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Date: 8/10/2021
FLORENCE – Kyle Hume still remembers the first time the notion of brewing his own beer entered his mind.
“My best friend Josh came over one day to hang out and he brought a beer in a blank brown bottle and he said, ‘You’ve got to try this beer,’” he said. “So I tried it and I thought it was pretty good. He said, ‘I made that,’ and my eyes got wide. I had all of these thoughts about the possibilities of having this ability of creating something that is completely your own, specified to what you want to taste in a beer – even things that might not even exist yet.”
Now, all of those possibilities are becoming a reality for Hume with his own craft beer company, Little Willow Brewing Co., which is quickly developing into one of the faster growing brands in the state.
“It’s exciting. It’s thrilling. This is it and I’m going all in,” Hume said. “I don’t have any investors, I don’t have any partners. This is 100 percent me, 100 percent my ideas, my recipes and my connections. Everything is paying off at this point.”
The Florence resident explained that now that he’s established his brand, he works hard to keep in mind his roots to keep himself grounded. Brewing, he said, hasn’t just become a profession – it’s something he takes personally and with every aspect, he tries to incorporate ties to his life experiences.
“Everything I’ve done kind of has a personal thing to it, even the Little Willow Brewing name – little Willow is my daughter,” he said. “A couple years ago I had to take on this new role of being a single dad and Willow has been there with me every step of the way. She’s brewed literally hundreds of homebrew batches and she’s done a few commercial batches. She’s 5 years old and she’s in the scene. And she’s always pushing me to be the best I can.”
He added that that personal touch and the pride he takes in what he brews means he won’t sacrifice quality and he hopes that commitment will shine through to consumers.
“I’ve always said it and I’ve stuck by this hardcore – if I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it right. There will be no corners cut,” he said. “You really have to have the passion that I had then in homebrewing brought to a commercial level and a lot of people when they get to the commercial level, it becomes margins and profits and money and they lose it. They become a business owner and a businessperson rather than the person they were with the passion, the heart, the care and the love they put into every batch because they genuinely cared about putting their full heart into everything they were doing.”
He added, “This is beer for people who like beer. I want this to be something that, when people enjoy it, to taste the passion and the love and the years of trial and error that went into creating a product like this. I want them to see that this isn’t just something I just whipped together just so I’m putting a product on the shelf. I want to be a step above. I’m coming into this not just because I want to start a business; I’m coming into it because I believe I can make a product that is on par with some of the top shelf stuff out there, but not as high a price point.”
According to Hume, much of his creativity comes from his experiences, especially those with his daughter. Their camping trips on the shore, he said, have often been sources of inspiration.
“I’ll brew while I’m camping,” he said. “Two years ago in the fall, I’m there camping in my favorite place with my daughter, my most favorite person in the world, and I was thinking about how I could make this gose I was brewing part of my experience and capture it. I thought about the salt in the ocean, calculated the salinity of the ocean water and figured out how much ocean water to add to a three-gallon batch of beer to achieve the salt content in the gose. I was able to incorporate something from our trip into the beer … It was phenomenal.”
Later, Hume said he added two varieties of raspberries from his favorite local farmers market to that beer.
“That’s the kind of creativity I want to bring on a commercial level,” he said. “That type of care, that type of creativity – things that people say you can’t do, I say, ‘Maybe you can, though.’”
As passionate and creative as Hume can be about his beer, he admitted that when he was homebrewing, and even when he broke into commercial brewing, owning his own brewery wasn’t always the goal.
After his friend’s introduction to homebrewing, Hume at times was brewing his own all-grain recipes as often as twice a week. Eventually, he made the jump to making brewing a profession. After starting off volunteering and “learning the ropes” at a brewery in Northampton, it became a paying job. From there, he joined the crew at the Lefty’s Brewing Co. in Greenfield and stayed there until its closure in 2019. Afterward, he was hired at Brewmasters Brewing Services in Williamsburg – where he still works and where his own products are contracted – making beers for as many as 10 different brands.
“That further allowed me to extend my reach into the industry. In this industry, you make a lot of connections and those connections do matter in the end. I’m learning that now. It really is a big deal,” Hume said.
Along the way, Hume’s own homebrewed beers won multiple awards and medals, including the homebrewing contest at the popular Connecticut River Craft Brewfest at the Holyoke Canoe Club. Still, he didn’t feel at that point a brewery was his path.
“At the Holyoke Canoe Club one year, I won first place and I won by a lot of votes. And second place was also me. After that, I had a huge surge in people telling me I should open my own brewery,” Hume said. “But I had a new baby, I was married at the time, I had a solid job, I had a solid lifestyle – life was good and I didn’t want to mess with it. A year or so later, I looked into it and you’re looking at $750,000 to get a real system and taproom going – all the startup costs and expenses – and that scared me even more.”
Working at Brewmasters, however, opened his eyes to the possibilities contract brewing offered to a successful homebrewer to establish a brand and gain market exposure without the massive overhead.
“At that point, I thought, ‘What am I waiting for? I’m going for it,’” he said.
At the time Hume decided to go for it, the country was in the height of the coronavirus pandemic. He had a registered LLC by November 2020, but took another five months to find a distributor in Homegrown Distribution of Bellingham. His first batch rolled out to the market in June.
“I think [the pandemic] was one of the reasons I had a hard time finding a distributor. They were sketched out, they were unsure about the future and a lot of places were reworking their business models,” he said. “But I think it all worked in my favor. When I released my first batch, it was obviously later than I had hoped, but the timing couldn’t have been better for entering the scene. Everybody wanted it, everyone was ready for it. I never stopped working through the pandemic – beer consumption went through the roof and [Brewmasters] was an essential business – so I still had an income and was able to get the stuff rolling on my own.”
Response, Hume added, has been more than he ever expected. A 10-barrel batch of his Hazy Days IPA, for example, sold out in 12 hours in distribution and was off the shelves in less than three weeks.
With Homegrown Distribution’s expertise, Little Willow is now available throughout Massachusetts from the Berkshires to Provincetown and recently, the brand broke into its second state with Rhode Island.
“I’ve gotten responses from people saying things like, ‘Honestly, dude, this is the best beer I’ve had in my life.’ And when it’s from people you don’t know, it takes on a whole different perspective,” he said. “It’s different than your family or your friends or your friend’s friend saying they like it. People can be critical and they’re giving their honest opinion, but the response I’ve been getting honestly kind of blows my mind.”
For more information on Little Willow Brewing, visit its Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/littlewillowbrewing or its Instagram at @LittleWillowBrewing.