachable, and I think that, like your friends have sort of intimated, that can be a very divisive style, even though it is wildly popular. And we like beers in that four to six percent ABV range is where a lot of our beers go. And oftentimes, those hazy boys tend to be significantly stronger than that. Yeah, and our ambrosia is 6.9 percent, so that is very much true to at least that portion of that style. So we don't do them because we're sort of this European-influenced brewery, and so we don't tinker around with it very much. We run them on the pilot system and the small batch system from time to time. But I think the, I remember when I was in middle school, I took music class, and in the music class, it was like all the kids in the class, and everybody got assigned some stupid instrument, and there was like one dude that played guitar, and so he got to play guitar, and our teacher's name was Mr. Frame. And Mr. Frame wanted us to play Money for Nothing, all right? And I remember him saying, you're playing that lick too clean,

33:38like the opening riff of Money for Nothing. I remember him getting on to the kid who was playing it, saying, it's too technical. Mark Knopfler plays this so sloppy. You have to play it sloppy in order to make it sound like the way Knopfler plays it. And I always thought that was really weird. But it sort of fits with the feel of the song, and maybe that's just his style of playing. But I think that sort of applies to the New England IPA. It doesn't matter if it's sloppy or not. Money for Nothing sold a gajillion records and made Mark Knopfler's career. Yeah. And I do think, just like any style, take Pilsner, for example. You can make a really good Pilsner, or you can make a crappy Pilsner. The same is true of that New England style. You can make really good New England style IPAs, or you can make crappy ones. I remember reading in one of Charlie Papazian's books that when you're going to have an additive to a beer, if you're going to add fruit, if you're going to add specific dry hops or whatnot, you want to be confident that your base beer is solid. And you can't just say, all right, well, the base beer is flawed, so let's just add raspberries to it and shove it out the door. That never works. But I think Nashville is very, very fortunate, the Nashville beer drinking community, to have two really strong producers of that specific style. Both Bearded Iris and Southern Grist are getting national and worldwide attention for the work that they're doing within that genre, within that style. And I think Nashville has done a really good job, as far as the beer community is concerned,

35:41of people staying in their lane. I love Hefeweizen, and we used to brew Hefe's at home all the time. And when we opened, we toyed around with the idea of opening with a Hefe as part of our lineup. But Yazoo's Hefe was, and still is, very well regarded, highly decorated in competition, and sort of universally available. So why would we tee off against somebody who's already doing something that's really unique and an excellent example of that style? So we identified what our lane was going to be and have stayed there. Did that answer your question? I feel like I answered it maybe three different ways. I don't want you to call out a brewer for making great new England IPAs. But yeah, it makes total sense when you look across the scope and the Nashville beer scene. The breweries that have really identified themselves have that space that's carved out, where you're looking at a lot of Belgian, European-style influences, and you have Bearded Iris up a little north doing some world-class IPAs. And the who benefits are the people living in Nashville, right? Because you can get these fantastic styles across. All right, I'm going to shift gears one more time here. And Brandon, if this is all right with you, we're going to do a little bit of a quick fire around.

37:15That way we can keep calling answers to under 30 minutes here. I've got a series of questions, and answer them as quickly as you can. One word's fine, multiple ones, as long as you're sure. Does that work for you, Carl? I'm ready. Okay. Favorite beer to drink during the summer? Crossroads. Favorite beer to drink during the winter? Guinness. Your least favorite beer type? Sours. Your favorite brewery in Nashville, not Black Abbey? Gosh, that's a hard one. Blackstone. Your favorite brewery outside of Nashville? The brewery in California. I know a brewer is highly skilled when they can make this style of beer well. New England IPA. The best beer city in the U.S. outside of Nashville?

38:27Asheville, North Carolina. The best beer country outside of the U.S.? Germany. So for those of you who have not visited the Black Abbey, you should know that music plays a very large role for Carl and for the whole brewery. Your favorite music artist? Ironman. Most overrated music artist of all time? Elvis Presley. The best live music venue in Nashville? The Ryman. Your favorite restaurant in Nashville, not the Waffle House? For those of you who pay attention to my Instagram feed, you know I spend a lot of time at Waffle House. Gosh, that's a really hard question. Gosh, I don't know. Favorite restaurant? I don't know. Pass. All right, and then the last one in a couple sentences. Make your pitch for Nashville's beer scene. Nashville's beer scene is incredibly diverse. It's still very young, which leads to a lot of innovation. So there's a lot of different styles coming out of here.

39:53And Nashville's beer scene grew up just like the city itself in that everybody got real big, real fast, which means in addition to being really diverse, you have a lot of really diverse stuff in package. So bottles and cans, clap your hands. I like it. I like it. And I've got one more question for you. What does the future hold for the Black Abbey? That's a good question. I think that breweries tend to end up or are designed from the beginning to be in one of two or three buckets. You've got your brew pub model, you know, where you've got a, like Bosco's used to be, where you brew on site and stays on site. It's a restaurant typically. Then you've got folks that are more like Bearded Iris and Southern Grist, who are selling a lot of their stuff in package there through the brewery, but also are sending beer out into distribution, but in very limited drops. And then you have breweries that are structured more like Black Abbey, Jackalope, Blackstone, and the like, where we're pushing a lot of beer into grocery. And so I think that the future for Black Abbey depends a lot on that channel. You know, we've been very straightforward from the beginning that we're going to be a brewery that is going to attempt to get our beer into a lot of grocery channels. You know, we do have a taproom, but we don't have a restaurant.

41:29And I kind of wish we did. But I wish that we had more food than what we have. But I think what the future holds for Black Abbey hopefully is continued expansion throughout the state in partnership with our wholesalers and retail customers. Yeah. And what would be the one thing that you would want people who don't know anything about Black Abbey to know about the brewery? I think the best thing about Black Abbey, with the exception of our staff people, because I really think that we have an incredible group of people that work here that both make the beer, package the beer, and then sell the beer, whether it's through the taproom or out in the trade, that I would just want people to take away the amount of care and thought that goes into not just the package design and the stupid beer names and the poems on the cans, but also the liquid. We spend a lot of energy making sure that beer, that it tastes good and it tastes the same every time.

42:43Great. Brandon, any follow-ups for you there? Maybe you want to dive deeper into feudal lord or Lutheran history? You know what, I think that we've done a great job here today. Adam, you have a future in being a radio host or podcast host. You did a great job interviewing Carl. One of the things I like to do towards the end of a show is I always give the guest the last word, so I like to open the table and just kind of say, hey man, the floor is yours. You're speaking to the people of Nashville, the hospitality community, whatever you want to say. You got to just take as much time, as little time, whatever you want to say to the Nashville community, go. I would like to say two things. Thank you for drinking our beer. We have an amazing opportunity to make something unique and have been very gratefully included in the Nashville community and the things that make Nashville great, not just bars and restaurants, but Nashville culturally, and we're very grateful for that. Thank you for drinking our beer and for those of you that sell it. Thank you for selling it. Nothing sells itself. I think that a lot of times it's easy to get disconnected from the fact that every time a faucet gets pulled, somebody convinced somebody to have that faucet pulled, whether that came through our marketing department or whether it came through, sorry, my phone said low battery there for a second. It almost 100% of the time comes from the bartender or the server or the host or somebody saying, you know what, you ought to try this Black Abbey. It's pretty good. And to those people that are making that sales pitch every day, those are the ones that I want to thank the most because we're nowhere without that.

44:46Very nice. And I would also add on top of that, you know, if you're out there and you're choosing what kind of beer to drink, especially right now during a pandemic in these times, I've been standing on a rooftop screaming to people, buy local, spend money on local beer. And if you're choosing, if you're at Kroger and you have a choice of Bud Light or Coors Light or any of these national brands, find the local brewery, support your local brewery. These are people who live in your community, hire people in your community, are spending the money that you spend in our community. And it's a great way to give back to people like Carl, who's donating his time for a great charity event like this Ask Chefs Anything event. And for you, Adam, for donating to the charity, this is just such a great thing. And thank you both for doing this today. No problem. Glad to do it. We're so excited to have you both. It was weird for me to not speak. It's hard. I'm like over here trying to not jump in and be like, this is his show. This is his show. This is his show. I was wondering if I could do it today. So it was a lot of fun watching it happen. So thank you both.

45:58Absolutely. I appreciate it. Glad to be a part of it. Thanks for your time, Carl. No problem. Anytime. All right, guys.