As far as innovation goes, we were one of the first with barrel-aging, but we we're also one of the first breweries to explore chocolate and coffee. Breakfast Stout came out in 2002, maybe 2003. Then we started playing around with rye malts—not a super popular thing to do back then. But then All Day came about, and I have my story, and Jeremy [Kosmicki, Founders brewmaster] has his idea, and Jason Heystek and Mike—it was just this one kind of flavor profile that we were all kind of looking for, but I think we all have different stories about how it came into existence. But I tend to drink more hop-forward beers. Centennial and Red’s Rye are my go-to beers at the end of the day. When I leave here, I’m just a dad, and every night, we read to our children. And it’s like, I have a lunch beer or two, then maybe another meeting beer at 3 or 4, and by the time I’m going home, I’m a little tired. Next thing I know, I’m reading to my kids and falling asleep before they do.

We started developing this recipe in 2009. It came out in 2012, but it was intended to come out much earlier. Quite frankly, we couldn’t come up with the recipe that was like, “This is it.” We don’t make many knee-jerk reactions anymore. But we started exploring a session beer. And the way I remember it, we had a beer called Solid Gold. It’s not my favorite beer. We produce a lot of beers, and we have a lot that are not the kind of beer I wanna drink over and over again. I put all fruit beers in that category as well—I will drink one of them.

When we opened this facility, a lot of people were coming into the craft beer category, and they kept saying, “What do you have like Miller Lite? What do you have like Coors?” So we had this beer that had a very low hop profile, pretty tight, crisp. Because of the lack of hop character, I didn’t care for it. That beer went from Solid Gold to Super Gold, we eventually called it “extra pale ale” or something like that. But ultimately, I ended up wondering why we couldn’t have a beer that has all the hop characteristics a typical Founders beer would have, but low in alcohol. So we started exploring that. We were bringing in hops from all over the world—brand new varietals that were new to the market. But we ended up with Amarillo and Simcoe.

I remember that Mark Sparkles VanDunk came in as I was walking up the stairs. He brought me a little snifter, and I remember grabbing it, [smelling it], and going, “I don’t have time for a Double IPA right now.” And he looks at me and he just gave me a nod. I was like, “No way!” I took one sip, and fuck, that was it.