The first time Rock & Vine visited Suds Monkey in 2018, it was purely by accident and there wasn’t much to it. We just happened to spot one of those blue highway signs that point out businesses off the highway and whipped into a small warehouse park near Dripping Springs.
Suds Monkey Brewing occupied one of those warehouses, and describing it as a microbrewery would have been generous — it was a nanobrewery, as small as a viable business could be. The two-barrel brewhouse was barely bigger than a homebrew setup and the “tasting room,” such as it was, had only three taps. The beer coming out of all three were just variations of pale ale. Some days there would be a food truck outside, some days not.
Fast-forward to the present day. That blue sign is now in a different location, pointing to a huge, barn-like structure. Inside are 24 taps, including three nitro taps, with a dozen core beers plus several seasonal offerings. Piping hot pizza and paninis churn out from a busy kitchen that by itself is probably bigger than the original brewery. There are tables aplenty and outside, children clamber about a playscape like, well, monkeys.
To put it mildly, things have changed. Owner and brewer Greg Plummer admits Suds Monkey’s rise from humble beginnings to thriving business wasn’t purely due to bootstrap-pulling. He also brought in some investors.
“Mostly they are part of our tribe,” Plummer says. “They were already our customers. It organically started where I brought a couple of people in to look at my business plan and see if I was crazy. In both cases they said, ‘Go for it’ and offered up financial backing that I didn’t even solicit. Then I was talking to an investor and another guy heard me and said, ‘I wasn’t eavesdropping, but call me.’”
Plummer said when he was young, he went to school for mechanical engineering and quickly “realized what I didn’t want to do.” But that background did teach him a/b testing, which he carried into brewing. “What you saw down there, everything was a test,” says Plummer, referring to the original warehouse location.
It was his second swing at the brewing industry. Years ago, he worked at the world-famous Stone Brewing in San Diego before moving on to other pursuits. He got the itch to come back, but found he had some catching up to do. “I had been out of brewing for about 15 years. There were new styles I had to learn. And then I had to figure out the marketplace. I was brewing very small batches.”
The upside is, those small batches gave him more opportunities for trial and error, to hit on what works. To make enough beer to cover the demand, he had to brew six times a day. “It gave me a lot of chance for experimentation,” Plummer says. We split-test beers to figure out what recipe is best. Never trust your gut. What I think will go to the moon ends up tanking, and the other version takes off.”
One of those new styles he had to learn was the hazy IPA, which is all the rage among craft beer lovers right now. “It was a struggle to learn to make a hazy,” he says. “When I started in brewing, a hazy beer was considered a screw-up. I figured it was a fad that would last about two years.” The hazy craze is still going, and he must be doing it right. Asked to identify Suds Monkey’s flagship, best-selling beers, he names The Juice (the hazy) and Handy Dad, a Kolsch.
Asked about his brewing philosophy, Plummer says, “I like beers that go to the core of that particular style the most. I don’t do sours or fruit beers, except for a cherry wheat that I first made when I was 18. We make that in the summer.”
That might sound like he’s playing it safe, but Plummer said he tries to educate customers to try new things. “I’m a creature of habit, but I want to break people of their habits and get them to move on to another beer. We make sure all bartenders are cicerone-certified [similar to a wine sommelier]. We’ll do beer tastings with the ingredients, where they can taste the grain or smell the hops used to brew it.”
By the time you’re reading this issue, in addition to the core beers, you can expect spring seasonals such as an imperial Irish red, a dry Irish stout, a German doppelbock and a Belgian Tripel. Whereas the original Suds Monkey might have just been a place for beer nerds to hang out, Plummer says the 2.0 version is “very family-forward.”
“We do an event every night of the week, such as live music, music bingo, and trivia night. Our stage can seat 2,000 people in the front yard. Our main focus as a business is to build on family traditions and become part of the fabric of the community. We host a lot of kids’ soccer parties. We’ve seen couples meet, have a baby shower, see the kids’ first steps, and now their 6-8 years old. We’ve seen some kids go off to college.”
Hours
Monday-Thursday, 4-9pm
Friday 2-10pm
Saturday 11:30am-10pm
Sunday 11:30am-8pm
12024 U.S. 290 (cross-street Nutty Brown Drive)
Between Austin and Dripping Springs
512-222-3893
sudsmonkeybrew.com