Nick Floyd of Three Floyds

Just 10 years after its founding, Three Floyds Brewing, a small Indiana microbrewery, has grown into an unlikely craft-brewing powerhouse. BeerAdvocate.com readers have ranked Three Floyds’ Dark Lord Imperial Stout as the best beer in America, Floyds’ Dreadnaught IPA the fourth best, and have placed five others among the country’s 100 best. Nick Floyd, the head brewer and co-founder of Three Floyds, is quick to credit his entire brewery team for their success. Still, it’s easier to call one guy than it is to call 20. So we called Nick.

1. Don’t lean on first impressions—especially when they’re warm and skunky
Floyd’s first run-ins with beer didn’t go too well. “At first, in high school, I hated beer because all anyone ever had was warm Budweiser, or warm Old Style,” he recalls. “I couldn’t understand why people were drinking it.” He got wiser, began homebrewing (and refrigerating) around 18 or 19, and got hooked. Soon after, he was studying at the Siebel Brewing Institute.

2. Do something you like
Brewing became a career and not just a hobby, because, “You have to do something you like—otherwise, you’re miserable.” He did stints brewing Falstaff at the Florida Brewery, and brewing German beers for Weinkeller in suburban Chicago, before deciding to co-found Three Floyds in a Hammond, Ind., garage in 1995. He explains his reasoning in terms that are tough to argue with: “We got the idea to start our own brewery because we got tired of making other people wealthy.”

3. Make do with what you have
Floyd describes Three Floyds’ brewing operation in those first few years as “kind of a Frankenstein system.” They cooked on a five-barrel wok kettle, fermented in old, open Swiss cheese fermentors, and used dairy tanks salvaged from Wisconsin. That wasn’t even their big problem. This was: Floyd’s original recipe for his flagship brew, Alpha King Pale Ale, clocked in at 100 IBUs at a time when “nobody around was used to beers even over 30 IBUs.” They compromised… a bit—Alpha King is now at 66 IBUs.

4. Stick with what works
Although the recipe for Alpha King Pale Ale has mellowed from the version Floyd used to brew in 1996—“It used to be more bitter,” he says, and was much hoppier—the beers Three Floyds brews today aren’t all that different from what they were making 10 years ago. Closed fermentors have made the quality much more consistent, but the recipes for today’s versions of Scottish Ale, Behemoth Barley Wine, and 66-IBU Alpha King are very close to what they were in the brewery’s earliest days. Even the original, discarded Alpha King recipe has found a home—“It’s actually kind of what our Dreadnaught Imperial IPA is now.”

5. Brew for yourself and screw the masses
“We always make the best beer we can possibly make, and not always care about whether the average consumer is going to like it or not,” Floyd says. “I guess everything we do is not normal. That’s kind of our motto. If some consumers don’t like it, or they think it’s too strong, or too heavy, or too dark, or too this, that’s too bad.”

6. Sometimes great beer just happens
In brewing, “You can calculate color, calculate alcohol, calculate bitterness, but until a month later, you won’t know exactly what you have,” Floyd says. “There’ll always be a question mark, there’ll always be tweaks on the next round.” Still, he says that his favorite creation, a one-time batch called Alpha-Naut, was far from deliberate. “We just dumped 150 pounds of hops in a five-barrel batch. It was offensively bitter, but somehow there was some balance in it. It was just a great beer, and we might make it again someday.”

7. Sea-Monkeys are better than trees
The brewery’s iconic, if scattershot, labels—a collaboration between Floyd and graphic designer/beer writer Randy Mosher—are “kind of loosely based on Sea-Monkeys art,” Floyd reveals. Why? Why not? “We wanted to be weird. Many microbreweries are named after a town, or they have an animal, or mountains, or trees on their labels. We wanted the complete opposite of that. So we have these weird characters.”

8. Value beer over ego
When he’s out at a bar, Floyd is more apt to drink somebody else’s beer than his own. “We drink ours all the time—we’re always sampling it,” he reasons, saying he’ll order up anything that’s local, “fresh and well-crafted.” He splits the taps at Three Floyds Brew Pub evenly between his own beers and those from other craft breweries that don’t distribute in the area.

9. Geeks are geeks are geeks
Asked what he’d be doing if he couldn’t brew, Floyd replies, “I’d probably be working in the video game industry. Video games or Dungeons & Dragons.” When told that most people wouldn’t want their names printed anywhere near Dungeons & Dragons, Floyd shrugs. “I’m a geek, I guess. I don’t care. We’re brewers. We’re obviously beer geeks. It’s just another form of geek.” ■