358: Bill Cherry of Switchback Enjoys the Slow Burn of Learning Through Doing

Innovation in beer has been accelerating for the past decade as breweries—excited by new styles and techniques, and feeding a culture of newness incentivized by social apps—churn out a relentless quantity of new beers in new formats with new labels. However, to hear Bill Cherry tell it, the choices he’s made at Switchback over the past two decades have been driven more by slowness than speed.

Packaging in 22-ounce bombers so they could dial in packaging before moving to more popular formats, or pursuing innovation in smoked beer because demand (and competition) in that niche are small, have afforded the brewery time and space to figure it out and build demand organically, always focusing first on the beer and its quality.

The results have paid off over recent years, with 2022 gold and 2023 bronze medals at the World Beer Cup for Katie’s Love Poem, their grodziskie. But that’s just the kindling, as their broader Flynn on Fire series has seen them tackle and learn from a vast array of different smoked beers. Cherry loves smoked beer because they’re harder to sell to consumers—there isn’t a built-in market for them, so they have to create one, and he loves that challenge as well as the runway for lower-stakes experimentation.

In this episode, he talks through that counterintuitive strategy and how it relates to their approach to innovation, including:

• designing Switchback Ale based on pieces of other inspirational beers
• growing slowly to make sure beer quality is always top priority
• packaging draft only for the first 10 years of the brewery until they could afford a quality bottling line
• homing in on smoked because because “nobody likes smoked beers, but they should”
• creating the smoke-o-meter scale for conveying smokiness to consumers
• step-mashing for flavor, not just attenuation
• maintaining a living yeast pitch that’s going on 2,000-plus generations
• balancing hop flavor and smoke aroma in smoked IPA

And more.

“if you can get people to drink something that they don’t know they want, that’s true craft,” says Cherry.

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