After months of construction, Apex Brewing is ready to open its doors

It’s taken a long time for Apex Brewing to get its brewery and tap room ready.

“We started buying equipment over a year ago, just because we knew it was going to take a while to get a lot of stuff,” Tim Chappell, the co-owner and brewer, said.

After months of construction delays and pandemic-related supply-chain slowdowns, Apex is getting ready to open at 2285 S. Main in South Salt Lake, in December or January.

“We focus on modern American ales — ales, not lagers,” said Chappell, who shares the business with his wife, Jen, who handles the financial side of the business. (She’s a middle-school math teacher, and excels at numbers-related tasks.)

The menu, Chappell said, features “modern beers that got popular in North America since Prohibition. Mostly beers that have gotten popular or gotten traction in the last 20 years or so, the 2000s. So IPAs, double IPAs, hazy IPAs, kettle sours, blonde stouts, that sort of thing. What sets us apart is we do very aggressive versions of each style.”

One beer Chappell cites is War Pig, a very bitter Cacadian dark ale that Apex brewed in collaboration with SaltFire Brewing at the Utah Brewers Guild’s Collab Fest in September. (Yes, it’s named for the Black Sabbath song.)

That will be on Apex’s opening beer line-up. So will a very hoppy beer, Playground (named because they use it to play with different hops), Pops (a vanilla-blackberry kettle sour) and Brawndo, the Thirst Mutilator (the name is a riff from the movie “Idiocracy,” and a high blonde ale, their “yellow fizzy beer … our beer-flavored beer”).

Considering the playfulness they employ for naming their beers, it’s easy to think there’s a deeper meaning for the name Apex Brewing — particularly with all of the Chappells’ adventures. But the name was chosen for a purely practical business reason.

“It’s not super sexy, to be honest,” Chappell said, laughing. “We wanted a name that started with an ‘A’ or a ‘B,’ really simple and identifiable.”

In and out of the food industry

It’s a lesson, Chappell said, he learned while working in China and Oregon. He said he would see bar managers go down a sales sheet “and check off however many beers they need. Most of them will be done on the first one or two pages, and then get on with their day.”

The Chappells had thought they would be opening Apex Brewing around Halloween, rather than December. But the couple is patient, because the journey to start Apex has unfolded over years.

Tim Chappell’s brewing career started in China. That’s where Chappell started brewing commercially, eventually founding a consulting company to help breweries get off the ground. Among his clients was the first craft brewery in Mongolia.

“I showed up and helped the marketing team, developed some beers and helped them with, ‘OK, if you’re going to be Mongolia’s first craft brewery, what is a Mongolian craft brewery?’ Not, ‘Let’s copy a California brewery and build it Mongolian.’ There’s a big difference,” Chappell said. “So I tasted a lot of local food, learned about their brewing process, and made some things that got them excited and trained some staff.”

This is Chappell’s third stint in Utah. He grew up on a farm in New Hampshire and dropped out of school in 7th grade, working as a chef in the summer and in ski resorts during the winter. Those gigs allowed him to travel all over the country. When he was 17, he hopped on a Greyhound bus and came to Salt Lake City for a ski season, then revisited two years later for another ski season. Eight years ago, he and Jen landed here more permanently after moving from southern China.

Chappell left the food industry in his mid-20s, he said, and went to school as a wilderness guide, which is where he met Jen. He followed her out to Oregon, and initially spent that first spring and summer guiding wilderness trips.

“I came out of the woods, and the housing market had crashed,” he said. “Where I was renting, the person sold the house, and all my stuff was in storage. I was just outside of Portland, a new kid in a new city, and didn’t know anybody but my girlfriend. I was like, well, I need a job. No one was hiring, not even cooking.”

He ended up working for a coffee roaster, “because that’s what the region is known for,” he said. “I worked as a barista for a while, got into specialty coffee pretty intensely, and won some regional barista competitions. It was a great way to get back to that sensory piece I was missing after leaving kitchens.”

The Portland area is also known for wine and hops — and most of Chappell’s clients, he said, were either hop-growers or vineyard workers. When he developed a fascination with hops, Jen bought him a small homebrewing kit. Chappell began tapping into the local homebrewing community, getting an informal education by chatting with Portland brewers and local hop and barley farmers.

Making homebrew in China

Jen’s teaching work took the couple to Guangzhou, just north of Hong Kong. There wasn’t much craft beer in China at the time, Chappell said, so he began homebrewing just for his own consumption. He sourced equipment through hotel markets and bought a half-barrel kit.

He said couldn’t find the right ingredients, though, and had to petition the U.S. Consulate’s agricultural trade office for help. In order to get the consulate’s attention, he had to start a consulting company, because he knew they would probably just ignore a random homebrewer.

“They ended up putting me in touch with Pabst Blue Ribbon,” Chappell said. The famed beer company has had a factory just outside of Guangzhou since the 1990s. Chappell joined an entourage that visited the PBR facility. The Pabst factory uses Cascade hops from Yakima Valley in Washington state, he said, and the company set up a subsidiary in Hong Kong to import the hops.

“They’d get their [wholesaler] off the plane in Hong Kong and drive him over the border,” Chappell said. Pabst gave the entourage the wholesaler’s number, “so, all of a sudden, this guy who’d brought this one hop over the border started getting calls from expats.”

Chappell and his fellow homebrewers started a club, so they could pool their orders and order in bulk. They found similar ways to source grain and yeast. By the end of the first year, the homebrew club grew to more than 400 beer lovers.

“We ended up having kind of black-market homebrew stores,” Chappell said. “We all had piles of ingredients and spare rooms in our apartments, and we were getting into cabs with backpacks full of grain and hops. … That snowballed, and like most homebrewers, people dreamed of opening a brewery. I was around, and I was like, ‘Well, I’ve set up coffee shops and helped build restaurants. … I’m sure I could help.’”

At first, he didn’t charge money to consult. He did a lot of beer tasting, judged contests, answered a lot of questions and encouraged his fellow homebrewers. During his last year in China, a side hustle he said he started out of boredom had become a full-time gig. And once he was back in the United States, Chappell continued consulting all over the world. When the pandemic hit, he decided it was time to open his own brewery.

“Opening a brewery is 5% brewing beer, ‘’ he said, “And then the rest of it is …. well, the rest of it.” With Apex opening, Chappell finally will get to do that 5%, creating his own beers rather than developing them for other breweries.