Reuben’s Brews - Adam Robbings

Adam Robbings - Interview Transcript

Reubens Brews, so I started brewing in the garage literally, and then it just sort of got out of control. We were lucky enough back in 2010 to pour a commercial festival as home brewers. And, the day before we got an email saying, "what's the name of your brewery?" And it was just Grace and Adam. But I started brewing when, our son Ruben was born. So we named it after our son Ruben and it's kinda stuck. We really focus on balance. So, you know, being from the UK, my wife says I grew up on boiled vegetables, so everything is, "I'm sensitive to everything. So, I have a sensitive palate." We talk about the glass backwards, so, talk about trying to brew unconstrained. And by that, I wanna focus on what the end goal is gonna be, irrespective of how to get there. So we're not constrained by what malts we have in house, what hops we have available, if we really want a certain flavor profile, we will break our backs to get there.

My home-brew club can make far better beers than you can commercially get. And it was like "Well why on Earth is that?" and also, "Why on Earth is home cooking always better?" Well its because you’re not constrained by production efficiencies. So as you go through industrialization process, you homogenize and maybe incrementally each decision you make is not that important but by the time you get to the end, it's a fundamentally different result than what you would have done at home. And so we want to guard against that at all times. So that's what I think makes us different.

With all of the bars closing, unemployment is shooting up specifically in the hospitality industry, how can we support the hospitality industry that supported us to get us where we are. So we came up with the concept of the "You Are Not Alone" beer and we brewed a beer and donated all the profits from that beer to Big Table which is a local hospitality nonprofit. And then we also encouraged our friends to do that too and other breweries. So ten or eleven other breweries did the same thing and donated to their equivalent local hospitality support organizations.

The name, (You Are Not Alone) obviously John Richards, he's kind of coined that and we've worked with John a little bit on some other projects and so it just felt fitting. And how bad would it be to not only be in self isolation or working from home, but then also losing your job and so you doubly feel alone.

Right now we're thinking about first responders and what we can do for them because this is going to be around for a long time, it's not a binary thing, it's not an on and off switch. We're in this for a while. It's tough times that you sort of get some more focus on what's necessary.

Business is about people right? So how could you not support your community. You can always do more and there is always more to do. That's the purpose of being. We don't exist without our community. To me, it's an existential fact that if you don't support your community, the community shouldn't support you and you shouldn't exist. And what Grace and I have always said from the start of this is that, we want our community to be proud of us. We want people to be proud of having us in their community.