top of page
20241122_092531.jpg
allegro Brewery Logo White(2)_edited.png

CARL HELRICH - OWNER/ASSISTANT TO THE BREWER

In college, I was that guy who would always buy different beers to try them out (although mostly with an eye to figuring out the best beer for your buck: the winner back then was Hamms.)  A few years later, I ended up brewing my first beer when I was 23 years old.  I was working as a truck driver making $8 per hour delivering produce and didn’t have the money to buy anything more than cheap beer. 

 

            

 

1000001089.jpg
1000001088.jpg

I ended up brewing around 30 batches of beer by the time I was 28, eventually graduating to all grain brewing (with a setup that probably totaled $75).  I’d spend 12 hours on a Saturday brewing beer to end up with four cases of beer I could be proud of and enjoy. Years ago, perhaps around 2004 or 2005, when we were really struggling as a winery in Brogue, I had the idea of adding on a brewery to the winery here in Brogue.  At the time, the idea that a winery would have a brewery associated with it was unheard of. Unfortunately, things were so tight we didn’t have the funds nor the time to actually put the idea in to motion.

 The last piece of the puzzle was finding a brewer, and it turned out I didn’t have to look far.  When people find out that we have kids, they always ask if they’re going to take over the winery at some point.  As any of you with kids know, we have never had any idea, nor did we ever want to push them in the winery direction.  But Dylan has been working in the vineyard and winery for the past few years, and the more I talked about brewing beer, the more he was interested in it.  This is a guy who cut his teeth on Reserve Chardonnays and Cadenzas.  Brewing beer is simply a natural extensio​n.

DYLAN HELRICH - SEñOR AWESOME 

TAPROOM HOURS:

bottom of page