Community Focus: Matt Minkus (Captain Fatty’s Brewery)

This month we’re telling the story of SAMsARA’s Goleta neighbor, Captain Fatty’s Brewery in Goleta.  When we began to build our winery in Goleta, the Captain Fatty’s team became fast friends and creative collaborators with our team.  SAMsARA Winemaker Matt Brady recently sat down with Matt Minkus, Creative Director of Captain Fatty’s, for a little Q&A:

We’re here in Goleta, California, talking to Matt Minkus of Captain Fatty’s Brewery. Hi Matt, tell us about Captain Fatty’s Brewery and your location here at the Los Carneros Business Center in Goleta.

Good morning!  We opened our location here in 2014 so we’re about to celebrate our fifth anniversary. We started on a really small one-barrel system and have since moved up to a 15-barrel system with quite a few new fermenters. Our goal has always been to create the best beer possible in as many styles as possible and serve them in a space that is comfortable, inviting, and fun for the community.

Tell us a little bit about your tap room. How many seats do you have, busy days, activities events?

Yeah, so we have food trucks almost every night of the week, every night except Monday. We have the football package on Direct TV, so it’s a nice place to watch a game. We have full bench seating with electrical outlets, so it’s a great place to work on your laptop computer if you like while enjoying a few beers.

SAMsARA Wine Co has been in the Los Carneros Business Center with you, making wine for just over a year. Tell us what it’s like to have SAMsARA as a neighbor and tell us about the collaboration you guys did last year.

Absolutely. We were thrilled to find out that a winery was moving in to our little neighborhood, lovingly called the Goleta Grotto. When we met the team, we were super thrilled to have you guys as friends and it’s really been great. We drink together, share ideas, and then ultimately share products. Last year we were fortunate enough to get some of SAMsARA’s left over crushed Grenache fruit to put in one of our sour beers.  We aged it for about a month and then broke it open!  It was a beautiful red sour ale with a lot of Grenache influence.  This year, we have a couple more in mind. We’re going to be doing another red sour and we also got some chardonnay that we put into the sour that we’re going to be coming out with shortly.

Tell us about your exciting new joint venture in Downtown Santa Barbara on Lower State Street.

We opened up a new taproom Downtown Santa Barbara on Lower State Street right across from the train station. It’s called The Project. It’s a unique experience where we combined our beer and tap room experience with Corazon Cocina, who makes terrific tacos and Mexican inspired dishes. However, they do much more than that. They do burgers, octopus burgers, burritos, tortas, desserts, breakfast. One of my favorite things right now is their huevos rancheros in the morning. We’re open breakfast, lunch, and dinner on the weekends, and we have TVs to watch sports games, a beautiful patio on State Street with shade in the Summer and heaters for the Winter. We also have big windows in our tap room that overlook the mountains and palm trees.

So there’s constantly a cool breeze. The vibe is awesome. It’s very similar to our tap room in Goleta, but a little bit more fast paced with the Downtown Santa Barbara vibe.

That sounds incredible!  We can’t wait to check it out!