Mark Russell
Head Brewer, Dock Street Brewery
Philadelphia, PA
“I've been given a lot of creative freedom through my time at Dock Street, and our roster is full of personal favorites.”
Craft Beer season is upon us, and we have our eyes on a local Brew Master who stops at nothing to bring us the best of his craft.
Mark Russell joined the Dock Street team about 5 years ago, where he's been experimenting with ingredients and concocting some of the smoothest beer recipes around.
We sat down with Mark who shared his experience brewing beer during a pandemic and some award-winning (fingers crossed) projects he's working on.
Let's start with the tough stuff. How has the COVID impacted the brewing business?
COVID has been pretty rough for most breweries, small independent craft breweries in particular. Off-premise alcohol sales may have been up overall through this summer, but draft beer has been nearly dead since April, and that's how many of us pay the bills.
Small breweries have had to quickly pivot to get their products to customers in whatever ways they can - through mobile canning, crowler fills, and even delivering straight to your door. We're lucky to have our own canning line, and throughout the pandemic, 90% of the beer we packaged has gone into cans.
Tell us about some of the beer competitions you’ve entered.
The two largest beer competitions we enter are Great American Beer Festival, and World Beer Cup. The latter is only held every 2 years, and unfortunately judging and the coinciding Craft Brewer's Conference were cancelled this year as a result of the pandemic. I was proud and confident in all of our entries (including our Bean2Bean Espresso Stout), but we'll never know.
As for GABF, Eddie Lopez and I won a bronze medal for our Man Full of Trouble Porter in 2017. Our entries for this year's competition will be judged the first week of October, wish us luck!
We occasionally enter smaller competitions as well, and won three ribbons at the PA farm show at the beginning of the year. A first for Man Full of Trouble, and two second place awards for Winter Haze and Wild King.
What are some of your personal favorite recipes that have gone live? Any ideas in the works?
I've been given a lot of creative freedom through my time at Dock Street, and our roster is full of personal favorites.
The beer I'm most excited about right now is a single decocted Italian Pilsner we're calling "Futuro." There is absolutely nothing like a crisp, clean, and balanced Pilsner with plenty of noble hop aroma and flavor.
Our lager program in general has the brewery excited right now; the brewhouse at Dock Street South is particularly well-suited for traditional decoction style brewing and we plan to take full advantage.