This is an introduction to one of the most unique brewers and brewery owners in Texas craft brewing today, and whose name you likely have never heard.
For context, modern craft brewing tends to be a slightly younger man’s profession, with the average age of brewers and brewery owners hovering just below age 40. The traditional craft brewer progression is from amateur homebrewer to professional brewer or brewery owner, which usually coincides with early disenchantment of that first professional job out of college. Thus, brewers tend to enter the business sometime in their 30s, and those that are actually sweating back in the brewhouse tend to be even younger than that.
Ken Kollmeyer is 77 years old, and he opened Nocona Beer & Brewery in 2017 in Nocona, a small town about an hour northwest of Denton and a few miles from the Oklahoma border. The brewery occupies the old Nocona Boots manufacturing facility, and the building is as much a character as the brewer. It is a distinctive Art Deco design dating back to 1948, and was the active boot and baseball glove manufacturing facility until around the turn of the century (current manufacturing operations were moved to the Mexican border decades ago). Mostly still unused at this point, the facility is filled with the slight musty odor of old leather back in the warehouse area.
Since opening the brewery, Kollmeyer has partially restored the old structure, adding a spacious taproom and full kitchen as well as a small performance space for bands, local entertainment or a pickup pickleball match indoors. The taproom bar surface is a full half of a restored split hickory log, and the brewhouse space is visible behind high walls of glass with plenty of canned beer available in a nearby hallway of fully stocked coolers. The space is both rustic and contemporary, holding rural small-town elements along with some very modern touches—both reflective of the owner and his wife’s tastes.
What makes Kollmeyer unique is not just his age in this industry but his own occupational history…
Kollmeyer has overseen the branding and marketing efforts for the brewery, and plenty of brewery swag is available with their trademarked Indian-head penny logo. As for Kollmeyer himself, these days he employs a staff to run the daily brewing, taproom and kitchen operations. As a younger graduate student, he took up the homebrewing hobby as a means to have alcohol available for social events (“We had no money,” he honestly admits), and with a naturally scientific mind he became fairly proficient at it in an age long before commercial kits, online ingredients and instructional videos were available to the hobbyist. Constructing most of his homebrewing equipment himself from almost anything usable or available, Kollmeyer kept up with homebrewing as much as he could, given the demands of his academic responsibilities and ongoing career path.
What makes Kollmeyer unique is not just his age in this industry but his own occupational history, which took a much different arc than professional craft brewing. Introduced more formally, he is Dr. Kenneth R. Kollmeyer, M.D., F.A.C.S, Ph.D., a retired vascular surgeon who spent decades of his career in Dallas hospitals with dozens of publications to his credit and a CV that spans 30-plus pages. He left his profession a few years ago as Chief of Vascular Surgery from Methodist Dallas after pioneering some of the early medical technology involved in today’s minimally invasive surgery.
Kollmeyer retired from medicine to a ranch he purchased not far from Nocona but, as a restless and self-described “serial entrepreneur,” felt the homebrewing itch once again after visiting more brewpubs on an Alaskan cruise. Thus was born the idea of a local brewpub in his small rural Texas town, and Kollmeyer has personally overseen almost every aspect and detail of the development. The space provided by the old Nocona Boots factory lends a distinctive and stylish frame to an otherwise almost–West Texas country brewery just barely outside the DFW metro orbit.
The brewery itself has seen some personnel shifts (Kollmeyer does not own the building, so an early partner has exited the business), churning through a few staff brewers before finding a good match of personalities and talent. Today, amateur-turned-pro Dave Young is his current head brewer, turning out solid mid-range beer styles competitive with any produced in the Dallas area. Likewise, the kitchen makes some tasty pub-grub fare of burgers, wings and quesadillas, and local bands can fill the space on weekend evenings.
Even without manning the steaming brew kettle daily, Kollmeyer can’t help but tinker with almost everything from recipe formulation to marketing efforts to taproom furniture and aesthetic trim on the bar. The indoor space is filled with picnic tables constructed from a truckload of telephone pole 4×4 crossbeams that he bought as utility company surplus. A mounted feral hog with a rattlesnake in its mouth hangs above a fireplace, and the hallway to the restrooms is lined with photos of old cowboy serials from the early days of television (his wife’s hobby).
Aside from a little travel, Kollmeyer still likes to collect firearms and target shoot on his ranch. Age may have slowed him physically but he is still able to manage the brewing operations and taproom, and even help with brewing where able. The only thing standing in Kollmeyer’s way these days is the currently limited capacity of the small Nocona brewery, which makes it difficult to break into the greater North Texas market. Self-distribution has limited practicality among rural towns like Nocona, and the distance to Metroplex markets is a significant factor. Commercial distribution can demand more product than a small brewery can produce, and contracts are rarely favorable to the brewery.
Growing a craft brewery to that next stage of success is a puzzle that Kollmeyer has yet to completely figure out, and one with a constantly shifting field of play as the modern craft beer industry continues to evolve. But puzzles and challenges are what has driven Dr. Kollmeyer his entire life. PH
