Rideout, a Mandarin Hide floor manager at the time, knew about cold-brew coffee, which was just starting to hit the mainstream about two years ago. Always experimenting with coffee cocktails at the venerable downtown St. Pete cocktail bar, he invested in equipment to begin experimenting with the concentrated coffee at home.
Then one thing led to another.
Rideout intended to establish his newfound business, Made Coffee, whose name is a nod to the word “craft,” as a cafe. He and his business partner Chris Dowd wanted a small retail spot dedicated to cold brew made in-house. Maybe it’d supply local restaurants and bars with coffee as well, Rideout thought. So out they went to look for a location.
Their search throughout the EDGE District turned into a year-plus hunt. As Rideout tells it, every property they viewed came with a problem — electrical was bad, rent was too high, the building was falling over. It was time to regroup.
“We just decided to kind of change paths and completely focused on the cold-brew nitro coffee,” Rideout said.
To get the word out about Made as a wholesale product, Taylor Prater, who worked with Rideout at the Mandarin Hide and shares his passion for coffee, helped showcase the cold brew in cocktails around town. With years of combined experience in the liquor and hospitality industries, the duo began partnering on events with some of the downtown St. Pete bars they’ve built relationships with. They’d curate coffee cocktail menus, tailored to each event, and the cold brew caught on.
“I think that really created a buzz at the beginning and got, at least like our core group and our friends and our relationships, involved in it,” Prater said.
She and Rideout’s restaurant and bar scene connections have helped Made score a spot on the draft lines of hangouts like Cask & Ale, the pop-up Intermezzo Coffee, Hunger + Thirst Restaurant Group’s three eateries, the coming-soon Grassroots Kava House and Bodega on Central, which goes through kegs and kegs of the stuff weekly. And now, they’re ready to evolve again.
Downtown St. Pete-based Hype Group is spearheading the rebrand of Made, bringing brighter colors to its identity, developing a fresh logo and producing designs for its coming-soon canned cold brew, among other things. While Made’s been around since early 2015, these changes will allow them to finally say, “This is who we are.”
“As everything evolved and we actually saw what this business was gonna be and what we wanted to do,” Rideout said, “we decided we wanted to freshen up the brand, take a little different path than what most coffee companies are doing.”
Specializing in canned and kegged cold-brew and nitro cold-brew coffee, Made is set to introduce what it calls a coffee brewery and tasting room to St. Pete.
The intersection of specialty coffee and craft beer isn’t new for Tampa Bay; there’s nitro cold brew, like Made’s, served up on draft as well as in cold-brew growlers. And outside the region, operations that bill themselves as “coffee breweries” have popped up in Sanford, Ohio, Canada and even the Philippines and Indonesia.
“I just think we’ve been influenced by so many things. I don’t know of one specific place that we were like, ‘Hey, let’s do this.’ But both of us are constantly on Instagram, reading articles and doing all these things to get a whole picture of this,” said Prater, a portfolio manager for William Grant & Sons. “I’m still in the liquor industry [and] he’s worked in hospitality forever that we’ve just pulled from all these different influences.”
Want hot coffee? Sorry. Made’s Warehouse Arts District production facility at 131 22nd St. S., across the street from 3 Daughters Brewing and next to Brocante Market, doesn’t plan to carry drip coffee, espresso, any of it. Coffee beer, on the other hand, isn’t off limits.
According to Rideout and Prater, they’ve been talking to breweries in the area, including 3 Daughters, Green Bench Brewing Co. and Mastry’s Brewing Co., whose coffee beers they hope to feature in the tasting room alongside their cold brew. Eight to 10 suds — mostly local, but also made elsewhere — are planned on tap.
“We have a lot of resources to pull from around here. We’re gonna tap into all of Florida for sure to start. I’ve got relationships all the way up into north Florida, so we’re gonna branch out,” Prater said.
Although the building is 2,200 square feet, the taproom will be small, likely 600 square feet. They’re going for an elevated, cozy, inviting feel, a place where they can work and bring clients. With big glass windows that look into the brewery (another shout-out to the beer business), the facility’s look will draw from the pair’s backgrounds, meeting somewhere between a craft cocktail bar and a brewery.
“The coffee brewery idea came from the craft beer industry. End of story,” Rideout said. “As far as why do I want to put all this equipment in view where you can see the process? It’s just because of how much I enjoy going to breweries and seeing the process of beer-making.”
Doing fun events for Brocante, which returns the first Saturday and Sunday of every month, is a goal, as is taking advantage of Made’s proximity to its brewing brethren. They want to reach out to brewery tour companies like Brew Bus to get in on the neighborhood’s synergy.
“We’re all just gonna kind of try to work together in that Warehouse Arts District and kind of make that little corner fun,” he said.
Something beer and coffee don’t have in common? Resources for those looking to do cold brew on a large scale are pretty much nonexistent, at least online. For beer buffs, however, a quick Google search can yield any number of results on big-batch or commercial brewing.
Rideout says he’s dug through various sources to see how cold-brew operations selling at a regional and national level are making it work to no avail.
“I can’t even see where they brew it,” he said. “I mean, obviously people are doing it, so we know we can do it as well. But if you want to go make beer, it’s being done. There’s hundreds of companies that make the equipment to make beer. But if you want to open up a cold-brew coffee brewery, there’s no one that’s said, ‘I can make you 1,000 gallons a day and this is how you do it.’”
Enter BrewFab. Located behind Mazzaro’s Italian Market, the company’s fabrication warehouse fashions brewing equipment for breweries around the state — and nation. Rideout reached out to Kyle Cureton, who owns BrewFab with his father Rick and has become an invaluable resource for Made, after spending six months testing out what could take their cold brew to the next level.
Most people who create cold brew for cafes on a smaller scale (under 10 gallons a day), Rideout says, are probably using a Toddy system, which Made was doing at first.
“Basically what that is, is you grind up all your coffee, you put it in this bag and then you lower it down in a bucket filled with water. You’re steeping coffee,” he said. “Let’s say 10 gallons of coffee, you’re using 10 pounds of coffee, so that’s fine. If you want to make 500 gallons of coffee, that’s 500 pounds of coffee.
And I can’t lift up 500 pounds of coffee.”
Bouncing ideas off each other, Cureton helped Rideout streamline the process, upping the efficiency with custom-built BrewFab equipment. Made’s brewing system requires a brew pot and two “brite” tanks, as well as several pieces of filtration equipment from the wine industry. (There’s also a CIP machine that hooks up to each tank and acts like a dishwasher.) Once coffee reaches the final tank, the holding tank, Made will use that to fill its kegs and cans.
Made, which is struggling to keep up with demand, already has designs in the works that’ll upgrade this system to handle more than 1,600 gallons of cold brew a week.
“There’s some beers that sit in these tanks for two to three weeks. With us, our entire process only takes 48 hours. From grinding to packaging, it’s a 48-hour process, so we’re able to brew every other day,” Rideout said.
Much of Made’s journey has been learning as they go, but also gearing up for the regulation of the coffee industry, which they see as inevitable. Their preparations include making their new headquarters a food-grade facility (coffee’s treated as a food product); sending their cold-brew cans to a testing facility for shelf-life stability; keeping a cold chain from brewing to shipping so the product is always in a refrigerated state; and looking into how to pasteurize their coffee to make it room-temperature shelf stable.
“There’s going to be a time where something’s gonna happen — where someone that’s not paying attention or someone that’s rushing the process or someone that’s just trying to go out there and sell coffee,” Rideout said, “and the FDA is gonna come in and say, ‘Hey, what are you guys doing? How are you guys making this product safe? Show me your processes.’”
He, Prater and Dowd want to be ready before that happens. They’re very clear about Made’s focus: it’s all about their product. The tasting room, whose doors will open sometime after the brewery, whenever they feel most comfortable, is just the cherry on top.
A fully automated Diedrich IR-12 roaster and Wild Goose canning line will assist their BrewFab equipment in fulfilling the 45-plus verbal commitments they’ve received from businesses and friends, mainly about their cold-brew cans.
“This brewery, that’ll be the game-changer. We can take on more accounts, we can keep up with demand. I would have to brew for 14 or 15 straight days compared to one day with the new equipment, so the ability to make a lot of coffee is gonna be the benefit,” Rideout said.
Tony Finotti, formerly of Mandarin Hide and now the head of the cocktail program at St. Pete’s recently opened Proper Kitchen & Cocktails, is infusing liquors and bitter agents with Made to create fun cocktails. Rideout says he sees Proper, where he serves as one of the partners, becoming the “testing hub” for Made’s coffee cocktail recipes, which could then be presented to potential clients.
“We really want to hit up the bartenders,” Prater said, adding that the Florida bar scene enjoys being on the cutting edge. “They like to be different, so I feel like what’s better than creating a product for them?”
They’re interested in distributing a cold-brew coffee lemonade, too. (This food editor’s tried some, and it’s tasty.) Jarrett Sabatini of Intermezzo, who also has a cocktail background, introduced Rideout to the combination, which he was skeptical of at first but ended up digging. Turns out, Made can portray the flavors of lemonade in a can using ingredients like citric acid.
Nothing’s off the table, really.
“We’re gonna do whatever it takes to continue to evolve the product. It’s not gonna be about turning a profit for us,” said Rideout, who wants to make more high-quality coffee a part of St. Pete’s coffee culture. “It’s gonna be just constantly snowballing, putting the money we make back into the business, to make it as big as we can dream, basically.”
This article appears in Dec 8-15, 2016.