Relevant Coffee launches new IRRELEVANT BEER brewery from industry veterans
“New brewery makes Irrelevant Beer” and “Irrelevant Beer brewery from Relevant Coffee Roaster plans to prove their worth” are just a few of the scrapped humorous headlines about the latest Portland-area brewery.
Irrelevant Beer team left to right: Quin Tinling, Mitch Montgomery, & Sebastian Lynch
Irrelevant Beer is a new brewery from some of the folks behind downtown Vancouver, Washington’s Relevant Coffee with industry and stone cold brew veterans attached. Sebastian Lynch, formerly of Trap Door Brewing, and Quin Tinling formerly of Level Beer, Wayfinder, and Pinthouse Pizza are heading up the brewery operations making contemporary West Coast styles and innovative coffee beers. Irrelevant’s taproom tasting room has quietly soft opened, and their first in-house brewed beers are hitting taps after a series of collaborations with some of the best area breweries like Ruse and Grains of Wrath.
Sebastian Lynch, Sara Wakeman, and Relevant Coffee owner Mitch Montgomery and his longtime friend and local businessman Don Walker, make up the Irrelevant Beer ownership group.
Mitch Montgomery grew up in Issaquah, WA, but moved to Phoenix, Arizona after attending Washington State University. A long distance relationship with his girlfriend and now wife brought him back to Washington where he fell in love with Vancouver. He founded Relevant Coffee and started roasting beans in 2015, starting small with pop-ups at local farmers markets before they opened a cafe in 2017.
“My first job was in a café working as a Barista, I quickly decided I enjoyed making coffee for people and the Hospitality industry was my jam,” says Montgomery. “I really like simple easy to remember names and I decided on Relevant Coffee because the more I thought about coffee and café culture the more I realized how “relevant” it was to peoples lives. People make new and continued connections over coffee, people make their living through coffee, coffee has a way to make the world a smaller place by letting consumers taste a terroir of where the coffee is grown.
Prior to the pandemic, Montgomery planned to grow the brand and open more cafes, but the shut downs necessitated a pivot into cold brew production in 2021 and that has since taken off and become a large part of the business. That is how Montgomery met his partner in Irrelevant Beer - Sebastian Lynch.
Montgomery had homebrewed for a stint in the early aughts after he had gotten out of college. He enjoyed the breadth of beer styles that could be made at home because there just wasn’t that many available at the time in the larger supermarkets in his area. Coffee has many similarities to beer, not only to stouts, but in the nuances and flavor profiles and connection to ingredients, roasting, and temperatures. Lynch was the head brewer at nearby Trap Door Brewing, and a regular at Relevant Coffee who had collaborated with them on making an American Cream Ale with coffee. When Montgomery was getting the Relevant Cold Brew production running he heard that Lynch was no longer with Trap Door, and thought “He [Lynch] was the perfect person to take charge of Relevant’s brewing needs, he tuned out to be excellent at making great coffee,” says Montgomery.
Making cold brew together, Montgomery and Lynch started joking about how fun it would be to make beer and cold brew in the same space. Suddenly with space opening up in the building that houses both the Relevant Coffee roaster and cold brew production, adding a brewery to the equation started to look like a real possibility.
“A beer brewery was never part of Relevant’s plan,” says Montgomery. “ I knew beer making was Sebastion’s passion which I wanted to support, we decided that starting a new business and brewery was the right move. I discovered that share many similar ideas about how to serve the community and grow a strong brand. I was certain he was the right person to partner with and launch a new business. Fast forward a year and a half and we have our first two beers ready to hit the market.”
Sebastian Lynch grew up in Newport, Oregon, and got into craft beer as a hobby when not poultry farming in Aurora. At first he fell into craft beer as an interest to learn about and try different beer styles, then got into homebrewing before he moved to Vancouver, Washington in 2015. His first job in the industry was as an assistant brewer for Trap Door, and in 3 years worked his way up to become the lead brewer.
After leaving Trap Door in late 2020 and taking the job as cold brew brewer for Relevant, Lynch was able to apply his skills on the production side. The similarities are primarily on the cold side, where the brewing system is designed to make a concentrate that is extracted as they push the liquid into glycol cooled tanks to remove the fine coffee grounds still in suspension and keep it cold for packaging. That part of the process is done in the same garage that they have built out to install the Irrelevant Brewery and pop-up taproom, and it is a tight fit.
“The hardest part has been simply keeping up with my cold brew coffee production, it’s been my full time job the entire time,” says Lynch. Who is also a co-owner on the brewery and the head of production. “I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the process of this buildout and am incredibly excited to be back brewing beer again. But it became pretty obvious early on that my position with Relevant Coffee would keep me from having any kind of full time position at Irrelevant alone, so I reached out to some friends that I felt would best fit the head brewer role. I didn’t have to look far.”
Lynch’s best friend Quin Tinling was a Portland brewer who cut his teeth at Hopworks Urban Brewery, before memorable stints at Level Beer, Wayfinder Beer, and Westward Whiskey distillery. But at first Tinling wasn’t interested, because he had moved back to his previous home in Austin, Texas to be closer to family and brew for the acclaimed Pinthouse Pizza. It took three asks, but eventually Tinling relented and agreed to move back to the Pacific Northwest to take the Irrelevant Beer gig.
Tinling was born in the Jamaica neighborhood of Queens, New York where his mother was born and his father came to from Montreal Quebec, Canada. He came to Portland in 2009 on a college trip where he had recently started homebrewing with some older friends, he quickly fell in love with the area and the craft beer scene which was just beginning to take off. But it was in North Texas back in 2011 when he got his first professional brewing job and decided to make it his career.
Before Tinling left Oregon to move back to Austin, Texas, he had a varied and informative career in Portland that gives him some unique insights on brewing styles. At Hopworks and Level Beer he learned the ins and outs of production and brewpub operations in a more classical and formative NW ale flavor profile, while still getting the chance to experiment with farmhouse wild ales at the latter. At Wayfinder Beer he learned his way around step mashes and slow fermented lagers, and how those can lead to great innovative hoppy beers. While the Westward Whiskey was something different entirely as a company centered on single malt.
“I do feel like I’ve come a long way with my brewing experience. I’ve worked under a lot of strong programs both in the NW and in Texas. I’ve learned how to make beers the way that I want and hopefully the way others do too. I learned how to make classic German lagers from Wayfinder, more unconventional beers at Level, and dialed in my IPA process through Pinthouse Pizza. I am very lucky to have learned both in and from those places,” says Tinling.
In 2022 Tinling went back to Texas, and found the different flavor profiles at Pinthouse Brewing, and then at Vector Brewing, a little bit different tastes than the northwest. He was still settling back in to Texas earlier this year, but something just didnt feel right.
“As great as that experience was I had the hardest time adjusting to being back in Texas. It didn’t feel like home anymore and it made me wonder if it ever really was. I moved back to the Portland-Vancouver area because I missed the people, the community that I was apart of, and frankly the beer,” says Tinling.
Even though it took some convincing, Tinling is excited to be back and both tap into his skillset and expand it a bit with coffee. Most of the Irrelevant Beer will be current cutting edge staples, but coffee and cold brew will be a regular guest in the brewing schedule with a regular rotating tap dedicated to them. Their first coffee beer will be a more straight-forward coffee stout with creamy lactose, but they really want to experiment with different styles other than dark beers and incorporate coffee into them. Having unique access to their own house roasted beans sourced from all over the world gives them opportunities that most breweries don’t have. Relevant Coffee has already made a hopped cold brew, and the two brands will interact more by influencing each other and potentially sharing future cafe spaces for beer and coffee.
Tinling is a huge fan of a good medium roast coffee, but he is not picky or nerdy (yet) on regional specific beans, instead letting each flavor lead by taste. He will take a similar approach to the coffee beer, saying “We want to use a depth of the flavors that most beer drinkers don’t associate with coffee. There’s a lot of deep fruit notes in coffee that I don’t think many brewers explore when adding coffee to beer.”
Relevant and Irrelevant owner Mitch Montgomery still emphasizes that the brewery side needs to stand on it’s own two feet by making a name for itself outside of coffee company associations. The name Irrelevant Beer is a playful tongue-in-cheek take on the coffee brand, that they hope shows they won’t take themselves too seriously. Similarly, the logo is simple and colorful with a mid-century modern vibe and playful aesthetic that was designed by Secret Pizza Design Co.
The initial Irrelevant Beer’s are not made with coffee, but the first is coming soon. The starting lineup is an American Lager, West Coast IPA, Hazy Pale Ale, and a Belgian-style Witbier . In production they currently have two fresh hop IPAs, a collaboration IPA with Obelisk brewing out in Astoria, and a Helles-style lager on the way.
Irrelevant Beer has just launched the first of two planned phases with a tasting room up the ramp of their brewery/cold brew production space behind a roll-up door on the side street behind Relevant Coffee cafe. Out front is a covered patio deck for the cafe, and an Irrelevant Beer neon sign to mark the location of the speakeasy-lite location. As the beer begins to trickle out in Washington via self-distribution, the tasting room will serve as a home base on weekends with an industrial feeling similar to the setup at Cloudburst Brewing in Seattle, or the old Upright Brewing tasting room in a basement with a rolling bar offering eight drafts. The second phase is a dedicated taproom/brewpub with a burger kitchen, and a relaxed but polished environment that is being built out in a vacant office space in the same building with a goal to open in the first quarter of 2024.
“Irrelevent Beer means a lot of things to me but first and foremost it means freedom,” says Quin Tinling. “I know that many seem like a strange thing to say but it really does feel like that. I’m sure to many brewers that have made the giant leap to start their own breweries it was scary, daunting even, but ultimately freeing. We’re not trying to reinvent the industry, we’re not trying to be the biggest production player in the area, we just want be focus on quality and be ourselves while doing it. Beer doesn’t have an ego, so why should we?”
IRRELEVANT BEER
110 East 17th St Vancouver, WA 98660
Tasting Room Hours:
Friday 5-10pm
Saturday and Sunday 3-10pm