Joe Mongan - Final cut

This is a podcast called Open Forum in the Villages, Florida. The host talks to leaders and interesting people in the community. The podcast is listener supported and they ask for donations to keep it going. They also offer audiobook services. The host interviews Joe Mongan, who runs a craft beer club in the Villages. Craft beer is different from regular beer and uses higher quality ingredients. The club has 400 members and is considering increasing membership. Joe explains the different styles of craft beer and his favorite is IPA. Welcome to the open forum in the Villages Florida podcast. In this show we talk to leaders in the community, leaders of clubs and interesting folks who live here in the villages to get perspectives of what is happening here in the Villages Florida. We are a listener supported podcast. There will be shout outs for supporters and episodes. A note from the heart. Hello dear listeners. I'm thrilled to share our passion project with you. Podcast that brings joy, knowledge and inspiration. Creating it is a labor of love. Even though it demands more time that I can easily spare. But hey, time isn't something that we can buy back right? Now here's where you come in. The unsung hero. You can help us keep the podcast alive and thriving. How? By becoming a supporter. You can make a small monthly contribution. Visit our website openforuminthevillagesflorida.com and click on the supporter box. Even a humble three to ten dollars a month makes a difference. And guess what? You can cancel anytime. No strings attached. Free and priceless. Thank you. Your support means the world to us. Stay furious, stay inspired and keep those headphones on. If you have a book that you would like to turn into an audiobook, let us know via email to rothvoice.com. Hope you enjoy today's show. This is Mike Roth on Open Forum in the Villages, Florida. I'm here today with Joe Mongan. Joe, thanks for joining me. Yeah, thank you for searching me out in the villages and inviting me to come on a podcast. I think these podcasts are always a good thing to do for people to listen to. Right, I think there aren't enough podcasts like this in the villages. Joe runs a club dedicated to beer or craft beer. Yeah, craft beer. There's a difference between beer and craft beer. And a lot of people probably in our age groups are just used to drinking beer. But we're trying to get out the word about craft beer, which is a totally different kind of style of beer. So how long have you run the craft beer club? The craft beer club started in May of 21. So coming up here in less than a few weeks, by the time this show goes live, the club will be three years old. So good. How many members do you have in the craft beer club? We currently have 400 members and we have 35 or so on the waitlist currently. So we're trying to see if we can increase membership, but we have to go to the members and see if they're willing to do that or if we're going to keep it at a cap on our membership right now. Interesting, interesting. There are only a few clubs here in the villages that are capped. Second Honeymooners and the New Jersey Club are the only two I can think of. Yeah, it all depends what you consider where you want to keep a good membership and the quality of what you can provide your members. You got to give them something that keeps them coming back. You can say you have a thousand members, but how many people are actually active? And our club strives to have most everybody active. And if you can't get into an event, but you strive every morning or every time when the event goes live and you can never get into the event, then you're not getting much for your membership. So we try to keep it to a level that everybody has an opportunity. I'm glad to hear people want to show up. Joe, first, why don't you tell our listeners what the difference is between beer and craft beer? Beer is probably what most people consider. It's mass-produced. It's mass-produced on gallon by gallon. So I'm not going to throw out a few names there because I have advisors, I guess you could say, in the middle of the course and all the big boys that do millions and gallons and advertise like crazy. Craft beer is more generating toward the smaller breweries and I don't offhand currently know what the levels are, but it's more quality ingredients, lesser of a product, but most people consider it like they're more informal kind of beers. They're not, I guess that's probably not the right word to use, is informal. The small batch. The small batch beers, but the people that do small batches can afford to put some more expensive adjuncts and stuff in their beers to make different beers that you can't get readily available in the big market because it becomes too expensive. What stuff would that be? Like a lot of fruits, actual real fruit instead of using extracts in beers. There's a lot of the cheap way to go and if you do a lot of things with a beer, you can put extracts in there, but that gives you a lot like an alcohol kind of in different bite to the beer. So where craft beers, most generally they will use the actual real fruit product, which makes a huge difference, but it's more expensive. Money's not everything all the time when you're trying to do a beer that most people can't get a hold of. And what percentage of alcohol is in the craft beer? Craft beer, well that's what the craft beers can be any level of alcohol because they're session beers. Session? Session beers, but session means is they're light alcohol beer. They're 3 to 5% roughly and what it means is you can drink these all day because they're lesser alcohol. So when you get into the craft beer style, then you start getting into the doubles and the triples and everything else, but you can go from a session beer all the way to a Russian Imperial Stout and sometimes you can get those in the 18 range of ABV, 18%. They're barrel aged beers, which has got a little picked up from the barrels and all that stuff. So you can get a broad range in craft beers where some of the cheaper beers on the market, they have 4% and that's where they stay. They don't alter those kind of quantities. So Joe, how long have you been brewing beer? Been brewing beer a little over 12 years. So it started all out as a, there's two different reasons I started it. I started it out because in Illinois where I was in the Chicago area, about 90 miles west of Chicago, I found the beers were bypassing and I've come from Rockford, Illinois, the good craft beers were bypassing Rockford and going up into Wisconsin or to some other cities because our distributors were not bringing them in currently and I thought, what's the reason for that? I could see some of, because what some of my favorite beers and what I really originally started brewing beer was, it was St. Floyd's out of Indiana was producing a craft beer, never even ever had it before and all of a sudden somebody went and brought some back and gave you a taste of that and it's why can't I get that here? Yeah, I've had that with a beer from Montauk Point, Long Island. You can't get Montauk beer outside of New York. Yeah, that's the way, there's other beers and they do that for a reason. So I thought, why can't I just start investigating how can I make this at home? So I had my two son-in-laws, I said let's brew beer together for something to do and we brewed a couple batches and so on and I went to, they didn't have any problem drinking my beer or our beer at the time but then I started getting involved in more in the brewing process which had created a habit for more money to put into the project and they had families that were just starting out in and everything else so they said, oh we're bailing out now, we can't get into it, you're spending too much money. So I said, okay, that's fine but they never had a problem coming home over the house and drinking what I was making and they still don't, they still visit here and everything else and they still love to do it, drink what I do. Do you have any craft beers with strange names? Oh yeah, I got a few strange names like I, well we just had a what we called our homebrew rock party a couple weeks ago and I have a coconut milk stout that I call monkey trap. So you wonder how does that come about and well the milk stout actually has coconut in it. So the beer is white? No, it's actually dark, basically mortar oil and I looked online, I was looking for names of beers and I looked, I googled a lot of things and I thought if it's got coconut in it then I found a picture of something where a monkey, they trap monkeys by putting a coconut on a chain, tying it down and then they put rice in the coconut and then the monkey reaches in there and grabs hold of the rice but it can't open its hand back up because it never wants to let go of the rice. So that's just much like my beer, you never want to let it go either as you're drinking it, so that's how I come up with the name of that. What's your favorite style of beer? IPAs are probably my most favorable style. For people who are familiar with IPA, tell us what that means. An IPA is the India pale ale and the folklore goes that they used to add a lot of hops to beers to India. As they crossed the desert, the beers would become less flavorful and maybe because they got too warm or something, it was to add more hops to beers. It took the American style people to probably start increasing the style but the name kept up the same profile or style you want to say. There's so many different styles of IPAs out there, that's what I say to some people, they say I don't like IPAs. I said you just have not had the right one yet.