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Dogwood Brewing
Crawford Moran: Dogwood’s professional homebrewer
Jacob Johnston
Editor
 Crawford
Moran is living the dream of many homebrewers.
“I was talking to my best friend on the phone one night
and asked him what he was doing and he was waiting for
his oatmeal stout to ferment,” he says. “I was shocked.
I didn’t even know you could make beer at home. So I
spent the next three hours on the phone with him, racking
up a good long distance bill getting all the details
and the next day I was brewing beer.”
To hear Moran talk, that telephone conversation was
probably the key event that turned him down the path
toward the founding of Dogwood Brewing Company.
Moran says that first batch of homebrew was brewed
in 1990 or ’91 and it only took him about 5 years to
move from novice homebrewer to professional brewer.
“Being born and raised in Atlanta, we had nothing.
Even our import selection and our craft selection sucked,
” he says of his reason for dreaming up Dogwood. I just
kept asking as a beer lover, ‘why don’t we have any
local beers?’”
The brewery opened June, 1996, and the first beers
to come down the line were the Pale Ale and Hefeweizen
followed by the Stout. Unfortunately, the hefeweizen
didn’t sell very well and has since been discontinued.
The Pale Ale remains one of their best sellers, however,
and the stout is still part of the year-round lineup.
 While
Moran does take part in the brewing going on at Dogwood
and has had some professional training as a brewer –
he took the Quality Control course at the Siebel Institute
in Chicago – he still employs a head brewer. The current
head brewer is Jordan Fleetwood, who previously brewed
for Big River brewpub in Chattanooga, Tenn., before
coming to Atlanta to replace the previous head brewer,
Matt Speece. Moran prefers to call himself Head Jackass.
Moran says that from their first year they’ve had a
fairly steady increase in business, with the exception
of a brief blip.
On Sept. 11, 2001, an order of yeast destined for Dogwood
Brewing Company was loaded on a plane. Then the terrorist
attacks in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania
happened and that plane (with the yeast shipment still
in the cargo hold) was unable to take off.
“They assured us that they stood behind the quality
of their product,” Moran says of the yeast company when
they were asked whether the delay on the tarmac would
affect the yeast.
Unfortunately, the yeast company was wrong about the
quality of the yeast. Moran says that the beer tasted
fine at bottling, but the yeast, which usually can only
consume certain fermentables in the beer and then die,
mutated and continued fermentation long past the normal
point. The result was beer that when opened was so over-carbonated
that it gushed out of each bottle. Dogwood scrambled
to pull the product off the shelves, but getting it
all proved impossible.
 “It
was a disaster,” Moran says.
Since then, their beers have returned to normal and
Moran says that the business has recovered quickly and
is currently better than it was before the gushing bottles
put a hit on sales.
“Luckily, we had built a pretty solid base for our
beers,” he says.
It also probably helps that Moran clearly loves his
work calling it “a dream job.” Still, he admits that
the brewing business is hard work.
“The downside is that it is a tough market and a tough
business. The hours are brutal. I've got a wife and
two little girls and I have to make sure and remember
that I have a family too.”
Despite the hours and hard work, Moran has managed
to carry the enthusiasm for beer and desire to experiment
of a homebrewer into professional brewing. Dogwood has
the tried-and-true stable of beers that pretty much
every microbrewery brews. There’s the Breakdown IPA,
the Pale Ale, the Stout and the Pilsner, but where Dogwood’s
creativity comes through is in their seasonal beers.
They brew a Belgian-style witbier for their Summer brew.
They have a highly hopped Octoberfest in the fall and
a similarly hoppy Bock in the spring. It’s the Winter
Ale that leaves the true beer geeks looking forward
to cold weather, however.
 The
Winter Ale is a completely different beer every year.
Most of the past incarnations have been Belgian styles
like 2001’s incredible Tripel, but there have been other
styles such as 2002’s Weizenbock. Unfortunately, Moran
couldn’t reveal 2003’s style (partly because they hadn’t
decided at the time) but did say it would likely be
another Belgian style this year.
One more example of the brewery’s creativity comes
in the form of a limited-release beer that will make
its debut in a few Atlanta-area pubs in July 2003. Decadent
was brewed with 10 different grains and 10 different
hops. An extremely limited release, it will only be
available on tap at 10 beer bars. There isn’t really
a style it belongs to, but Moran said he was looking
to create a session beer that was complex and flavorful,
but was something you could enjoy a few of in a sitting.
I got to taste a young sample of the beer and all I
can really say is that I’m looking forward to trying
the finished beer this month. Don’t worry about missing
out on this beer, however. Moran expects to for Decandent
to be a year-round brew, although it will continue with
its limited release.
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