Drinking beer with college buddies seems an unlikely way to start a career path.
For Glenn Vopper, though, it led to a weekend business.
Vopper is one of three friends who together founded Jax Brew Bus. Now finishing its third year, the guided tour goes behind the scenes of Jacksonville’s growing craft-beer industry.
Up until six years ago, there were no craft breweries in Jacksonville. Today there are eight.
“There aren’t a lot of people who know about them still,” Vopper said. “We do our best to promote the scene and honestly, it’s just a lot of fun.”
Bar hopping shouldn’t need a tour guide, but in the case of craft beer, there are a few barriers to entry. The menus are one of them. With beer names like Hasselhoffenweisse, Old Battle Axe, Count Shakula, and Killer Whale Cream Ale, what does one order?
Most of the craft breweries have four or five staple beers that are always in stock, Vopper said. That’s a good place to start. After that, branch out to one of a dozen other experimental brews that revolve on and off the menu.
On the tour, Vopper picks out a standard recipe to get guests started. Then, he steers them to others as he learns more about their personal tastes.
Vopper also delves into brew theory, taking tour-goers into back rooms to see kettles, tanks and casks that the beer cycles through during the brewing process. It’s here that brewers experiment with flavors, like adding peppers or fruit.
Now a beer “snob,” Vopper can pick up subtle differences.
“I can taste a beer and say, ‘That’s a Bold City Brewing beer or an Intuition Ale beer,’” Vopper said. “It’s mainly because of the yeast. It adapts to its environment and becomes its own unique strain. It’s like a flavor but almost style.”
Vopper grew up in Orange Park, where he met Josh Carpenter and Mike Maulsby, friends who would later become his business partners. The trio attended the University of North Florida, majoring in economics and political science.
In those days Vopper drank Bud Light.
“It was a case of, whatever I could afford. I was not picky,” he said.
After graduation, the three got jobs in law and finance. Outside of work, they kept drinking beer.
They branched out to craft beer and started home-brewing. The craft beer industry was gearing up and the friends thought they might one day open their own brewery.
Drinking beer is easy. Brewing it is not.
“It costs a lot of money,” Vopper said. “We’re really good friends with all of the head brewers, and it’s really not as easy as what we had first envisioned.”
They learned several local counterparts had trained at schools in Chicago, or abroad in Germany.
One day Carpenter asked Vopper and Maulsby to meet him at Intuition Ale Works. He had a new idea. He had seen a craft beer bus tour in another city and thought it would work in Jacksonville.
“We were like, ‘OK Josh. What’s your big plan now?’” Vopper said. “But, when he pitched it to us, we were like, wow that actually is amazing.”
The friends bought an old airport shuttle bus at a bankruptcy auction and Jax Brew Bus was born.
At first they designed the tour to cater to home-brewers like themselves. They brought home-brewing equipment on board and gave an in-depth overview on how to use it.
“We found a lot of people didn’t really care about it. They were really more interested in the beer,” Vopper said.
Today, the tours draw from every demographic, Vopper said. Not just college students, but older people who appreciate good beer and people who’ve never had craft beer before and who want to check out the breweries.
“By the end of the tour, I think we get people converted. They get out of their comfort zone from what they normally drink,” Vopper said.
And, while it’s still Vopper’s dream job to one day open a brewery, for now, he loves running the bus.
“We get to go and hang out and talk about beer for a few hours,” Vopper said. “I’ve usually got 14 new best friends by the end of the day.”
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