Vitamin Sea Brewing in Massachusetts

In this episode of the UnCapped podcast, host Chris Sands talks with Dino Funari, founder of Vitamin Sea Brewing in Weymouth, Massachusetts, about his background, how the brewery came to be and where the name came from. Here is an excerpt of their talk.

UnCapped: You just had a recent anniversary. When was Vitamin Sea founded?

Dino Funari: Yeah, we celebrated four years in February. We opened in February 2019. We got a year-plus in before the pandemic hit.

UnCapped: Did you open with canning products in mind, or are you one of the breweries that had to do a real quick pivot?

Funari: Actually, our model was such that we were canning right out of the gate. We were packaging our beer in cans and selling from the taproom from the beginning. For us, it was more like playing catch up, because all of a sudden, everyone was in line waiting for beer [at the onset of the pandemic], with the fear of the unknown. So we pivoted a little bit, in the sense that we had to produce and package more than we had expected.

UnCapped: It was a big boon for canning line manufacturers, as everyone got frustrated with not being able to get time slots with mobile canners.

Funari: We had reached out ahead of time and said, “Hey, can you slot us for the next 24 months?”

UnCapped: What was your first home brew?

Funari: That was back when you had to buy a kit.

UnCapped: Was it Mr. Beer?

Funari: I don’t think Mr. Beer was even around then. It may have been, but it was the same thing, where you have buckets and the extract kit and all that. It just stunk up the house and exploded everywhere. It was a mess. I did that for a little bit and thought, maybe this isn’t the right time.

Then I got into home winemaking, and did that for probably 25 years or so.

Then about 10 years ago, I got the itch to get back into home brewing. I started brewing with a friend every Saturday at the house. It kind of compounded from there. Other friends would come by, and it became a weekly ritual, if you will.

The beer was slightly better than those initial batches and started to get better and better as we continued to progress and learn. Eventually, we would get the beer out to friends. We had this cooler in the front yard. We’d leave cans of our beer in there, and people could come by to pick them up to try and give us their opinion.

UnCapped: Like those little neighborhood libraries.

Funari: Yeah, or the egg stands. People leave their eggs out for people to come by. The honor system. So we did that, and people were like, “This is good. You should do something with this.” We were kind of like, “OK.”

People pushed us into it. It was not our intention at first. We wanted to make beer — and make good beer — but more for our own consumption, being hobbyists and what we would consider artists. That’s why we did it.

We went along with that and decided to start taking it seriously. Then we realized, wait, this is a business — a real, legit thing. We have to make hard decisions. There’s money involved and all that stuff. We wrote a business plan and started to look for locations and talk to banks and the whole thing.

UnCapped: All the fun part.

Funari: All the fun part. We’re actually not in the town we wanted to be in, although it’s worked out great for

Vitamin Sea Brewing

30 Moore Road, Weymouth,Mass. 781-803-2104 vitaminseabrewing.com us. I think our dream of what we had when we opened is completely different now than it was then. We opened much larger, found a much bigger space, which is great because the way things went, we would’ve been in trouble right out of the gate at the other place, with a much smaller system. We wouldn’t have had the capability to grow the way we have. With the space we have, we’ve been able to scale up and organically grow the business.

UnCapped: What size system did you open with?

Funari: We have an oversized 10-barrel brewhouse. We actually do 12 1/2-barrel turns. And then we fill 20- and 30-barrel fermenters.

We still actually have our home brew system, which we brew on five days a week. That’s a treat when we do collabs with people. They come through and see that thing, and they’re all jealous. It gives us a chance to do one- or two-barrel batches of test beers that we can put in the taproom and gauge people’s interests, without having to commit to 20 barrels of a red ale or something.

UnCapped: Enough people are gonna enjoy it, but not enough that you want to dedicate 10 or 20 barrels to it.

Funari: Exactly.

UnCapped: Like, there’s always those people clamoring for a brown ale, but there’s just not that many of them.

Funari: All three of them, right?

UnCapped: Yeah.

Funari: So it’s nice. It gives us that flexibility.

This excerpt has been edited for space and clarity. Listen to the full podcast at fnppodcasts.com/uncapped.