Beer Nut: White Lion’s head brewer Mike Yates has had a long, strange trip

SPRINGFIELD — In a weird way, Mike Yates' brewing career has come full circle.

"I started out with one Ray and now I'm brewing for another Ray," he said with a laugh during a recent interview with The Republican.

The two gentlemen he is referring to are the late, great brewing genius Ray McNeill of Brattleboro's McNeill's Brewery and Springfield's entrepreneur extraordinaire Ray Berry, founder of White Lion Brewing.

But it wasn't a straight line between those jobs. In between Yates spent time at a handful of breweries, including Cambridge Brewing, Amherst Brewing and Northampton's much-missed Building 8, as well as stops at Berkshire Brewing and Connecticut's Cambridge House Brewing.

Unlike many brewers, Yates wasn't a home brewer, but sort of fell into the trade accidentally.

"When I was at UMass in the early '90s, we used to go to McNeil's because it had some of the best beer for miles," he said. "Then fast-forward a few years later, and I had moved to Brattleboro and went in there looking for a bartending job, but they gave me a job cleaning the bar and helping out in the bottling room."

As fate would have it, one of the brewers assisting Ray McNeill quit and Yates was asked if he wanted to learn how to make beer.

"And I said, 'why not?' So I'm not one of those guys who started out in the garage. I just fell into it," he said.

Serendipitously, Yates' college degree turned out to be brewing-adjacent.

"I studied plant pathology at UMass, which is a division of microbiology, so there's a lot of yeast and bacteria and fungi in there," he said. "So, my college education actually came in to play later on."

White Lion Head Brewer Mike Yates draws a draft at White Lion Wednesday at The Shops at Marketplace in Springfield on June 20, 2018. (Chris Marion / The Republican) Staff-Shot

While Yates got his various jobs in different ways, he also helped open two notable breweries from scratch, Building 8 and White Lion. What is the difference in approaching a new business as opposed to an established one?

"Well, I helped design the layout for Building 8 and White Lion, so it made sense to me as far as raw materials coming in and the finished product going out. There was a flow to it. It's kind of like being able to build your own house: You get to decide where things go and how you want it," he said.

"That said, if you're going to place like Cambridge House Brewing in Connecticut, they've been there for years and everything was running just fine, so there was definitely an advantage when you walk into a turnkey system – but then again, everything can be old and broken."

Mike Yates and Ashlet Clark of White Lion pose for a photo at the White Lion Summer Beer Garden at Tower Square Park in downtown Springfield, June 14, 2019. (Danny Nason photo)

Does he have any specific philosophy or goals with each beer he brews?

"On paper, everything can seem perfect, but then you have to execute it and it's all about temperatures and time. I'm kind of a control freak in that I want to do that stuff myself. Like, here at White Lion, I'm still up on the brew deck, making all the beer," he said.

Yates stressed that the process is about attention to detail and making sure the beer that is designed on paper comes out to expectations.

"And if it doesn't, that's where you learn and go back and change things," he said. "But I've been doing this for almost 30 years, so there aren't a lot of surprises anymore. But it's always about aiming for that perfection that you never ever really get to."

Read the original article on MassLive .