Hot Pizza and Anchovy Hops: The Fast Fashion Beer story
Fast Fashion’s Tinned Fish was an early preview for a new experimental hop codenamed Anchovy.
Matt Storm and his two Seattle locations of The Masonry are known for two things: wood fired pizza, and a deep and intensely curated beer list featuring obscure, rare and notable mixed culture wild ales and saisons. These pleasures are timeless, and have earned The Masonry a strong following from connoisseurs that line up for the latest exclusive beers that are hard to find elsewhere. But there is a time and place for everything, and just like the disposable trends of celebrity culture couture and the fashion industry he is embracing the here today and gone tomorrow beer geek can drop culture.
In September 2020, Storm caught many by surprise when he announced mid-pandemic a new brewery project called Fast Fashion. The first beer “Hot Pizza” dropped in 16oz cans in October, and despite having no media coverage and very little info it sold out quickly based simply on the devoted Masonry fanbase. But who was making the beer, and where it is brewed has been as cloudy as the 100% Hazy IPA lineup and as devoid of info as the stark website landing page. Nonetheless, via a well read instagram account Fast Fashion has continued to drop (and sell out) a series of small batch beers in the Seattle and Portland with a growing amount of buzz.
The origins of Fast Fashion start with a one-off double dry-hopped hazy IPA released by Stillwater Artisan Ales back in 2018. But how does an east coast Baltimore, MD based gypsy brewery known for wild farmhouse ales get tied into this Seattle beer story?
Brian Strumke is an artist and DJ who pursued his homebrewing passions to open one of the first pioneers of gypsy brewing called Stillwater Artisan Ales in 2010. Over the years Stillwater has built up a reputation for innovation both in their farmhouse ales and in their innovative brewing practices that happen all over the country. Over time they have branched out into other styles and international distribution, recently launching a hopped hard seltzer line called Sparkling Stillwater.
In 2018 Strumke moved from Brooklyn, NY to Seattle, Washington.
Strumke: I ended up in Seattle because it’s the most lawless state I could find for my needs!
It was only an amount of time until Strumke met Matt Storm who had established his own Seattle Farmhouse Fest that draws brewers from across the country. The pair became fast friends but it wasn’t until the pandemic that the opportunity arose to form a new brand together. Storm had already been thinking about starting a brewery, but it was commiserating with Strumke over beers and the impending COVID-19 shutdown of bars and restaurants last Spring that put the plan into motion. With Strumke’s jet setting across the world to oversee Stillwater production and attending festivals near and far put on hold along with most flights, suddenly the idea of a localized brand of hop driven beers in cans made a lot more sense. And for Storm the shutdown just cemented his already his dim outlook for the future of on-premise establishments like his own. It might have been time for something new.
Storm: I have been of the opinion for awhile that beer bars are dying. People don’t seem to see the value in especially what I do, like a very highly curated list. It’s a bunch of beers that people haven’t heard of that are really expensive. I just don’t think the market is really there anymore.
Though Storm admits that people buy up anything he puts on tap at his tiny Queen Anne location of The Masonry, but even then it’s almost a feudal enterprise trying to make money on such a small scale. Pubs are just not as profitable these days and now with a family to take care of and the pandemic putting things into sharp focus by hastening the demise of the non-brewery affiliated beer bar. The time seemed right to explore new business models.
Storm: It’s kind of evolve or die, I think it’s something I should have done awhile ago…It was the right time for it, and it was pretty necessary.
Strumke: It was the perfect storm…Matt Storm!
Storm: Fuck you!
Fast Fashion Beer founders Brian Strumke (left) and Matt Storm (right)
Both Storm and Strumke have different visual arts backgrounds, both involved with design work and musicality. Storm is a designer with no brewing experience, and Strumke an illustrator and former DJ with a ton of brewing and recipe design background but no hospitality experience. Together their pieces fit together like tetris.
Strumke: Matt wanted to do the IPA thing, and It fits in well with what I was doing with Stillwater, because it’s the one thing I don’t have is a local outlet. Stillwater is distributed internationally, but I need to make beers that hold up in transit so it’s no good to be shipping hazy IPA’s around.
Storm had an outlet with two Seattle locations of The Masonry and tons of bottle shops who would happily carry cans if they didn’t sell them all in-house. What they didn’t have was a name, or even a brewhouse to make the beer.
That’s when Strumke thought of the one-off Stillwater beer called Fast Fashion from a few years before. That beer was originally intended to kick off a full series of Hazy IPA’s, but they had trouble getting the beer to turn out right at the 100bbl Conneticut production facility most Stillwater packaged beer comes from.
Strumke: We couldn’t get it right on such a large scale, we couldn’t make a banger hazy, atleast now how I wanted it. So I just stopped production.
But the name had stuck in his brain, and when he suggested it to Storm for the new beer brand he loved it.
Storm: It’s so good!
Strumke: So many breweries just make the same base, change the hops and change the label. I called it Fast Fashion because it’s tongue in-cheek, it’s like here today and gone tomorrow. I thought it was the perfect name to represent the whole hyped up can drop culture. It’s Fast Fashion! There’s nothing wrong with it.
For all his passion for the project and NE-style IPA’s, Strumke enjoys drinking West Coast style IPA’s the majority of the time, and he holds up a bottle of Sierra Nevada Celebration he has recently been enjoying to demonstrate.
Strumke: I am a big fan of the whole pacific northwest influence on IPA’s, I like a little bit of an edge and bitterness. A lot of hazy’s these days are just flabby, they lack the bitterness, it wears on my palate. Between the malt bill and the lack of bitterness it’s hard to take in more than one or two.
Storm: If we came out with a Sierra Nevada Celebration like beer tomorrow we couldn’t sell it to save our lives. If we want our beer to be drank in the best possible state it needs to be a beer people are excited to drink. So how to we make a beer that people are excited to drink right now, that we are also excited to make, is what we are going to be trying to do this whole time.
So Fast Fashion Beer landed on approach that puts the hops first, both in flavor and aromatic contributions as well as a more bitter finish that leaves you wanting another. So far every Fast Fashion beer has been a hazy IPA, and will continue to be a hop focused brewery even when they may branch out into other styles.
Masonry Pizza and a Fast Fashion Thin Crust hazy pale ale.
Though both Fast Fashion founders have their day jobs running separate businesses, the new beer brand is a true partnership that exists on it’s own merits outside of Stillwater and Masonry. The collaborative nature of the brand is truly a two-hander with no employees or distribution agreement. Instead they operate on an alternating proprietorship arrangement with No Boat Brewing in Snoqualmie, Washington. The two companies share a brewhouse, with No Boat able to use a canning line that Fast Fashion purchased as they were able to save money they would have had to invest into licensing, demo and equipment. Working together they were able to get Fast Fashion off the ground as quickly and affordably as the name suggests. While Strumke is the brewer and point person on recipe development, he is also training Storm to become a brewer in his own right.
Strumke: The way I do Stillwater and the way that is setup I have taken over the visual art as well as the recipe design but then I send it out to have it executed elsewhere. This is a different role where I am trying to pass on information to another person, I am trying to bring him into a new realm of understanding beer and not just feeding recipes to someone who’s already trained. It’s a learning experience for both of us. We fight sometimes and that’s cool.
Storm: I dont think we fight that much! We have not argued at all over whether something is good or not. If we don’t like where something is at ‘then fuck it it’s dead to us’ and I love that. I think there are going to be some really cool things that come out of this.
Matt Storm and Brian Strumke at hop selection in Yakima
One of the early triumphs is their own distinct hop variety from Segal Ranch in Grandview, Washington. Nicknamed “Anchovy” by Strumke, the unusual but flavorful experimental variety is said to be bursting with jolly rancher watermelon notes, and was featured in their second beer “Tinned Fish.” The brands short and punchy names are indicative of their sense of humor that satirizes the industry and pop culture, while also poking fun at themselves. The so-called Anchovy hop will become more prominent in next years beers as the pair have leaned on their industry cred to sponsor the hop with the grower and pick up the bulk of it’s production during the next harvest. So next year when they bring back their semi-mainstay beer “Hot Pizza” and tweak it to include their new hop, they can label it “Hot Pizza: with Anchovy.” The pizza references have continued with recent release “Thin Crust” a hazy pale ale.
Fast Fashion’s latest beer is “Compliment Sandwich” a wheat IPA that showcases vegan humor and their aesthetic of colorful monotone can designs that recall something that Andy Warhol might create if he was alive today. Cultivated by an instagram following, Fast Fashion is dropping beers more frequently as they get into the groove of production and have started to make regular Portland deliveries. The 20bbl batch size, allows the flexibility you would expect from a brewery called Fast Fashion that hasn’t brewed a single beer twice. It’s a streamlined process, a bare bones operation that is designed to be slick and malleable like any small artisanal brand should be in 2021. This is so far gone from flagship beers and core offerings as to become almost unrecognizable from the craft beer scene of just a decade ago, you could even say it’s throwaway just like the fast fashionable trends that inspired it, and that’s exactly the point.
“We want to really embrace fresh and hoppy beer meant to be drank quickly and then go away.”
Follow @FastFasionBeer on instagram.