Bob Sylvester

Bob Sylvester brews like a monk. It wasn’t always like that. He started off on a Mr. Beer kit he got as a gift. That grew into extract brewing, and then all-grain. Then, halfway through his 40s, he and his wife launched a tiny shoestring brewery in a warehouse near the Gulf of Mexico. “We really wanted our own business,” he says. “That way, if it fails, it’s us.” That doesn’t appear likely. Saint Somewhere is a tiny, one-man, Belgian operation, but it has attracted a nation of ecstatic customers. “I’m a 200-barrel-a-year brewery, that you can buy anywhere from Florida to Portland, Oregon. Which is kind of ridiculous.”

1. Jump!
For years, Bob Sylvester’s homebrew habit was a way to blow off steam. As he tired of his day job, Sylvester began eyeing brewing as a career possibility. Some friends had kicked around the idea of launching a brewing cooperative, but when he presented them with a business proposal, “everybody looked at me like I was nuts.” He wasn’t. He and his wife pored over the numbers and figured they could cobble something together out of pocket. “I imagine it’s like jumping out of the airplane for the first time,” he says. “You’re excited, but there’s always that fear of impact with the ground.”

2. Break the restraints
Sylvester gravitated toward Belgian styles early. “Basically, it was because I didn’t like using recipes,” he says. In the Belgian genre, he saw broad latitude to play around, experiment and create something unique. “I always liked the idea of Brett, wild yeast, different fermentation temperatures, monkeying around with that aspect. The whole Belgian brewing philosophy. I guess I’m somewhat of a frustrated chef.”

3. “Handmade” means “made by hand”
Saint Somewhere beer is made by one brewer—Sylvester—who does everything by hand. Nothing in his brewery is hard-plumbed. He has an open-top mash tun that he shovels grain in and out of. He whirlpools wort with an oar. His pump is mounted on a skateboard so he can move it around easily. When he needs to get a temperature, he sticks a thermometer in the mash. “There’s nothing automated at all,” he says. “I want to stay very old-school. I honestly don’t think the beer would come out the same on a $100,000 push-button system.”

4. Buggy and hot feels like home
A house yeast strain gives Sylvester’s beer a distinctive character. It began as White Labs 565, but as Sylvester ran it through generations, it picked up a few wild bugs and critters, and spun off in its own direction. He needed a strain grounded in the Saison family, he says, because Florida is hot, and he “ferment[s] at ridiculously high temperatures.” The elevated fermentation temperatures bring out wonderful esters; test batches he ran with Trappist strains “would just really go on a weird tangent.”

5. Redefine “style”
“I don’t brew to any particular style,” Sylvester says. He calls Saint Somewhere a Saison brewer, but says that distinction is one of process, not recipe style. “There is no solid definition of a Saison, other than a particular yeast and a particular fermentation temperature,” he insists. “It’s all very personal and subjective.” Lectio Divina, Sylvester’s Amber, is actually a dark Saison. His Saison Athene gets dinged because it doesn’t taste like Saison Dupont. He wants beer drinkers to think about Saison the way they think about Trappist beers. “Trappist is not a style. They just do what they do.”

6. Simplify, simplify
Saison Athene, Saint Somewhere’s flagship, is spiced with chamomile, rosemary and black pepper. Lectio Divina looks and tastes markedly different, but it isn’t all that dissimilar in the kettle. Both are built on barley and wheat malt. Saison Athene gets a few additives and some sugar, while Lectio gets caramelized candi sugar. The yeast makes it tart. “A little bit of difference in the tank makes a big difference in the end,” Sylvester says. “I don’t have a laundry list of 18 different malts. I think a lot of that is overkill. Simple is normally best.”

7. Dump the cones, and open wide
Sylvester’s Belgian and Floridian influences come together in his fermentation vessels. He uses sloped-bottom fermenters normally intended for winemaking. “If I went to conical fermenters, it would change the character of the beer. It would clean it up way too much, and I’d end up with an ale of some sort with a little bit of a Belgian leaning.” He also uses open vessels, and ferments at ambient temperatures. Open fermenters let “a bit of Florida get in,” in the form of airborne wild yeast. The result is an “indigenous Florida-slash-Belgian beer.”

8. Go local
Saint Somewhere’s newest beer, Pays du Soleil, also plays around with Sylvester’s roots (he calls himself “a militant, passionate Floridian”). The beer’s backbone is a bit lighter than Lectio Divina, with less candi sugar, and it’s brewed with a pair of adjuncts native to the Sunshine State: hibiscus flowers and palmetto berries. The berries are “kind of a weird animal,” Sylvester admits. They were first eaten by Native Americans; later settlers “compared them to a combination of peas and tobacco juice. On the surface, that doesn’t sound real good, but they add a real neat character to the beer, almost a roasted peanut aroma. It’s a very unusual flavor. Certainly better than the description.”

9. Blaze a trail
Sylvester estimates that his brewery was the first craft outfit to open in Florida in two decades. “People said the Florida market isn’t going to support anything like this. When we opened, in Florida, we were really an anomaly.” While Saint Somewhere distributes nationally, Florida remains Sylvester’s biggest single market. And since he debuted, a flood of new craft outfits has followed. “There’s not a week that I don’t get a call,” Sylvester says. He’s glad to see the family expand. “There are people dreaming of it, and there’s still plenty of room.” ■