Kickin’ it with Backlash Brewery’s Helder Pimentel

This is one for the geeking-out books. As a huge fan of Backlash Brewery‘s beer, aesthetic, and blog, I was thrilled to sit down with founder Helder Pimentel at one of his favorite haunts, Eastern Standard, and get his take on new brews, epic fails, and lessons learned.

Salute‘s your latest release. What’s the reaction been like from the Boston drinking public?

It’s been really positive. It’s our first American-style beer; typically we do Belgian beers. I actually just got out of a meeting with Jim Koch from Sam Adams – we presented him with two bottles because he was a big reason we were able to do the whole Salute thing, with Sam Adams hops. He was really happy with it. 

Tell me how the hop-sharing came about.

The way hop contracts work is you tell a supplier you want a certain amount of hops for the upcoming calendar year, and you’re committed to buy all those hops whether you’re going to use them or not. Sam Adams signed up for more than they could use last year, so they decided to allow local brewers to buy them – at a low price because they purchase huge quantities. We entered our name in a raffle, got lucky and won these hops we wouldn’t have had access to otherwise.

It’s awesome… you seem thrilled with the first batch.

Yeah, I put a lot of pressure on myself because those hops were hard to come by. I’m my own biggest critic; sometimes I overanalyze things.

Speaking of which, do people like me keep bringing up the destruction of Death? What lessons did you learn from the fallout?

We’ve heard about it a few times, but it’s usually in a positive light. People are like “Oh, that sucks – but you did the right thing.” It was a giant fail from a brewing standpoint, but we embraced it and held to our standards, which is what I think people remember the most. 

I fully intend on making it again next year. I think the biggest lesson we learned is it’s okay to mess up as long as you’re honest with people. I think it would have been way worse for us to pretend the beer was fine. 

There’s a blog line about your business plan that goes, “It’s hilarious how goddamn wrong we were about…well…pretty much everything.” Looking back on your first year, what would you change? Any advice for fledgling brewers?

Knowing what I know now, I think I would have had a contingency plan in place to scale more effectively. We started on a shoestring budget, which I was really proud of for the first year, but now I look back and if we had more money we could have grown faster and taken advantage of all the positive press we got. 

But considering the flip side of it, if we had all this borrowed money and didn’t do well, that would have been a catastrophe. So all things considered, we did pretty well erring on the side of being conservative. It is kind of fun to go back and look at our business plan – it was so epically wrong. But it was wrong in the right direction.