Where There’s Smoke, There’s Smoldered Society • Hop Culture

Smoldered Society Brand Manager Cameron Frank once almost burned his mom’s house down. While watching his mom’s dogs, Frank says he had left the house and later an ember popped out of the fireplace and landed on the ottoman, sparking a small fire. “I came back, and the house was filled with smoke because it had been smoldering for hours,” he shares. “I pissed my pants.” Running inside, Frank says he grabbed the dogs (everyone was fine). Years later, when he had the opportunity to run his own beer brand, Smoldered Society rose from those ashes.

“The house is still standing, by the way,” Smoldered Society Art Director and Director of Sales & Marketing Peter Cahlstadt points out.

“It was just my mom’s great-grandmother’s ottoman,” laughs Frank. “The dogs were fine.”

Smoldered Society, an offshoot brand of Community Beer Works, which also includes Thin Man in its portfolio, has been on fire, landing on our list of “The Best New Breweries of 2024.”

Pulling any of their beers off the shelves takes us back to one of those underground raves we went to in Chicago in our early twenties, where people stood around drinking PBR, dancing, and watching folks skate on a homemade ramp set up in some empty warehouse.

That sort of f**k-the-man attitude, captured in this brand, from the labels to the beers, has been turning heads and setting shelves on fire.

We’re following the smoke to Smoldered Society.

Rising From Day-One Employees to Start Smoldered Society

Frank, Cahlstadt, and Smoldered Society Head Brewer Ryan Zacarchuk met while working at Thin Man Brewery in Buffalo, NY.

“It’s funny because all three of us were essentially day-one employees,” says Frank, who started there nine years ago as a busser before “weaseling” his way into a sales position and eventually becoming brand manager.

The PR and advertising major says he “was a horrible college student” who didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, so he got behind the bar. “I started to fall in love with beer.”

A former barista and bartender, Zacarchuk says he felt bored and wanted to do something more creative. Considering going back to school for brewing, Zacarchuk says his boss, one of the original owners of Thin Man, had a different idea. “Why don’t I just give you a job at the brewery,” Zacarchuk says he told him. “You can wash kegs or whatever.”

Zacarchuk eventually took over running the small-batch system before becoming the head brewer at Smoldered Society.

At the time, Frank lived around the corner from the brewery and would pop in four to five days a week just to talk to Zacarchuk and ask him, “What the f**k are you doing?!”

Similarly, Cahlstadt found Thin Man a wayward home.

“I dropped out of art school and just drove around a lot with my buddies, going up to Vermont and all the beer places,” he says. Cahlstadt originally applied at Thin Man to be a bartender, but they told him he wasn’t qualified. “But we need someone to make a bunch of ads for us, and we see this art school shit on your resume,” Cahlstadt laughs as he retells the story. “I told them I definitely graduated and could totally work on all that!”

All three collided at Thin Man, which Community Beer Works acquired last year.

Looking to utilize an unused seven-barrel tank space, Community Beer Works tapped Frank, Cahlstadt, and Zacarchuk to start Smoldered Society.

Garage Bands, Skate Decks, and Small-Batch Beers

If Community Beer Works is your honor-roll-student big brother, Smoldered Society is like your…well, art school-dropout kid brother—extraordinarily creative and talented and unbound by any rules.

Drinking something from Smoldered Society warps you back in time.

Punctured 9-volt batteries, three-eyed monsters, dancing skeletons, and ‘90s analog TV sets with knobs are common fixtures on Smoldered Society’s cans.

“Smoldered goes back to the early days of startups and the guerrilla-ness of starting a small-batch brand,” says Cahlstadt.

Fueled by passion, creativity, and an almost lets-do-whatever-the-f**k-we-want attitude, Smoldered doesn’t hold back.

For example, when Zacarchuk wanted to make a beer resembling ambrosia salad. For all those folks who didn’t grow up in the Midwest, salad is a very loose term for this dish of pineapple, mandarin oranges, mini marshmallows, coconut, and whipped cream.

“It’s the marshmallow fruit salad all the old Polish ladies bring to parties,” jokes Cahlstadt.

To mimic the “salad’s” coconut flavors, Zacarchuk added Sabro, a hop with coconut-like qualities, on the hot side. “It’s crunchy and chewy,” says Zacarchuk. And for the pineapple, the most tropical fruit-like hops Zacarchuk could think of was Nelson and Azacca.

For the marshmallow, he added a Nature’s Flavors powder. “It tastes like marshmallows and feels like marshmallows,” he says. “It’s super weird!”

The IPA, Weaponized Incompetence, came out as close to Ambrosia as possible—a statement in itself that is pretty wild.

The philosophy at Smoldered isn’t necessarily bigger is better, says Zacarchuk, “but bigger is better!”

Like using “unapologetic pounds of hops per barrel,” says Cahlstadt.

Zacarchuk says it’s not uncommon for Frank to tell him to push the hopping rates slightly next time. “It’s a game of inches right now,” says the head brewer, who has gotten some of Smoldered’s beers up to five pounds per barrel on their tiny seven-barrel system.

Yet for a brand built on Godzilla-like flavors, the brewery’s restrained pilsner is perhaps everyone’s favorite.

The Crown Jewel

Smoldered Society’s Strike Anywhere has become the unequivocal and somewhat surprising favorite in the brewery’s portfolio.

“That’s our pride and joy,” says Frank, “Despite everything else we’ve said, I feel like this is unabashedly different but cool.”

Wanting to appeal to a domestic consumer, Frank says Strike Anywhere struck that perfect balance.

Essentially a Czech-American lager mashup, this pilsner gets an infusion of corn (for that American inflection). Zacarchuk also drops the final gravity a bit to make this beer more drinkable.

“You can drink like f**king three of them,” says Cahlstadt.

“It’s just meant to be a super extra drinkable Czech lager,” Zacarchuk piggybacks. “It’s something living in my brain for a while—this combination of where American beer came from and combined with the tradition of [the style].”

For perspective, while Smoldered brews all its hoppy stuff and fruited sours in its seven-barrel fermenters, Strike Anywhere goes through the twenty-barrel system.

For practical reasons—the lager isn’t tying up a tank for too long—but also because people have responded so well to the quaffable bottom-fermented beer. “This is our permanent line beer, our permanent package placement beer,” says Frank, who was shocked at first that this beer shot to the top. “This is the crown jewel of Smoldered for me.”

Fed-Up Garage Punk Fun

At Smoldered Society, it all comes back to having fun, whether designing beer recipes, coming up with beer names, or illustrating quirky graphics.

Cahlstadt, who approaches Smoldered’s art with a notepad instead of a digital vector-based program, calls it “fed-up garage punk.”

“It feels almost primitive,” says the former art school student. “It’s like I’m doodling on a notepad instead of taking notes during class.”

While other brands Cahlstadt has worked on feel precise and clean, Smoldered Society is very much handcrafted through “pencil and paper.”

Like Illusion of Society, a double IPA series with a bushy-eyed banker on the can holding up a birdcage with a globe inside it that looks almost like an early 1900s political cartoon.

Frank went to Cahlstadt with the idea, and “he just threw together this incredible design,” says Frank, admitting he has these crazy ideas that Cahlstadt always seems to execute.

Like Balrog, the brewery’s double-dry-hopped triple IPA with Citra Cryo, Nelson Savuin, Citra-licious Hop Oil, and Nelson Hop Oil. An ardent Lord of the Rings fan, Frank wanted the label to touch on the darker side of Smoldered. For those who don’t know, Balrog is essentially a demon of the ancient world and a servant of the first dark lord, Morgoth. “I sent [Cahlstadt] a shitty JPEG from a Google search, and four days later, this beautiful label hit my texts,” laughs Frank.

“It’s all possible,” says Cahlstadt, who calls these monster- and character-like doodles “brain barfs.”

This is unapologetically Smoldered Society, and people have been eating it up.

Keep Eating

Everything Smoldered touches possesses an absurd authenticity. You know when you stand in front of a campfire, and your clothes still smell like smoke the next day? Something about Smoldered Society permeates our fabrics, latching on and refusing to let go.

Frank, Cahlstadt, and Zacarchuk won’t ever apologize for their DNA. In fact, they believe that’s what makes this brand so authentic.

“It’s an expression of who we are,” says Frank. “I get shit every once in a while, but I love to eat and will keep eating it!”

Smoldered is big, Smoldered is brash, and Smoldered is in your face. But they wouldn’t have it any other way.

The only piece missing is a brick-and-mortar where they can see their fans’ faces every day.

For the self-distributing trio, a taproom is essential to growing the brand.

“It’s a channel of creativity we haven’t had yet,” explains Frank, who believes the extra space will allow them to branch out with the brewery’s crown jewel—Strike Anywhere—brewing new variants.

But Frank assures that he will always go to Zacarchuk with “even more f**ked-up pitches on pounds per barrel!”

And make some taproom exclusives that are “pretty f**king weird.”

That’s the goal here. “Just keep pushing and pushing and pushing,” says Zacarchuk.

We’re not sure Smoldered Society knows how to do it any other way.

Isn’t it strange that just a little spark, a smoldering ember, can create so much smoke?

And where there’s smoke…there’s Smoldered Society.