USA, KY: Holsopple Brewing aiming at early 2017 opening

If brewing beer is part art and part science, Sam and Kristy Gambill certainly will have the science part down when they open their new business, Holsopple Brewing, in early 2017, Insider Louisville reported on October 25.

Kristy is a microbiologist, while Sam studied genetics and later studied fiber content in beer at the University of California-Davis.

“There’s fiber in all beer,” Sam notes. “But more so in craft beer.”

“It’s a health food,” Kristy deadpans.

The couple, who moved to Louisville five years ago from Oregon, have long worked in the spirits industry. Kristy, whose maiden name is Holsopple, currently works at Brown-Forman and previously worked at Full Sail Brewery in Hood River, Ore. Sam has worked in the brewing business for Miller in the past.

Now they’ll work toward bringing craft beer to the Lyndon neighborhood via their small brewing operation tucked away in a strip center just off Lyndon Lane at 8023 Catherine Lane. The 1,200-square-foot space is evenly divided between brewhouse and taproom, both of which are under construction.

The taproom will feature plenty of reclaimed wood and steel, and will seat about 36 people. There will be eight tap lines, which at first will be a blend of house beers and guest brews.

Food won’t be served, but customers will be free to carry in whatever they’d like. The Gambills also hope to work with neighborhood restaurants on delivery options.

The adjacent brewhouse features a six-barrel system that has grown from being a two-barrel system Sam had been using to homebrew. As plans moved forward to open the brewery, he began to acquire additional equipment, expanding it with a larger mash tun and fermentation tanks.

“This is truly a customized system,” he tells Insider.

The couple decided to expand the system, Kristy says, once they realized that using the smaller system meant Sam would be brewing almost nonstop to keep the taps full.

“It would pretty much eat up all of our time,” he says.

There is room for three more fermentation taps, should they decide to expand the brewing operation in the future.

Holsopple Brewing, while it is currently awaiting federal permits that will allow it to brew and open, already has a few signature beer recipes. The flagship beer will be called Aloupa, which is a mashup of the words “A Louisville pale ale.”

“We want to produce a flagship brand that most people will like,” Sam says.

While IPAs are all the rage, not everyone likes hop bitterness, Sam says. Aloupa will be “flavorful” but without the bitter hop bite of an IPA — in other words, it will be an accessible, drinkable pale ale that should offer something for most palates.

Another Holsopple staple will be an English brown ale that will lean toward an English porter, with chocolate notes, as well as a version of a dunkel beer Kristy created while at Full Sail. She calls it a “Northwest dunkel,” as it employs Northwest hops for a more bitter finish to balance the traditional malty flavor.

The couple, which have two young sons, decided to open their own brewery after considering it for years. In short, they saw opportunity.

“We’ve talked about it before, but there was never a good time to do it,” Sam says.

But in researching the Louisville market, he was told by a local distributor that their volume of craft beer sales is only about 7 percent. The Gambills saw it as a sign that there is a need for more craft beer in the present and future, as percentages are much higher in the western part of the U.S.

“There’s a lot of growth in craft beer,” Sam says, “so it makes this easier to do knowing there is so much potential.”

In addition, they so far have found other breweries to be quite supportive, offering advice and help as they ramp up.

“We came from a huge brewing community in the Pacific Northwest,” Kristy says. “People would help each other out. It feels the same way here.”

For the short term at least, Holsopple will stick to being a neighborhood brewery, with pint and growler sales being the focus, but distribution isn’t out of the question once the business is up and running. Also, the hope is to eventually experiment with German-style lager beers, which take longer to ferment and could tax a smaller brew system in terms of production. Still, the interest in lagers was part of the reason they went with Kristy’s family name, as it is a traditional German surname.

It’s truly a family business, as it will be fully owned and operated by the Gambills.

“We definitely want to keep it as homegrown as possible,” Kristy says.

Once the brewery opens in late 2016 or early 2017, hours will be Tuesday through Friday, 4-10 p.m., and Saturday noon-10 p.m.

24 October, 2016