Jamie Floyd is in for a long day. He started brewing at eight this morning after only four and a half hours of sleep, and his oatmeal stout is nowhere near finished. Floyd stands at the opening of the brewing kettle, a large metal tank that boils and sanitizes beer, eagerly poking at the stout slowly filling the tank with a dark green, plastic rowboat paddle. “It’s going really slow,” he says. We’re not even at half-kettle. I’m going to be here all day.” 

            He is dressed in full brewing gear, wearing a black Dickie’s jumpsuit tucked into brown boots, and looks ready for this long day of…waiting. It usually takes about eight hours to brew one batch of beer, but oatmeal stout can take up to 10 or 11 hours. Floyd estimates he’ll get done around eight tonight. He got sucked into a late night at the Cirque De Luxe Fashion show at the Lane County fairgrounds last night, one of the many local events sponsored by Ninkasi Brewery, the brewery he founded and co-owns. He looks tired.

            The Eugene community is important to 36-year-old Floyd. He moved to Eugene in 1990 to attend the University of Oregon where he majored in sociology, a degree that seems to have little to do with brewing, but Floyd found a way to combine the two. When he opened Ninkasi in June 2006, he made it about more than just making beer by adding to it his passion for the community.

            The brewery is very active in supporting the arts and local community events like the Emerald City Roller Girls roller derby league and the Cirque De Luxe Fashion Show. Ninkasi throws several community-orientated parties every year and help non-profit groups’ fundraisers by supplying them with beer. Floyd also took over the Sasquatch Brew Festival with several other local groups to continue the local charity work it does.

            “My focus in sociology was communication studies, so it kind of fits really well with my philosophy of contributing to my community locally, which is what I really wanted to do,” he says. “It’s kind of like becoming the village brewer, so-to-speak.”

Though Floyd knows the science behind brewing beer, he says he’s more of like a village brewer than a biochemist. He’s read many textbooks on brewing and is fascinated with the history of beer and its influence on society.

              A sense of community definitely exists at Ninkasi, its staff consists of only five workers and four part-owners. On this busy day in the small garage nestled in a business complex on the corner of Third Avenue and Van Buren Street, the crew is in full-motion. A medley of indie and alternative rock music blasts from speakers at the back of the building, and three workers haul around kegs on trolleys while chatting and laughing. Floyd is stuck watching his stout begin to boil very slowly, but he is still full of energy and tries to burn off some of it by running back and forth between the large, metallic tanks eagerly poking at the stout with his paddle. He drops under one tank to fiddle with its mechanics in an attempt to speed up the process slightly.

            Floyd clearly understands the mechanics behind brewing good beer—which makes sense because he’s been doing it for over 15 years. He started with a friend when he was only 19 and still in high school by making hard cider out of mainly apple juice and baker’s yeast in his hometown of Cupertino, California. “We fermented it at like 130 degrees in our attic in the Bay Area,” he recalls. “It was disgusting, but we did it.”

            After moving to Eugene, he continued to home brew with a roommate while living in the UO campus co-ops. After his graduation in 1994, he began working in the kitchen at Steelhead Brewing Company to pay off student debts and eventually became the night kitchen shift manager.  

            Floyd always had a vision of owning his own business and was thinking of trying to open a coffee shop when the head brewer at Steelhead offered him the position of assistant brewer. He was promoted to head brewer a year and a half later

“I hadn’t really thought of it as a career before, and it just turned out to be the perfect job for me,” he says.

            Floyd quietly started planning Ninkasi while still working at Steelhead and met partner Nikos Ridge, an NYU graduate with a degree in economics, through a mutual friend one day and mentioned he was thinking of starting a brewery. Nikos convinced Floyd to hire him. So he quit Steelhead in 2005, and a year later, he and Ridge opened Ninkasi with just the two of them brewing using rented equipment at Sofia’s Restaurant and Bavarian Pub in Springfield until their present location was ready.

            Today Ridge is making his escape from Ninkasi—but only for a week’s vacation. Floyd, still captive to by his stout, catches him while he’s leaving and yells with a big grin, “I’m excited for you man, really excited. I’m salivating in anticipation of living vicariously through your stories.”

             Floyd’s excitement for his partner is understandable; he hasn’t much time off since starting Ninkasi. A snowboarding trip to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, got cancelled a month ago when he had to cover for one off his employees who was expecting a child at that time, and he was supposed to have this week off, but instead he’s working every day.

            “It’s kind of one of those things where my job might, for a lot of people, seem like it stops say at like six o’clock at night because I might be drinking beer,” he says. “But I’m really still working most of the time.”

Floyd’s idea of a vacation does not involve beer. “I like to say that a real vacation for me means I’m drinking tequila. I’m not drinking beer,” he says.

             But it’s impossible for life to be all work for someone whose profession is making beer. Floyd has found a way to kill some time by joking around and drinking one of Ninkasi’s India pale ales with another one of the part-owners, Matt Beatty, while standing outside facing the railroad tracks that border the brewery. He notes that they both fall victim to Oregon’s allergy season, and they’re trying to drink as much IPA as they can before their allergies hit.

             It’s Floyd’s passion for beer that has helped build Ninkasi’s popularity. He’s had requests from across the country from people as far away as New York who want to sell Ninkasi’s beer, but Floyd would rather stick to the community and keep Ninkasi a regional brewery. His general rule is to sell no further away than eight hours from Eugene, with some minor exceptions.

            Floyd is back again, hanging close to the kettle, eyeing the stout eagerly. Only an hour has passed, and he still has many more left to spend with the stout. Beatty reminds him this may be the last time he has to brew oatmeal stout.

“Honestly, oatmeal stout to me, you know how I feel about it,” Floyd replies. “I don’t care if I have to sit here all day. It makes it good.”