Crooked Culture Brewing, located in the Cumming City Center, will reach its first anniversary Nov. 2.
The business was started by brewer Patrick Leonard and business partner Nick Estes. The pair first met when both were trying to open a brewery.
Leonard, who started out as a home brewer and had made beer at Gate City Brewing in Roswell and Jekyll Brewing before Crooked Culture, said he was inspired to get into brewing 20 years ago by such West Coast IPAs as Pliny the Elder.
While he had “a lot of experience making beer,” Leonard didn’t have much experience on the financial side. On the other hand, “Nick knew the financial part,” Leonard said.
His solution: “Why don’t we just get together and do this?”
Since then, with the help of head brewer Geoff Gardner, Crooked Culture has created a wide array of styles. “We’re known for our hazy beers,” Leonard said, but a recent visit found the brewery offering a nice cross section of beers.
In fact, Crooked Culture has 12 beers on tap and two pilot beers, Leonard said, “so we typically have 14 beers on all the time.”
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Crooked Culture’s brews have such colorful names as Esta Bien Con Migo Mexican lager, Hippies From the 1800s Czech pilsner, Today Was a G’day New Zealand IPA and the Sun Rises in the West American IPA.
“We’re not into distribution at this point, so there’s nothing holding us back from making great beer,” Leonard said. “Every beer is served in its own glass, so I can look out and know what everyone is drinking.”
The air-conditioned brewhouse, which Leonard described as “quite a luxury,” has an Alpha 10-barrel, two-vessel brewing system.
The brewery recently started offering canned beer to go, and “we’d like to have about half of our tap board in cans and ready to go,” Leonard said. “We’re trying to can about every other week now, and anything on tap, we can fill a crowler for you to go.”
The brewery is quite spacious, with 7,000 square feet inside and another 7,000 feet of patio and rooftop space. That includes areas that can be rented for private events.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
“It was not cheap to get it up and running,” Leonard said, but he is “pretty proud of what we’ve been able to get going in such short amount of time.”
For food, Crooked Culture now is partnering with Ball Ground-based Dominick’s Wood-Fired, after initially playing host to food trucks.
He said Wood-Fired is building out two shipping containers and is “going to be here permanently,” providing all of the brewery’s food, with a wood-fired grill and a menu of burgers, sandwiches, pizzas and salads.
Leonard said the partners are excited about their Cumming location, adding that it is “not quite the Atlanta beer scene, but we’re seeing a lot of people coming up here. Cumming is not a small town, but it’s so far removed from Atlanta it’s really a good feeling to have that happening.”
Crooked Culture Brewing. 421 Vision Drive, Cumming. 470-239-4024, crookedculturebrewing.com
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