Q&A with Mark Burford, Co-Founder of Blue Point Brewing

Why did you attend GABF?

Mark: It is certainly the quintessential beer event in the country and it has proven itself by its professionalism and the varied amount of beer you can get. And for someone who is an east coast brewer, like myself, I can come out and try beers I read about in the press but don’t have access to on the East Coast. On one trip I can try as many beers as I need to from different parts of the country that I can’t get to myself over the course of the year. There are things that are trending in different parts of the country that we want to check out.

Most interesting or surprising ingredient you saw or sampled, how was it?

Mark: A couple of the different wine barrel aged selections. Beer aged in different wine barrels has been the most interesting so far and I’ve liked them all. The complexity and depth that they add to beer really brings us into the wine category and puts us on the dinner table, where we should be.

Ingredient you most want to experiment with?

Mark: We’re looking for an indigenous item from Long Island, where we’re from. We want to find an item to brew with that is not anywhere else – a real serious Long Island indigenous item. There are only a couple of things we can do. I think next summer we will do some bayberries and some things that grow on the dunes on Fire Island.

Most common style of beer and most surprising style of beer you’re seeing?

Mark: I think it’s no surprise that IPAs are where it’s all at. Most surprising, the peanut butter beers – the fact that they’ve survived more than a year.

Can you tell us about the wet hop project?

Mark: Wet hop beers are very artisanal in that they’re only brewed one or two days a year.  The hops coming right off the vine and have to get into the kettle. We actually had a hops supplier in Michigan pick hops, throw them in the refrigerated truck and drive straight to Patchogue and we brewed within 13 hours of having them on the vine. And that sort of that psychosis of suppliers is hard to match across other spectrums of the world in business. You get the feeling of the dedication of everybody – this guy literally picked a thousand pounds of hops off their field, put them in a refrigerated truck , drove here in what he thought would be a 16 hour trip but ended up being 13 hours. Boom, we threw it in the kettle and we have beer we can only brew once a year. The dedication of the entire supply chain is extraordinary. People just don’t go through that effort unless they have a love and dedication for the product, you know?

From the raw materials point of view has it been dramatically different since you’ve come into the A-B system? Whether it’s a barley mill or the hops? If you could just talk from a raw materials POV?

Mark: What it has done is open up more resources to us. The raw materials, the technical side of the brewing, cannot be underestimated. We’ve been offered all kinds of help and new products and it’s sparked all kinds of creativity amongst the brewers and started to get them energized again. Nothing is out of bounds, just anything you can think of we might be able to do.

Anything I didn’t ask that you wanted to talk about?

Mark: I think we’re on another wave of explosion in the industry. I’ve been doing this 20 years and watched it come and go and watch it wane and grow. You can just see from the enthusiasm of the customers that it’s about to go through another one of its growth phases. And that’s exciting to see once again.

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