Hugh Sisson: The Journey of Heavy Seas Brewing

Summary

In this engaging conversation, Laurie Forster and Hugh Sisson explore the evolution of Heavy Seas Brewing, the craft beer industry, and the nuances of different beer styles, particularly IPAs and Hazy IPAs. Hugh shares insights into the brewing process, the importance of quality ingredients, and the art of pairing beer with food. They also discuss current trends in craft beer, the impact of cannabis on the industry, and Hugh's personal favorite wine recommendations.

Takeaways

• Heavy Seas Brewing has evolved significantly since its inception.
• Quality ingredients are crucial for crafting flavorful beers.
• IPAs dominate the craft beer market, representing a large percentage of sales.
• Hazy IPAs have gained popularity for their softer, fruitier profiles.
• Beer and food pairing can enhance the tasting experience.
• The craft beer industry is experiencing consolidation and innovation.
• Cannabis trends are influencing consumer preferences in beverages.
• Personal enjoyment of beer should be prioritized over strict pairing rules.
• Hugh recommends a Class A Chianti Classico as his favorite wine.

Beers Tasted

Bod*dacious Blonde
Loose Cannon IPA
Hazy Cannon Hazy IPA

Hugh's Radio Show: Cellar Notes on YPR

Hugh's Wine Recommendation: 
Badia a Passignano Chianti Classico D.O.C.G. Gran Selezione

Transcript

Laurie Forster (00:01.148)
All right, Hugh, welcome to The Sipping Point. I'm so excited to talk all things beer with you.

Hugh Sisson (00:07.371)
Thanks, Laurie. I appreciate the opportunity.

Laurie Forster (00:10.124)
Awesome. Well, we've known each other for a long time. Actually, I go back to the Sissons pub days when I lived in Federal Hill, actually. So I actually did get to visit the Brew Pub and spend a good amount of money in there when I was living in Federal Hill. I know, of course, I know that's how everything started. And now you have Heavy Seas this year awarded

Hugh Sisson (00:13.486)
Yes we have. Yes we have.

Hugh Sisson (00:27.876)
Thank you very much.

Hugh Sisson (00:34.864)
Mm-hmm.

Laurie Forster (00:37.02)
at the US Beer Tasting Championships, the top IPA and the top hazy IPA. So it's been an amazing journey. Maybe you could just maybe in a nutshell kind of tell us how you went from a family brew pub to one of the premier craft brewers in the country.

Hugh Sisson (00:43.983)
Yes.

Hugh Sisson (00:57.232)
it's a whole lot of battle scars really more than anything else. It's a, so we, I mean, you were familiar with the pub. The fun thing now is, is while I live in Delaware, I'm in Baltimore usually three days a week and I have, an apartment, which is a block and a half away from where assistance used to be now. So I'm still, I'm back in the hood. no, they, the, so I left systems at the end of 94.

Laurie Forster (01:00.988)
Right.

Laurie Forster (01:17.457)
wow. Okay.

Hugh Sisson (01:24.912)
opened Clipper City Brewing Company, which became Heavy Seas in 95. We literally just this past weekend completed 29 years of operations. So now we're actually in our 30th year. So it's been, it's been quite a, quite a, an honor and a privilege to have had a run this long. Made a lot of really great beers, some of which sold great, some of which didn't sell at all, but that's all right.

Laurie Forster (01:40.123)
Wow.

Laurie Forster (01:47.419)
Yeah.

Laurie Forster (01:53.628)
Well, that's how you learn, guess. At least that's what they say. You learn more from failure than from success. I guess along the way, you're going to have to have a few duds to bring it all together. But I also know that you love wine as well. so that's we, of course, judged wine competitions together. And I know you're a wine lover and

Hugh Sisson (01:59.535)
Yeah.

Hugh Sisson (02:04.879)
Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Hugh Sisson (02:16.132)
Mm-hmm.

Laurie Forster (02:16.858)
But I started with beer. Is that how it was for you? You started as a beer lover and then transitioned into wine or did you always love both?

Hugh Sisson (02:26.624)
I probably started more as a, as a beer fan. was in, the, in the seventies, I was a college student that didn't like beer. and then I had the wonderful opportunity to go and study in London, in 1974 for six weeks. And I discovered there that I did like beer. I just didn't like the crap that we had at the fraternity parties. So, so that sort of was the beginning of the slippery slope. And then.

Laurie Forster (02:37.359)
Interesting.

Hugh Sisson (02:54.858)
Once we started operating the family restaurant Sissons, I've always been one those people that thinks if you're in the business, you need to learn it. You need to be a student of your industry. So I started learning about wine and got very enthusiastic about wine and remain enthusiastic about wine to this day. Also bourbon.

Laurie Forster (03:14.668)
Love that. Also, I know that's big too. Okay, maybe another conversation for us on another day. But I know I have three of your beers here from Heavy Seas that we're going to taste and talk about along the way. And I'm excited because I do enjoy beer, but I probably don't know as much about it as I should because I'm always diving into the world of wine, which is overwhelming as well, right? So

Hugh Sisson (03:18.543)
Yeah.

Ha

Hugh Sisson (03:29.593)
Okay.

Hugh Sisson (03:41.646)
Mm-hmm

Laurie Forster (03:42.552)
I know we have three. We're going to start with the Bodacious Blonde. Love the name. I guess in beer, you guys always have the fun, cheeky names. know, wines are seem to be, you know, more serious in label and in names, but tell us about the inspiration for Bodacious.

Hugh Sisson (03:46.382)
Mm-hmm.

Hugh Sisson (04:00.784)
So, so, okay, as somebody who's been making, true local beer in the Baltimore metro area and the state of Maryland for many, many years, you know, I always would frost my shorts when national bow, which hasn't been made in Maryland forever, over 30 years now, still people think of it as, the local beer and it's not even, it's not a local beer. then Guinness came in.

Laurie Forster (04:27.931)
Right.

Hugh Sisson (04:30.576)
and I, and I've got no malice for these folks. mean, they're good people, but you know, Guinness comes in and starts making a beer called Baltimore blonde and then shifts the production of it to New York. And when that happened, my folks kind of said, wait a minute, this is ridiculous. So, so we came up with, bodacious blonde so we can have a, excuse me, a real Maryland beer, that was celebrating the whole Maryland schtick, as you can see from the package design.

Laurie Forster (04:41.436)
I saw that.

Laurie Forster (04:53.692)
All right.

Hugh Sisson (04:57.968)
The original name of it was B-O-H Dacius, but before we shipped the first case, we got a cease and desist letter from Pabst Brewing Company, who are the ones that own National Bow. So we said, screw it, we're going ahead, but we took the H off and that's why there's an asterisk right there after Bow Dacius.

Laurie Forster (04:58.522)
Love it.

Laurie Forster (05:03.503)
Okay.

Laurie Forster (05:08.658)
boy. Okay.

Laurie Forster (05:16.556)
Okay, there's the answer to all that. Perfect.

Hugh Sisson (05:20.56)
Yeah. So, so, and we were shooting for something that we can put out at a, a, at an attractive, price point. think this sells for, I don't know, 16 bucks for a 12 pack or something like that. But, but yeah, and it's, it's crushable. It's easy. I enjoy it.

Laurie Forster (05:36.988)
So would you call it a session beer? Is that what crushable means?

Hugh Sisson (05:41.52)
well, it's, think it's what four and a quarter, 4 % alcohol, four and a half. Okay. So I mean, by our standards, that's relatively low alcohol. yeah, you could call us a session beer. I don't know. I just call it a drinking beer.

Laurie Forster (05:46.927)
Okay.

Laurie Forster (06:00.892)
I love that. Okay. Just want to make sure I'm getting all the beer terms down. Yeah, I love it. It's nice and light and crushable, coiffable, whatever you want to say, easy to drink. But there's flavor there. You know, a lot of the, I won't mention any names because we'll probably get in trouble, but the light beers that people are drinking from some of the bigger companies really just tastes like carbonated water, if you will. I don't find them at all.

Hugh Sisson (06:08.75)
Yeah.

Hugh Sisson (06:13.06)
Mm-hmm.

Hugh Sisson (06:22.916)
Right.

Hugh Sisson (06:27.406)
Yeah, they don't taste like much.

Laurie Forster (06:29.572)
Interesting, this has flavor, so how do you accomplish that differently and still have this nice, lighter, lower alcohol beer?

Hugh Sisson (06:39.054)
Well, I mean, first off, you're using high quality malt and the alcohol comes is lower because you're using less of it. So if you're going to use less grain in the mash bill, you better be using really nice grain in the mash bill. It's not an overly hoppy beer. So it's pretty clean.

Laurie Forster (06:55.674)
Okay.

Hugh Sisson (07:03.798)
I just think it's, you know, it's, it's eminently drinkable and it gives you a little more, more to play with. mean, this, this'll be good, either on your boat or as you're getting off the tennis court.

Laurie Forster (07:15.128)
Okay. I like that. Yeah. And it has, it does have like a little bit of that malty flavor on the finish and on the nose, which is really nice. And I love the Baltimore branding, of course, because, you know, a lot of us are very proud of our flags and a lot of the different things around Maryland. I've been in Maryland now for 20 years, so I do think I maybe get an honorary Maryland status.

Hugh Sisson (07:17.136)
So, unh, unh.

Hugh Sisson (07:21.583)
Yep.

Hugh Sisson (07:28.752)
Ha

Hugh Sisson (07:40.472)
You do. You get a membership card now.

Laurie Forster (07:42.972)
Thank you so much. I appreciate it. All right. So the next two that were beers we're going to talk about are the winners from the US Beer Tasting Championship. When did this take place? Were you there when the awards were given? How does that go down? Sounds like it's like the Emmys or something.

Hugh Sisson (08:01.296)
No, it, well, yes and no. mean, the people who put this on, it's a nonprofit group. They've been doing it for, I don't know, 20 years, maybe longer. And they just solicit products from breweries all over the country. And they have the competitions are broken into several regionals. There's a Northeast, there's a Southeast, and I forget how many other categories there are. So they,

And they do three or four a year. So they have the summer beers and then they have, you know, year round products, IPAs, cetera. So we've been, I mean, we've been sending them and they don't charge anything, which is unusual. So this is literally people who are doing this just for the love of beer. So we've been entering these things for years and this is not the first time we've gotten a grand national champion.

Laurie Forster (08:45.508)
wow, that is.

Laurie Forster (08:51.332)
Wow.

Hugh Sisson (08:59.236)
thing in a category. This was particularly gratifying though, because IPA, American IPA and Hazy IPAs are probably two of the most important categories in beer these days. And so getting the top award in those two categories is sort of a real coup. But you send them in, they have these independent panels, they then publish their regional results, and then the ones that win the regionals go into the national pile.

Laurie Forster (09:16.024)
Absolutely.

Hugh Sisson (09:29.186)
And then they published the national results and they've been like I said, they've been doing this for for well over 20 years. So it's a it's a thing.

Laurie Forster (09:35.226)
That's great. And when did this IPA thing become so huge? Cause it feels like it almost dominates the whole beer scene. Sometimes when you're at various different restaurants or bars, it seems to be all IPAs or hazy IPAs versus, you know, sort of a variety of styles. When did this become the craze that it is? Yeah.

Hugh Sisson (09:58.954)
IPA has been the driving style in the category for probably almost 20 years now. mean, it's really, it's still, you know, IPA is, the category is still growing. I think it represents probably 60 % of all craft beer is something of a variation on an IPA style. yeah, it's, I mean, it's still the driver.

Laurie Forster (10:06.107)
Wow.

Hugh Sisson (10:28.272)
know, which is, which is, which has made the hop industry absolutely crazy because, you know, they're used to the large, the large guys, the A.B.'s and the Molson Coors of the world. I mean, they use hops and they use huge volumes of hops because their volumes are so big. But, the amount of hops that they use per barrel of beer produced is minuscule. And then us little knuckleheads came along and started buying all these hops. And so all of the hop growers

put in lots and lots and lots of vines. And now that the industry is softening a little bit, they're kind of in panic mode ripping vines out because it's just, you the economics are shifting.

Laurie Forster (11:06.084)
Right. And what does it mean at India Pale Ale, just like if you don't know anything about beer, what makes that style? Is it the hops, the heavily hopped?

Hugh Sisson (11:14.852)
Yeah, well, it's so, and I think this is still largely true, but back in the day, the English were making pale ales and the English had troops in India and they would ship them pale ale. And fortunately pre-Louis Pasteur and pre-understanding of bacteria, et cetera.

These things were being shipped in wooden barrels in the hold of wooden sailing ships with no refrigeration. And by the time the beer got there, it was for crap. So what somebody figured out was that if you raised the alcohol level and you put in a lot of hops, hops were a bacterial retardant. And that style became known as an India Pale Ale. So if a brewery makes a pale ale,

Laurie Forster (11:46.394)
Yum.

Laurie Forster (12:03.504)
Okay.

Hugh Sisson (12:04.98)
and an IPA, the IPA will always be stronger and much hoppier than the other one. So that's where that story theoretically comes from. And it's been the dominant style for a long time.

Laurie Forster (12:11.301)
Okay.

Laurie Forster (12:16.357)
Okay.

Laurie Forster (12:19.928)
And the grand champion here we have the loose cannon. I hope you didn't name this after me. I know obviously heavy seas you have the maritime theme going on and the and the like sort of skull pirate theme. But where does the loose cannon come from? What was the inspiration on the name?

Hugh Sisson (12:34.084)
Mm-hmm, right.

Hugh Sisson (12:40.816)
So the first name for this beer was supposed to be Three Sheets to the Wind. And I literally, as I was driving from Baltimore down to the beach, got a call from a small, they're not really a brewery, but somebody who owned a brand called Three Sheets to the Wind. And he got

Laurie Forster (12:48.284)
Love it.

Hugh Sisson (13:10.304)
snarky with me about the trademark. And this is all happening while I'm in the car. And I hung up the call and I have no idea why, but all of a I said, screw it, I'm going to call it loose cannon. And that's how it happened. And it's a brilliant name for a beer, especially one that's got 7 % ABV. Now, the fun thing now is if you ever have a chance to come and visit the brewery tap room,

Laurie Forster (13:13.625)
Okay.

Laurie Forster (13:17.557)
boy.

Laurie Forster (13:25.144)
wow, okay.

Laurie Forster (13:29.807)
It really is.

Hugh Sisson (13:38.499)
We have two cannons on display at the tap room. call them the heavy seas loose cannons.

Laurie Forster (13:38.736)
Yes.

Laurie Forster (13:46.063)
Okay.

Hugh Sisson (13:48.708)
They were, so the story behind those is that the father of a friend of mine while scuba diving in 1975 off the coast of Jamaica found these cannons on the ocean floor and had them brought up. One of them is Spanish and dates back to the early 1700s. And one of them actually comes from the court of King George III, who was the King of England when we had the Revolutionary War. So there's my English loose cannon. So there's my, those are very cool.

Laurie Forster (14:17.929)
Lovely. Now color wise, all right, we can already see like we're into some deeper colors here and.

Hugh Sisson (14:22.072)
Yeah, yeah, you're into more of a pale amber color.

Laurie Forster (14:28.068)
Yeah, and you get definitely get some of those hops on the nose.

Hugh Sisson (14:31.436)
yeah. The hops are... What makes this beer so popular and I think why it works so well is that it's really, really, really well balanced. You've got the aromatics on the hops. The seven and a quarter percent ABV was not... We didn't just say, well, let's do that. We kind of built the beer around the hops so that there was enough malt skeletal structure in the middle.

Laurie Forster (14:43.676)
Mm-hmm.

Hugh Sisson (14:59.472)
so that it all balanced out and reached harmony. And it's got some nice bitterness in the finish.

Laurie Forster (14:59.877)
Okay, yeah.

Laurie Forster (15:06.778)
Very nice, but not over the top, because there are some that are just, wow. Yeah, that's really nice.

Hugh Sisson (15:09.135)
No.

Right. Yeah, I just wanted something that you could, you know, sit back and have a couple of them and not get palate fatigue.

Laurie Forster (15:20.888)
Right. And do you think of it the same way as we do in the wine business, as in if you're thinking about what you're going to eat, do you think about what you're going to eat with which beer? Like this would be with heavier foods and bigger dishes than our bodacious blonde because of that flavor and bitterness.

Hugh Sisson (15:32.484)
Sometimes.

Hugh Sisson (15:37.84)
Yeah, I I do. I mean, this beer does phenomenally well with sharp cheeses, does really well with some spicier foods. This is good with Thai, for example. So, yeah. So, I mean, you can play a lot with food and beer pairings. The Brewers Association, which is our national

Laurie Forster (15:46.96)
Okay.

Laurie Forster (15:54.746)
Ooh, that sounds delicious.

Hugh Sisson (16:07.226)
Clearing Board, if you will. I mean, they spent a lot of years trying to really promote beer and food pairing and their books out on it all the rest of that stuff. I've kind of gotten to the point, maybe I'm just getting old. I just pick up what I feel like drinking and then what I feel like eating and I don't pay that much attention to it anymore. I mean, clearly, if I'm going to have a really nice piece of beef, I'm going to go for either a dark beer or a red wine. I'm not saying I'm completely without.

Laurie Forster (16:27.036)
Whoa.

Laurie Forster (16:34.779)
Yes.

Hugh Sisson (16:36.526)
scribbles, but.

Laurie Forster (16:37.67)
You're not a heathen. Well, maybe. that's awesome. Well, and I do think that's one of the appeals of beer over wine. And it's a stereotype, of course, but just as that it's more fun and you don't have to think about it as hard. You don't have to know.

Hugh Sisson (16:41.028)
Well, my wife might argue that.

Laurie Forster (16:58.58)
exactly where the hops were sourced from and what strain they are and you know, so take the pressure off of people and just kind of, you know, enjoy. But I think it's you probably still could have fun with events with showing people how different pairings would be fabulous. But yeah, I agree.

Hugh Sisson (17:01.283)
Right, right.

Hugh Sisson (17:12.691)
sure. yeah. And I mean, I've done I've probably done.

four or 500 beer dinners in my career. So I have done a lot of specific pairings of beers with food. And I've gotten pretty good at it at this stage. I just think the whole thing for me, and again, maybe this just because I'm getting old, I just, I don't wanna work at it anymore. I just wanna, I mean, yeah. So for example,

Laurie Forster (17:32.47)
I'm sure.

Laurie Forster (17:41.756)
I want to enjoy it.

Hugh Sisson (17:47.152)
I'm still doing the seller notes program on wines for the radio stations in Baltimore. Sometimes even though I've got a bunch of wines I'm supposed to taste for that, I'll go to the seller and grab something that I'm not supposed to taste. And my wife will say, well, why are you doing that? Because I don't want to work tonight. So I'll just open the cork and just enjoy it. I'm sure you have lots of moments like that when you're looking at stuff and you got to, yeah, it becomes work.

Laurie Forster (17:54.043)
Yep.

Laurie Forster (18:06.076)
Right. Absolutely. Yeah, there's wine work when you're evaluating the wine and then there's enjoying the wine and off the clock kind of thing. And tell folks if they want to tune into your Seller Notes, where can they check it out? Are you podcasting it? Is it on their website?

Hugh Sisson (18:16.601)
Yep. Right. Right.

Mm-hmm.

Hugh Sisson (18:29.066)
they, you can, you can go to the w YPR.org website and look up the seller notes things. And all of the broadcasters are there. and I guess that's podcasting per se, but, yeah, you can, you can do all that. We're on 88 one FM. and then we're in the, that's w YPR in Baltimore. it's w YPO and ocean city. and it's another.

Laurie Forster (18:34.244)
Okay. Perfect.

Laurie Forster (18:40.198)
Great.

Laurie Forster (18:49.308)
awesome.

Hugh Sisson (18:56.686)
So there's a Frederick station, a Baltimore station and an Ocean City station. Yeah, been doing that for 31 years now. Yeah. Yep, yep, yep. I saw him yesterday. Yeah, yeah.

Laurie Forster (19:00.72)
Great, awesome. You're expanding, franchising. Woo, really? And Al too, right? Okay, gotta keep the duo together. Love it, all right, great. So.

We're going to get ready. We're going to taste the hazy IPA. And I know this is a category and I go to, we have a number of beer festivals here in town every year that I've been going to. And it seems like this category has really exploded as well, especially for people who maybe the IPO, IPAs are a little much, but they want something in between. Would that be a great way of doing it? Cause I know a lot of people say, I don't like IPAs, I love hazy IPAs. So.

Hugh Sisson (19:27.481)
Mm-hmm

Hugh Sisson (19:33.102)
Yeah.

Hugh Sisson (19:46.99)
Yeah, you know, well, it's an interesting approach. if you hold this up, you can see it's definitely hazy. not, if you compare it to the loose cannon, which is much more clear. Anyway, so here's the story on hazies. Again, going back about 20 years.

Laurie Forster (19:47.472)
How does that all come together?

Laurie Forster (19:59.021)
Mm-hmm.

Laurie Forster (20:05.007)
Right.

Hugh Sisson (20:13.432)
There was a bunch of small New England breweries who did not have the equipment to filter their beer. So they, they took what could have been a liability and turned it into an asset and got everybody to say, isn't this cool drinking this unfiltered beer? So now one of the, one of the, one of the upsides of not filtering beer is that

Laurie Forster (20:33.244)
Hugh Sisson (20:42.156)
all of the hop components, I mean, when you filter beer by definition, it's a process of removal. So when you don't filter the beer, all of the hop elements become very much more forward aromatically and softer and a little rounder on the palate because they've got all this other crap that's buffering them. Now, the problem with that is that that is not a stable product. So you either had to get those super, super, super fresh

Laurie Forster (20:47.344)
Right.

Laurie Forster (21:02.544)
Okay.

Hugh Sisson (21:12.28)
There was even one very famous one that used to put on the right on the can that you were supposed to drink it right from the can so that you they didn't want you to look and see how ugly it was. And the whole point there is that beer tastes very different even three weeks after it was packaged. So the problem became when you're on a commercial scale like we are is

Laurie Forster (21:24.763)
Ouch.

Hugh Sisson (21:41.718)
I can't put unfiltered sediment dropping beer into a package and expect it to have any shelf life at all. So the Sierra Nevadas and the heavy seas and a whole bunch of, you know, we all had to figure out a way to do this without just not filtering the beer. So we developed a whole different approach to producing these products to get that effect. And yet it won't sediment out in the bottle. And we still got those very soft floral aromatics.

Laurie Forster (21:59.846)
Right.

Hugh Sisson (22:11.568)
in the nose.

Laurie Forster (22:11.75)
was just going to say very floral on the nose and fruity. Yeah.

Hugh Sisson (22:14.808)
Yep. Yep. Very, very floral, very fruity. It seems softer and rounder on the palette than the loose cannon.

Laurie Forster (22:24.613)
It does.

Laurie Forster (22:28.112)
Hmm. And yeah, citrusy. So wheat beers versus hazy IPAs. What's the difference? Is it the hopping or?

Hugh Sisson (22:30.959)
Lot of citrus on that.

Hugh Sisson (22:38.224)
Mm-hmm.

That's actually a good question. Some of the classic German style wheat beers, the Hefeweizen, they're not filtered. They will throw a sediment in the bottom of the bottle. Those are very delicate beers and they use a funky yeast which gives the product a clovey flavor, spicy flavor.

Laurie Forster (22:52.986)
Right. Yeah.

Right.

Laurie Forster (23:08.25)
Right. Or banana and bubble gum or something was the thing. Yep.

Hugh Sisson (23:11.47)
Yep, yep, yep, yep. That all comes from, well, that's because they're ales and that's from the esters that are produced using an ale fermentation. yeah, so this is a completely different, know, it's still an IPA. It's totally different from loose cannon. And I really like this one. think it's terrific.

Laurie Forster (23:33.092)
I do too. And is it proprietary what you're doing to achieve this and not having to filter? And so how do you do that but still keep its shelf stable? It does get a little, okay, but you still retain the flavors and the cloudy.

Hugh Sisson (23:37.506)
No, I don't think so.

Hugh Sisson (23:43.546)
Well, it does get filtered, but...

Right. Well, see, that's the technique that my brewmaster Chris Leonard has developed. He's a smart feller.

Laurie Forster (23:55.036)
Okay, all right. You'd tell me but you'd have to kill me. That kind of thing. I gotcha. gotcha. Yeah, this is delicious. That's true. So good. So obviously we tasted the blonde, the IPA and then the hazy cannon hazy IPA.

Hugh Sisson (24:00.174)
Yeah, pretty much. As long as you didn't tell anybody, they'd be fine, but no, it's really good. Yeah.

Hugh Sisson (24:12.4)
Mm-hmm.

Laurie Forster (24:16.7)
Where do you see, since we're getting ready to go into a new year here, where do you see, are there any styles that we haven't talked about that you think are gonna be the next big thing in craft beers or any, you know, new weird stuff that you're working on?

Hugh Sisson (24:34.85)
I expect, expect IPAs to still dominate the category. I mean, so, you know, so we've got, you know, the loose and the hazy and then we have a citrus IPA and then we have a double IPA. and then we've got this whole new series that we're bringing out now called the loss navigator, which are nine and a half percent double IPAs. yeah. those are beers with true testicular fortitude. but, but they are.

Laurie Forster (24:56.986)
Wow.

Hugh Sisson (25:03.78)
So I still think IPA category is there. There's a lot of people who are talking about, you know, like light American lagers making a comeback. I, I answered that with a big maybe. I just don't see it. We can't, we, mean, the collective we have as craft brewers, we just don't have the economies of scale and the American consumer.

Laurie Forster (25:19.534)
Hmm

Laurie Forster (25:30.907)
Yes.

Hugh Sisson (25:33.722)
probably isn't I mean if that's the style of beer that they want why wouldn't they buy Budweiser or Miller or whatever at a much better price point so I I Question whether that's gonna come back. I Think things like you know the gold etc. Maybe the blonde ale they they may pose better opportunities overall You know one of the things that we're doing is that we're now branching into

Laurie Forster (25:57.468)
Okay.

Hugh Sisson (26:03.886)
soft drinks. I don't know if you've ever remembered the Dominion root beer. We're now producing this under license and we're developing a ginger beer to go along with it. Just to diversify what we do. And you saw a lot of breweries that got involved in the RTDs, the cocktails and the cans. mean, Dogfish has done a lot of that. So I think our industry is

Laurie Forster (26:06.364)
interesting. Okay.

Laurie Forster (26:14.255)
Great.

Hugh Sisson (26:33.07)
clearly in the process of contracting a little bit. And I think you're gonna see a lot of consolidation over the next couple of years. And I think we're gonna probably have to go through a little bit of a Darwinian correction overall. And then I think you're gonna begin to start seeing the creative juices coming back. But anyway, that's where it's gone. mean, it's...

Laurie Forster (26:48.764)
Mmm.

Hugh Sisson (26:59.856)
know, cannabis has had an effect on the industry. Gen Z has had an effect on the industry. And I think the overall economy has had an effect on the industry. yeah. yeah, no, definitely. I see the wine numbers. yeah, and even spirits are down now. So, this too shall pass.

Laurie Forster (27:10.18)
Yeah, wine too probably would be a similar story. Yeah.

Laurie Forster (27:21.018)
Wow. Where are all these sober people? want to know. I don't know any of them. Just kidding. so just, one last question and we appreciate so much sharing your time and information here. feel like I, I know so much more about beer and I appreciate that. if you could just have one wine, you know, they said one more wine. That's it. That's the last wine you'll ever have.

Hugh Sisson (27:26.446)
Ha ha ha!

Hugh Sisson (27:34.64)
Sure. huh.

Laurie Forster (27:50.716)
What would be your choice? What is your, I often talk about Barolo because as I say, it's my death row wine. You if I was only given one more wine before I go, what is your OMG wine?

Hugh Sisson (27:50.754)
huh.

Hugh Sisson (27:57.786)
Right.

Hugh Sisson (28:04.142)
What is My OMG wine. Hmm.

Laurie Forster (28:09.902)
I know, it's hard to pick.

Hugh Sisson (28:11.952)
probably a really Class A Chianti Classico.

Laurie Forster (28:22.204)
I like that. Italian reds, you had me on Italian reds, but that's it. There is so much better quality now. People don't always think of Chianti Classico because of their old notions of what Chianti used to be, but there's so much great wine now as well.

Hugh Sisson (28:28.172)
No, I... yeah.

Hugh Sisson (28:37.667)
Right.

There's one that's produced by Antonori called Bari Al Pasigiano. Have you ever had that one?

Laurie Forster (28:47.834)
I don't think so.

Hugh Sisson (28:49.058)
It's a property literally a mile further down the road from Tignanello. And it's just straight Chianti Classico and it's unbelievable. It's unbelievable. That and a good Bistecca for Antena, I'm in a biz.

Laurie Forster (28:55.448)
Okay.

Laurie Forster (29:02.17)
Wow, that's amazing. All right, I'm searching that out. Well, Hugh says, if folks want to check out Heavy Seas Beer or come visit you at the tasting room, where should they go to find out all things Heavy Seas?

Hugh Sisson (29:16.09)
Mm-hmm.

Hugh Sisson (29:20.185)
www.HSBeer.com, Heavy Seas Beer.com. It's all right there.

Laurie Forster (29:24.7)
Perfect, and if you go, tell them the wine coach sent you, and I know they'll take great care of you and get to see those two cannons. So that's inspiring me to get back to the brewery as well.

Hugh Sisson (29:33.583)
Yeah.

Hugh Sisson (29:36.91)
The cannons are really cool. you see King George III insignia on the cannon, it's way cool.

Laurie Forster (29:43.0)
Wow, that's very cool. Well, Houston, thank you so much. Cheers. We really appreciate you coming on the Sipping Point.

Hugh Sisson (29:48.88)
Cheers.

My pleasure. Thanks for the opportunity.