ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
Levi Williams moved from his hometown in Arizona to Liberal recently to start a truck and trailer business, and after doing that, he saw a lack of a brewery in town.
“It kind of drove me crazy,” he said. “I started looking for buildings and talking to some of the folks at the city, and they showed a lot of support for it, a lot of excitement for it. We looked into it further and decided to go for it.”
Williams’ search led to the building at 103 W. 2nd Street in Liberal, the former home of the Seward County Health Department, and he and his wife, Shelly Williams, made an offer on the building and bought it.
“We waited for a little bit to get to where we could go ahead and start construction,” Levi said. “We got construction rolling. We’ve been charging ahead ever since to get it done.”
The Williams currently own a brewery in Arizona, where Levi worked on the financing and legal sides of the business to get that brewery started.
“I was never the boots on the ground for it,” he said.
“We were partners from afar on that one,” Shelly said. “We were living in North Dakota at the time. It was his hometown, and he was very passionate about that one, getting it up and running.”
The now open brewery, called Tortuga Brewing Company, offers some of its product at a few bars and restaurants in town.
“We have a mango blonde raspberry sour,” Levi said. “We have an IPA. We have an amber ale. We have a peanut butter porter, dry hopped wheat. It’s a real easy drinker, not too overwhelming on the hot flavor. It scratches the same itch as the pilsner would.”
“We already have all of those kegged and ready to go,” Shelly said.
Levi said new products seem to be a constant at Tortuga.
“One day a week, another one comes out,” he said. “My brewer’s been going crazy cranking them out.”
The Williams hired a brewer out of San Diego, Sean Chibata, who was a production brewer in California.
“I got in touch with him through an online forum,” Levi said. “We talked and hit it off. He sounded like he knew what he was doing, so I flew him out here to interview and brew a couple batches. They turned out pretty good, so we extended an offer, got him relocated out here. He’s been cranking out beer ever since. He arrived here in early June.”
Initially, Levi estimated Tortuga will bring 12 new jobs to the community, but he said there could be more as the company has much potential to expand operations.
“Depending on how it takes off, we’d have a canning line,” he said. “That would add another three or four jobs. A delivery job would be another job. Depending on the infrastructure side of it, if the manufacturing side of it takes off, we could be looking at a lot more jobs than just a taproom.”
Levi said the couple’s dream is to be able to service all of Southwest Kansas, and their processes are tried and true straight from San Diego.
“You really have to have your stuff together or the beer crowd will eat your alive,” he said of breweries in the Golden State. “We have beer that’ll stand up on a national level. You go drink our beer, and we have a lot of people go, ‘That’s actually really good.’ It comes out every time brewed like it would stand up to anything nationally, and it’s fresh. It’s made right here, and we take a lot of care in making sure every batch turns out right.”
In addition, Shelly said she and Levi are looking to make Tortuga a space for people to congregate.
“It’s not just about the beer,” she said. “It is about the beer, but it’s not just about the beer. We want Tortuga to be a place where people come and they feel comfortable no matter who they are or what walk of life.”
In this way, Shelly said people can meet with friends and have a business meeting, lunch or dinner.
“There’s going to be an area for kids to play,” she said. “There’s going to be some basketball games. There’s going to be things to entertain the kids. On Mom’s afternoon out and you want to come and grab a bite and grab a couple pints, the kids are entertained.”
Levi said what endeared the couple to breweries is the family friendly atmosphere of many other breweries across the country.
“It’s going to be fun,” he said. “It’s being a less rigid space where if you want to go in and have a few beers, you can. If you want to have dinner with the family, you can go in there. You can count on the food being good. You can count on the environment being good, and you can count on it not being too rowdy, but a fun environment. That’s really what got me excited about breweries in the first place.”
Levi said all of the breweries he has visited have warm welcoming vibes.
“When we opened one in Arizona, that was the goal,” he said. “It was the first place allowed to serve alcohol in the history of the town, and it opened up to a huge warm reception for people who were looking for a space.”
Levi said the Williams are looking to bring a similar vibe to Liberal.
“It’s going to be a comfortable environment where you’re not feeling like somebody’s trying to turn tables, you’re not feeling you’re pressured to get in, get out,” he said.
“It’s a very relaxed atmosphere,” Shelly said.
Levi said Tortuga products will be sold at local bars, and he said the couple would love to partner with local restaurants as well.
“They’ve been so good to us,” he said. “We intend to continue to offer that, and we also have excess capacity. We’ll be thrilled to continue distribution there.”
As far as liquor stores go, though, Levi said selling products to those businesses is a process that can get merky.
“We’d have to have a canning line, and we’d have to have a lot of things there we don’t have at this time,” he said. “Eventually, yes, that’s our next expansion plan, but it’ll be a couple years down the road. We’ve got to get this open and get it s doing its own thing and expand from there.”
In the meantime, Shelly said customers can get items such as growlers and crowlers from the brewery.
“If people like the beer and they want to have at their barbecue on the weekend, they’ll be able to do that whether it’s a few cans or a couple growlers,” she said. “That will be available.”
Levi said transforming the former health department into a brewery was a little easier than some may think.
“It was awesome because it was already ready,” he said. “It used to be a hardware store, and after that, it was a furniture store. Everything was there. That roof, that beautiful tin ceiling was there, and it was all covered up with dropped ceiling and walls that were pretty easy to knock down. Nothing was structural.”
Levi said watching the transformation from the health department’s offices to open space was awesome to see.
“We did keep the bathrooms,” he said. “There was a break room where the women’s restroom is. The men’s restroom, we pushed it back into some of the break room. We split the break room and left the stall in the middle. You have a bigger stall for a changing table, for handicap.”
Levi said Tortuga could be using the help of local ag producers in making their products.
“We are looking at that infrastructure,” he said. “One of the challenges is we need some very specific things from our grain. Protein count versus starch count is important. The malting process is pretty labor intensive. We have reached out. There is a guy doing Kansas specific malting. He actually has to take it to Colorado to malt it. He sources Kansas grains. We plan to do some work with him as we’re able to, but the process is pretty refined by some of that the guys who produce that grain.”
Levi said grains will be sourced from all over the world as well.
“We end up with grains from Germany if we’re trying to do a German style lager,” he said. “We end up with some British malt. We end up with a pretty broad range. If you’re going to make a beer in a style, you want to bring that characteristic with it. If you come in and sit down and drink an ESB, which is our next one coming out, I want you to think you’re in Britain.”
Levi said this is the ultimate goal with all Tortuga products.
“We try to match the water profile,” he said. “We try to match the malt build, the yeast strain, the conditions it would’ve historically been brewed in so it comes out tasting like that.”
“We do have bees locally, and we have already used our honey in the amber and eventually are going to be doing some ciders and things that will be utilizing the local honey,” Shelly said.
Levi described the process Tortuga uses to brew beer.
“We’re taking the starches out of the grains, converting them to sugars, and we are using yeast to turn that sugar into alcohol,” he said. “The way we’re doing that is by taking the grains into our mash garden and rinsing it with hot water, letting it soak in there, and we can determine how much sugar comes out of those grains based on the temperatures we use and what types sugars come out of there.”
After this is done, Levi said adjustments will be made for the different styles of beer.
“Then we’ll take it over to the kettle, boil it,” he said. “That’s when we’ll add our hops. That’s when we’ll add a lot of any adjuncts we plan on adding in, and we’ll send it off to ferment.”
“We use different malts and barley, and we figure out what malts and barley will give us different profiles,” Chibata said. “Some malts and barleys will give us more bready characteristics. Some will give us more malty, or some will give us more caramel.”
Prior to the opening of Tortuga, products were made at a separate facility and shipped out using a space smaller than the building the brewing company now calls home.
“This is a dream,” Levi said. “We just have a lot of merch in there right now. This facility is going to be very nice to be in. It’ll be really nice to be able to stretch out a little bit.”
Levi said when the brewing company in Arizona opened, it was met with much local resistance.
“As soon as they saw how much revenue we brought to their local economy, they were happy to roll out the red carpet for it,” he said. “The next time we applied for expansion, they were thrilled to help us out. I haven’t done the math on the local impact, but between sales tax that’ll be collected, the liquor enforcement tax, we do end up generating a lot of revenue for the local and state governments.”
Shelly said Tortuga will be heavily involved in the Liberal community, and one of the things being looked is a community cleanup day.
“If there’s an area of town, we’ll pick this quadrant, and everybody who meets up gets a flyer, a voucher to come back and meet up and have a beer afterwards – just things to help bring the community together, beautify our community,” she said.
With local bees being part of the brewery process, Shelly said would love to start a beekeeping club.
“I’ve met several other beekeepers since we started keeping ours in mid-April,” she said. “Having a bee club meet here once a month, having it be a place where groups can come and meet, sit down, have a chat.”
Saturday, Oct. 19, local Internet provider IdeaTek is hosting the Fall Festival, a free event in downtown Liberal, at Tortuga, and those who come can enjoy live music, cornhole and an array of vendors.
“With Fall Fest, we’re reaching out to some of the other breweries in the area to see if they want to come and serve as well,” Levi said. “We really want to see the brew community strengthened, and we’re at a really awesome time in brewing. We just got our self-distribution as a right.”
Levi said recently passed legislation allows breweries to now distribute up to 1,000 barrels of their own product directly to retailers.
“We don’t have to sell it to a distributor and hope that distributor gets it there and treats it well in the interim,” he said. “That’s been a huge boost. I think we’ll see a little bit of growth, and I want to help that growth be healthy growth and collaborate with some of the breweries around here and help each other out.”
Chibata said Tortuga hopes to host an international beer month event as well.
“We have our food vendors up in Garden City,” he said. “We can also pair with them to do an international beer month where we do different beers from different countries.”
Levi said construction was scheduled to be finished in mid-August.
“That’ll allow us to start adding in all of our things and start taking delivery of all of our restaurant equipment,” he said.
As that has continued since then, Tortuga has hosted some soft openings and is now open to the public from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week at 103 W. 2nd Street.
