Interview
SLIFF 2019 Interview: Sean Mullen – Director of KINGS OF BEER
KINGS OF BEER screens at The Tivoli Theater (6350 Delmar) Saturday, Nov 16 at 3:30pm as part of this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival. Director Sean Mullen will be in attendance and will host a post-screening Q&A. Ticket information can be found HERE
In KINGS OF BEER — directed by Sean Mullin (“Amira & Sam,” the winner of SLIFF’s 2014 New Filmmakers Forum) — a diverse group of elite brewmasters from 65 breweries and 23 countries battle it out in an intense competition to brew the world’s most iconic American lager: Budweiser. The brewmaster who can brew the best, most consistent Budweiser over a 12-month period will bring home the Global Brewmaster Cup. Judged by an illustrious group of experts who are sequestered deep within the historic walls of the most renowned room in the brewing world — Room 220 — most of these “key tasters” have decades of experience, which has trained their palates to pick up the most minute of flavor flaws. The tasters in this fabled room are responsible for ensuring the standard of more than one-quarter of the world’s beer, with Budweiser the gold standard of consistency by which all the other beers are judged. In a competition usually decided by no more than a hundredth of a point, even the slightest misstep can cost a brewmaster the coveted Cup. Despite the hardship and uncertainty, one thing is clear: Kings aren’t born, they’re brewed.
Sean Mullen took the time to talk to We Are Movie Geeks about his film and the contest at the center of it.
Interview conducted by Tom Stockman October 30th, 2019
Tom Stockman: So you’ve been to the St. Louis international film Festival before.
Sean Mullen: Yes, for my 2014 film AMIRA AND SAM, which I wrote and directed. It won an Emerging Filmmaker’s award there. It was a great experience.
TS: Congrats. Now you’ve made your second feature, KINGS OF BEER. Why did you make a documentary as your second feature?
SM: It came to me pretty organically. The idea came through my agent from a company that was wanting to make a documentary about beer and had this idea, so I went in and met with them. They had some connections with Anheuser Busch and the beer industry there in St. Louis. I found out about this contest, this incredible internal brewmaster competition, which I was unaware of. Essentially, there are 65 breweries worldwide that brew Budweiser. Every month they send a batch to St. Louis for a blind taste test. The results of that are recorded immediately and the results are sent back to the brewmasters. They all compete to see who can make the best Budweiser. I thought that was fascinating.
TS: Has beer always been one of your interests?
SM: Yes. For quite a while.
TS: Me too. What is the goal of this contest that this film is about?
SM: They are brewing Budweiser and the contest is to see who can brew the most consistently high quality of Budweiser beer around the world.
TS: Who are the judges for this contest?
SM: There are a group of key tasters . They are all experts on tasting beer that are there in the St. Louis area . The film focuses on three of these tasters. Twin brothers Pete and Mike Cramer who are considered top brewmasters among tasters. The other is Jane Killebrew. They’ve been with the company for decades and the three of them lead this panel of tasters.
TS: Who are the contestants in this contest?
SM: They are the Budweiser brewmasters, from all 65 breweries around the world that make Budweiser. We focused on the top five in this documentary. What drew me to these five that we started to focus on, about halfway through the year-long contest, was what a diverse group they were. One was a man from China who spoke no English. It was fascinating to watch him brew beer over there. We also follow a woman from Columbus Ohio, an Army veteran who lives in Colorado, a woman in New Hampshire, another guy down in Houston, and a professor up in Canada. We followed these people around for a year to take a look at their process. I think what might challenge perceptions is that while people are so enamored these days with these hoppy IPA beers, it’s really the lagers that are much more difficult to brew. It’s a longer process. It’s a much more fickle process, and the fact that it’s much more difficult to brew and that makes the subjects more interesting. ‘
TS: How involved was the Anheuser Busch brewery in the making of your documentary?
SM: Very much. The financing for the film came through some channel of the brewery organization but they did allow us total creative control. The film shows, warts and all, what it takes with this difficult process.
TS: Were there any secrets that the Anheuser Busch people did not want to do the disclose in your documentary?
SM: No not really. I was surprised how open they were with me, this independent filmmaker that came along. Really the focus was on the challenges of these 65 breweries worldwide. They have different air quality factors and and different water, things like that to work with and it’s such an extremely difficult process and so fascinating to watch these brewmasters juggle these different variables. we also followed the tasters during these contest, where they judge everything from a scale of one to ten. Once a bottle of beer is open, it automatically drops to a nine. The tasters are shown tasting not just Budweiser, but a variety of beers, so the film shows how decisions made in one room affect the quality of 1/3 of the beer being consumed worldwide.
TS: What were some of the challenges of making this film?
SM: Really the big challenge was just narrowing it down from all of the brewmasters that we followed and filmed. They were all such incredible people and there were some tough choices we had to make. We shot over 500 hours of footage which we had to edit down into our 82 minute-long film. We filmed this whole sequence in Moscow with a woman brewmaster there, but we had to edit that out. In Russia, brewing beer is more of a female-dominated industry. Of the 35 brewmasters we met in Russia, 30 of them were women, which I find pretty fascinating. I think the more knowledge people have about the process of brewing beer, the better. I think that’s what is nice about KINGS OF BEER. I think in an educational way we sneak in some morsels for the audience to take away about brewing beer, and our angle is how lagers are a much more difficult beer to brew, much more difficult than people may give it credit for.
0 comments