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This post is one in a partnership between the Rochester Beacon and veteran reporter Will Cleveland, featuring articles published on his Substack site, Cleveland Prost.
Ellyn Gooch readily admits she never expected to be brewing beer for a living. So there’s no way she could have anticipated wearing the crown as Rochester’s most popular brewer.
But here we are. Gooch, a brewer at Strangebird Beer, the city’s most adventurous and acclaimed brewery, last year earned the City Magazine title (outpolling her bosses, Eric Salazar and Micah Krichinsky, both Strangebird co-founders/co-owners).
Gooch has been nominated again and can defend her title with the help of her adoring fans. As Gooch tells it, she’s Rochester’s “favorite” brewer, not the “best,” because our scene is blessed with a lot of incredible talent. (Voting is open till Nov. 28. You can vote for Ellyn and all your favorites here.)
In the face of a shifting beer landscape, I thought it would be fun to kickstart the Prost Profiles series again. Expect to meet some of the Rochester region’s most passionate and fascinating beer characters in future interviews. We’re starting with Gooch, a 31-year-old Irondequoit native who has been brewing professionally for about two years now. Gooch has a great story, is a great person, and highlights all that is right about craft beer — creating an inclusive, inviting, and fun environment for all.
CLEVELAND PROST: Introduce yourself. Who are you? And how did we get here? Can you outline your meandering path to becoming a brewer?
ELLYN GOOCH: How did we get here? I don’t think I was ever into beer growing up. I wasn’t really a big drinker. I didn’t sneak stuff from my parents. I wasn’t out in the field doing stuff I told my parents I wasn’t doing. I went to school at (SUNY) Fredonia and I studied business administration with a concentration in the music industry and then I minored in communications. I wanted to be a tour manager. I was really into music at the time and I’m very organized and I like the detail kind of stuff. I thought that would be a fun thing. I graduated college and I was part-time bartending. I moved into event planning at I-Square in Irondequoit. Starting in 2016, I started managing the conference center there, doing a lot of the private events, the food and wine pairings. And then they have the Reserve, the beer and wine bar on the first floor, and when they started up a craft beer club, they put me in charge of sending out all the pairing information and the beer information. I had a moment where I realized I liked doing that sort of thing better. I decided to leave my job at I-Square and take a shot at craft bartending. I sent out a post on my Instagram story one day, asking if anyone knew of any breweries hiring and the next week I started at K2 Brothers Brewing. That was in 2018. I was there full time until the pandemic in 2020, learning about beer and enjoying being a young person in beer. After the pandemic, I moved from K2 to Iron Smoke, a brief foray into bourbon and whiskey, and then I’ve been here at Strangebird since the day we opened in 2021.
CLEVELAND PROST: So how did you make the transition into brewing?
GOOCH: It wasn’t something I anticipated at the time, but it was something I’d kind of been thinking about for a while. When I was still at the first brewery I worked at, I was hoping for some growth and maybe a back-end opportunity there. That never came to fruition. When the opportunity presented itself here as brewing assistant, I wrote up a little cover letter, sent my resume in, and we did an interview and I made the transition a couple of weeks later.
CLEVELAND PROST: What were your main duties as a brewing assistant?
GOOCH: I started off doing readings on the beers as they fermented, logging all that information in the computer, just shadowing our head brewer at the time, Nicki Forster, with doing line setups and learning how to clean tanks. From there, I sped through.
CLEVELAND PROST: It’s really the best beer education you can get — learning from all these talented folks.
GOOCH: Yes, Micah is definitely a more technical brewer. He likes the true science of it all. He made me buy a textbook my first week as a brewing assistant and then asked me to read through chapters and ask him if I had any questions. And I was like, “I have questions about all of it, because I haven’t taken chemistry since 11th grade in high school.” And he was like, “Oh yeah, I forgot not everybody goes through brewing school.”
(Aside: I laughed so hard here, because Krichinsky has a master’s degree in brewing science from California-Davis, one of the best brewing schools in America, and then he spent a number of years brewing at craft icon, Dogfish Head Brewing in Delaware. He is exactly the type of nerd who would make someone read a textbook.)
Micah has all that technical experience and Eric (Salazar, Strangebird co-founder and director of wood-aging) has been hands-on since he started in the industry two decades ago. (Salazar spent 24 years at Colorado-based New Belgium Brewing, leading one of the first wood-aging and wild ale programs in the country.) Nicki was a perfect little marriage between all those things. She understood all the science and she had all those local connections. I felt pretty lucky to be learning from the three of them.
CLEVELAND PROST: I know your official title now is just “brewer,” so when did you drop the “assistant” part from your title?
GOOCH: It was after a trip we took to Belgium in late 2023. There was another brewer from Pennsylvania on the trip who kind of degradingly referred to me and another female brewer as “assistants.” And when Micah and Eric overheard that, they were like, “Yeah, we’re not cool with that. We’ll drop the ‘assistant.’ Tell people you’re a brewer, because you are.” I was like, “OK!” So I’ve been a brewer officially since then. It was an interesting experience.
CLEVELAND PROST:I don’t get that. Like, why do you have to put people down to feel better about yourself? You’re no better than anyone else.
GOOCH: I think that was the first experience I had where I felt like someone wanted me to feel like I was less, because I am a woman doing it. But with the support we have here and from learning from a female brewer when I came on, it really feels like we’re not the minority anymore, because, quite frankly, we’re not here.
CLEVELAND PROST: So how did you get nominated for Rochester’s favorite brewer?
GOOCH: Before brewing, I was involved in front-of-house, hospitality work, so I like to think I have a ton of people out in the industry still that I know by name and I like to go get a drink at their bar. I got nominated because Micah told us all to nominate ourselves. He was like, “You guys are all brewers, you should tell your families to nominate you.” So I texted my mom and told her my family should nominate me. When the list came out, I was a little bit surprised. I was expecting to see some other names. There are so many experienced, wonderful brewers in this city. It’s an honor. I hold the title with pride. But I do like to refer to it as Rochester’s favorite brewer, not best brewer, because there are so many amazing brewers here.
CLEVELAND PROST: And then you won!
GOOCH: It was fun, it was cool. I have a ton of support in my family for what I do. I think a lot of my industry friends rallied behind me as the only female nominee. So that felt kind of cool. And now I’m up for it again!’
CLEVELAND PROST: So, boil it down for me: Why do you love this job?
GOOCH: It’s a great job to keep me physically active, while also keeping my brain stimulated. There are a lot of moving parts every day. There is a lot of problem-solving and trouble-shooting. It’s also really cool to tell people you make beer.
Will Cleveland is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer. A former Democrat and Chronicle reporter, he writes about beer in the Finger Lakes region and Western New York on Substack.
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