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For a beer-making trio that grew out of a Bible study, it might come as a surprise that the Monday Night Brewing (MNB) patron saint of converting hops and barley into delicious alcohol is none other than balladeer Bryan Adams.
Or maybe it comes as more of a surprise that a group of Bible study dudes decided to start a home brewing operation in the first place. Either way, Jeff Heck, Joel Iverson and Jonathan Baker take beer — and Bryan Adams — very seriously.
“Yeah, the first week [of brewing beer], we were like, ‘What should we put on?’ Joel has a horrific iPod — it’s awful,” Jeff said on a recent Monday in his driveway where a brew was underway. “But the least offensive was Bryan Adams’ Greatest Hits The Best of Me.”
“So we put on some Bry-Bry,” adds Jonathan, who, it should be noted, selected “All for Love” (by Bryan Adams) as the first dance at his recent wedding reception, which also flowed with a special nuptial edition MNB ale.
As they’re telling me about the beatification of Saint Bryan Adams, the flow of people arriving to Monday Night Brewing, hosted in Jeff’s garage and driveway on – you guessed it! – Monday nights, has increased from a trickle to a steady stream. Joel, the third MNB partner with the embarrassing iPod, is posted up in front of their pilot brewery system as it steeps crushed barley in hot water, which will then be cooled, hopped and yeasted before going into the fermentation chamber. A cluster of MNB patrons have gathered around him as he explains the finer points of how they’re cooking up tonight’s Belgian wheat with fresh ginger.
“Joel grew up in Japan, so he tries to put ginger in everything that we do,” Jonathan jokes.
Brewery attendees can sample the MNB craft beers on tap (typically their trademark IPA and Scotch ale), and many in the mostly male meet-up also treat it as a Homebrew 101 course, asking the expert threesome questions about ingredients and techniques that nudge different characteristics and flavor qualities out of the grains.
When the guys brewed their first batch of beer together four years ago, they weren’t intending to hone their home brewing into a full-blown operation, complete with their own brand of Monday Night Brewing beer soon to be sold in liquor stores. Instead, they were just looking for an icebreaker activity for a Bible study.
“We were talking about deep, profound things like the meaning of existence and God, but we didn’t really know each other that well. So one Monday night, we decided that we’d brew a batch of beer,” Jeff says. “It was great, and we had a great time, so we did it again the next week and the week after that. Then we started actually figuring out that we could make beer that was decent tasting.”
Pretty soon, around 20 or 30 people started showing up at Joel’s house — the original MNB headquarters — to participate in the homebrew process, and Monday Night Brewing was born.
“About three months into it, Joel and Jonathan and I had [become] the guys who were organizing and making sure we knew what we were doing, and we also started to realize that our professional backgrounds and our personal interests were all complementary and aligned really well, so we decided we’d give it a go and make a business out of it,” Jeff explains. “We put together a three-year plan that turned into a four-year plan.”
Divvying up the MNB tasks, Jonathan oversees marketing as Master of Mind Control, Joel handles operations as Taste-Testing Ninja, and Jeff covers finance and beer recipes as Supreme Beer Chancellor.
The business-end of moving their signature beers (Eye Patch Ale and Drafty Kilt Scotch Ale) from Jeff’s garage to liquor store shelves has eaten into time they’d typically devote to brewing, but it’s not like they haven’t amassed an epic amount of beer-making experience in the past four years.
“I’ve probably brewed 20 batches of [our IPA] just trying to get it right,” Jeff says. And when you consider that it takes three weeks for a beer to ferment before imbibing, that adds up to a whole lot of time invested in this delicious ale that conjures up “sweet caramel, citrusy flowers and swashbuckling adventure.”
“The Scotch Ale is the one that I’m most proud of because there’s nothing else like it that I’ve ever tasted,” Jeff adds — although this gal personally can’t stop craving a frosty glass of refreshingly earthy MNB Blind Pirate Double IPA, which is saying something since I don’t even consider myself an IPA fan.
Although the men are beer masters now, they’ve naturally concocted some failures along the way.
“We wanted to make a Christmas beer and called it swaddling ale,” Jeff says. “But I decided that I wanted to get something that had a spruce or evergreen flavor, but really light and subtle, so I probably added 10 times the amount I was supposed to of this spruce flavoring. It tasted like a can of Pine Sol that someone had poured vodka into.”
Clearly, developing and brewing fine craft beer like the Jeff, Joel and Jonathan have done is far more complex than cracking open a PBR.
“It takes tenacity. It’s been a lot of long nights, too; a lot of long weeknights,” Jonathan says. “We’ve been out here ‘til one a.m. some nights. This is my creative outlet now. I used to write a lot, and I don’t do that anymore because I think about this too much.”
But the guys don’t take all of the credit for MNB’s success. For them, the folks who stop by and sample every Monday have also provided invaluable feedback, which has been crucial for tweaking their IPAs, ales and wheats bit by bit into an impressive craft beer repertoire that would delight even Bryan Adams’ distinguished palate.
“We had such humble beginnings and started as a group of folks coming together to drink beer,” Jonathan says above the buzz of MNB patrons milling about. “We want what we’re doing to feel like it’s other people’s, too. The regulars who come feel like they’ve been a part of this from the beginning, and we want that and we want their input, we their feedback and we want them to tell their friends.”
Photo Credit: Jason Travis
When I met up with Catlanta at Esther Peachy Lefevre Park in Cabbagetown on a recent Saturday morning, he looked like he’d been on the losing end of well, a cat fight. Faded purple and yellow bruises marbled the left side of his face, and a spider web of scabs snaked alongside his eye like misplaced mascara.
But I quickly came to find out that this street artist ain’t no street brawler. He had face planted off a fixed-gear recently, barely escaping the spill without stitches. Catlanta’s a lover, not a fighter.
“It’s kind of like meditation,” Catlanta says. “Just doing it and making cats.”
That day, we shuffled our way toward Reynoldstown on one of his kitten drops. Every now and then, he’d spot a good hiding place, leave behind a Catlanta kitten magnet, and snap a picture of the prize with his phone to post on Facebook for his fans can later venture out and find it.
“I enjoy making them, but it’s the interactive part that’s the real draw for me,” he says. “This is something I did in a few hours on my living room floor, and people are out looking for it. It’s really grassroots and great that people are actually getting out and looking and walking around their city.”
Although the Catlanta project got started as a spray paint tag he tossed up along Dekalb and Wylie to kill time during January’s Snowpocalypse, he’s abandoned the graffiti and now focuses full-time on the magnetic and cardboard kittens he sprinkles around the city. That way, he doesn’t have to worry about catching flack from disgruntled neighborhood associations and possibly getting caught by the cops with a can of spray paint in his hand.
“It’s too much stress when I have more fun doing this,” he says.
But even more than that, Catlanta just doesn’t think his tag is up to snuff.
“The tag is cute, but it’s not like it was ever really a good tag,” he says, explaining his move away from graffiti. “It’s takes a long time to learn to spray paint and do a really effective tag. So one, I don’t really like them, and two, I was getting a lot more negative feedback about it. I had tons of people who enjoyed it, but there were also a lot of people giving me shit.”
That’s the funny thing about Catlanta. While his tag has become one of the best-known around town in a short time spawning rip-offs including Ratlanta, Batlanta and Copy Catlanta, the artist is somewhat ambivalent about the cartoonish cat designs saying, “They were just like really stupid cartoon drawings.”
“I never really wanted it to be called Catlanta,” he says. “I wrote it with that, but I wasn’t wanting that to be my tag.”
In fact, he didn’t come up with the word “Catlanta” either, but snagged it from an Atlanta t-shirt he inherited from his grandmother.
“It’s actually a really awesome t-shirt,” he says. “It’s three cats jumping in an arc over the city and the skyline, and it says “CATLANTA” in big block letters.”
Awesome indeed.
And like Catlanta tag, the kitten drops also began purely out of happenstance.
“I was working at a mall job and found a ton of magnets and just started making magnets and giving them away to people. I wasn’t even planning on making it like a hunt, but I posted some pictures [of Catlanta kittens] to the Internet, and the next day this guy who commented on it was like ‘I looked for FIVE HOURS and I couldn’t find it anywhere,’ because I hadn’t put where the locations were,” he recalls. “I thought that was funny and thought I’d see if people would react to it and actually go and look for them.”
Sure enough, people have reacted and then some. Depending on the neighborhood, the collectible kittens disappear in mere minutes, his Facebook fans always ready to pounce at the next chance to go Catlanta-caching, whether in nearby Cabbagetown or Decatur, in more prominent locales like the High Museum and Philips Arena — even in Athens.
“I’ve actually started watching some of [the people Catlanta hunting] sometimes from a distance if I can tell they’re not going to know if I’m there, and it’s pretty interesting,” he says. “I never stay long though. After someone finds it I want to leave because other people will come up and try to find it and look sad when they don’t.”
After he stashes the final kitten on the drop outside Park Grounds, we go inside so he can grab a coffee and upload the pictures to Facebook and let the day’s Catlanta prowl commence.
Not ten minutes later while we’re idly chatting about possibilities of Catlanta merchandise, such pet clothes — “My cat will wear clothes, so he could be a model for it,” he jokes — a woman arrives outside the coffee shop and starts rooting around the entrance for the stray kitten.
Grinning wide and looking around as though awaiting congratulatory applause, she strolls inside Park Grounds cradling not one, but two, Catlanta kittens, circles the seating area and walks right back outside.
Hot on her trail, a guy shows up whom Catlanta recognizes from a previous kitten drop and sees he’s too late.
But then the Catlanta magic happens.
Rather than hoard her litter of kittens and scurry away, the woman hands one to the cat-less fellow, and they both smile — along with Catlanta who’s been watching the exchange go down.
“I’m glad he found one, actually,” he tells me. “A couple weeks ago I was in Decatur, I did a drop, and he didn’t find one. We were sitting at a coffee shop across the street and saw him not find it and we were laughing because within five minutes two people had come to claim it. Then I saw on Twitter later ‘Oh hi people laughing at me because I didn’t find a Catlanta across the street’ — oops!”
And that’s really the point of the whole thing for Catlanta. He doesn’t care about out-tagging other street artists or making some Humane Society statement about being kind to kitties. He’s just getting a kick out of a project that was born out of boredom and randomly evolved into something that’s aroused a novel excitement and afternoon adventures for strangers around Atlanta.
“People have asked me, ‘What’s the message?’ and there’s not a message,” Catlanta says. “It’s just wanting to get people to interact. People get their own thing out of going to look for it, and it’s that experience that I’m more worried about.”
Photo Credit: Jason Travis
The desire for tattoos has been described as “a primitive and inexplicable fascination with the process of puncturing the skin, letting blood and consenting to change the body for life.” While growing up on Long Island, Danielle Distefano probably didn’t spend much time pondering those whys and wherefores of humans’ bizarre compulsion toward tattooing. She just knew that she wanted one. And bad.
“I got a Sick of It All dragon, which was my favorite band at the time,” said Distefano, co-owner of Only You tattoo shop in Grant Park across from Oakland Cemetery. “It was totally illegal style. I got a fake ID just to be able to get tattooed. I didn’t even care about drinking or anything like that; I just wanted to get tattooed. I’ve always been an artist and was hanging around tattoo shops while all my other friends were getting fake IDs so they could get tattoos as well.”
Distefano tells me this while hunched over my side, tattoo gun droning like a hand held jackhammer. After all, if you’re going to interview a tattoo artist, what better time to get inked? Granted, it wasn’t exactly a Hunter S. Thompson-caliber reporting feat, but the tattoo-cum-interview was first for both Distefano and myself. And while we weren’t sure whether I could pull it off, what with the pain factor and all, Distefano certainly proved the consummate multi-tasker, chatting away casually while carving out the seemingly impossible intricacies of the tattoo I had requested.
For months, I had been pining away for a battleship tattoo. An absurdly detailed battleship modeled on the USS Iowa with artillery a-blazin’ and a tiny, infinitesimal, flag a-blowin’, that is. And where did I want this World War II relic? Running up my ribcage, smack dab on that bony harp. In other words, one of the most painful tattoo spots on the body.
After a shot of whiskey next door at Tin Lizzy’s to strike down the swarming butterflies in my gut, I laid down on table, t-shirt rolled up and tucked into my bra, and braced myself under the gun. With M. Ward’s “Hold Time” playing calmly in the background Danielle asked, “You ready?”
“Let’s do it,” I said, wishing I had taken a second whiskey shot.
When Danielle transferred the stencil onto my flesh, I asked Only You co-owner Matt Greenhalgh what he thought about it.
“I think she’s crazy,” he replied.
“Why’s that?” I responded, butterflies beginning to stir again.
“Do you see the detail on that?” Greenhalgh said, half-laughing and shaking his head at the apparent absurdity of my tattoo request.
But as an artist constantly refining her craft, Distefano isn’t one to turn down a challenging design. “I like old school imagery but with a modern take on it. Like a bit more refined feel,” she said, explaining her personal tattooing style. “And I do impossible little tattoos as well, like battleships on ribs with a million little details. I’m willing to do a lot of stuff that other people aren’t, but I only do it if I know it’ll be a good tattoo.”
That straightforward philosophy and a relentless work ethic have been the backbone of Distefano’s 10-year career as a tattoo artist. And as a woman honing her chops in a male-dominated industry, that intense focus on quality, precision and style helped her break through the bullshit stereotypes of women as second-tier tattoo artists and demonstrate that she could ink as well as, if not better than, the boys. “I feel like I’ve gotten respect in the industry because I focused on being a tattooer instead of concentrating on the fact that I was a female tattooer,” Distefano said. “I got respect from a lot of old school male tattooers just because I wasn’t trying to prove anything. They saw that I was serious, that I was willing to do the work and wasn’t looking for handouts.”
Although women tattooers are becoming more commonplace thanks in part to reality television, the industry’s boys’ club roots run deep. For that reason, when the 19-year-old Distefano landed an apprenticeship in Chinatown — incidentally around the same time reality queen Kat von D was getting started on the West coast — it was a stroke of luck she gratefully jumped at.
“There’s a ton of tattoo shops in New York, and there are also a ton of people who are willing to instruct you, and you definitely get the opportunity to tattoo a lot when you live there,” Distefano said. “And that just helps you grow, having that experience and being able to constantly work. You don’t always get that in a small town. Whereas, you have tons of tourists coming through the city who want to get a tattoo and who you also won’t see again, so if I messed it up, it wasn’t this guy who lived next door or something.”
Of course, Distefano did mess up in the early days, just like any other tattoo artist learning the ropes. In fact, the first tattoo she attempted – a small shield with an anchor emblazoned on it – remains unfinished.
“My machine stopped working, and I was so nervous that I just gave up. I was just like ‘That’s it, that’s all you get. I can’t finish it’,” she recalled. “I never figured out why. It could’ve been as simple as adjusting a rubber band, which probably would’ve worked, but I had absolutely no guidance and I was just horrified doing my first tattoo.”
Ten years later and rookie nerves long gone, Distefano now doubles as tattoo artist extraordinaire and business owner, having made a name for herself while ping-ponging from New York to San Francisco before heading down South with her husband and photographer Matt Miller. She and fellow 13 Roses veteran Matt Greenhalgh opened Only You two years ago, a daunting prospect at the time, considering Atlanta’s already crowded tattoo scene.
“Since being here, there have been four shops that have tried to open within a few miles of Only You,” Distefano said. “But we weren’t trying to open up and have other shops go out of business. We just wanted something different than other shops wanted and we wanted to be able to coexist.” With an eye-popping portfolio and a jam-packed appointment calendar that barely leaves her any breathing room, Distefano has gone far beyond merely coexisting. From giving tattoos in her in-laws’ kitchen in Gwinnett, to working as one of the city’s most in-demand tattoo artists in only five years, Distefano has thrived. “The reality is that if you’re good at what you do, you’ll be fine,” she said. “It doesn’t matter that there’s a shop down the street because all you have to worry about it what you’re producing and getting a good product out and worrying about your own stuff.”
When Distefano turned off the tattoo gun, I walked over to the mirror and saw what she was talking about — literally. There was the impossibly detailed battleship incarnate, the proof positive of Distefano’s expertise sailing up my left rib cage with its tiny flag flapping in the invisible wind.
Photo Credit: Tim Song