Myrtle Beach’s Gordon Biersch Brewery and Restaurant ‘Where Urban Meets Ocean”

This was a Facebook Live Video

Meredith:           Good morning everyone and thanks for joining us live here at MBN.com. And today we’re at Gordon Biersch at Market Commons, and joining me is the general manager Jason Landis. Jason, thanks for having us out here today.

Jason:                   Our pleasure, thanks for being here.

Meredith:           This is such a fantastic restaurant here in Myrtle Beach, just located right in the heart of Myrtle Beach, and one of the aspects that I love about it, is it’s also a brewery. So, we’re actually standing inside the brewery right now. So tell us a little bit about Gordon Biersch, its background.

Jason:                   Absolutely.

Meredith:           Little bit more about the restaurant here.

Jason:                   Absolutely. Gordon Biersch, Myrtle Beach. Located right in the heart of Market Commons. Great location, like you mentioned. Minutes from anything, so we’re blessed with a great location. We’re also blessed by being a brewery restaurant as well, so all the beer that we have is made in-house, on premise. We’ve got a great brewer by the name of Daniel.

He’s here all the time, just not now, but he’s in here toiling away making the beer. Everything you see here is just kind of the guts of the brewery right now. But yeah, from start to finish, all the beer’s made in house, and it’s fantastic.

Meredith:           This is amazing. This is so cool actually to be standing in here. While we’re in here, tell us a little bit about each of these tanks and what they do, just a brief synopsis.

Jason:                   Gotcha. Well, this right here, we’re next to the mash pump. What we do with this is we fill this up with warm water and then we drop pretty much the cracked malt into the warm water, and this is for the mashing process. We transfer it through all these pipes underneath here over to that big vessel there. That’s called the louder ton.

Essentially, it’s just a giant strainer. What we’re doing is we’re separating all the liquid, from the malt that’s in it. As that’s happening, we clean out this mash tun, bring it back over here. Now it’s a boiling process and then once that’s done, we bring it over to the fermentation tanks, and then this is where we add the yeast to it. Then we let this sit for about a month, month and a half, and then it’s ready for general consumption.

Meredith:           So basically, like when you’re making beer … So, it has to ferment for a month to a month and a half?

Jason:                   Depending on the beer. Yeah. Somewhere around there.

Meredith:           Okay, and how much beer … This is ginormous.

Jason:                   Yes, it is.

Meredith:           How much does it fit?

Jason:                   This is about 30 barrels, which is like 60 kegs.

Meredith:           60 kegs?

Jason:                   That’s the size of a batch. Yep.

Meredith:           Oh my goodness, and then how often … How much beer do y’all go through here?

Jason:                   A lot.

Meredith:           A lot of beer.

Jason:                   A lot. Yeah.

Meredith:           How many, like on tap, how many different types of beer do you offer?

Jason:                   We have, usually we can do up to nine beers on tap. Every now and then we’ll have seven or eight but we try to keep nine on tap. We have everything from traditional German lagers all the way up to IPAs. We’ll do small batches sometimes where it’s like one or two barrels, but most of the time we’ll have nine. Nine on tap.

Meredith:           Okay, and then when you’re changing different taste, do you ever have like seasonal beers that you do?

Jason:                   Absolutely. We have four seasonals. We have, coinciding with the seasons, we have Maibock  for the spring, we have a Sommerbrau for the summer, and in the fall we have amazing fest beer. In the wintertime we have a WinterBock, and with each of those … Whenever we tap those, we have tapping parties, bring in a band, we’ll have live music, free food. Well, with free food, we accept donations, and we raise money for charity.

Meredith:           That’s very cool.

Jason:                   At each of these events. So yeah, it’s a big time.

Meredith:           Tapping parties. Okay, so they have quarterly tapping parties. That’s really cool.

Jason:                   It’s a great time, absolutely.

Meredith:           And who comes up, you mentioned you had Daniel that does a lot of the brewing here. Does he just come up with different ideas or do you take requests from what types of beer people want? How do that work?

Jason:                   A lot of it is up to the brewer. We do have some core beers that we have on tap. We will always have the Märzen, the Märzen is kind of our flagship beer. We use that in a lot of our cooking. It’s great synergy between the brewer and the chef.

A lot of the food that we have utilizes the beer that we make in house. So some of the beer, we have to have on tap all the time. So, the Märzen is one of those. The Golden Export will almost be always on tap. It’s a nice blonde lager.

Everything else is kind of up to the brewer’s discretion. We have everything from company recipes that we can use and then each brewer kind of has their own little special spin that they can put on brews. So each Gordon Beers, while it’s gonna be similar, each one is a unique experience, which is really cool about the company.

Meredith:           Yeah, this is really cool. So you’re talking about food. I’m gonna take a walk outside the brewery now. Let’s go kind of take a look at the restaurant.

Jason:                   Absolutely.

Meredith:           And maybe the line, and we can talk about some different things that are on the menu here at Gordon Biersch.

Jason:                   So the kitchen’s right around here. We’ll let her go through.

Speaker 3:           Can I not be in this?

Jason:                   You’re fine.

Speaker 3:           All right.

Jason:                   Just say, “Hi!” But yeah, we got the kitchens back here, right next to the brewery, and like I said, “It’s a unique kitchen.” A lot of the product that we have utilizes the beer that we make.

So, it really kind of pulls everything together with the beer and the food that we have in-house. Food’s made pretty much from scratch. In the kitchen right here. So, while you see the guys who are working on the line, we have a whole other level of kitchen with people preparing everything for the day.

Meredith:           That’s great, and I love restaurants that are from scratch because not every restaurant is from scratch. So, that’s another positive thing here at Gordon Biersch.

When it comes to menu items, what would be some of the must try menu items when you come here?

Jason:                   I mean, we’ve got great items. Everything from appetizers, small plates, up to the entrees. It sounds simple but the garlic fries are amazing if you like garlic. They are out of this world. The egg rolls are just to die for. Those are some of the starters that we have. Some of the entrees, I always tell people we have a lobster shrimp taco that is out of this world.

Meredith:           Oh, wow!

Jason:                   Probably the best thing on the menu. Some of it’s quite traditional German fare. A lot of the beer that we make is traditional German lagers, so we pair that with some of the traditional German fare. We have some German sausage. We have a chicken schnitzel dish.

Meredith:           Oh, that sounds really good!

Jason:                   That is through the roof, it’s so good, and then some great desserts as well. Just a nice variety of food, a little bit of everything.

Meredith:           Yes. Well, I’ve eaten here a few times and absolutely love it, and I love the ambience here, too. So, I like how the lighting, it’s a little bit dimmer, it’s a little bit quiet, I love how you have the booths. You have options to have a both.

Jason:                   Absolutely.

Meredith:           It’s a little bit more privacy in here with the barriers in between.

Jason:                   It’s great, it’s a really comfortable feel.

Meredith:           It is.

Jason:                   But be like, classy enough, yet not pretentious. It just kind of markets to everybody. It’s really nice.

Meredith:           Yeah. I love that. Classy but not pretentious. I like that. Yeah, this is very cool, and now this place gets packed out too, because also, when it comes to the bar, you have the TVs, and you have a lot of sports.

Tell me a little bit about what do you offer when it comes to the bar scene at night, during the week and on the weekends?

Jason:                   We do happy hour 4:00-7:00 every day. We run discount beers. We have discounted small plates. Starting at right around three dollars and going up. So, there’s a lot of options there. We do taco Thursdays, where we’ll have tacos all day, on special, as well as some of our beers and our margaritas, and then late night, after 10:00 we’ll run discount happy hour appetizers, as well.

Meredith:           Okay.

Jason:                   Menus open, full menus open late, till 11:00 during the week, till 12:00 on Friday and Saturday.

Meredith:           Wow! Yeah.

Jason:                   So, yeah. No matter when you come in, we got something for you. Absolutely.

Meredith:           Okay, great, and then also you have a bar that is outside too, right? You know what, let’s go walk down there. We’ll took a look at this because I believe it opens up, right?

Jason:                   Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yep.

Meredith:           To outside?

Jason:                   It’s one of the nicer aspects of the bar, the garage doors are fantastic. Some of the best people watching in the Market Common.

Meredith:           Yeah, so this is pretty cool. Right here.

Jason:                   When the weather’s nice we can pop those open, you can sit outside, you can sit inside. The patio seating is just phenomenal. Really nice. Really cozy.

Meredith:           It is great out there.

Jason:                   Great atmosphere.

Meredith:           And you get a nice breeze sometimes.

Jason:                   Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Meredith:           It’s nice and cool, and I’ve been here actually in the fall, like October. It’s just-

Jason:                   It’s fantastic. Nothing better.

Meredith:           Oh, it is fantastic! Yeah.

Jason:                   Absolutely.

Meredith:           So now we’re here, we’re actually looking at what’s on tap. Let’s talk a little bit about … What do you have here on tap right now?

Jason:                   Absolutely. We’ve got, what we call, we have our core beers going down. You have the Golden Export, the Hefeweizen Schwarz beer, the Czech Pilsner, and the Märzen. Those are our traditional kind of German lagers.

They’re always on the [inaudible] boot. German purity laws are only gonna have water, hops, yeast and malt added to it. So, those we’re gonna have on tap quite often.

This is our seasonal right now, we have our Sommerbrau. It’s a Kölsch style ale, light-bodied, blonde, almost like a citrus flavor to it. Super refreshing in the summertime. We have a Bourbon barrel that’s kind of unique this year. We’ve partnered with one of the distilleries out of Kentucky, that’s just right across the street from one of our restaurants. So, we got a bunch of Bourbon barrels. So, we have a Bourbon aged lager-

Meredith:           So, does it have like a Bourbon taste to it?

Jason:                   Absolutely.

Meredith:           Really?

Jason:                   Bourbon smell, Bourbon taste to it. Absolutely.

Meredith:           Oh, seriously?

Jason:                   We age it for a couple months in the barrels.

Meredith:           Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jason:                   And it’s fantastic. That’s a Amber lager right now. The next one we have is a Pilsner, that’s aging right now.

Meredith:           Oh, okay!

Jason:                   Which is gonna be really, really good. And then we include things like IPAs as well. That’s one of the things that the brewer kind of puts his own little special touch on. We have an IPA on tap, Surf’in IPA to session. Super easy drink, you still have the nice hop characteristic to it.

Meredith:           Mm-hmm .

Jason:                   Then we have a blueberry vodka on tap, that’s just a wild seller, right now. So-

Meredith:           Oh, wow! I bet! It actually sounds really good.

Jason:                   It is. Very refreshing. It’s very good.

Meredith:           Yeah. All right. Well, gosh. What a great selection here.

Jason:                   Mm-hmm .

Meredith:           This is a really nice bar and it seats a lot of people.

Jason:                   Absolutely.

Meredith:           It’s great.

Jason:                   Happy hour gets packed. Everything down here is first come, first serve. So, people know to get here right at 4:00 and try to get the prime location. You know

Meredith:           Well, tell me a little bit about, you know the golf scene here. I mean, since we are in the golf capitol of the world.

Jason:                   Absolutely, we’ve seen a lot of groups come in from, year round, but we see a big bump, right around like spring.

Meredith:           Mm-hmm .

Jason:                   And then, right when the fall hits, we’ll see a nice bump of golfers coming in. We’ll have parties of eight, 12, 20, golfers that will come in and just spend hours her

e drinking.

Meredith:           Yeah.

Jason:                   Kind of like, a little small place. Just going over the day.

Meredith:           Right.

Jason:                   Who shot what, and who … So …

Meredith:           Exactly.

Jason:                   Absolutely.

Meredith:           And really the location is key to here-

Jason:                   Yeah, it’s not a far drive to anything.

Meredith:           … being simple. No! I mean, in the airport, literally is-

Jason:                   Like literally five minutes away.

Meredith:           Five minutes away.

Jason:                   Absolutely. Yup.

Meredith:           So, might be a great place if you’re just getting off the plane here at Myrtle Beach. Wanna swing by and grab a bite to eat at Gordon Biersch. Relax here at Market Commons. Maybe after a round, come here but location is prime. An amazing restaurant brewery. Again, I love this ambiance. It’s very chill.

Jason:                   It is.

Meredith:           It is very chill.

Jason:                   It’s great. It’s nice. We love it. We love it, so.

Meredith:           And then, also surrounding, when you go outside of Gordon Biersch, just you have a lot of things to do here in Market Commons. You have the movie theater, you have bookstores.

Jason:                   Great area, you have plenty of shopping, a lot of golfers who will be sitting here at the bar while their wives are out shopping. So, that’s a nice little added bonus.

Meredith:           Right.

Jason:                   But there’s plenty of shopping. There’s plenty of other bars as well. So, you know, once you get done with us, you can bar hop and check out some of the great locations that we have as well.

Movie theaters, there’s athletic parks over there-

Meredith:           Yeah, the athletic parks are amazing for sports.

Jason:                   Yeah, we see a huge sport’s tourism bump as well, and then there’s always festivals year round that are going on, over in the parks over here. So, there’s always something going on at The Market Commons. It’s a great location.

Meredith:           Well, Jason, thanks for having us out today.

Jason:                   It’s our pleasure..

Meredith:           Gordon Biersch is amazing so y’all are doing a great job here and I’m sure you’re gonna be slammed this fall, with lots of great golf because we have had a great year in golf, in Myrtle Beach this year.

Jason:                   We see it, and we appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Meredith:           All right. Thank you.

Jason:                   Absolutely. Thank you.

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