I may be an obnoxious beer snob most of the time, but I try to relax those impulses during the summer months. In times of heat and humidity, I can’t judge those who reach for a watery macrobrewed lager. Even I have been known to turn to Blatz, Schlitz, Pabst, or even water itself to quench my thirst, so who am I to cast a stone? Of course, as the summer winds down, there’s no better time to reintroduce your taste buds to actual beer flavor. Perhaps even something unique… say, black pepper pale ale?

Yes, indeed. Spring Green-based Furthermore Beer offers two excellent ales that will reawaken your beer palate. The Knot Stock Pale Ale is a surprisingly tasty blend of refreshing hop zip and black pepper zag. If you’d prefer to ease into a good beer, there’s the Proper, a mild, smooth, and drinkable English-style ale. Both beers have been finding their way into Madison-area bars and liquor stores since earlier this summer, and the Proper is available at American Players Theater in Spring Green. Furthermore brewmaster Aran Madden was kind enough to submit to an interview (conducted, of course, via email; I’m no luddite).

What’s your brewing background?

I walked into Coppersmith’s brewpub in Fort Collins, CO when I was volunteering with the Student Conservation Association in the Rockies. That was my introduction to small breweries; it was the lighting of the fuse.

I began homebrewing like a madman when I returned to my home in Pittsburgh, PA, and soon decided to make a go of brewing professionally. I enrolled in the American Brewer’s Guild in Davis, California and did an apprenticeship at Napa Valley Brewing Co. in Calistoga. I eventually became Head Brewer at the Foundry Ale Works, and more recently played second fiddle at The Church Brew Works.

What’s the biggest challenge in starting a new brewery?

Financing is big. You always hear that the reason most business fail is that they were undercapitalized. My business partner, Chris Staples and I are both card-carrying members of the have-nots, so we were undercapitalized, but we didn’t want to let that stop us. As we were whittling away at the business plan, we ran into the guys at Sand Creek Brewing in Black River Falls. We were talking to them about utilizing their facility to help us get beer to market while we worked on building our own brewery. However, at some point we decided to whittle the brewery out of our plan altogether. Sand Creek made it clear that they could handle our volume, so we decided to postpone the building of a brewery until we can prove that it’s feasible to do so.

Do you see yourselves as filling a particular niche?

Next to the financing, the next biggest issue we faced was making sure that we could deliver products that people could fall in love with. The difficulty is that there really is no “making sure”. What we can do is make sure that we are in love with the beers. We wanted the beers to be fun, and that’s why we coupled with American Players Theatre when developing Furthermore’s Proper. APT is such a great experience for people; it’s a wonderful escape in to woods. It was really fun to created a beer specifically with that experience in mind—something that will quench your thirst in the summertime, with enough flavor that its still a bit of a celebration when you can crack one open during intermission. On top of having fun, we wanted to be edgy. Edgy, yet drinkable. That’s kind of what I see our niche being. I’ve made a lot of beers that were meant to be a punch in the mouth, but at the end of the day, even the craft-beer-wackos want some balance in their beers. A lot of what we will be doing, and the Knot Stock is a good example of this, is taking a recipe that could wreak havoc on your palate, then pulling back on the reigns to bring the beer more toward edgy than apocalyptic. Oh, and then we will follow those edgy beers with the apocalyptic version, because, what if the end is near? You have to be ready.

You’re currently having your beer brewed at Sand Creek Brewing. How did you set that up? How long do you expect this arrangement to last?

Yeah. So we were working with American Players Theatre to get them beer by the beginning of this season. We were just about to begin converting an old building in Spring Green to be our brewery when we thought we should have some safety feature put in place if the build out to way longer than expected. We asked around and finally got in touch with Jim Wiesender at Sand Creek. I guess aside from running a good operation, they seemed to have an understanding that they would be helping us get off the ground and we would be helping them keep their brewery fully utilized as they continued to grow. It was also a plus that Todd Krueger, the brewmaster, didn’t blink when I said I wanted to be as involved as I could in making my beers. He was comfortable with it. In terms of how long we will be there, well, Furthermore’s motto is Ready, Fire! Aim, so...

Do you plan on having your own facilities at some point?

Yes, we do want to open our own facility in Spring Green. I am comfortable working under Sand Creek’s roof, but as a brewer, at some point the jealousy of not having my own brewery might get to me. Before that jealousy mounts to Amy Fisher-like levels, I think we will look to get our own place up and running. But, as stated above, we are not sure how long it will be before we pull the trigger. It’s not a question of time as much as it is a question of volume. If people like our beer and they are drinking it, then our production volume grows. If we can get to a break-even point, then we can think about moving forward with a brewery. As much as we like our own beer, it’s not worth putting every dime into building the thing until the beerly beloved have not only spoken, but have said “YES”.

Black pepper and pale ale isn’t an obvious combo, but it works out quite well. From whence did the Knot Stock recipe arise?

Black pepper and hops. They’re just so damn good together. I’m surprised Reese’s hasn’t put this combo in a candy bar. I got the idea back in Pittsburgh. This loony biscotti guy had fourteen different kinds of biscotti, mostly normal, some outrageous, but in a chocolate-and-nuts kind of way. In the mix was a black pepper biscotti. I decide to try one to see how foolish it was to execute the making of such a bad baked good. Much to my surprise, although it was not great, it was not bad. In a cookie that is meant to be mild, the pepper lacked a counterpart, but in a big hoppy beer, I thought it might just work. Sure enough, it did, but way more than I had expected. The flavors are really interesting because there is an overlap between the hops and the pepper. Sometimes you clearly taste pepper, sometimes hops, but at times the two overlap and it’s hard to nail down just which one you taste. I think this is what makes the combo acceptable to beer drinkers. If a new element stands out too much, it is perceived as a novelty flavor. If the new element blends well, it is seen as complimentary. The pepper is certainly complimentary, and for my tastes, it actually enhances the experience of a base beer. The Knot Stock is a bit different from that first batch of pepper pale. There have been some recipe changes, but mostly we’ve turned our attention to nuances with the pepper. We use a really nice Tellicherry, cracked just before gets infused into the beer. The process side is also very important; how and when and at what temperature the pepper is added has become a big focus.

Your website lists “Fallen Apple” and “Three Feet Deep” as upcoming beers. What will these be?

Fallen Apple will be a fall seasonal. It consists of a Wisconsin Cream Ale blended, pre-fermentation, with about 40% fresh cider, and the two then ferment together. Now, as much as I think hard cider is tasty, it always reminds me of a wine cooler. What I love about this beer is that that it grounds the light and delicate flavors of the cider in a hearty beer. At the same time, the beer takes on a Belgian-like character. The Fallen Apple taste like champagne with a strong beer backbone.

Three Feet Deep is a stout made with peat-smoked malt. Peat was a common fuel in Ireland, literally cut from the soil. When added to the fireplace, it produces a soft, pleasant aroma, one that has remained as one of my strongest memories of my grandmother’s house in County Cork. Brewer’s malt that is dried with a peat fire is potent stuff, but when used in small amounts, it adds a degree of earthy warmth to a beer. At the same time, stout is a beer that benefits from strange flavors you might not ordinarily want in your beer. Burnt, dirty, and black—now that’s a good stout. Too clean and you may as well drink a dark lager. Three Feet Deep promises “burnt, dirty and black.”

For more on Furthermore’s beer and where you can get it, check out www.furthermorebeer.com.