Scott Falke, owner of Levi Garrison and Sons Brewery in Hamilton, with Joey Anthony Samrany, head brewer and Scott’s nephew. This January Scott sold 4% of the brewery to Joey for the sum of “love and $1.”
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The process for making beer includes brewing, fermenting and maturing, and packaging.
Scott is pictured at a tank. Six more tanks were added this January, which will increase production by about four times.
As a young man, Scott Falke worked breaking horses at the Owen-Good Ranch in Raymore. He helped his boss drive around to breweries picking up spent grain to feed the livestock. He talked to a lot of beer makers. The seed of an idea to one day start his own brewery was planted.
For a lot of years the notion just lay there, fermenting.
In the meantime, Scott got a PhD from the University of Kansas School of Medicine in 2003. He was an associate professor of biology at William Jewell College for the next 10 years.
Scott served as a major in the Army Reserve and was called to active duty during 2010-2011. Ideas for the brewery came to a head while he was stationed in Afghanistan.
“I’d been thinking I’d open a brewery after I retired, but we decided to pull the trigger early,” Scott says.
Right away, actually. He got home from his stint in the military in 2011, bought a building in Hamilton, started work on the building in 2013, and opened the doors to his brewery in 2014.
He quit his teaching job and now works at the brewery full-time. He still lives in Liberty and makes the 45-minute drive from there to Hamilton every day. His wife Leslie works at the Liberty Hospital.
Scott has an uncle that lives in Hamilton, and that was his original connection to the town. The quilt stores had just started to get up and running, but at that point he didn’t really imagine the town bringing in people from all over the world.
“My uncle would talk to me about the popularity of the quilt stores, but I didn’t put two and two together,” he says.
The building on West Bird in Hamilton, affectionately known as Baby Bell, used to house Bell Telephone. Customers would go there to pay their bill and it had a switchboard. The building had been abandoned about 30 years when Scott bought it.
Through 2013-14, he gutted and stripped it down to the brick shell and dirt floor.
His brewery was originally called the Ninja Moose Brewery; however, the name was changed after he received a cease and desist from another brewery that thought the name infringed trademark (which is not the same as actually infringing); nevertheless, he decided not to fight Goliath. He changed the name to Levi Garrison & Sons Brewery. Levi Garrison was Scott’s great-grandfather. His company was Levi Garrison and Sons Sorghum Company in Osceola, MO.
Scott says his PhD came in useful in the beer-making process: “There’s a lot about chemistry and microbiology in making beer.”
In the beginning, the brewery setup was not that much different from a home brewery. Scott started small with five-gallon batches and was brewing beer every day twice a day.
The taproom was a popular destination for local patrons.
“On Friday and Saturday they’d come in and buy me out of beer; we were running at full steam,” he says. “We worked through the week to get through the weekend.”
He steadily increased production and is now making 180-gallon batches.
“The honeymoon is over and we’re old hat now, but they’re still coming in. We still have a decent foot traffic,” he says.
Levi Garrison & Sons offers 11 beers and one hard cider in-house in the taproom.
Scott says the most popular beer is the oatmeal cream stout, followed by amber, triple and wheat.
The business has grown and he currently distributes to 29 customers in St. Joe and the Northern suburbs of Kansas City.
While his business has expanded, so has the rest of the town of Hamilton. That is due to the popularity of the Missouri Star Quilt Company. Scott sees customers stopping in to have a beer that have come from across the country and even internationally.
“Hamilton has grown to be a cozy little tourist destination,” he says.
Scott has no regrets about his decision to quit teaching and start the brewery.
“Except that I waited so long to do it,” he says. He adds: “We’re a little family brewery that popped up and we’ve been steadily growing. I’ve put my heart and soul into the business.”
He has visions of growing into a statewide business, but doesn’t look to go past the state border.
“We’re a Missouri family; it’s a Missouri brewery,” he says. “If we build the thing up, maybe my nephew and grandson will run it one day. It beats a real job.”