- [Announcer] Production of "Applause" on ideastream public media is made possible by the John P. Murphy Foundation, the Kulas Foundation, and by Cuyahoga County residents, through Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.

(energetic horn music) - Coming up, those "99 beers on the wall", are now an artistic opportunity.

Plus, the legacy of Hough Bakeries is alive and well, thanks to this man, Archie Garner.

And, from the honeycomb to your home's pantry, meet a beekeeper who's making it sweet and sticky.

It's time again for Applause.

I'm ideastream public media's, David C. Barnett.

In recent years, beer cans have become a different kind of canvas for artists to show off their work.

Let's travel now to three Northeast Ohio breweries where the artwork on the cans is as important as the beer inside them.

(label gun clicking) (perky music) - [Customer 1] Right now, beer cans are like pop art.

You know, you to the beer store, and you're just confronted with all this crazy artwork.

- [Retailer 1] There's a lot of beers on the shelves these days.

So, you gotta have something that's gonna at least catch people's eye.

- [Customer 2] When I want to go buy a beer, I want to make sure that, you know, good label, good name, and the beer is good, yeah.

- [Artist] Beer Can Illustration.

It's kind of open-ended.

It's kinda like a movie poster in a way.

Just feels like I get to be more creative.

- [Retailer 2] We wanna make sure that the artwork stands out.

- [Retailer 3] People collect beer cans, like, people will reach out to me, like, do you know how I can get this one can?

(perky music continues) - NOBLE Beast BREWING CO., downtown Cleveland, Ohio, the NOBLE, which is like a German classification of traditional European hops.

And then the Beast is the American craft brewing side, which for better or worse, has no rules.

A lot more creativity.

- So I enjoy beers a lot.

I think I was drawing quite a bit here in my, like, downtime.

If I was here solo waiting for someone.

So the staff picked up on that and saw.

Let Sean know.

And I think the first thing we did was maybe a flyer for an event.

- [Shaun] Justin designed a can label just for my personal camping trip.

- [Justin] That Pappy's Pilsner, Shaun and his friends will get together and do a bunch of different activities in the woods.

- [Shaun] It's a fun label, because it's just all the little stories that have happened.

Or trips that my college buddies and I have been going on for about 15 years.

- [Justin] There's a cabin, there's tire swings.

There's climbing up on trees, jumping into rivers.

So it was neat to throw all those different things on the can, and kind of get a more crowded, immersive view than I normally would on a simpler can.

- [Shaun] Thought, "Why waste such a good label?".

So we brought it out to market this summer.

So, Murder Ballads is a Baltic Porter, and we've done well with that.

We've won two Great American Beer Festival awards with it.

That's a can design that has also been super popular, and it's inspired by one of Justin's favorite artists.

- [Justin] And that's a little homage of mine to Ed Gorey, who's an artist who animated intro series on PBS show "Mystery!".

Just spooky enough, like very accessible.

But still kind of that edge where you're like, something weird is going on behind the label.

- [Shaun] So it's fun, because every single can is as unique as the beer in it.

And it's a new process to come up with it and kind of collaborate on that design.

A big reason of why we continue to can is it's just fun to to make these new labels.

And it's another creative outlet.

- [Justin] And I love seeing the beers out in stores.

You know, I'll see it at Heinen's when I go there.

There's like, one Heinen's in particular that keeps it on the top shelf.

And I'm super proud about that when I walk by.

And I'm like humbled, and I feel excited that I get to do it.

(energetic guitar music) - Missing Mountain Brewing Company, located in Cuyahoga Falls, right on the Cuyahoga River.

Everything about this place is great.

Except, the only thing that's missing is a mountain.

We've brewed probably over 120 different varieties of beer.

So each of those beers have to have a name.

We use a lot of pop culture.

There'll be just some things that, maybe something funny that was said in the brewhouse.

With that, we could have some pretty cool can art to 'em, too.

- You can just be creative, to really flex your artistic muscles.

I kind of think of it as this generation's album artwork.

You know, there's no rules.

Everybody does something different.

It's really up to the artist and the brewer, and how far you wanna take it.

- "I'm Up, Let's Get It!

", actually comes from a rap song.

It's the attitude that we want to have.

It's another day we gotta get up, we gotta attack it.

He said, (fingers snap) I got it.

- Starting a new day, so I went with a rooster.

I thought he was a cool iconic, doing his call.

- The art that he came up with was amazing for it.

It's gotta be either number one, or number two top label.

(bouncy piano music) - Zwickel Trickle is a hazy, pale ale.

You know, we knew this was gonna be a flagship and we were gonna have it on there.

And we wanted to make sure we had a good name for it.

- The zwickel is the tap on the tank.

You know, it's beer coming out of the zwickel.

- And that little zwickel valve was just ever so, just dripping beer, and it wouldn't seal all the way properly.

Bro, you gotta zwickel trickle, to name stuff.

- Doing illustration, it's an art form.

It's like a vacation job.

To be in a fun mind state to work on it, and make something fun.

I love working on Missing Mountain, and doing can art.

I wish I could do it, you know, all day long.

(upbeat jazzy music) - The brewery is located in Sandusky, Ohio.

I'm from Vietnam.

I moved to Sandusky 2011.

And then I start out Small City Taphouse 2014.

And then suddenly one day I say, "Yeah, let's open a brewery".

Back in 2015, when I hang out with my buddy, he called me "Cocky little Asian guy".

Putting letter-by-letter.

That's how I come up with the brewery name, Cocky Little Asian Guy.

CLAG, yeah.

And then now, everyone loves it.

And they all want to come here and drink good beer, and eat good Asian food.

I got all my family support me, and they back me up behind it.

So here we are.

(playful music) - [Grace] Papa BUI and Mama BUI are for Kha's parents.

- Every Father Day weekend, I always want to release a beer.

Represent my dad.

And Mother Day weekend, I always want to represent my mom.

To release a beer for her, because I love my mom and dad.

- [Grace] But it was just kind of an homage to his parents, and the inspiration they've given him for the whole company.

And he just really wanted to have something that showed them.

And there are two versions of them.

One where they're dressed in traditional Vietnamese, like Royal garb, and then the originals, where it's just them.

- She's good with that.

So my mom looked like my mom.

She's, you know, she looked pretty awesome on a can, yeah.

- So Back to the Wild is a local wildlife rehabilitation center, and they did a collaboration with them on this beer.

The '80s vibe, you know, you can find those tank tops at a thrift shop.

That's just kind of like a vignette, of a bunch of wolves on a mountain, and one's big and the other one's small.

It's kind of like "Napoleon Dynamite-ish".

- I think that label is one of the badass label.

When she get that done, I looked at it, I was like, damn!

And that, that's awesome.

- Usually, if somebody asked me for something, I deliver it to them, and I have no idea what they do with it.

Cause sometimes, the people that contact me for work, I don't get to meet ever in person.

So doing something like this, and then getting to come down, like when we were at the anniversary party here.

And seeing people walk out with big crates, and stacks of the can that I did.

It's just cool to see people like, walk out with it.

Seeing our beer can.

People sit with it for a long time and look at it.

It's so much more engaging, cause they're not just like, "Oh, that's cool".

Scroll.

They're sitting there and drinking, and keep looking at it, and take another drink, and talk to people about it.

Which is just, it's very cool to see.

To sit back and watch people engage with it in such a different way.

(bouncy guitar music) - [David] When the beloved Hough Bakeries closed in the mid '90s, one of its head bakers wanted to keep its delicious legacy alive.

Cleveland photographer and filmmaker, Angelo Merendino, recently completed a new documentary to share his story.

Here's an excerpt.

- When I come into the shop in the morning, it's like I'm in my own world.

I have control.

I get to do what I want to do.

And I get so much satisfaction out of fulfilling my dream and passion.

And everything I make, a lot of love goes into it.

(mellow jazz music) Lionel Pile was the founder of Hough Bakery.

He was originally from the Barbados.

He came here in the early 1900s, and he settled in New York City at first.

And then he moved to Cleveland.

He worked in a bakery on Hough Avenue and then, he saved his money and he bought the bakery.

And it became the Hough Bakery.

He and his four sons were very successful, and the bakery really grew.

They opened a couple other stores on Hough Avenue.

They moved into different parts of the city and the suburbs.

They were in all the neighborhoods.

Each of the brothers had their specialty.

Robert Pile was the catering specialist, and eventually he was the King of Catering, in the city of Cleveland.

He had all the big parties.

All the elite of Cleveland went to Robert Pile, Hough Bakeries for their parties.

When I was a kid, I used to watch my grandmother in the kitchen.

I was fascinated by the way she would make biscuits out of a piece of dough, and it would rise and taste so good.

I started working at Hough Bakery in 1968.

My job was mopping floors at four o'clock in the morning.

Then I graduated to cleaning equipment.

It was very difficult for a person of color to get into certain positions, not just at Hough Bakery.

But in that time, it was like that everywhere.

With my passion and my dream of being a baker, I was denied.

And so I filed a discrimination grievance with a union, to go into production department.

When the Pile family found out what was going on, they told the management, "Let him into the production department".

After I mastered that department, to get into the specialty department, some of the people threatened to fire me if I didn't turn the job down.

Because I could only get it through a bid.

So I told them, "Fire me".

I had just as much of a right to have that position, as anyone else had.

I was afraid of getting fired, and I had to take care of my family, but I wasn't going to back down.

But when I worked at Hough, I was in heaven.

I wouldn't stop until I got into the baking department, but it was a struggle getting into that department.

But when I got there, the bakers took a liking to me, and it was a lot of fun.

Everybody liked me.

So I got on their backs and I just tortured them, and asking them questions.

"What is this?"

"What is that?"

And "Let me do this" and "Let me try that".

And I got on their nerves every day, and they would show me a little.

Hough got into a little financial strain, and they needed an influx of finance.

What really hurt Hough was earlier on, I guess in the '80s, a lot of the supermarkets would have had their own in-store bakeries, and people were doing their impulse buying.

And instead of going out of their way to go to a Hough store while they were shopping, they just went into the supermarket and picked up their their goodies.

And it cut into Hough's business a lot.

So they had to sell the business to a company from out of town, and that company took over.

And they didn't do things the way Hough did it.

The quality wasn't there, it just went downhill.

And in 1992, Hough Bakery shut it doors for good.

While I was working at Hough, I was a single parent of five children, when I met Valinda.

And we met at a party, and it was love at first sight.

I said I'd never get married again, because I had five children, but she changed all of that.

(Archie chuckles) - Archie and I met at a mutual friends party.

And I had seen him before, but at the party we kind of got to know each other a little better.

He began to introduce me to some of the people there, "This is gonna be my next wife".

And I'm looking at him like, "Oh, what is he talking about?".

(Valinda chuckling) He would often say, I would like to have my own business.

And back then, to me, it was just him talking.

Cause I couldn't see it.

I couldn't envision that.

I was just thinking, "Well, okay, we'll see".

when Hough closed, I really wasn't nervous.

I didn't understand what had happened, and what was going on, or why it closed.

But, I knew that Archie was the type of person that was gonna take care of and provide for his family.

So, no, I didn't worry about him not having work.

It was just that I kind of felt bad, because it was a loss of something that he loved to do.

- My father-in-law wanted to hire, get me hired, at Ford Motor Company.

And at that same time, my dream was to reopen Hough Bakery, Reopen my own bakery.

And there was a dilemma, because I didn't wanna disappoint my father-in-law, cause we were really close.

But my dream was to open my own shop.

So it looked like everything was down, but it was the just the beginning for me.

(lighthearted music) I knew Hough was, there was a void in the market, and in people's hearts for Hough Bakery.

And then I discovered that Hough was not, there was no license for Hough's name in the state of Ohio.

So I applied for it.

And surprisingly, I got the use of it.

So then, a couple of years later, I was approached by a financial firm that saw a picture of me and my son in the newspaper, in a short story.

And they approached me with the idea of reopening Hough bakery in the city of Cleveland again.

They applied for the name on a federal level.

And I didn't like it, because they had did that before they talked to me.

And so when I asked for part ownership, they told me I couldn't have any ownership, but I could run the business.

And I told them, "No way".

I had too much invested in Hough Bakery to just work for someone else, under the Hough Bakery name.

So, I was praying that Ford Motor Company never called me, and that dream came true.

And I was able to pursue my dream.

- [David] The new film by Angelo Merendino.

From mopping the floors, to making the cakes, the story of Archie's Hough Bakeries, premieres at the 2022 Chagrin Documentary Film Festival.

In the 1970s, a medical student from Guatemala, escaped to the United States and he reemerged as an artist.

On the next Applause, meet Hector Castellanos Lara, who's made his mark on Northeast Ohio's art scene for more than three decades.

Plus, enter the puertos of Cleveland's Latino community.

And, blame it on the Bossa Nova with Brazilian jazz musicians Dylan Moffitt, and Moises Borges.

All that and more, on the next episode of Applause.

(energetic music) - [David] Beachwood "Bee Whisperer", Amalia Haas, has always had a strong connection with the natural world.

In this next episode of the Making It series, learn about her passion for beekeeping.

And how the honey her bees create, ties in with Jewish traditions.

(wings fluttering) - And I somehow as a beekeeper, have the privilege of being able to look in on this incredibly complex world.

I was just swept away.

(Amalia giggles) It was like falling in love with an incredibly complex process.

(whimsical guitar music) My name is Amalia Haas, and I am the founder and CEO, sometimes I say, "The Chief Bee Whisperer", at Bee Awesome.

Bee Awesome provides educational programming about pollinators, and the environment, and the climate, with a special focus on bees.

And for a certain section of the year, a lot of my work focuses on Judaism and the bees.

Because the Jewish New Year is celebrated with honey, and I am part of the Jewish community.

So there's a real interest in that.

A hive needs several things to happen successfully, in order to be able to produce honey.

One thing that a hive needs, is it needs enough bees, and that requires having a healthy queen.

Usually there's one queen in a hive, and she, during the growing season, will lay anywhere between 2 and 3000 eggs a day.

And that is what establishes the population of the hive.

The majority of the bees are female, but they're not egg layers.

And so their job is to do everything else.

They create the wax, and they build the comb.

They raise those young that the queen lays.

They defend the hive from invaders.

During most of the year, there are also the third cast of the hive, is called the drones.

And those are the males, and those don't do active work in the hive.

But obviously they're needed, for reproduction of the species at large.

That's a smaller population of the hive.

What they also need is all the ingredients that sustain life.

They need water.

They need a protein source, which for bees is pollen.

And they also need an energy source, which for bees is nectar.

A lot of the work of the hive is actually dehydrating that nectar so that it becomes honey.

It's a neat experience to be a Jewish beekeeper.

Because there is a specific time of year, which is before the Jewish New Year, which happens in the fall.

Where the whole Jewish community, really all around the world, traditionally takes apples and dips them in honey, and says the Hebrew phrase, (speaks in Hebrew).

Which means, "May it be a sweet and good new year".

And then, eats that apple with some honey on it.

As a beekeeper, I'm joining a human natural connection, that goes back for thousands of years.

And the hive has been always viewed as a source of healing.

I love it.

I really do.

I love the teaching.

And the appreciation that people show for local honey, is very special.

- [David] If you want to be awesome and check out more Making It entrepreneurs from Northeast Ohio, visit arts.ideastream.org.

Cleveland jazz trumpeter and composer, Dominick Farinacci is a mainstay on the Northeast Ohio music scene.

But for a time, he lived and worked in the middle east as a jazz ambassador.

He joined me for Applause performances, leading the Tri-C JazzFest All-Stars, in a tune written while living in the capital of Qatar.

- This is Doha blues.

You got to live in Doha, Qatar, in the Gulf region of the world, for a few years.

I was working as an ambassador for jazz at Lincoln center.

And it was an incredible opportunity.

To be able to bring artists, from all over the world together night after night, collaborate, learn about each other's music.

And also, kind of figure out how to play this music in a whole new environment, right?

A whole different environment that, many things in the environment are kind of set up, in the exact kind of opposite sense of what really the special qualities that really embody jazz music.

So it was an incredible challenge.

And one of the great experiences of my life.

Met a lot of great folks.

And one night, went out in the middle of the desert, and tried to, like, kind of, like, take in this new experience.

And out of it came this song called, "Doha Blues".

(funky jazz music) (funky jazz music continues) (funky jazz music continues) (funky jazz music continues) (funky jazz music continues) (funky jazz music continues) - [David] If you'd like to watch more of this Emmy award-winning edition of Applause performances, you can via PBS Passport or the ideastream public media app.

Now it's time to punch the clock and head home.

Thanks for watching this edition of Applause.

I'm ideastream public media's David C. Barnett, hoping you can join us again, next time.

(funky jazz music continues) (gong-like music) - [Announcer] Production of Applause on ideastream public media, is made possible by the John P. Murphy Foundation, The Kulas foundation, and by Cuyahoga county residents, through Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.