John Bryce is sitting next to me downtown at Soulvaki. A golden pilsner fresh off the tap is sitting in front of him. The logo on the glass reads "BLACKSBURGER Pils," in familiar Tech colors.
He talks casually, a 2001 graduate who could never pack up and leave Blacksburg. He drinks the beer like it could be a pint of Kool-Aid, but what is bubbling down his throat is a culmination of years of blood, sweat and an admiration for beer that could never be bought. More importantly, it is his beer. As the owner of the Blacksburg Brewing Company, he is consuming his flagship beer. The beer is the result of a strange path that found Bryce shutting down the BBC in its first incarnation in 2004 and later on selling the brewing equipment so that he could finance a German education that would garner him the title of Brewmaster VLB from a famed school in Berlin. Upon his return, fate found him working for the Roanoke Roadhouse Brewing Company, which had bought his brewing equipment. This was the genesis of the second incarnation of the Blacksburg Brewing Company. While sitting in the restauraunt Bryce took the time to talk to the CT about his experiences:
CT: When was the first time you considered going into the brewing industry?
JB: I guess it kind of happened on accident. When I graduated from Tech, I decided that I wanted to stay here, I didn't want to leave, and I studied finance. And I could have gotten a good job in finance, but I was like, "I want to stay in Blacksburg for a while," and I didn't know what I was going to do. It was really hard to find a decent job. I ended up getting a job at a restaurant that they were building. It wasn't going to open up till the end of the summer, and so I had the whole summer to kill, and I went back home to Richmond and I was like, "Well I need to find a job for the summer until this other job starts, and I'll stay in Blacksburg." And I had worked as a server at Rich Ralph during one of my summers off college so I had been around in a brew pub, but I didn't have anything to do with making beer, but it's intriguing so I was like, "OK, I have to get this job for the summer. Maybe I ought to try to work in a brewery; that seems like that'd be a really cool thing to do." So I called up every brewery I knew of or could find out about in Richmond, and of course no one was hiring - most breweries are a one- or two-man operation - but I did find two of them where two of the brewers were like, "We can't pay you or hire you, but if you want to come hang out we'll teach you some stuff, and you can kind of do the apprentice thing and work for free and learn," and I was like "OK." So I did that and I basically just stayed until they got tired of me asking questions or whatever, and then I came back here and started working in the restaurant, and I just got hooked on the idea of working in a brewery, and I was just like, "This is what I want to do." And so that was when I decided that that's what I was going to do was work in a brewery, and at that point I had to figure out how.
CT: So that's how you got your feet wet was working in the brewery?
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