An Interview with Ruse Brewing by Fortside Brewing’s Paul Thurston
The latest in an ongoing series in which brewers interview their colleagues in frank and insightful conversations that offer different perspectives on the craft beer industry.
Shaun Kalis and Devin Benware of Ruse Brewing
By Fortside Brewing head brewer Paul Thurston -
I've known Shaun and Devin since they were both working in the Culmination Brewery - Shaun as he rented time and space to get Ruse Brewing off the ground and Devin in his former role as Culmination brewer. I was drawn to the energy and artistry of the group of people working in that space and enjoyed absorbing some of that whenever I'd pop in or we'd work on a project together. Later, as Shaun and Devin combined forces and Ruse moved into their own space, I've always been impressed with not only the fantastic beers but their ability to balance an ethos of constant evolution with simply having fun making beer. Brewer to brewer, that joy in the evolution of the craft speaks volumes, and judging from the success that Ruse has had it's clear that message resonates vibrantly with the craft beer loving public as well.
The following is a transcript from a casual discussion Paul, Devin and Shaun had at Ruse Brewing near the tail end of summer.
Paul Thurston, head brewer at Fortside Brewing in Vancouver, Washington
Paul Thurston (PT): I think guys have a pretty unique and cool origin story, so I thought we’d start there. Would you guys mind running me through the years that preceded moving into this place?
Shaun Kalis (SK): Yeah, Devin and I moved around between a few different breweries over the last total of 15 years…
Devin Benware (DB): Combined, yeah…
SK: And we crossed paths and met as brewers at Culmination and we started an alternating proprietorship out of there and started brewing our own brand on the side while still brewers for them. I think we were one of two alternating proprietorship brewers operating at that time.
PT: All self-distribution?
SK: Yup, we drove around, we had a pick-up truck. We’d only do like 20 barrels a month out of there; we’d work on our stuff a lot. Lots of late nights, bottling till like 3 o clock in the morning sometimes.
DB: It was a lot of work, but we were able to build a brand that at least all the industry people and the beer people had heard of before we even opened here.
PT: It seems like a really cool way to both work on your recipes and connect with customers while you’re building the plan and eventually this space.
SK: I feel at the time we were, not like embarrassed, but we were like man, we don’t even have a brewery and it’s hard to convey that to people. But looking back it was the most valuable thing ever to have- number one our own beer to sell, and we met so many people driving around selling it ourselves so they got to know us directly, bar and restaurant owners, beer bar owners. Looking back we’re like wow, we actually had a chance to build something up, instead of opening up this space and go zero to 100, we were able to have a name and beers and won a couple medals at Oregon Beer Awards before we had a spot too, so that helped.
PT: That’s huge. And you guys opened in this space, what has it been, 3 years?
SK: It was July of 2018.
DB: We just had our anniversary thing. We just released a bunch of cans, we didn’t actually have any sort of parties. We’re still not actually open in here- we’re able to use the lobby though, but we’re still putting together a plan. We were going to open back in July and then things started popping off again so we pulled back.
SK: But yeah it’s been a good ride, we both admired each other’s work ethic and upbringing, back to what we were talking about, like ideas of what we had, visions of a company and the beer we were going to have coming out of it, they were the same ideas and man it worked out really well.
PT: How would you guys describe that - your beer identity and brand identity?
SK: We were always into a kind of artistic approach to the branding…
DB: And trying to stay small through the pressures of…you know, if grocery stores are calling you for beer, sometimes say no. Focusing on actually staying small and not just saying it and getting big anyway because you had the opportunity to.
SK: The same vision of the beers and the art, and we both love music a lot so we wanted to incorporate that into the spot, so all those things were attributes we wanted to highlight.
PT: I’ve always felt that with you guys, even before at Culmination but definitely now here, that kind of tie between arts and music and culture and the way you guys approach beer making and the way you present your beers…
DB: Thanks man.
SK: Thanks that’s exactly what we’re trying convey and we also have some other friends that are around locally that we were influenced a lot by, like Upright and stuff like that. I’d always liked their approach too and when we were getting going here it was inspiring to just look at your friends and peers and stuff and see what they’re doing.
PT: How would you describe the way your love of music fits in with the way you approach beer making in general and the craft?
DB: Well for one we always have music playing, like 24/7.
SK: Just kind of layering things, like with a band recording an album you have all your instruments and you have to put them all together to make the song. You get all your parts together, and each part is just as important as the other parts, you know, like if you’re making hoppy beer the malt is still just as important as the hops, or yeast. It’s the same thing in a song, the drum beat is just as important as the guitar solo.
PT: So as far as the creative process- as brewers we have to come at this different ways depending on the project we’re engaged in, in recipe formulation whether you start at the end for a particular flavor profile or if you’re starting with some raw materials you really love and want to use in a particular process. Do you guys have a preference in that way? Do you prefer to start at the finished profile and work backwards or start at the raw materials and work forwards?
DB: Well we listen a lot to what the customer’s feedback is, that’s what we base, almost purely, what we’re brewing on. We listen to feedback and then tweak the recipe every time. We’ll notice certain beers will be more popular than others, we’ll see what attributes those beers had and try to recreate them without just completely copying the beer over and over.
SK: Exactly, just listen to the customer and dissect it ourselves too, does the team all like this? Number one does the customer like it? Is it selling well and well received? And number two do we like it as the creators of it, we’ll get input from the team and say hey what would you want to change a little bit? But it’s all customer driven.
PT: How do you guys gauge that, is that mostly direct conversations with your customers, is it social media..?
SK: Yeah directly at the bar or in this case selling beer to go.
DB: We’re still really connected to the customers who come in, we’ll talk to everybody and see what they like, and yeah also following on Instagram and see what people like there.
SK: Of course some of that is with a grain of salt, like on Untappd and stuff.
PT: Sure.
SK: But I mean you can tell when something is well received. Sometimes we’ll have a beer that we love that doesn’t score high on those things, but…
DB: We’ll still make them; we just have to balance it with stuff that will sell.
PT: That’s my exact next question, how do you find that balance between the passion projects that might not sell too well but you need to do to kind of keep the creative juices flowing, so to speak?
SK: We still throw them in there. We used to be more of a farmhouse-centric brewery, when we first started all this, and you can’t even find farmhouse stuff on our menu that often anymore, and even though we wish it was different, we’re also happy we can make other stuff than just one certain style only. I think that’s challenged us more to get better at more styles that we didn’t make in the past.
DB: I think we rack our brains almost more, or equally so, trying to figure out how to brew a perfect lager as we do trying to figure out how to brew a palatable hazy IPA or a fruited sour or something because those beers that sell well are actually…
SK: Extremely difficult to make.
DB: It takes a lot of research. Everyone kind of looks at these hype-y styles and just thinks like ‘ya just throw a ton of hops at it’ or ‘just throw fruit in it’.
PT: That’s the easy thing to say, but I totally agree, it’s not true at all in the end.
DB: There’s a lot of extra processes and steps and actually a lot more time- our hazy IPAs take 7-10 days longer than a lot of west coast IPAs.
SK: Like Devin said too, just trial and error, some of these beers, especially the hazy stuff we’re doing now, we’ve done so many of them that it’s been good trial and error for us- customer feedback mixed with what works, what didn’t work, either balling it up and throwing it in the trash or taking part of that beer and applying it to the next one.
DB: It feels cool when you can look at a style and say we’ve never made that before and we’ll ask some of our industry friends “how’d you do that” and “what did you use” and “where did you get this from” and “at what point did you add this in”. We’re still learning a lot of stuff, which I think is exciting even if it’s kind of the sellout or easy thing to do by making things that sell well just because they’re popular right now in the beer world.
PT: I understand that attitude is out there but I strongly disagree, it is just about constant improvement and making the beers people want so that you can make the beers you want too, it all plays into each other.
SK: We’ll come up with beers that we know aren’t the ones keeping the lights on here, they’re fun beers that we like that probably will be sitting around for 4 months, but it’s good to do those every once in a while. Like Devin said we’ve got to have a balance between what keeps the lights on here and also what drives our creative energy. But if we can knock both those out at the same time, that’s great too.
PT: And having those resources around for the styles you’re not used to brewing, being able to reach out to people you know in the scene and pick their brains immediately is obviously a huge part of being a brewer in the Portland area…
DB: Yeah I think things progress in cities like Portland -and obviously a lot of other cities- because so many resources, you don’t have to wait for the customers over the next 3 months tell you what they like, you can have five of your brewer friends over and they can tell you if they think it’s garbage or not.
PT: Anything about the overall Portland area scene you guys don’t love?
-Long Pause-
PT: Not to muckrake too much, but you know…(Laughing)…We can edit this out…
DB: I don’t know,’ I think it’s awesome being so close to so many different breweries.
DB: I think post 2014 or so, everyone was opening small breweries, I think the creativity just, because these smaller batches were turning quicker…
SK: So the competitiveness is now at its highest here…
PT: But it’s a fun competitiveness, right? It’s not like a…
SK: Totally, but I mean there is no margin for error anymore, consumer palates are trained well, so much better than they were 10 years ago, people know what off flavors are now in beer. Before they were like, “whoa, this has a funny butterscotch taste to it” or something, and those things, I hate to say it, because we want all breweries to exist, but we feel like nowadays, with so many, it’s just a very competitive region.
PT: I think that’s totally true - it’s been fun to feel that extra drive to push myself and work harder in improving my craft that comes from that collective bar raising. I’ve probably learned more over the last, say 5 years, than I had the previous 10 years. We’ve all had to just to keep up.
SK: Our philosophy has always been- we can sit and overanalyze the science behind all day long, but at the end of the day if it doesn’t smell or taste good you can just cut your losses and start over, it’s better to…
DB: We’ve definitely dumped batches of beer before.
SK: We’ve dumped so many barrels, you can ask other people that do barrel aged beers, it happens. If we can utilize, say out of 8 barrels, 4 that are awesome and we dump the other 4, then we’re happy. We’ll have some great beers in there, and those beers will forever be better than the ones we threw out.
PT: So you guys have, what, 3- or 4-year-round beers, couple annual releases…
DB: Year-round is a good phrase…
SK: Yeah 3- or 4-year rounds, sometimes they come and go too…
DB: Not “flagships” in any way, just things that we constantly brew, we don’t have anything that you go to the grocery store and it’s always in a 4 pack or a 6 pack there, but…
SK: It’s been pretty fun coming up with —if we have one silver lining about all this crap that’s going on- it’s been really fun coming up with all these one-off cans. We’ve never seen so many cans in the history of our company, I mean everything we’re canning. We’re doing some -very little- draft only beer, for Day One Distribution, our distributor, but hardly any.
PT: Same for us at Fortside really, I mean we’re pinching off 5 or 6 kegs from every can run and everything is else going to cans. An occasional draft only release, but trying to limit that as much as possible. But yeah, it has been fun in that way, doing way more one-off stuff than we normally do in cans.
SK: We never thought we’d have 30 hazy IPAs in cans, and west coast IPAs, and…
DB: Yeah we’re doing a couple new releases almost every single week.
PT: How far do you guys plan that stuff out, do you have…
SK: Um like a week before…
PT: Ok so ya’ll like to stay totally nimble on that?
DB: Not as far out as we maybe could, since we’re so small…
SK: Some stuff…
DB: We planned our fresh hop beers out…
SK: We’ve got the winter beers, we’ve got a bunch of imperial stouts coming this year, barrel aged versions…
DB: We’re getting better at it.
SK: And you talk to distribution and they’re like “can we get a little more of a game plan here?” and we’re like an improv, you know if you’re talking about music, we like to improv…
PT: There’s pluses and minuses to that too that too right? But regardless you have to stay nimble and respond to the market.
SK: That’s the benefit to being small, if you’re driving straight, you can take a right turn at any time and go down that path, and we love that aspect of the size we’re at, and even if we’re a little bit bigger we could still do that, but we never want to get to the point where we’re too big where we can’t change the path and the direction.
PT: What kind of percentage of your beer is going to Day One or to outside distribution?
SK: Not much right now.
DB: Currently, maybe, 20%.
SK: Usually more like 35%, when it’s normal business.
DB: We’re moving more volume now just in cans, like everyone is buying a case at a time when they come in, if they make the trip over, they want to buy a case. So, we’re moving slightly more volume out of this tap room than we were early fall last year, but obviously the margins are…
PT: Much, much lower, right. Ok, so, where do you see Ruse in 5 years, what do you guys plan or dream about for the future?
SK: Right before Covid hit, we were looking for a second tap room.
DB: We got really close actually…
SK: We’re still looking around, we’re not in any rush…
PT: Glad you guys didn’t sign a lease, right before…
DB: Yeah, being stretched right now would be pretty nuts.
SK: But yeah, a small, satellite tap room, in North-ish Portland, at least north of here, we want to cover this area, we’ve got so many regulars that come here, we don’t want to take anything away from them. We’ve talked about maybe in a couple years having a small production brewery. We never want to get huge but we could do 5-6,000 barrels, which is big, you know? But we never want to be huge…
DB: Yeah 5 years out, I mean, god…
PT: (Laughing) who knows where the world will be in 5 years, yeah…
DB: We go by 1 to 2 year plans. Right now, the plan is second tap room.
PT: You’re thinking just a tap room, no brewing facility in that space?
SK: Yeah just like a 1,000 sq ft place with outside -we don’t have outside seating here- so we really want to have outside seating at that place, a patio.
PT: Could you make it a little closer to my place? Just a little farther east if you’re looking at North Portland.
SK: We’ve been looking all over the place like Mississippi, we were looking at Kenton for a minute…
DB: St. Johns. Typical qualities, lots of foot traffic…
SK: At the end of the day, just the right location. So we’re just being patient.
PT: Maybe another silver lining of covid right, there should be some spaces opening up. Not ideal but…
SK: You feel bad though, maybe a restaurant was in there or something. So we’ll see.
DB: But at the same time, yeah, if we could help someone get out of a lease they can’t afford, it would be cool to somehow be able to help them out by taking the space over, but you’d always feel a little…
PT: Yeah, it’s just a weird situation for sure.
SK: We’ve also talked about brewing, not necessarily totally exclusive beers, but some beers you could just get over there or vice versa, but yeah- we’ll see. We still want to have the same kind of vibe we have here, and older building with wood then a lot of the art and music, we want to do all those things.
DB: If we were vying for like a new construction type of tap room, we would have easily found one back when we were looking back in last September and October. Our real estate guy kept show us all these brand new, in the bottom of an apartment building types of places. While there were some cool spaces it just wasn’t what we wanted. The aesthetic we wanted to try to find was an older building…
SK: We wanted them to kind of mirror each other and have the same vibe, the bar would probably be the same material…
PT: This building is so dope, it really is a perfect space for your guys vibe.
DB: A lot of people told us we were insane when we said we were going to put a tap room down here, with no food, I mean I used to drive down here so many times and I never even looked down this street. But I always got kind of a weird feeling when I drove -my girlfriend used to live in Sellwood- whenever I drove by this intersection, I always got this weird feeling that something was going to happen here.
PT: Huh, that’s cool.
SK: Anyway, we’ll see man, we were also planning on expanding a little bit here too, so…
PT: But like keeping the same footprint or?
SK: What we were going to do before covid, which we’re still waiting to do, is switch out 3- 20 barrel tanks and a 10 barrel tank for 4- 30’s. That’ll move us to, what, 3,000 barrels?
DB: Yeah, I mean depending on what we’re brewing, it all depends on what we’re brewing…
SK: And what we can sell, and hopefully people will still be buying beer (laughs).
DB: Yeah, I mean if this is a west coast IPA brewery in this size we could probably be making 500 more barrels a year if we were making just west coasts, we could be turning beers in 2 weeks instead of 4, our hazies usually take around 28 days.
SK: We make a lot more west coasts too, which is really fun. We’re actually going back in time with some of these west coasts, making beers we grew up drinking, that are pretty dank and piney.
PT: With a little less IBUs right? I really like these new west coasts with all those classic notes but less…
SK: We’ve actually been doing more with more IBUs.
DB: Well, more IBUs for us.
SK: (Laughing) Yes more IBUs for Ruse, we do pretty soft beers. In competitions our American IPAs score really well, but they’re always dinged on IBUs, not being bitter enough. Couple have made medal rounds and just never got passed 4th into a medal because of bitterness levels. So we’ve played around with some new recipes that are more aggressive. We brewed another west coast IPA just today that’s going to be pretty dry and pretty light bodied and going to have a huge hopload of nelson and mosaic.
DB: We have found that going back in time on the west coast IPAs has been more popular than trying to throw a bunch of cool, crazy, new school hops in. Which is kind of funny, we’re looking back to 10 or 15 years ago IPAs and just making them nuanced and less bitter than those beers were.
SK: And taking bits and pieces of what we’ve learned. Fast forward to 2020, and make a new version of the same beer we were drinking in 2006. We really love that dank pine of centennial and columbus and we love the softness of hazy IPAs, so let’s incorporate some of that. So water profile on most of these beers is pretty similar to our hazies.
PT: 100-120 ppm chloride range?
SK: Totally, yeah. We’ve been learning a lot about lagers too.
DB: We’ve had some fun collabs, but we don’t try to fuck with lagers. We don’t want to reinvent; we just try to make them as classic and…just make them as we want to drink them. We’re not trying to reinvent the lager wheel or anything.
PT: Yeah as far as our beers I totally agree, with our west coasts I usually don’t mess with chloride too much or try to ramp up the fullness that way, but just do a lot to minimize bitterness, a lot of cooled down whirlpool hopping and heavy dry hop, 45-50 IBU range. But IBUs are a state of mind you know?
SK: Somebody asked Devin on Instagram or something what the IBUs of a beer were, and we were like “what are IBUs?” and the guy sent us a link to an article on IBUs (laughing).
DB: He was like “Seriously, you guys don’t know what IBUs are?!?” (laughing). I wanted to keep going but…
SK: We pick up a lot of bitterness with dry hops and huge late charges too…I’d be curious, we’ll get some stuff tested soon.
PT: It’ll be totally different than what we’ve been telling people. I do like to just say, only half-jokingly, that IBUs are just a state of mind, since the presentation can be so different from the number.
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From here we paused to taste through some beers- Fortside Bounty ’19, Fortside Ripple Effect, Fortside Palisade #3, Ruse Pilsner, and Ruse Shifting Dreams
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PT: Alright, you guys want to try this silly word association thing I put together? It might be totally dumb, but only one way to find out…So just respond to these words with another word or a set of words, whatever pops into your head.
DB: Like a couple words or..?
PT: Whatever, whatever you feel. Hazy IPA.
SK: Money makers.
DB: I just think of hazy IPA when you say hazy IPA.
PT: (Laughing) That’s fair. The Grateful Dead.
SK: The best band ever.
DB: Bears.
Luc Goovaerts (Ruse Brewer, rad dude): The worst band ever…
PT: (Laughing) Ok. This actually reminds me Shaun that I meant to touch on how it was you partnered with a brewer from Vermont who doesn’t even like Phish…
SK: (Laughing) I know! I actually took Devin to a Trey band show in San Diego. We were down there for an event and I had the hardest time finding tickets, but I said “Devin if I get tickets will you go?” He’s like sure!
DB: I had a great time.
SK: We did have a great time. We were drinking 24 oz PBRs all night, it was great (laughing).
DB: I like the music, especially live.
SK: Trey band is great too, with the horns and stuff.
DB: Alright let’s keep going.
PT: Beer Competitions.
SK: Beneficial for feedback.
DB: Odd.
PT: Pilsner.
SK: Awesome.
DB: Tasty.
PT: DDH.
SK: Isn’t that a move that the guy from Wrestlemania used to do?
PT: (Laughing) that would be a good can design, like a WWF guy wrestling a hop.
DB: I just picture Instagram.
SK: Instagram, yeah, there you go.
PT: Oak.
SK: Vanilla
DB: Grain…this is harder than I thought it’d be.
PT: Is it? (Laughing) How about this one then - shotguns.
SK: Fridays.
DB: Late nights. Or afternoon (laughing).
PT: Seltzer.
DB: Polar. I just think of seltzer as a non-alcoholic thing, hard seltzers haven’t gone in my head yet.
PT: Kettle sour.
SK: Meh.
DB: Let’s go back to the if done wrong thing…
SK: There’s a lot more bad ones than good ones.
DB: You don’t want to boil them when you’re hung over.
PT: (Laughing) Right? You’d have to be shot gunning while kettle souring to get through that one. Hop creep.
DB: Will ruin your day.
PT: Will ruin your production schedule.
SK: Have to cancel canning runs.
DB: That’s one of the reasons we have to have such a tentative brew schedule, you just have to wait. It’s ready when it’s ready and if it’s not ready, we’re not going to can it.
PT: Yup. Alright guys well that’s all I have, thanks for making the time. Now I can turn this off and we can taste a couple more beers.
SK and DB: Thanks everyone!
Paul Thurston at Fortside Brewing
Paul Thurston bio:
Paul Thurston is the Head Brewer at Fortside brewing in Vancouver, WA and holds a side gig in customer innovations with Mainstem Malt. He developed a deep passion for homebrewing, and craft beer culture while in college in Eugene, OR, and the rabbit hole enveloped him from there. He attended the Siebel Institute/Doemens Academy World Brewer's Full Diploma course followed by stints at Rogue, BridgePort, and Base Camp prior to his current roles.
Left to right: Shaun Kalis, Luc Goovaerts, and Devin Benware
Shaun Kalis grew up in the Detroit metro area, and moved to Portland in 2006 with his now wife Dana Kalis. He landed his first brewing job that year, and has been a brewer in Portland ever since. Shaun met his business partner Devin Benware while they were brewers at Culmination Brewing. Kalis and Benware officially opened Ruse in 2018 and are insanely proud of the team they build and the beers they make. Phish is his favorite band and tacos and sushi are his favorite foods.
Devin Benware grew up in Vermont, at 17 he began home brewing on a whim one summer day with a couple friends . Devin held a variety of cooking jobs in Vermont before moving out to Portland in 2011. Devin started brewing professionally at 23, met Shaun Kalis at Culmination and designed their idea of a perfect pocket sized production brewery/taproom which opened in the summer of 2018. Both have a deep passion for the classic styles that they drink on the regular and apply that same focus and creative and scientific approach to current 2020’s beer style trends.
