Dad always told me that I could never make Sieben´s at home since it just couldn´t ever taste the same. I never even tried until after he had passed away because, well, he was the brewmaster at Sieben´s brewery Company from 1933 until it closed in 1967, and who would know better? My name is Richard Sieben and what I really knew about brewing could have been written on the end of a toothpick (other than a few random "secrets" that he let me in on about the process). It occurred to me one day that I always managed to do whatever dad said I "couldn´t" do. It was his way of throwing down the gauntlet, and it was done so craftily that I didn´t even know I had taken up the challenge.
Home brewing for me started as a project for one of my MBA classes. I liked the idea of brewing commercially, but never expected it to happen. Well, the bug really bit hard and the more I learned about brewing, the further I found myself looking into the possibility. I went to brewers conventions, visited the oldest brewing school in the country and spent a lot of time thinking about it and concluded that I would be happy to just be a home brewer for the rest of my life.
Then the unexpected stuff happened. I won a scholarship to the Siebel Institute (the above mentioned oldest brewing school in the country), found a live culture of the original Sieben´s yeast and found my dad´s brew logs. Really nothing more formal than a bunch of pocket sized notebooks with numbers and comments in them.
The recipe was never written down per se as a "recipe", but rather, it was discovered written in my father´s log books in a "code" of sorts that would make sense only to someone who was familiar with the operation. Having been to the brewery a number of times as a young boy, I did actually remember more than I thought I did. Conversations with other family members helped fill in the blanks. Even then, it took five years of home brewing experience before it became apparent what the books really meant. Then it took another five years to "perfect" the recipe and brewing methods until I got an end product that tasted like the original Sieben´s beer.
My single motivation for starting Sieben´s Brewing Company, is to make this beer available for everyone´s enjoyment.