Recently the head brewer Garrett Crowell announced that he was leaving Jester King to open up his own brewery. We are excited to hear that Jester King promoted Averie Swanson to be the head brewer and we asked her few question.
How does it feel to be promoted to head brewer? Will this be a big transition for you?
I am super excited about the position! Honestly, I don’t think it will be a big transition. I imagine I will be doing a bit more recipe development in this role than I was before, but otherwise I don’t think my day to day role up here will not change much.
Will you continue with the current Jester King recipes or will you be creating new ones?
Honestly, we don’t really have many recipes that stay the same from batch to batch- maybe a handful of beers that we make have the same recipe every batch. Petit Prince won’t be changing anytime soon. All of us up here enjoy experimenting with flavor combinations, so I imagine there will be plenty of cool new beers in our future.
What are your favorite beers from Jester King and or other breweries?
Of our beers, I think Petit Prince would have to be my favorite. It is the beer you can drink all day and still get stuff done. From other breweries– it is tough to narrow it down, but some of my absolute favorites would include Tipopils from Birrificio Italiano, Live Oak’s Grodziskie, and Bowie from Oxbow Brewing.
What can we expect in the near future?
All kinds of stuff! We have a few more fruited SPON beers in the works, and we are coming into barrel blending season, so there will be several of those beers coming out fairly soon as well!
I really enjoyed the Buddha’s Brew, will you be making more?
Possibly! We enjoy working with the kind folks over at Buddha’s Brew and were pleased with how that beer turned out this last time around, so perhaps next year we will get another batch going!
Here is the official press release from Jester King Brewery:
We have a very exciting announcement to make at Jester King Brewery! We could not be more pleased to announce that our Brewery Production Manager Averie Swanson has been promoted to Head Brewer!
Averie has been with us at Jester King for over four years now. She has risen from volunteer, to apprentice, to brewer, to Brewery Production Manager, to Head Brewer! She has displayed wonderful commitment, intelligence, ingenuity, and leadership along the way. Her promotion is testament to the power of hard work and dedication.
As our Brewery Production Manager, Averie oversaw and ran beer making at Jester King. She coordinated our brewing and fermentation schedule, managed barrel aging, blending, and fruit refermentation, supervised our brewers and packaging team, sourced raw materials, came up with scores of creative new ideas for beers, and fixed innumerable everyday problems through sheer commitment and grit. She will continue on with all of these responsibilities as Head Brewer.
On top of all these duties, Averie has been a wealth of new and powerful ideas for other parts of the business, as a member of Jester King’s management team. She has and will continue to represent Jester King with professionalism and class at home and abroad by managing our offsite events and giving brewery tours.
Overall, we could not be more pleased with the job Averie has done over the years at Jester King, and can not think of a more deserved and qualified person for this promotion. We’re excited to see an important driver of our process and product over the last several years take the helm. We fully expect her to continue to do great things for us for years to come!
If you happen across Averie at the brewery or out there in the beer world, I’d encourage you to congratulate her on this most merited accomplishment.
Cheers,
Jeffrey Stuffings
Founder
Jester King Brewery
