When longtime friends Michael Key and Eddie Leal joined Silver Reef and helped open it in 2019, the southern Utah beer scene was a desert as dry as the Mojave.
In a largely Mormon area where the craft-beer learning curve can be steep, bringing a regular rauchbier to the table might sound crazy—but the pair had seen it work before. When they were both working at Gordon Biersch, the company’s Annapolis brewery won gold for its rauchbier at the 2014 Great American Beer Festival—and, suddenly, every Gordon Biersch had to brew one as a promotion.
“We thought nobody was going to drink it,” Key says, “so we made the smallest batch possible.” But the company put its marketing muscle behind the beer, and it was selling out everywhere. “People loved it,” Key says. So, they brewed it again at Leal’s location.
Their experience with that beer would eventually lead to Más Fuego—which, a decade later, won a gold medal of its own at the 2024 World Beer Cup.
It was Leal, now head brewer at Silver Reef, who named the beer, drawing from his Latin background. “I was thinking of smoke and fire,” he says. “Más Fuego is basically adding more fire.”
More Smoke
They brew Más Fuego in 20-barrel batches at Silver Reef’s production facility in St. George. The brewery’s primary owner is the Ellis Island Casino in Las Vegas, so there’s an outlet for all those kegs–about 20 pubs, besides the casino.
When Leal brought Más Fuego to Silver Reef, he increased the beer’s smoky core—Weyermann’s beechwood-smoked malt—to 80 percent of the grist. The rest of the grain bill pushes into märzen territory, with layers of Munich and Caramunich. “I like the märzen-style for this beer,” Leal says. “In a helles version, the malt can be too light. Märzen meshes well with the smoke.”
With so much of the beer going to Nevada—about two-thirds, with the beer just about always being on draft—the team is regularly brewing it. “We like drinking it; we like brewing it,” Key says. “We love the smell when we’re mashing it. It’s like a barbecue in here.”
When deciding how to hop the beer, Leal didn’t want to taper the sweetness of the malt or the intensity of the smoke too much. “I want the malt and smoke to shine, so I just do a bittering hop addition of 22 IBUs,” he says, “just to counter the sweetness a little bit.”
More Lager
The team stopped using Hersbrucker hops years ago, moving to German Magnum to bitter all their lagers. “The consistency is better,” Key says. “It’s a cleaner, higher-output hop.”
With six decades of brewing experience between them, including their time at Gordon Biersch, Key and Leal know their way around lager brewing. Key started brewing at Steelhead in Eugene, Oregon, working under the legendary Teri Fahrendorf. While running a brewpub for her, he needed to bring in an assistant and hired Leal. Today, the two work in tandem, with Key the director of operations. “We grew up together,” Leal says.
When it comes to lager, the two prefer to stick to what has worked for them over the years. “I’ve noticed in the long run, I get better attenuation, better filtration, when I stick to the old ways,” Key says. “We’re used to doing stuff a [certain way], and we hardly budge. It works. We might play around with some beers, but not the lagers.” For example: Key doesn’t believe a decoction is necessary with modern malts, but he’s steadfast in his commitment to step-mashing Más Fuego and the other German-style lagers.
Key spent about five years brewing for Gordon Biersch in Pasadena, using what were largely traditional German lagering techniques. He’d wake up and drive 50 miles across Los Angeles, just so he could live near the beach. Between the commute, long hours, and exacting work—such as having to constantly step up small batches of yeast to propagate pitches large enough for the full-scale system—it was a rigorous ordeal. “I probably lost 10 years of my life out of the first five years I was brewing,” Key says. Still, the experience taught him to avoid shortcuts and follow an intentional, systematic process.
The knowledge and rituals extend into Silver Reef today. The long commute and excessive yeast propagation are the past, but he’s still spunding for natural carbonation, lagering patiently, and polishing for great clarity through a plate-and-frame filter.
One outlier in the process has been the local water. Key says that when they were outfitting Silver Reef, they contacted a California water treatment company. “At one point, the word ‘motherfucker’ came out of his mouth,” Key says. “He hadn’t seen anything like it before.”
Besides having very hard water, with a lot of calcium, there’s also a lot of sand in it—the brewery has to pre-filter the water coming into the building just to keep the dirt out. Then they need to change those filters about twice as often as a normal system. The brewery also uses an oversized water softener. “We add a lot of calcium chloride to our beers, and some gypsum,” Key says.
Leal adds that the calcium chloride emphasizes the body of the beers, aids fermentation, and helps the beers come out cleaner. “It just gives a softer mouthfeel,” he says.
More Barrel
While Más Fuego took gold in the Smoke Beer category at the 2024 World Beer Cup, Silver Reef’s Smokin’ Barrel also took bronze in Wood- and Barrel-Aged Beer.
In fact, Smokin’ Barrel was Más Fuego—before it rested in Basil Hayden bourbon barrels for about two years. “We don’t baby our beers,” Key says. “This barrel sat in our casino in Vegas, in our beer garden, it sat in the summer when it was over 100 degrees out,” he says. “It can get cold in the winter, too. It got beaten up.”
Its success was a pleasant surprise—some barrels at the brewery just don’t pan out under such conditions, but the one that produced Smokin’ Barrel was a winner. Leal says its flavor initially was all barrel—but then, over time, it got smoother and smoother, and some of that whiskey character faded, eventually letting the smoke peek back through. “The smokiness just hung in there,” he says.
With beers like Más Fuego and Smokin’ Barrel, the team is proud of what they’ve built in the desert that was a beer desert.
“We want to bring beer culture to southern Utah,” Key says. “And bringing Más Fuego—establishing it as one of our house beers, where people want to drive up to try it, or drive from Vegas to come through and try this beer—it’s kind of nice.”
Key says that industry reps will contact him when they’re headed to Vegas, just to see whether Más Fuego is on tap. “It’s our little niche,” he says.
