wandering soul beer

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Brewing Through Grief: The Story of Wandering Soul Beer

Pull up a stool with matt smith.

When tragedy struck brewer Matt Smith’s family, he channeled his grief into a beer project that has since gone on to help others cope with and address loss. He’s the owner and founder of Wandering Soul beer based in Beverly, Massachusetts and he shared his story with All About Beer editor John Holl.

John Holl: Tell me about the brewery and how it came to be.

Matt Smith: The way it started is not really a typical path to starting a brewery. And actually in fact, I don’t have a physical location for a tap room that people can come visit. There’s a shed behind my house here in Beverly that is a fully licensed brewery. I have a state permit for the shed, as well as a Federal permit and an FDA registration. So technically, and legally, I can brew beer out of that shed and sell it directly to people. But they can’t drink here because they would literally be drinking at my house on my property.

So really, it’s just a formality for me to be able to take my recipes that I’ve accumulated for many years now and just produce them at other breweries in the area. Then I can self-distribute all that beer to local stores, bars, events and things like that.

The brewery has actually been a grief project for me. We lost our first daughter Melody in 2017. My wife was full term in her pregnancy, almost 36 weeks pregnant, and we found out that Melody’s heart stopped beating.

Our worlds were shattered. We had just moved into a new house, which is the house that we still live in. She was our first child, and my wife could have lost her life.  I had a stable job with another brewery. She had a stable job as a teacher. Everything’s going great. And then all of a sudden, everything just falls apart.

I had to leave my job with Clown Shoes Beer which, ironically, operated the same way I currently do; they didn’t have a physical location. I learned the business that way. If you’re making the beer somewhere else, and you’re relying mainly on wholesale, it’s a little different than having a place where you can invite people in and they can drink your beer there.

Basically, I entered the worst time of my life and the way that I grounded myself was to apply for the paperwork to start a brewing project which ended up being called Wandering Soul.

I wanted to release a beer in honor of Melody as a way to have a legacy for her. I was always afraid that her name would just get lost. And no one would ever remember, aside from us.

I didn’t think that I would get approved for the state and federal permits. I thought it was kind of a long shot.But it was approved at the end of 2018.

So I reached out to my friends at Castle Island Brewing in Norwood. I’m good friends with the owner, Adam. And I’ve become good friends with all of them. And I reached out on a whim saying like, ‘Hey, I got this permit, can we brew a batch of this beer that I want to call Melody Maker’?

It was a recipe I was working on prior to Melody’s death for a New England style IPA that’s 4.9% ABV. This recipe, I tweaked and tweaked and tweaked for years and did like 20 versions of it. And I finally reached a point where I was comfortable producing on a larger scale. I designed the whole label. And I donate some of the profits to a charity that helped me and my wife called Resolve New England .

The beer is brewed with two 2 row, Vienna malt and flaked oats, and I use Citra, Mosaic and Motueka hops. It’s fermented with a version of London Ale III.

Castle Island helped me make the beer and it sold out, and we made another batch and that sold out and it just became a business that was never supposed to be. But it did and it’s been amazing.

It’s the thing I’m probably most proud of in my whole life. And it’s been hard. I mean, this industry is not an easy one to operate in, especially when you’re tying your business and your brand to a story that’s so personal and not necessarily bright and cheery.

I’ve always designed it as a symbol of hope, because every beer is dedicated to a person or a concept, but there’s dark elements to it.

People can go through these things in life that can be labeled as sad, tragic, transformative, whatever the word is. And to produce something out of it, I think is very important for other people who are grieving and suffering to find some sort of creative outlet or something that they can use as a mode to get through the grief process. If I didn’t have this, I don’t know what I would have done.

John Holl: Have you been able to connect with folks through this? You’re talking about being hopeful, has that been able to forge a deeper connection with people you’re interacting with through this beer?

Matt Smith: The community around it is pretty amazing. I heard from a lot of people through Resolve New England. We’ve since gone on to have two other living children, they’re three and five years old now. The beer sort of opened up this conversation with all these people that were willing to share these things with me, that are so deeply personal,things like life and death situations. It was just so incredible, that people were willing to trust me. Because I think they saw that I was willing to take the step of talking about this in a very public way.

Especially for dads that go through this kind of thing, there’s really very little support. I think that for women that literally shoulder the load of losing a child during pregnancy, it obviously takes a much different toll on women. But also, women are a little bit better at talking about these things and finding community.

For men, it’s really hard, because I think men are supposed to be the stoic ones who just try to power through and not necessarily talk about it. That wasn’t an option for me. I knew that I had to talk about it.

John Holl: If other brewers go through extraordinarily terrible circumstances, like you did is there a path for them for this? Can projects like this have a larger place in beer?

Matt Smith: I was a little bit hesitant in the beginning about putting this out. Because I do know, a lot of other brewers. I had been in the beer world for a pretty long time before this and met a lot of people that way.

I was a little worried about what people within the industry were going to think. I was always very cautious of not trying to seem like I was trying to exploit some sad story to sell beer. This was a  very personal thing that I felt like I needed to do for my healing.

It did really have an impact. I’ve met so many other brewers through this and I’ve done at least 20 collaborations at this point with people, some who have become some of my best friends.

I want to help people at the end of the day, I want this story to have an impact not just for me, but for other people that might feel lonely or isolated or deep within grief.

Everybody’s going to be up against this at some point in their life. And it’s one of the hardest things I think to get through. Because in the end we are all in this together. It’s a human experience. And the only way to get through some of these really tough things in life, is to lean on people around you, or just find people that have gone through things similar to what you’re going through.

Maybe you come out on the other end a little different, and maybe a little damaged and scarred from the experience, but you’re still here. And you carry this stuff with you.

I carry the memory of my daughter every day. I wish she was here every day. But in a way she’s kind of been my copilot.

Pull Up a Stool is a regular feature on All About Beer. Reach out to editor John Holl at  [email protected]  with suggestions on brewing professionals that should be featured. And to support our journalism, pleas e  visit and donate via  Patreon.com/AllAboutBeer

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Wandering Soul Beer Takes Its Brews on the Road With a Mobile Taproom

It’s a tough time for the craft beer industry. Brewers remain in a recovery state from the COVID-19 pandemic; material costs have risen over two years of inflation; consumers are drifting toward beer alternatives, like nonalcoholic beer and hard seltzer, whether for health reasons, monetary ones, or both. Faced with this combination of market forces, breweries are either shuttering or merging with other companies to sustain their businesses.

Beverly’s Matt Smith has approached this volatile environment with an innovation: taking beer to his customers instead of having his customers bring themselves to his beer. Smith’s brewing project, Wandering Soul Beer Co., has functioned as a partner brewing outfit (the old terminology, “contract brewing,” has grown passé) practically from its start in 2017, so the distribution model isn’t new to him. What is new is his method of distribution: You can find cans of Wandering Soul beers on shelves, certainly, but why go to the store when you can visit Smith at his mobile taproom?

Matt Smith started Wandering Soul Beer Co. in 2017 in response to a family tragedy: The loss of his and his wife Abby’s first child, Melody, in utero, at 8½ months. Over the next five years, Matt poured himself into Wandering Soul to honor Melody’s memory. His flagship beer, Melody Maker, is his tribute to her. He announced an indefinite hiatus in fall of 2022. “It was just too much for me,” Smith says. “It wasn’t sustainable anymore, and I felt like I had accomplished what I wanted to with it. It felt like it had run its course for me, personally.”

Passion has a way of rekindling itself, and in 2023, Smith realized he missed brewing. “I had a conversation with myself about weighing the pros and cons of returning to it,” he explains. He knew he needed to set rules for himself to stave off burnout; he has a distributor to deliver Wandering Soul beers for him, to start, and he’s added a lineup of sparkling hop waters, called Hidden Path, to his repertoire. Most of all he has a taproom on wheels.

This alteration of the direct-to-consumer model typical to the craft beer industry suits Smith on a few levels. For one, it dovetails nicely with Wandering Soul’s character. “I don’t view [Wandering Soul] as being tied down to a specific place,” Smith says. “I wanted to preserve that, and that’s where the idea for the mobile taproom came about.” There’s a financial element at play here, too: Opening a full taproom right now presents a daunting risk, and the mobile taproom lets him pare back overhead.

“I approached this company called Tiny Pubs,” Smith explains. “It’s these two brothers that started this company of little mobile pubs, so we’re calling it the Micro Taproom.” Tiny Pubs rents out a handful of different mobile taprooms, including the Wee Irish Pubs, decorated to evoke the spirit of an Irish bar; for Smith, they built him a space to rent that, by a delightful accident, looks like the shed behind his house, where he first began brewing batches on his humble 5-gallon setup. It’s another instance of the mobile taproom concept being simpatico with Wandering Soul’s aesthetic and Smith’s story.

The Micro Taproom doesn’t come without obstacles. Every town has different laws and regulations surrounding the sale and consumption of alcohol, and Wandering Soul has to navigate them, which is a task easier said than done. “It’s not like I can pull the thing up in a park and just start selling beer to people,” Smith says with a laugh. “It doesn’t work like that. It’s regulated; it’s alcohol; there have to be ID checks and a perimeter and all sorts of different rules.”

But these complications won’t deter him. If anything, they’re motivation to push boundaries and be a pioneer in the field. “My focus is on doing things that are different and haven’t necessarily been done before,” Smith says. “I’d rather take the risk doing something no one’s ever done than opening a brewery.”

wanderingsoulbeer.com

Wandering Soul Beer Releases Everything Happens IPA

• Press Release
• Posted 2 Hours Ago --> Mar. 19, 2021 at 6:09 PM

BEVERLY, Mass. — Wandering Soul Beer is a small craft beer project based in Beverly MA, dedicated to honoring the people and things that make us who we are.

The beer project has 7 different types of beer:

• Melody Maker (New England Pale Ale)
• Things We Don’t Say (Double IPA)
• Bend, Don’t Break (New England Pale Ale)
• Young Mouse (Belgian Wheat Ale w/ Mango)
• Past Life (Vienna Lager)
• From The Wreckage (Imperial Stout)
• The Brightest Star (New England IPA)

Wandering Soul Beer was started by former craft beer production manager and home brewer for many years, Matt Smith. Smith dreamed of one day releasing his own craft beer. He somehow found inspiration during the most difficult days of his life. After his wife, Abby, gave birth to a stillborn baby at 8 1/2 months pregnant, Matt struggled to understand the loss of their daughter, who they named Melody. As a distraction and an alternative way to cope, Matt threw himself into his passion—brewing more frequently, replicating and refining certain recipes, investing in equipment, and then finally obtaining federal and state permits to sell his beer. From there, Wandering Soul Beer emerged from the darkness and into the light.

Wandering Soul isn’t just about the beer. The company prides itself on prioritizing giving back as much as making a profit. As such, each beer is dedicated to either a person or a concept surrounding doing better and social good. A portion of profits from the sale of “Melody Maker,” for example, goes to Resolve New England, a group that helps families struggling with pregnancy loss and infertility. Wandering Soul’s Double IPA “Things We Don’t Say” shines light on the thoughts and experiences people endure that they may be too afraid to talk about, while its “Bend, Don’t Break” brew honors the concept that the branches of a willow tree will bend under pressure, but they do not break.

The company recently launched “Everything Happens,” a beer that contemplates if everything does happen for a reason or if we try too hard as humans to assign logic to the unknown.

• Tasting notes: Hazy/New England Style IPA- 4.9% ABV. This hazy New England Pale Ale features 7 different hops: Citra, Rakau, Idaho 7, Azacca, Belma, Michigan Chinook and Michigan Bitter Gold. Look for bright aromas and flavors of tropical fruit, peach and grapefruit with a balanced bitterness.

Wandering Soul Beer is based in Beverly, Massachusetts.

The beer is sold in over 500 stores throughout Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland. No other craft beer company has combined love with loss or passion with purpose in a way quite like Wandering Soul.

For More Information: https://wanderingsoulbeer.com/

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Everything Happens.

Wandering Soul Beer

Pale Ale - New England / Hazy

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472 Ratings

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The Unique Burial of a Child of Early Scythian Time at the Cemetery of Saryg-Bulun (Tuva)

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Pages:  379-406

In 1988, the Tuvan Archaeological Expedition (led by M. E. Kilunovskaya and V. A. Semenov) discovered a unique burial of the early Iron Age at Saryg-Bulun in Central Tuva. There are two burial mounds of the Aldy-Bel culture dated by 7th century BC. Within the barrows, which adjoined one another, forming a figure-of-eight, there were discovered 7 burials, from which a representative collection of artifacts was recovered. Burial 5 was the most unique, it was found in a coffin made of a larch trunk, with a tightly closed lid. Due to the preservative properties of larch and lack of air access, the coffin contained a well-preserved mummy of a child with an accompanying set of grave goods. The interred individual retained the skin on his face and had a leather headdress painted with red pigment and a coat, sewn from jerboa fur. The coat was belted with a leather belt with bronze ornaments and buckles. Besides that, a leather quiver with arrows with the shafts decorated with painted ornaments, fully preserved battle pick and a bow were buried in the coffin. Unexpectedly, the full-genomic analysis, showed that the individual was female. This fact opens a new aspect in the study of the social history of the Scythian society and perhaps brings us back to the myth of the Amazons, discussed by Herodotus. Of course, this discovery is unique in its preservation for the Scythian culture of Tuva and requires careful study and conservation.

Keywords: Tuva, Early Iron Age, early Scythian period, Aldy-Bel culture, barrow, burial in the coffin, mummy, full genome sequencing, aDNA

Information about authors: Marina Kilunovskaya (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation). Candidate of Historical Sciences. Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dvortsovaya Emb., 18, Saint Petersburg, 191186, Russian Federation E-mail: [email protected] Vladimir Semenov (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation). Candidate of Historical Sciences. Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dvortsovaya Emb., 18, Saint Petersburg, 191186, Russian Federation E-mail: [email protected] Varvara Busova  (Moscow, Russian Federation).  (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation). Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences.  Dvortsovaya Emb., 18, Saint Petersburg, 191186, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected] Kharis Mustafin  (Moscow, Russian Federation). Candidate of Technical Sciences. Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.  Institutsky Lane, 9, Dolgoprudny, 141701, Moscow Oblast, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected] Irina Alborova  (Moscow, Russian Federation). Candidate of Biological Sciences. Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.  Institutsky Lane, 9, Dolgoprudny, 141701, Moscow Oblast, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected] Alina Matzvai  (Moscow, Russian Federation). Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.  Institutsky Lane, 9, Dolgoprudny, 141701, Moscow Oblast, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected]

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