("All About You" by Basic Comfort plays) Celebrating vibrant people.

captivating places and remarkable things.

This is Living West Michigan.

♪ I’m all about you ♪ ♪ Everything that ♪ ♪ you say and do ♪ ♪ Show me your world ♪ ♪ Everything that ♪ ♪ you say and do ♪ ♪ you say to me ♪ ♪ Can’t get enough ♪ ♪ I’m all about you ♪ ♪ I’m all about you ♪ ♪ I’m all about you ♪ Celebrating our vibrant community together, powered by your dedicated support.

Thank you.

("Rest" by Basic Comfort plays) (Music) My name is Karen Forbes I’m moved here from Mexico 12 years ago.

That’s quite a different journey story itself, but this is the only place that I lived since I came from Mexico and immediately fell in love with the culture here, the people, the city, it’s a beach, it’s beautiful.

What got me to the point of being here with Burzurk was I was looking for work, and we at that point were home brewing, making beer at home, just for a hobby and we just decided to, like, take it the next level.

This is where we are now.

So, in general, Karen manages the front of the house.

I do all the brewing and all the inventory stuff in the back.

Our brewing area is maybe 500 square feet, maybe, if that.

It was about a six month process to build out the entire building, but I did all the work myself, because at the time, it was the start of COVID and I was laid off.

I used to to be an engineering manager and worked in automotive for 33 years, and I made way, way, way better money doing manufacturing than what I’m make in this, but this is more of a passion.

As a local brewery, how do you feel like the community supports you guys?

We are very, very fortunate to have a lot of our local people come and tell me, like, your place is awesome.

Your place is a local gathering.

People come here, connect, just feel welcome.

This wall was designed by one of your tattoo artists.

Can you tell me about who designed that in the process of that?

Yeah.

She’s never done anything type of art like this, and it’s the girl that does.

I have a lot of tattoos.

She’s an artist, I call her.

You’re not only a tattoo, you’re an artist.

Definitely.

You have a way of expressing art.

She just came and just started doing like free draw and stuff and colors.

and this is what end up being in.

We love it.

It just, it just blends together with our theme, with our vibe that we want.

And I understand your theme is kind of like Caribbean retro, is that right?

So we started with like the idea of Caribbean retro.

I think we’re switching more into just like a diverse multiculture.

We love culture here.

We are about, like fermenting different backgrounds of culture, and like you said, colors, we love colors, we love everything, diversity.

With only 12 taps, what does the process kind of look like to figure out what you’re gonna have on tap?

There’s a big crowd in the craft brewery industry for IPAs, so we definitely have to have majority IPAs, but of course, it’s about my culture as well.

I like to show people a little bit of my culture research.

We have beers.

They’re focused on Hispanic culture.

Like, right now, our Mexican lager Kickin’ the Donkey just won the second place for the whole state of Michigan on Untappd.

I tried to incorporate it as much as I can a little portion of my culture into the beers, because that’s how we make when we make beer with passion.

We’ll go through 4,000 pounds of grain every month.

All this grain you see here right now now will be gone in the next week, week and a half.

Some of the base grains are all here, so these are things that we use a lot of.

This is about 80 or 90% of the recipe, and then you’ve got a bunch of smaller stuff to add to color and add minute flavors and things like that into the beer.

Then also we have a lot of water chemicals as well.

So we’re very fortunate.

Water quality in West Michigan is incredible.

It’s pretty neutral.

We actually try to modify the water to meet the type of beer that we’re going to make.

So probably 80% of the beers I make just with the standard water out of Grand Haven.

All we do is strip the chlorine out.

But on the very specialty beers, like things from Belgium, or if we want to make like a German specific beer, the water flavor there is important because it really adds a lot of depth to the beer.

So then we’ll actually try and we’ll pull the water profiles from that area and try to match the water chemistry to that area.

So can you maybe walk us through that process of what it takes to craft a new beer?

Tyler and me, we start brainstorming, and we just kind of a sit together and create a recipe together.

Most of our recipes have anywhere from, you know, probably two different grains in it to some have seven or eight grains in it.

Then you have to mix a specific amount to make that exact Beer.

Some of them have, you know, two different hops in or one hop in it all the way up to, you know, seven or eight hops in it, potentially.

And different times that they’re added are very very specific and very critical.

All we’re doing is we’re basically taking all the sugar out of the grains and all the flavor and all the color out of those grains, so we just soak it until it all comes out and then that turns into what they call wort.

Wort then gets transferred over to the kettle where we boil it.

We usually boil for an hour, and as you’re doing that, there’s very important steps.

You add hops at the very start of the boil that control bitterness.

You add hops that a different time for flavor, you had hops at another time for aroma.

Sometimes on some of our really crazy beers, we had things like marshmallow fluff.

We had cinnamon in there, we had spices, we put orange peel, lemon, coriander We have a Belgian waffle porter beer.

It starts in the morning by me making four hours of waffles.

Chop those all up, we put them in the mash with the grains that are gonna be soaked in it, tastes like Belgian waffles when it’s done.

It was so sweet the first time we made it, we almost dumped it.

Right away, we had to say okay, how are we gonna make this come back a little bit?

You don’t want to add hops to make it bitter.

That’s gonna be horrible."

So we added coffee.

We went to Magnum Roastery, and we picked out our favorite coffee blend, and it tasted incredible.

It cut the sweetness just right.

We took that beer to an Eastern Market Festival for Detroit, and it was announced the Detroit Free Press, and it was gone in one hour.

Oh, whoa!

And then let me show you where it goes after we keg it.

And so this is our cooler.

I built this cooler, and when we added it onto the side of the building, and then we ran all the draft systems this stuff ourselves, and so it’s about as big as I could accommodate.

As you can see, there’s a lot of beer in here in storage, because when we make a single batch of beer, if it’s a seven barrel batch, it will make 14 of these kegs, 14 half barrels in one batch.

And then basically then the empties, once they empty them over there, it gets distributed.

all those lines go out to the bar It goes underground for about 80 feet, and then we take the emptys, put them over here, and I have to clean them, and then the whole process starts over again.

What is your favorite part about being a part of the craft beer community here in West Michigan?

It’s precisely that, that it’s a community.

I never felt like it’s been a competition, you know, even with all the local breweries in town, it’s we always support each other.

We send people to each other.

In the summer, there’s people that come here just for the destination, for breweries in the beach and we make it a purpose to say, hey, have you been to Armory?

Have you been to Odd Sides?

Have you been to other places around.

So we’re always like helping and supporting each other.

We move a lot of beer through some of these local places.

I don’t want to just can and have cans sitting on shelves at Meijer that may get bypassed with the other thousand brands that are out there right now.

But I do want to make custom beers for people that really appreciate the beer and keep them in specific locations.

We’re not here to be millionaires.

We’re willing, we’ve really modified our lifestyle in order to do this, and to supply beer to the east side of Grand Haven, in general, everybody in West Michigan.

This is what it is.

This is what we are in this industry together.

It’s not a competition at all.

We’re all in it together.

(Music) We are here at Tanglewood Winery in Holland, so let’s talk about your family business, because this has been kind of around for a very long time prior to it becoming a winery.

Tell me about your family history.

Absolutely, yeah.

So the farm itself actually started in the late ’60s.

My grandpa actually started with this farm right here that we’re on.

And my dad took it over quite a few years later.

That was my whole plan.

My entire life, I was planning on going into the blueberry farming world, but right around 2008, you may recall, there was some turmoil there.

And the industry kind of crashed a little bit.

And that was right when I was graduating Michigan State for horticulture.

So not really what you like to graduate into.

We were actually dumping tons of fruit.

Many days we were dumping one to two tons of fruit that was perfectly usable.

And that got me thinking that we should really do something else.

So what I did is I ended up going back to school for wine chemistry, and starting this up originally using just all of the fruit that would have been wasted in the process.

Tell me what fruits you all have produced and grown over the years and what you’ve kind of merged into the wine business in aspects.

Absolutely.

So it started out as just a blueberry farm.

We were doing almost exclusively blueberries.

As the winery came into being, we started to diversify a little bit more Now we grow quite a variety of things, we grow black currants, we grow aronia berries, which are kind of a new, unique one.

We also grow raspberries, blackberries, elderberries, and, yeah, our own grapes as well.

How did Tanglewood and what’s the secret behind the name tangle?

So, the original thought process was was it’s going to be blueberry wine, and if you’ve seen a blueberry bush, they’re kind of just a mess of tangled wood.

So decided to go with Tanglewood because that was primarily what we were going to do.

The logo was originally going to be some kind of stylized blueberry bush, but we had that beautiful tree out there, and we ended up leaning into that a little bit more, and it seemed like something that could be iconic for when people drive up here.

So was the family all behind the idea of producing wine once you went through the dry spell, and thus then we’re like, wee need to use this fruit, right?

It’s been a family affair since the very beginning.

My dad is part owner of the winery here.

My mom helps out, my sisters help out.

Even my nephew is working with us now, and Yeah, we we keep it in the family.

Wonderful.

So tell us about Tanglewood and what you’re producing here.

So you use the blueberries.

Raspberries are in production right now.

Was it a raspberry wine you’re doing right now?

Yes.

We’re doing fruit wine with no water, no artificial flavoring, and little to no preservatives in anything that we do.

That’s extremely unique in especially the fruit wine world, where almost I’d say most fruit wines are between 60 and 80% water.

We’re not using any water whatsoever in any of our wines, and it just makes a much richer, much different product than most of the kind of light pink fruit wines that you see out there on the market.

I was going to say, that’s got to be a rich wine if you’re not putting any water in.

Exactly.

Yep, exactly.

And a side note of that is that it actually preserves the wine, because a lot of the fruit that we have is so high in antioxidants that it actually reduces our need for preservatives.

So a healthy wine.

Exactly.

You can feel good about eating this.

There you go.

Would you say there’s a lot of family pride in Tanglewood?

Yeah, absolutely.

It’s a good gathering place for not just seeing friends and family again, but for the entire community at large.

There’s a lot of people that come here to see all the different people that they know, a lot of the people that live around here.

Kind of a gathering place.

Exactly.

Local music, food trucks, all of that, and almost almost all of it is local people that, you know, have local connections, so.

What’s your favorite wine here?

I really enjoy the rosé for a dry wine, and then for a sweeter wine, I really like our port style black currant wine which is called Dawn.

We right now have about 17 different wines, and of those five are dry, most of them are probably in the semi sweet range, and then we have a few dessert wines, as well as a few port style wines.

We have quite a few sparkling wines as well, the Beach Bum that you can see kind of front and center here.

That’s one of a few different sparkling wines that we do as well, and we like to have things that are easy for people to drink on a hot day, as well as things that are a little bit richer and heavier for the winter months.

Final question for you, Trevor, how do you feel having taken something that you’re father, your grandfather, established many, many moons ago, many years ago, and then turning it into something different, kind of taking it another direction while you still maintain your other aspects of it personally, to grow and be, you know, one of the younger ones taking this to the next level.

How do you feel personally?

I got to say, at the beginning, it’s a lot of pressure.

It’s a lot of pressure to have an idea, not know quite where it’s going to go.

But hindsight being 2020, you know, it does fill me with a lot of gratitude for my parents, my grandparents, for setting this up in the first place, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t quite proud of how things are going right now.

It feels good.

It feels good to see my grandparents here and my family here, and to be able to show them that we can adapt, and we can do the best we can with what they’ve built.

Awesome.

The title of our show is Living West Michigan.

I would say that you guys are actually living in West Michigan and taking it to the next level.

We’ve been here our whole lives, and that’s not gonna change anytime soon.

So, yes, I would say that, for sure.

Cheers to Tanglewood Winery.

Cheers.

What makes this area so cool is it’s been in my family since 1854, so it’s very historical to our family at that point and being able to grow old school apples on it, it just kind of brings it all together Can you tell us about Pux Cider and kind of how it all began?

Wow, so Pux Cider, it kind of started with my uncle, bought this farm from one of our cousins and we took it over, and he knew that my brother, Andy and myself were into Cider.

Mark approached us and was like, "Hey, you want to grow some old school apples " and try our hand at cider?"

And we were like, "Yeah, it sounds cool, you know, being part of the family farm."

And that was about 13 years ago.

It was when we first planted the trees behind us, not really knowing what to grow or much about traditional ciders.

It’s not really what you see in the American market.

Cider here tends to be carbonated, sweeter and more fruit oriented So we wanted to do more traditional, more apple based cider using traditional apples, and that’s kind of where we started our learning process.

We’re here on the Pux Farm today.

Can you tell me about kind of what makes this land so special to grow these apples on?

So this area is known as the Ridge, and it’s the largest production area of apples in Michigan.

It’s very heavy clay.

It’s very high up, so the risk of frost is reduced, being a higher elevation.

This is the apple region of Michigan.

It’s ideal for the grown fruit.

So I understand that you grow heirloom and also traditional cider apples.

What I guess would be the difference between the apples that you grow in here and maybe the apples that I would find at a grocery store.

Apples that you’d see in a store, you know, they tend to be produced to be the most perfect apple size, color, no imperfections storage, shelf life.

And cider apples, they tend to be ugly, we’ll have cannons, which aren’t really done desirable in a dessert apple, something, you know, that’s sweet with acidity.

That’s not what you’ll see at a store.

Cider apples are very different.

When you ferment them, what’s left is a lot of personality, which you don’t get from a lot of dessert apples.

Can you give us maybe the quick rundown of Apple off the tree to cider into the glass?

What happens in between there?

So basically, what we’re doing is we’ll start picking apples end of July, and at that point, all of other, there’s a bunch of different techniques, like sometimes I’ll leave them in storage to sweat them to get more sugar built up in the apple, but most times, I’m just picking them I’m pressing them, and then we take that juice, and, you know, I’ll treat it if I want to do a wild ferment, I’ll just let it ferment.

If I want to do a standard ferment, I’ll add pectin, pectinase, so it’ll drop all the solids out, so it’ll be clear.

I’ll add some sulfites to kill all the natural yeast in it, and then I’ll add a standard yeast And that’ll give me the exact same result every time, and that’s kind of what I do for all my mainstream Ciders.

Four years into having our location and ten years into being in distribution, we have found that our driest ciders are a lot of times our most popular ciders, and people come to our taphouse in Grand Rapids just for wild ferments.

You know, they want a Kingston Black single varietal, which is coveted by cider nerds, because it’s said to be the most well rounded cider apple ’cause that has, you know, the astringency, the tannins, and the flavor, and consumers know what that is, and that’s something that is super cool.

What kind of maybe traditions or values do you feel like you’ve really carried on from your family that you carry on into Pux today?

Uh, you know, I think that at attention to detail in knowing apples, knowing how to grow them, is a big part of the family and and, you know, I think that is something that is really passed on to me, just the passion for growing apples and doing something, farm based, you know, off the land and something from the farm.

I feel very, very thankful to be able to carry on and do something different, you know, switch gears from, you know, just mainstream Apple production to now we got different product.

What does all your land kind of look like?

You’ve got this farm, and then you said, you’ve got a couple other farms.

Yeah, so it’s all, you know, it’s when you see the trees that are all rows of very strict planting, that is what all the other farms are like.

So it’s all high density just made to get the most light in, easiest to maintain, easiest to pick.

I grew 150 different kinds of Apples, a couple different Honeycrisps, you know, Firestorm, Evercrisp premiere, you know, the original.

You know, these apples are hundreds of years old, so when you’re having it, you’re kind of getting something that somebody might have tasted hundreds of years ago.

And I think that’s super cool What is next for Pux Cider?

You said, maybe you guys are looking at some expansion?

We’re doing a location on the farm, where there’ll be an outdoor serving area.

You’ll be able to come here and grab a cider and sit out and enjoy nature And I think that’ll be a really different approach compared to our Grand Rapids location, which is more, you know, urban and art and music, and I think it’ll be cool to come out here, and, you know, I kind of take it for granted cause I’m always out here, but, you know, it’s a cool space to see Hello, West Michigan.

Welcome to Melina’s free fun forecast.

I’m Melina.

Today, we’re predicting perfect weather for adventure, all at no cost.

Let’s check the map for today’s top picks right here on Melina’s free fun forecasts, where the fun is always free and the weather is always perfect.

This week, we’re stretching, sculpting, and sweating, with skyline views right here on the Blue Bridge in downtown Grand Rapids.

Every summer, for 10 years now, Grand Rapids Parks and Recreation has teamed up with downtown Grand Rapids Inc and Priority Health to bring you a full lineup of free outdoor fitness classes.

You heard that right, free No registration and no fees.

Everything from yoga, at sunrise, Zumba in the evening, line dancing at sunset, and that’s just a few of the Monday through Friday offerings.

There’s something happening almost every weekday, from May through mid August.

I got out my mat to try Barre on the Blue Bridge.

Barre is a low impact, high intensity workout that blends ballet inspired moves, yoga and Pilates to help build strength, improve posture, and increase flexibility.

Think tiny mov movements that burn in all the right places The classes totally beginner friendly and led by certified instructors from local studios.

When asked what they enjoy most about the workouts, repeat participants of barre classes would undoubtedly say that barre has increased their strength, flexibility, and muscle definition Additionally, they could acknowledge that their posture is better and they feel taller.

As the main goal of barre is to stretch and lift the spine.

Also, barre’s unique micro movements that can help you develop a killer core and burn fat in addition to toning and shaping your muscles.

Some people like to incorporate props such as weights or balls to increase the difficulty You may not think these tiny movements would do much, but a 60 minute barre class can burn upwards of 300 to 400 calories.

The best part, all you need is a yoga mat, or just a towel, some water, and maybe a little courage to try something new to enjoy this free fun activity.

Visit Grand RapidsMI.gov and find your way to the Parks and Recreation page for the entire free outdoor fitness class schedule Whether you’re looking to switch up your fitness routine or just just want an excuse to enjoy the outdoors, these free classes are the perfect way to get moving, meet people, and soak up some sunshine.

("Rest" by Basic Comfort plays) Have a good day!