For a brewery located square in the American heartland, “in the middle” is a phrase that doesn’t apply to Prairie Artisan Ales. On one end of the brewing spectrum, Prairie produces highly regarded, cleanly brewed beers packed with flavor and personality—including Bomb!, an Imperial stout aged on espresso beans, cacao nibs, vanilla beans, and chile peppers—at a production brewery in Krebs, Oklahoma. Meanwhile, at Prairie’s hometown facility in Tulsa, Brewmaster and Cofounder Chase Healey is testing the boundaries with inventive sours, wild ales, and other funky barrel-aged projects.
Healey is making the nearly two-hour drive between the two breweries—a trip he makes at least once a week—when he calls for our interview. As we talk, it becomes apparent that he’s an inspired and ambitious brewer who is often moving in at least two directions at once.
“It’s hard to more or less have two breweries and develop them in such a way that each stands on its own but both are part of the same bigger vision,” he says. “Maybe it’s a little easier for a brewery that focuses on a core lineup, but for a guy like me, who has a lot of ideas and wants to try a lot of stuff, it’s difficult to make sure we’re doing what we need to be doing at the larger facility while still creating an identity for our new place.
“I don’t want to lose sight of what’s going on with the day-to-day, but I’m realizing that, as the company grows, the most important thing I can do is to [send] it in the right direction.”
Prairie’s roots lie in a germ of an idea planted at a local beer festival. Healey, who started homebrewing in college and worked as head brewer at Coop AleWorks after graduating, approached his friend Zach Prichard, owner of Choc Beer Co. in Krebs, and asked if he could brew on his equipment. That same day, Healey floated an idea past his brother, Colin Healey, about creating artwork for the project. Chase awoke the next morning and found a “funny little drawing” lying on his kitchen table of two cartoon prairie dogs walking arm-in-arm.
“It’s something we’ve never used in a label, but it made me know that he got where I was coming from,” Healey says. Prairie Artisan Ales launched in 2012 with Chase contract brewing at Choc Beer Co. and Colin concentrating on marketing and label art. A partnership with Shelton Brothers distributors helped put Prairie’s beers on the map and onto shelves around the country.
“I’d seen the success that Jolly Pumpkin and Saint Somewhere had had working through the Shelton Brothers to sell small amounts of beer throughout the country, and they were willing to take our brand on,” Healey says. “That helped us to get our beer into a lot of places pretty quickly and gain some early recognition.”
The enthusiastic reception to their beers inspired the brothers to launch a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to put together their own brewhouse. They successfully raised $23,698 in early 2013 with help from 268 backers. That spirit of independent entrepreneurship remains a strong driver for the brothers, who’ve since helped grow the Krebs brewery into a four-vessel, 50-barrel brewhouse and recently put together the two-vessel, 10-barrel brewhouse in Tulsa without the assistance of outside investors or loans.
“That’s how it’s always been,” Healey says. “We make beer and then sell it to pay for equipment to make more beer.”
Prairie will produce about 7,000 barrels of beer this year, which is “a little bigger than I ever thought we would be,” Healey admits; however, he’s wary of growing much bigger too soon.
“I’m not trying to be the next large-scale brewery,” he says.
Healey would rather focus on improving the efficiency of Prairie’s current operations, as well as continuing to experiment in the Tulsa brewhouse. He’s currently working on a project to fill several newly installed foeders (pictured at top), including blending in barrels of older beer to try to “create more of a house flavor by spreading some stuff around,” he says.
He also regularly uses a coolship to make spontaneously fermented beers, as well as pitching various strains of lab-grown Brettanomyces and putting stress on the yeast so that that flavors become more expressive and shine through in the finished beer. Or he might even pitch souring bacteria directly into the kettle, as well as create acidity and complexity through barrel aging and blending.
“I think every technique is fair game when it comes to sour beers,” he says. “It’s fun to make all these different beers with a variety of levels of acidity and figure out what can stand on it own versus what might work well within a bigger overall blend.
“Things tend to come together a bit more organically. It’s much less structured, for better or worse, but that’s how my mind operates.”
While Healey doesn’t often start with a concrete goal in mind, all of his brewing projects are driven by a desire to create beers that have a reason for being and an expressive point of view.
With so many ambitious brewing projects in various stages of production, however, Healey admits that it can be a challenge to keep up with it all and see every project through to fruition. It’s also a challenge to package, brand, and create TTB-approved labels for what may end up being a relatively small amount of beer.
While there is extra effort in relentlessly pursuing the unknown, Healey says that he often learns from his mistakes and enjoys the freedom to make beers that spark his imagination, rather than simply filling a core portfolio.
“The biggest thing for us is to have fun and not take ourselves too seriously,” Healey says. “The beer is a medium for me to be expressive with flavors and ideas, and I leave it wide open for my brother to do what he wants with the artwork.
“Maybe there’s more risk involved and more dynamics doing it that way, but it’s an awful lot of fun.”