Renegade Brewing
By Ian Guevara
Zac Caramonta is a renegade, making renegade beers his own way. And it's successful.
He’s bearded, sweating profusely from the brutal summer heat and sports the tattoos one would expect for a renegade. With a beer in his hand and a hint of mischievousness in his eyes, Zac has created an empire from humble beginnings, hard work, a little luck, and a love of beer.
The Man, the Myth, the Legend: Zac Caramonta
“I’m not an entrepreneur, I’m a brewer,” Zac says defiantly as he looks over his massive operation nestled only a mile outside of downtown Hammond, Louisiana. His brewery, Gnarly Barley, has exploded over the past five years into one of the top distributors of beer in Louisiana.
Zac has done it his way and that attitude has been adopted by every single person working in his facility. Even the cans carry that mantra and have the slogan, “Doing it our way in Hammond, LA.”
If you look at the names of Zac’s beers, you’ll see something distinctly different from other locally brewed beers in South Louisiana: they’re not all named after cultural or geographic icons of Louisiana. That’s by design.
“So honestly when we opened eight years ago, everything in the beer industry was trying to be as local as possible.”
“It was like pump local, pump local, which is a lot of our industry. The food and beverage industry is ‘connect yourself to local, connect yourself to the South’. Louisiana based cajun, creole, that whole thing.”
“And in fact when we first started shopping distribution and looking at opening the brewery, one of the comments was that our name wasn't local enough and that we wouldn't be able to succeed without basically pimping locality.”
“So I kind of took that as bullshit. I don’t need to lean on that ‘everybody has to know that’s from here to buy my product’. I want the product to transcend that you’re only buying it because it's local.”
Walk down the grocery aisle in any store in Louisiana and a majority of the local beers have the same types of names and looks, pawning off this region’s love of self branding. Names that revolve around neighborhoods, streets, and bodies of water spill out and flood your brain with those nice little comforts. And often you keep drinking these beers even if they taste foul because the can looks cool or the name is catchy.
“I didn’t think we needed to fall back on it. We were told we had to, that is what was going on is local, local, local. We decided to go a little bit different.”
That same attitude also lent itself to the naming of the brewery. Yet another exercise in trying to connect to the community through nostalgia, yet again, the renegade brewer went his own way. He named his brewery Gnarly Barley, a reflection of his two great passions: skateboarding and brewing.
“From the very beginning we were like, you know what, you don't like my name? Well, fuck it. I’m a skateboarder, I’m a brewer, I’m naming my fucking brewery Gnarly Barley whether you like it or not,” Zac states, ever the renegade.
Quality over quantity, uniqueness over conventionality, these are the cornerstones of Gnarly Barley. Zac does not seem to care for or about placating to yesteryear, pushing the envelope like a skater pushing ground. He wants to create the best beer he can.
“We’re not going to brew for the local [community’s nostalgia]. We’re going to brew beers that we love and we’re going to bring it to the local community. Hopefully they’ll get it and enjoy it.”
And that passion for innovation, quality, and uniqueness led to Jucifer, arguably one of Louisiana’s most popular beers and the beer that clearly shows that Zac’s vision was the right course to follow.
“We were the first to put up a shelf-stable hazy IPA in Louisiana.”
Jucifer Hazy IPA is the pillar that Gnarly Barley stands on. Its flavor is only barely rivaled by the can’s artwork. It’s the beer that put Zac’s brewery on the map. From its opening in 2014 through 2017, Gnarly Barley was growing, but not at warp speed. Then Jucifer was introduced to Louisiana markets and everything changed.
“2015-2016 we hit our capacity, manufacturing-wise,” Zach noted. “The tap room started to bring in more cash so we bought more tanks. We added a canning line, bought two more tanks which doubled our capacity from 2,000 barrels to 4,000 barrels.”
“And then we released Jucifer. And from there to basically 2019 it was hold on to your shit. Things went nuts,” said Zac. In that time Gnarly Barley garnered a “Top 50 Fastest Growing Brewery” by the Brewers Association in 2017 and 2018.
With rapid growth comes the fundamental decision that all business owners must make: stay in your comfort zone or expand. Our renegade chose to expand.
“By 2019 we were buying equipment as fast as we could afford it. I was just paying cash for tanks to get them in here quickly. And that was just focusing on keeping up with production of Jucifer.”
Gnarly Barley now covers almost half a city block and is ever growing. Zac has bought buildings, leased land, and has plans to keep growing. It’s as if staying in one place would lead to extinction and he works with that sense of urgency and passion. The growth of the brewery has added another feather in Zac’s cap: a designation change.
“So right now we’re only in Louisiana. This year we will pass up microbrewery and be considered a regional brewery.” Zac says, brimming with pride. “But we’re only in one state so it's kind of a funny term. Hey, you’re a regional brewery, but you only distribute in one state. By production levels we’re a regional brewery, but we’re a very large single-state brewery for sure.”
The accomplishments of Gnarly Barley are a team effort. Zac is only one half of the equation in the initial growth of the brewery. Cari Caramonta, Zac’s wife and partner in crime, is the co-founder and Vice President, working with Zac on recipes, marketing, and tasting.
The brewery employs a little over twenty people and each one of them carries Zac and Cari’s passion for beer and quality.
“We have passionate folks here.” Zac points out. “Everybody who has come along has been so into it that we exude that we give a shit and we’re going to make the best beer we can possibly make.”
Great leaders have an eye for talent and know when to allow that talent to flourish. Zac hit the jackpot when he made his first hire. All he was looking for was someone to clean the kegs, instead what he received was a beer savant who would one day become his brewmaster.
“Joey was my first hire and he came in started cleaning kegs, worked his way in as a seller, then started taking over brewing and eventually I slowly relinquished water creating over to him. And then his first recipe that he came up with for this brewery was Jucifer,” Zac laughs in recollection.
Zac doin’ it his way.
The renegade knew he caught lightning in a bottle and allowed himself to focus more on other aspects of the business and cultivate Joey’s talents.
“So after that I was like, “Hey man, how about you take over recipe creation?”
Since then, Zac hasn’t looked back and Gnarly Barley’s reputation and status has only grown. In 2021 alone, the brewery received many prominent awards nationally including being named “Brewery of the Year” by Beer Connoisseur Magazine, five silver medals in the USA BEER ratings, and gold medal from the 2021 U.S. Open Beer Championship for Jucifer IPA in the New England/Juicy IPA category.
Yet with the recognition nationally, Zac keeps a low profile at home. Like Batman, his identity as a renegade brewer remains a quasi-secret. Like all great leaders, he prefers to defer attention to others in his business and heaps effusive praise on their contributions. However, it still amuses him when old friends and acquaintances only just now realize that mild mannered Zac Caramonta is a master brewer.
“What’s funny is, I have guys and girls I went to high school with, friends of mine, people I’ve known for a long time, and I wasn't on social media so nobody knew what I was doing for a living at the time.” Zac chuckles, “They literally purchased our beer for years thinking we were a brewery out of California.”
That relative anonymity despite skyrocketing success is evidence to his renegade attitude and work ethic. His company makes beer his way and does it well. They’ve worked hard, built an incredible brand, and are determined to make quality beer their focus.
“We’re not trying to punch the clock and get beer out. We’re trying to make great beer.”
Quick Quotes:
Favorite beer:
“My favorite beer that Gnarly Barley ever created is not my creation, but its “Hypnic Jerk”. That's Joey, my head brewer's creation. It’s an English Barley Wine, which is odd because I’m definitely all hopps. I love hoppy beer, IPAs, but that one beer is, in my opinion, the best thing we’ve ever created.”
Least favorite beer ever created:
(Laughing)
“One of the worst beers we’ve ever made is on tap right now! It's one of the “Test Batch” IPAs. Those beers were never meant to be sold, we do these test batching things all the time, but sometimes we release it. Sometimes we use new hopp products. We put two new IPAs with these new products that are new to the manufactures and new to us, just trying to figure out how to use them. So it was a shot in the dark completely. One of them was super bitter and kind of weird, and the other one is a very bitter but it still should be way better.”
