From left, Upper 90 Brewing Co.’s coowners Chris Gaglio and Mike Sinclair
Basement beer Party by stacy schultz photo by carmen troesser
For brewers Mike Sinclair and Chris Gaglio, the decision to open Upper 90 Brewing Co., in the basement of a restaurant was part personal, part business. The longtime friends have been making beer since 2009, when they made a New Year’s resolution to take their newfound love for craft suds into their own hands. “It came about kind of as a dream to do something for ourselves instead of working for The Man for the rest of our lives,” Gaglio explained. Once the rave reviews reached beyond family and friends – and piqued the interest of the elites among the local food scene – they entered brewing competitions and began winning ribbons. With accolades under their belts, they set to work on a business plan. Meanwhile, bartender TJ Vytlacil was thinking up the business plan for his next move. Vytlacil, who opened the members-only Blood & Sand in 2011, was setting the gears in motion for a lunch spot in Citygarden named Death in the Afternoon, which opened this June.
Photo by CARMEN TROESSER
How did their plans converge? Well, Vytlacil and Sinclair go way back. When Vytlacil was about 12, he and his mother moved to St. Louis from Denver for her job, where she worked with Sinclair’s wife. The two families became fast friends. “TJ and I (played) Nintendo and roller hockey in my basement and street hockey out on the church parking lots,” Sinclair said. “They’ve just been really close friends of the family since. He calls me his godfather now. That’s an honorary title, which I’m very proud to accept.” Sinclair and Gaglio knew that if they were going to take the leap into entrepreneurship, Vytlacil and his business partner, Adam Frager, were the guys to do it with. “TJ brings that level of unbridled energy and enthusiasm that we feed off of because he’s very successful at it,” Gaglio said. “He’s got the smarts, and he has experienced so much in the world that we’re looking to go into. There’s just a lot Guide to Drinking 2014
of symbiosis, a lot of good interaction between all of us, and Adam, his partner, is phenomenal, too.”
something lighter – Irish red ale, Kölsch and a dunkel will be among the first to hit the kegs.
The plan is to keep their day jobs, brew on weekends, lease the basement space from Vytlacil and Frager and sell beer that’s piped up to dedicated Upper 90 tap handles at Death in the Afternoon. As for what will come out of those taps, the restaurant’s hours present a hurdle. “You don’t want to come into lunch, drink an oatmeal stout and then have to go back to work,” Sinclair explained. “So we’re trying to be aware of that and take some of what we do in the homebrew and limit that to make it something that’s sessionable – something that you can have one with lunch and go back to work and still be functional and be awake.” Look for glasses of
For now, Sinclair and Gaglio are technically a “brewery in planning,” having marshaled their equipment and applied for the proper permits. (At press time, Upper 90 had received a federal government green light, but was still waiting on state and local permits.) Until the all-clear signal comes, they wait. And they plan. They wonder if they, like the home brewers before them who built beloved drinking holes like Civil Life, 4 Hands and Exit 6, can make their brewing dream come true. And there’s nowhere they’d rather be doing it than in the basement of a guy who used to stay up until midnight playing roller hockey – in the basement. saucemagazine.com I SAUCE MAGAZINE I 9