Saturday, July 19, 2025
Brewmaster Grant Wood has made his life a dedication to the art of one thing — craft beer.
Wood’s story began where so many other Texas success stories have originated— Texas A&M University. After flip-flopping majors for a couple of years, one day Wood was looking through the school’s extensive course catalogue and stumbled across a major he had never considered before — food science. It combined everything he loved, the artistry of cooking (one of his previously considered fields), with the science of something a little more technical.
After graduating in 1984, Wood found himself living in San Antonio and married to his lovely wife Susan, without a nickel to either of their names. After a couple of months of watching Wood work odd jobs, Susan decided it was time to gently nudge Wood into a steadier career.
“Susan kicked me in the butt one day and said, ‘Hey, get a real job, you know — like one that maybe involves your degree,”’ laughed Wood.
So, he found himself a real job working as a lab technician at Pearl Brewery in San Antonio, where he fell in love with the brewing industry.
“I really needed a job, and I thought, ‘Making beer, smart, yeah!’ So, I decided, I think I want to make a career out of it, and I was asking management there what I needed to do to get involved in production.”
Pearl sent Wood to Seibel in Chicago, one of the best brewing schools in the country. There he learned all about the process of craft brewing, how to pair flavors, and the essentials of what it takes to make it in the industry.
“I actually went to Seibel with a couple of other craft beer names at the time — a guy named Dan Carey who went on to create New Glarus in Wisconsin, and Jamie Emerson, who created Full Sail out of Oregon.”
After Seibel, he went back to Pearl, where they repeatedly made Wood work midnight shifts and refused to give him a raise,.While Wood admitted he was grateful for the opportunities Pearl provided, he decided to search for the next step in his career elsewhere. Wood then got on “across the street” at Lonestar Brewing.
“I went from midnight shifts to evening shifts. I got to work all over the brewery, from what we call the hot side and the cold side, working production and fermentation to filtration packaging and was there for about six years,” said Wood. “So one day, my boss came to me and said, ‘Hey, things are going badly for the company, you may want to think about your future and make some choices about that,’ which was very nice of them as it turned out, Lone Star and their parent company were about to go bankrupt,”’ he continued.
He then sent out two resumes; one to Anchor Brewing in San Francisco, and one to Sam Adams Brewing in Boston. He was awarded the Brewmaster position with Sam Adams and decided to move his young family across the county to blustery New England.
Wood joked, “They usually do get about between three and four feet of snow for a season, yeah? ... But that year, it snowed 120 inches, so like 10 feet!”
While the air outside may have been chilly, it was Boston and Sam Adams that truly sparked Wood’s love for the industry.
“I had a great career with Boston Beer,” explained Wood. “I was there for 16 years, and did a variety of different roles with them, from running a brewery in Boston to production management contract breweries where we did third-party production, a little bit of brand development work, and recipe development ... I learned more in my first two years at Sam Adams than I had in the 10 years before working at the other breweries.”
Because of his career at Sam Adams and Boston Beers, Wood can be credited with either the creation or development of classics such as Twisted Tea, Angry Orchard cider and Utopias, all of which shine as Boston Beer’s most beloved favorites.
Utopias, to this day, is the strongest beer brewed in the United States, and in 2001, earned Wood a Guinness World Record as the strongest beer in the world with its 28% ABV. While Utopias is now ranked number five on the list of the world’s strongest beers, Sam Adams continues its limited release every two years in batches of 13,000 that sell for more than $240 apiece — in states where one can purchase Utopias, that is. Since its creation, Utopias has been banned in 15 states.
“One of my old bosses, the lady who helped found Sam Adams with Jim Cook and Ron McAlmon, always said, if you're in the brewing industry and you're not having fun, you're doing it wrong,”
Taking this advice to heart, after Wood’s 16-year tenure at Sam Adams, Susan realized Wood had lost his fervor for Sam Adams and Boston. Worried her husband was stuck in an unfulfilling place in his career, she mentioned her concerns.
“I have to give a lot of credit to Susan continuously, because she notices things that I don’t until it's too late,” Wood conceded.
“He quit having fun,” Susan added.
“She's right,” he agreed. “It got to be kind of a drag actually. My last couple of years at Sam Adams, I did quit having fun. I think the key factor is the main guy I was working for; I didn’t really like that much. It became less about creativity ... and there was a managerial push to move me away from growing into doing other things, whether it was brand development or something else,” Wood explained.
So, in 2010, when Wood was scrolling through his emails, he opened a newsletter announcing a small brewery opening in Granbury that was looking for a brewmaster to join the team. He sat down with Rhett Keisler, owner of Revolver Brewery, in a bar in New York, where Keisler made an offer Woods couldn’t refuse.
“I wrapped up my stuff at Boston Beer, moved out here in December of 2011, and showed up for work on the fourth of January 2012,” explained Wood. “We built Revolver from a brown field site to fully operational brewery by August of that year. We sold our first stake Sept. 1, and then it was off to the races.”
When Wood arrived back in Texas, he noticed the state needed “a really full-flavored blonde ale,” and Wood believed that if he could craft the perfect one, it would become the centerpiece of his new brewery. When his brew was completed, he named it “High Grass” and believed it was going to be THE beer.
However, in an uncanny twist of fate, it turned out this couldn’t have been further from the truth.
In 2012, the not-yet-open brewery was visited by its neighbor; a farmer down Fall Creek Highway who owned a pick-it-yourself strawberry farm. The farmer came to the brewery with a 5-gallon bucket of solidified honey he had been unable to sell and was hoping the Revolver team could find a good use for it.
“So, I cracked open this barrel of honey. It was just beautiful, I mean, it was about as red as the garland on that statue over there,” Wood said, gesturing to the deep red Christmas bunting behind him. “It just smelled like strawberries and peaches and had this beautiful freaking character. I was just like, ‘Man, that's so fantastic. What can I make up?’”
The man was onto something.
“The thought process goes like this — there's a lot of honey wheats out there, so obviously my thoughts went to a wheat based beer; I put the honey in there, and then I felt like it needed some spices to go in it, and so maybe some fruit to kind of accentuate that,” began Wood. “I love blood oranges, and the color of that honey reminded me of blood oranges. And I was like, we're gonna get some blood oranges and get a couple of spices to go in there, some warming spices. So that's kind of the mental exercise. And then we went in and made a 5-gallon pass of the beer.”
Letting the world know of his little experiment, Wood wrote “Blood and Honey” on the brewery’s special board, not expecting too much to come of it.
“Rhett came in my office one day and goes, ‘What's Blood and Honey?’ I said, ‘Remember the honey from Mr. Chris? Well, I made that into a beer with blood orange and honey, and I'm calling it Blood and Honey.’ Rhett’s just like, ‘Stupid name, who’s gonna buy that beer?”’
Blood and Honey quickly became Revolver’s claim to fame, and to this day, is Texas’ second most popular craft beer — right behind Shiner Bock. The brew is one of the few North Texas beers that has been in continuous production for over a decade. Suffice it to say, a whole lot of people are going to buy that beer, but it is always said that hindsight is 20/20.
“When Blood and Honey took off, my sleepy little brewery that I had envisioned exploded,” Wood said. “We had to buy more tanks. We had to hire more people. We had to go to the second shift. We had to buy more tanks. Hire more people. Add the third shift. It became an around the clock, five-day-a-week operation.”
The effects of Revolver Brewery on Granbury’s community have been widely felt. The brewery, located off Fall Creek Highway at 5650 Matlock Road, became the happening place to be on a Saturday afternoon. Families could be seen gathered with old friends and sharing a bottle of one of Wood’s plethora of unique brews.
A few years after Revolver exploded onto the scene, Wood got a call from his previous boss at Sam Adams, Jim Cook. Jim told Wood he believed it was time to walk away from Revolver — the craft brew industry was showing signs of dwindling and large breweries were increasingly beginning to snatch up smaller craft breweries.
Heeding Jim’s advice, in 2016 Wood and Keisler sold Revolver Brewery to Miller-Coors in a $69 million deal. Wood stayed with Revolver until the deal closed in 2019.
When COVID-19 hit, Wood decided it was the perfect time to call it quits on his career and go into early retirement. The business he had helped to build had sold, and the people who now owned Revolver didn't share the same creative beliefs as he did; the industry had once again lost its spark for Wood.
“Revolver was beginning to move in a different direction,” Wood began. “Their (Miller-Coors) philosophy is, it's got to be all about drinkability and lighter styles. Their model of demand is built on selling a lot of beer, and the only way you really sell a lot of beer is to make it really, really drinkable, and in that case, not filling or flavorful. But we had built a business on craft, including a lot of different, not necessarily super drinkable things,” he said of the creative differences.
However, retirement wouldn’t last long for Wood.
“I mean, I don't play golf or anything like that, so I didn’t have, like, a steady hobby,” Wood started.
“It was during COVID, so the things that were his hobbies, he couldn’t do any of that,” Susan added. “I think that a lot of things that might've made retirement more enjoyable just weren’t accessible ... he got really bored.”
In December 2023, amid the boredom of his soon-to-be failed retirement, Wood received a call from John Herman, who informed Wood about Bero — a nonalcoholic beer brand being founded by celebrity Tom Holland. Holland had begun a sobriety journey in 2022 and had noticed an extreme lack of quality alternatives to traditional brews. Herman informed Wood that Bero would be based out of the United States, and they were urgently looking for an expert brewmaster to join the team.
Wood jumped at the opportunity and hasn’t looked back since.
Since he once won awards for brewing the world's strongest beer, many would assume that going nonalcoholic would be against the grain for Wood, but he explained that the two processes are the same — just in reverse.
“The process of brewing beer is you take barley, you cook it, and you break starch down into sugars,” began Wood. “Sugars are eaten by yeast, which creates alcohol. It's a direct correlation — the more sugar, the more alcohol. If you select a yeast that doesn't really like to ferment, it doesn't like to make alcohol, which is what we do here, it only eats one set of sugars, and therefore it doesn't make as much alcohol. And then the trick is to balance the flavors after fermentation, to get the flavor that you want to make it taste like beer.”
The notion of getting the nonalcoholic brew to taste just like a traditional beer is exactly why Wood was chosen for the job. With 40 years of experience tinkering with flavors and polishing existing recipes to perfection, he knew exactly what it took to even out the flavors. His success in this task has repeatedly been proven by samplers who fit into the exact clientele Bero is after.
“I've seen people drink this who were drinkers before. They were alcoholics, and they gave it up. I've seen these people taste Bero, and you can see visually, you can just see the look on their face, like ‘damn, that went right to that place that beer was before for me.’ It sort of gives them this visceral reaction,” Wood explained.
While Revolver focused on bringing new and exciting flavors to the market, Bero’s goal is to bring back the classics to an audience who craves a quality, alcohol-free alternative.
“You can do market studies and say, you know, what are the most popular varieties of beers, and so that’s kind of what we followed,” Wood said. “There's a pilsner in there, kind of a maltier, straight-up beer, which I modeled after a beer called Pilsner Urquell. There's a hazy IPA, right, which is a New England IPA. It's not really sweet, but very hoppy. Next up, I think we’re going to work on a West Coast IPA.”
Bero went live Oct. 16 and will soon be available in stores across the US. The company has plans to quickly begin producing and selling its product in Tom Holland’s home country — the good ol’ U of K.
“It's gonna be a fun project, I think it's kind of my last challenge,” said Wood.
When asked how Wood created a 40-year career around the brewing industry, despite all its challenges, he explained that he loves the craft and its ability to bring people together.
“I love the creative part of it,” Wood began. “To me, it's a great melding of art and science. I mean, you've got to create this product that has certain specifications, that needs to taste a certain way; we need to be able to repeat that. There's a science to that, but to create the product and to imagine the flavors that would go in there, create the formulation, and see it come to life — that’s the other reason. That's the artistic part. So, the art and science and the challenges of creating a product that people are going to want to enjoy, that's the thing that keeps me going; frankly, the thing that kind of brought me back out of retirement.”
Wood explained that anyone with a good palette and quality training can make it in the brewing industry and become a successful brewmaster such as himself but warned there’s often more to the business than meets the eye.
“Get some training,” he explained. “You know, you can find a little brewery. Seems like they're always looking for a little help. Most of the time it doesn't pay very well but you get into a brewery and find out what it's really like. Sometimes it's just not as romantic as people think it is, but at the end of the day, it's a lot of fun because you're making a beverage that almost everybody enjoys.”
