By Janelle Fisher
City Pages Editor
Saturday, March 11, Noble Roots Brewing Company will celebrate its sixth anniversary with a party, but Alex Falish, who is head brewer and also one of the owners at Noble Roots Brewing Company, said his and his family’s interest in beer actually began 10 years before the brewery officially opened.
“Our origin story starts with a family trip to Europe back in 2007,” he said. “My older brother, now our head of marketing, was studying over in the Netherlands and the whole family went and visited him. We also went to Germany, Belgium and France and that really kind of opened our eyes to beer that was not domestic light lager.”
After that trip, Falish said his family got into homebrewing and tested the waters with family and friends before deciding to take the leap and start a full-scale brewery.
“We came back, and shortly after my brother graduated from college and moved back home for a little while and got us into homebrewing. We homebrewed for a while and we slowly started making what we thought was better beer. And our friends told us it was better beer, but they’re not necessarily impartial observers when they’re getting to drink for free. But as we got better and better, we finally decided, ‘maybe this is something that we can do.’ We wanted to create a small neighborhood brewery. After a couple years of planning and trying to find the right location, we were able to purchase a building and open our brewery in 2017.”
Over the past six years, Falish said Noble Roots Brewing Company has made some significant accomplishments, but the one he’s most proud of is the connection with the community.
“We’ve won some awards at some local beer fests for best brewery, which is always awesome,” he said. “We recently won some awards at a beer competition out of Ohio. But really, what we feel is our biggest accomplishment is developing a really big base of local followers. We have a ton of regulars that we see in the taproom once a week, twice a week or once every couple weeks, and we continue to see those people because we’re coming out with new beers pretty frequently.”
Falish said not only does Noble Roots have new beers often, but it also has more beers in general available compared to when the taproom first opened.
“We started out with six beers on tap when we first opened in March of 2017,” he said. “Now, at any given time, we have 15 beers, a hard seltzer and a hard cider — all of which we make in house. And then we have what we call our garage series. That’s our pilot program. Every two to three weeks, we release a brand new beer and we just ran out of number 124.”
To celebrate its sixth anniversary, Falish said Noble Roots Brewing Company will add four new dessert-themed beers to its collection.
“For the sixth anniversary, we kind of wanted to lean into effectively a six-year-old’s birthday party,” he said. “We have four dessert beers coming out and we’ll have those in a very limited quantity available on tap in the taproom on Saturday and then we’ll also have a four-pack of those beers to go… The first one is a dirt cake stout, kind of inspired by everyone’s favorite childhood dessert, so we made it with oreos, gummy worms and vanilla pudding. The second one is a key lime pie sour, so again a classic dessert, and we used some key lime juice, vanilla beans and graham crackers. The third one is a strawberry cheesecake beer, so we used a decent amount of strawberry puree and then we actually used cream cheese powder in this beer to try and really replicate the characteristics of a cheesecake. And then the last one is a grasshopper beer, so kind of inspired by the favorite supper club after-dinner drink. We used chocolate and mint in this as well as some soft serve ice cream.”
Adding to the birthday party experience, Falish said the celebration will also include a food truck and likely a pinata filled with candy and beer tokens.
After the party, Falish said Noble Roots Brewing Company is looking forward to moving into a new, bigger space and continuing to expand in the years to come.
“Our biggest focus right now is we’re in the process of an expansion,” he said. “So we’re moving into a new production facility five miles northeast of our current facility. So we’ll have brand new equipment going into that facility hopefully this week…and eventually we’ll move our existing production equipment over to that building so we can have some expanded taproom space in our current building. And that will really allow us to get our beers into more places in the area. Right now we have very limited distribution to some bars and restaurants as well as liquor stores and a grocery store. With the new building, we’ll be able to get our beers into a lot more places, like Festival Foods, which we are not in right now.”