Travis Zeilstra at Black Tooth Brewing in Sheridan, Wyoming, is a formally trained chef who believes that beer is food. He uses that culinary background not to explore the limits of brewing, but to brew award-winning expressions of styles that appeal to his somewhat conservative local market.
Zeilstra attended the Western Culinary Institute in Portland, Oregon, and then hopped back and forth from his hometown in Montana and Oregon, working as a chef and brewer at Enzo restaurant in Billings, Montana, Montana Brewing Company, and Pelican Pub & Brewery in Pacific City, Oregon. Once he finally accepted his workaholic tendencies, he decided to put those hours into a company he owned himself. He finally settled in Sheridan, Wyoming, where he opened Black Tooth Brewing Company with his business partner Tim Barnes in 2010.
Their initial intent was to locate the brewery in Montana, but the red tape and political climate toward brewing was too intense, so the partners headed to Wyoming where opening the brewery would take six weeks instead of nine months. “I looked for a location that was close to Billings and Miles City, Montana, that needed a brewer,” he says, and he settled on Sheridan, where the water is good and the locals (and local taverns) would be receptive to craft beer. He named the company after the Black Tooth Peak in the nearby Bighorn Mountains and branded his beers in reference to Sheridan landmarks (such as the notorious Bomber Mountain) and Wyoming symbols such as the state flower, Indian Paintbrush.