Brewmistress Cheryl Stubbs Mendrala '91 / Big Y Wines Gordon Alexander '85 / Sober Jugglers Bill Ross '92 and Brian Smith '96

Career in Beer

Cheryl Stubbs Mendrala '91

REFINED FLAVOR IN ALE is not something insisted upon by the average college drinker, and Cheryl Stubbs Mendrala '91 who found the taste of beer foul when she started partying at UMass was no exception. The Burlington native recalls her college years as "a Busch time of life. Whatever was being served at the keg party was what you drank."

It's Busch no longer for Mendrala. At 29, as a co-owner of the fledgling Moonlight Brewing Company in West Springfield, Mendrala has joined thousands nationwide including a number of fellow UMass grads in trying her luck in the microbrew business.
After their workday is done three of the four partners are engineers, including Mendrala, who works for ABB Atom in Connecticut Moonlight's brewers head for their kettles in a one-room brewery in the boiler building of a former munitions plant. There they brew up such original flavors as Golden Starlight, Pale Moon Ale, Blueberry Patch, and Morgan Horse Brown, honoring a breed first developed in West Springfield.

It was when she landed a good job after college performing stress tests on pipes for the nuclear industry that Mendrala could afford to abandon her cheap-beer-in-plastic-cups ways. Her husband, Gary, began brewing in the basement of their duplex, and the couple embarked on a joyful scientific sampling of microbrews cooked up by other "craft" brewers.

"We said, `You know, ours tastes as good as these. Think we could sell it?'" recalls Mendrala one Friday night this summer, sipping a cider at the desk of the tiny Moonlight office. On the door separating the steamy workings of the brewery from the balmy summer night hung the company sign, painted purple and engraved with gold letters. The walls were brightened by posters of amber ales, mounds of hops, and the Brewer's Conversion Table. A shelf was lined with bottles and tap handles adorned with crescent moons. These are the tools of a trade about which Mendrala knew nothing when the future brewers applied for a license three years ago.

"We were so naive," she admits. "Alcohol is a very regulated industry." The partners had to immerse themselves in lengthy applications, including criminal background checks, for the state and federal governments. The city, too, exercised caution in granting its first commercial brewing license. From the "We can do this!" moment to the topping of their first keg took fully two years.

A year into the business, the new brewers still spend less time at their craft than in convincing skeptical bartenders to give them a try. That takes some doing in a market where Milwaukee spends billions a year to advertise and where "outside of West Springfield, they don't know who you are." Moonlight's nights-and-weekends schedule precludes delivery runs outside a fifteen-mile radius. Those strict liquor laws prohibit them from crossing state lines, anyway.

That's okay with Mendrala, who notes that it's all part of the microbrewing spirit: keeping it small, keeping it local, developing a loyal following in neighborhood bars and package stores. But there are signs that Moonlight is catching on in some farther-flung locales including Amherst. Chuckles Mendrala, "It's strange, going back and selling to the same places I used to buy beer." Ali Crolius

Big Wines Guy

Gordon Alexander '85

YOU GET THE IMPRESSION that any wine shop at
which Gordon Alexander happened to hang his shingle would have the potential to become a major hot spot. A few minutes watching Alexander work the phone in search of a case of prime Bordeaux is enough to make plain that the man knows his stuff. But in bucolic Northampton? In a shopping-cart-strewn plaza? In a double-storefront between Fashion Bug and General Cleaners? Wine country this is not.

Yet in the decade since Alexander graduated from UMass with a degree in geology and went to work at Big Y Wines, where he is now general manager, the North King Street package store has experienced Jack-and-the-Beanstalk-like growth. By the most prominent yardsticks against which these things are measured quality of selection and volume of sales Big Y Wines ranks among the top half-dozen wine stores in the country. "Square footage we're pretty big too," Alexander adds. "Because real estate's cheap when you're in the boondocks."

Alexander's stroke of genius was to recognize the lengths to which wine drinkers will go to secure a bottle of '53 Chateau Lafite or '93 Richebourg Domaine De La Romanee-Conti. It's not unusual for Big Y patrons to drive a hundred miles or more to pick through his meticulously attended inventory, which comprises approximately 5,000 different wines. "People come for good wine, serious wine, so we have to have a very good selection in stock at all times," says Gordon. "People will pick up ten to twenty cases at a whack and trundle back to northern Vermont or wherever."

Our guy also got out ahead of the technology wave with a snazzy web site (www.bigywines.com) on which the Big Y Wines inventory (and renowned newsletter) can be perused with ease. The store's sales topped $5 million in the past year. Half its business comes in over the phone, fax, and Internet.

Alexander's background in wine traces through his parents, who had a cellar in their Armonk, New York, home. His geology education comes in handy for examining growing conditions during forays to France, Chile, and other wine-growing regions; he is furthering his professional expertise by pursuing an MBA at UMass. But perhaps Alexander's most valuable professional asset is his charm. The wine business is a subculture; Alexander's patrons aren't just customers, they're fans. He counts among his friends fellow wine buyers, vintners, and enthusiasts throughout the world.
Including Hadley. Sam Silverstein '91

Juggling for Attention

Bill Ross '92, left, and Brian Smith '96

WHEN BILL ROSS '92 AND BRIAN SMITH '96 perform their consciousness-raising juggling show, "Last Call," for incoming college freshman during orientation, or for high school seniors the week before graduation, their audience gets two things: an hour of manic juggling, pratfalls, bad puns, and good theater; and a sobering message about alcohol abuse.
In that order.

"We're entertainers first, educators second," says Smith one day this summer as he and Ross were preparing to perform at Siena College in Albany. "That way we've got a better chance of communicating."
Ross and Smith, who bill themselves as "Screaming With Pleasure Productions," communicate with a display of skill that is one part serious and three parts hip. They ride unicycles. They juggle clubs, knives, a baby doll, a lit torch, and a bowling ball. They perform skits, mostly comic, but one suddenly grave, about date rape as viewed by two roommates the morning after.

At well-timed moments they throw in statistics: On an average weekend night in America, one driver in ten has a blood alcohol level over the legal limit; in a college town it's one in five. Among Americans ages sixteen to twenty-four, the leading cause of death is alcohol-related automobile accidents. In 80 percent of date rapes, the man is drunk; in 55 percent the woman is.

The numbers reach whichever ears are ready to hear them. "We're not preaching," says Smith. "The appeal of `Just Say No' is limited to kids who are at low risk to begin with. We think the high-risk kids are the ones we can relate to."

One way they relate is with their own stories. Ross, a self-described high school- class clown, narrates a history in which he met drunk-driving arrests with incredulity that anyone would think he was a drunk. "I had to pay court costs and fines, go to A.A. meetings, hear the statistics. None of it meant a lot to me until I met the surviving family of victims of drunk driving." When he quit drinking "October 24, 1985," he says he needed something to do. "So I juggled six hours a day."

Smith, who learned to juggle as an adolescent and who later majored in history at UMass, describes a night when his drinking buddy passed out and he found himself alone. "When I was drinking, I never wanted to be alone. Ever." He describes smashing a liquor store window to snatch a bottle of bourbon. "The owner decided not to press charges, because I was such a good" he pauses "customer."

School administrators who book a Screaming With Pleasure performance have realized that lecturing is unnecessary a point Ross grasped when he earned a degree through the University Without Walls in theater and social issues.

"Some people in educational theater are so hell-bent on getting the message out that they sacrifice the entertainment," he says. "We began by wanting to talk to kids who were like us when we were that age, which is to say, the ones who weren't listening."

John Stifler '92G