As part of of craft beer documentary I produced around 2010, I interviewed Nick Floyd. He was quite the gracious host and had a very good dry sense of humor. I believe he drank a Robert the Bruce during our whole interview. He then gave me what is still one of my prize beer possessions - A bomber of a collaboration beer he made with Sam Calagione from Dogfishead, called PopSkull. A very special part of this interview is he told me the key inspiration for his Dark Lord. Read on to find out!
Cheers, Dan Taylor
Here are excerpts from that interview (some are edited for clarity)
Dan: How did you get started in brewing ?
Nick: I started homebewing when I was eighteen. I originally hated beer in high school, because everyone drank warm budweiser or old style and it tasted like crap. Then I finally had some good beer and learned you could homebrew and make beer yourself. So I started homebrewing.
Dan: Did you start with the 5 gallon approach to making beer in your house?
Nick : Yeah (big smile) my mom was from the UK so not only did she not mind she was excited about my brewing, she would ask “oh what are you cooking” I would tell her beer, and she said “oh that's good.” So that was a good thing that she was so supportive.
Dan: What year did Three Floyds open and did you have some idea of the kind of brewery you wanted?
Nick: We originally started in 1996 in Hammond, Indiana as a small five barrel brewhouse. It was all open fermenters and we made beer for the local chicago market. I was greatly inspired by west coast beers at the time, it was the early 1990s none of the midwestern micros were making anything really hoppy or remotely bitter, so we wanted to be sort of a west coast brewery in the Midwest. So some of our early beers like alpha king was a very hoppy pale ale and gumballhead which was a hoppy version of a wheat beer - both of those are top sellers. We also made a scotch ale, Robert the Bruce, which was more of a traditional scotch ale, which no one was making at the time.
Dan: When did you grow out of the 5 barrel brewery?
Nick: In 2000 we moved to Munster and built out a much larger brewery giving us much more control over our brewing process. I went through Siebel Institutes brewing program and took a job at a larger Florida brewery to get some experience brewing at a larger scale. I went from making 5 barrel batches to 300 barrel batches, learning a lot about larger systems and larger scale brewing. The consistency and quality of our beer improved a lot.
Dan; To me you are a creative brewer how does your process work for creating beers?
Nick: I guess after getting down a certain number of styles you branch out and want to tweek this style or invent a new style…..especially having creative brewers here and with the pub here we have the ability to introduce experimental batches which allows us to push the envelope and try different things.
Dan: You also like to collaborate with other craft brewers who are some you like to collaborate with?
Nick: We collaborated several times with Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head - it was fun to hang out with Sam, we actually had a joint party called Dog Floyd a Palooza, it was a customer appreciation night at the bottom lounge in Chicago . We had like four bands and invited all our top bar and liquor store accounts and had a party where Sam and I brought a bunch of our weird high gravity beers that bar and liquor stores normally had not seen or tried. We collaborated with Mikkeller of Denmark on a beer we called Oat Goop. We wanted to make a double ipa and use some weird ingredients, so we decided on oats. So it was originally called Havre Goop, havre which means oats in Danish and goop which means glue. We like each other's beers so we do one at least once a year with them.
Dan: Of course we need to talk about Dark Lord. Where did the inspiration for Dark Lord come from?
Nick: It was around 2002 and we really did not have a Russian imperial stout yet. My girlfriend at the time was working at Flossmoor Station, and the brewer Todd Ashman was winning a lot of medals with his imperial stout, I think it was called Imperial Eclipse. it was a really good Russian imperial stout. So I decided to make a giant Russian imperial stout and we called it Dark Lord.
Dan: What was the first year you had it available ?
Nick: I think it was in 2003 we only served it here during beer tour hours, and you could buy a beer tour and get several free samples and Dark Lord was one of those samples. Then in 2004 we decided to make 7 barrels of it and bottle it. Around 50 people lined up outside the brewery and we sold out that day.
Dan: when did you realize you had something quite unusual, that the craft beer world went a little crazy for?
Nick: In 2005 we doubled production and sold out in a day again. So in 2006 when our pub opened the lines were so long maybe 700 people and we had double production again and it sold out in one day again. I think at that point we knew we had to limit it somehow. So we came up with the ticket system, so, people could be assured if they came they would get a Dark Lord.
Dan: And as they say, the rest is Dark Lord History