The ownership team who named the company could hardly believe it when they did a simple internet search, and discovered there was no Mountaineer brand beer. The mountaineer image is synonymous with West Virginia: the state motto, after all, is Montani Semper Liberi, Mountaineers Always Free.

Then there’s the pride in West Virginia University sports teams. “There are no professional sports franchises in West Virginia,” said Maerzluft. There are Steelers fans, Redskins fans, Ravens fans, but, “The W.V.U. Mountaineers are the only statewide sports teams. It’s a big source of pride for everyone who lives here or went to school here.”

That personal connection, said Maerzluft, is “Key Ingredient Two” in Mountaineer’s journey from local start-up to successful enterprise. Mountaineer pride is enough to get people to try the brew, but at more than seven bucks a six-pack, it is not enough to keep them as customers. That’s where Maerzluft comes in, Key Ingredient Three.

A brewer with more than 16 years in the business, he has won several national brewing awards in a career that began behind the bar at Widmer in Portland, Oregon, when it was still a brew pub and Maerzluft was still a home brewer. In San Francisco he worked at the legendary Toronado brew bar in San Francisco. His boss there encouraged him to get an education in brewing.

So after an apprenticeship at Crooked River, the big Cleveland-based company that owns many brand name “craft beers,” he entered the famed Siebel Institute of Technology, an Ivy League science education for a brewer. When his milk stout won an international competition—the first time an American stout had ever beaten one from the renowned Makinson brewers—Makinson offered him a job at their Frederick Brewing Company, which brewed Blue Ridge and Wild Goose pale ales. Maerzluft was the brewer there until the company was bought by his former employer, Crooked River.

Mountaineer is now available in three states, but it’s fast becoming a local icon in the Eastern Panhandle. After two short years, locals increasingly go to bars expecting at least one variety of Mountaineer on tap. And returning tourists ask for it, too.

When Maerzluft talks about brewing, there is a lot of science talk mixed with poetry: awakening rhizomes on the barley, or exploding yeast death—apparently, that’s how yeast die, and it’s bad for beer when it happens. But Ask Maerzluft the ale scientist about the secret to Mountaineer’s success, and you get a decidedly unscientific response: Quaffability.

“When you go into a pub, you’ll have one. Then you’ll have another,” he said. The idea is to appeal to both the seasoned craft-beer drinker and to people accustomed to the lighter-bodied beers typically brewed by the big commercial outfits. “Our nut brown ale is our most popular ale,” he said. It’s meant to be rich, dark, and full-bodied, but easy on the palate. A stout ale should complement a meal, Maerzluft said, not be the meal. Maerzluft tries to brew a range of ales that offer rich and varied flavors, but leave a little room for another. And for people who like the light, crispness of a lager beer, there is Mountaineer lager.

Now that Mountaineer has attracted loyal customers, Maerzluft said the company can think about other aspects of its business. “We would like to buy more of our supplies from local vendors,” he said. “But we haven’t been able to find the sources yet.”

A craft brewery like Mountaineer needs only a few employees to crank out a few thousand gallons of beer a month. But it has to buy supplies to bottle, and package all that brew—there is more money in packaging than in ingredients. There are bottles, boxes, labels, bottle caps, cartons, shrink wrap, and more. “We buy everything we can from local vendors, but we’d really like to source the materials themselves closer to home, too.”

Environmental considerations are also on Maerzluft’s mind. Brewing beer, for example, requires completely sanitary conditions. Cleaning 20- and 40-barrel tanks is a messy business. Right now, all the waste water goes down the drain. “Once we get to a certain size, we’ll have the margins to install our own filtration system, so all our cleaning water will be purified,” he said. For now, they communicate regularly with the city water department, which monitors the gray water Mountaineer sends to the sewage system. The regular monitoring enables Mountaineer to modify their cleaning regimen as needed.

Current measures to lower the brewer’s ecological footprint include a heat exchanger that captures heat from the cooling wert and re-uses it to boil the next batch. And most of the hops Maerzluft uses are organically grown.

“We give our spent yeast to a local farmer,” said Maerzluft. “He feeds it to his cattle, and his customers love the results. He jokes he’s halfway to Kobe beef: He feeds them spent brewers yeast and he adds a little beer to the feed. He’s only missing the massage and the classical music.”

Local home brewers also line up to take some of the spent yeast. It’s still got life enough for home brew, but not for the exacting standards of a commercial craft brewer.

Brewing beer might sound like a dream job to a lot of people (okay, to a lot of guys), but for Maerzluft and crew it’s serious business, with the same tight margins and cash-flow problems as any other business. Home brewers and ale aficionados know about the current worldwide hop shortage. It’s hit craft brewers particularly hard. “We had to buy an entire year of hops at one time, and we had to buy what was available,” said Maerzluft. “That was $35,000 worth of hops to pay for and store.”

For now, Mountaineer’s business planning is paying off. They are about to add even more brewing capacity. They are running out of floor space for brewing, but there is one huge space they could tap for expansion. Their huge cold-storage warehouse is practically empty. “We ship it out as fast as we can bottle it,” said Maerzluft.