Small Mason brewery making a big splash

Amid the backdrop of a 400-acre former dairy farm, tucked away in a valley on the outskirts of Shelton, Evan Puckett and Don Conant spend their Saturdays hard at work.

The owners of Keyhole Valley Brewing still have their day jobs at a steel fastener business that Puckett’s family owns — Valley Nut and Bolt in Olympia — but last year they decided to go into business together by starting their own nanobrewery.

“I started brewing three years ago, just for fun,” Puckett recalled. “A friend of mine had been thinking about starting a brewery, but I decided that it wasn’t going to work out. Then my coworker, Don, said, ‘Let’s just start our own small brewery.’ Let’s keep it small.”

And small it is — Keyhole Valley Brewing is in Puckett’s garage at Keyhole Valley Ranch, the 400-acre property that his mother-in-law owns.

Puckett grew up near Tumwater, and about 3 1/2 half years ago, he and his wife, Annette Puckett, and their children moved to her family’s ranch after her grandmother died.

The property has been in Annette Puckett’s family for more than 50 years. Her mother lives in a house down the road, and her cousin lives across the street.

“It’s a lot of fun,” Evan Puckett said. “There’s always family around.”

Puckett’s family — including a daughter, 13, and a son, 11 — responded positively to his newfound homebrewing hobby three years ago.

“They thought it was really great,” he said. “My wife’s really behind it and my kids like to help me with it too, some of the time.”

Puckett started brewing 5-gallon batches and sharing them with friends. He used kits from Rocky Top Homebrew in Olympia and researched heavily online.

“I’m pretty good at following laid-out plans and instructions,” he said. “I only had one batch early on that I had to throw away. I started getting some really good feedback.”

When Conant, who had been homebrewing for around 10 years, approached him about starting a nanobrewery, Puckett felt like it was doable.

“We wanted to start small and have something where we weren’t going to put too much money in it,” he said. “We bought a 20-gallon system, which was fairly inexpensive, and we knew we could make enough batches to fill kegs.”

While microbreweries, as defined by U.S. law, make less than 15,000 barrels of beer each year, nanobreweries are even smaller operations — these small businesses are often run by one or two people and produce beer in small batches, according to the US Department of Treasury.

Puckett and Conant refined their recipes on the 20-gallon system, then moved on to a 50-gallon system that they found on Craigslist and cleaned up.

Conant, who also teaches at St. Martin’s University in Lacey, built stainless steel shelves, tables and brewing stands for the brewery’s kettles at the weld shop at Valley Nut and Bolt.

They obtained their business license and liquor license in April of last year, and now Keyhole Valley Brewing produces about six kegs a month.

Some of those kegs go out to private parties, but Puckett also delivers beer on his lunch break during the week to Smoking Mo’s Restaurant in Shelton, the Tiki Tap House in Centralia and the Oly Taproom in Olympia.

Smoking Mo’s has Keyhole Valley’s Pioneer Pilsner on tap, and the nanobrewery also makes a saison (the Keyhole Farmhouse Ale, a low-alcohol “easy drinking beer,” Puckett said), a vanilla porter, a Belgian wit and a variety of IPAs.

Last fall, Conant and Puckett participated in a guest brewer’s night at Smoking Mo’s and again at the Fish Tale Brewpub in Olympia, where they sold out of all their beer in less than two hours.

They plan to participate in the Shelton-Mason County Chamber of Commerce’s Blues & Brews event, Saturday, June 16.

Puckett’s garage is also licensed as a tap room, and he sees the potential for private parties at the Keyhole Valley Ranch. But those ideas are still a little ways away.

“This is mostly for fun, we’re not trying to push it,” Puckett stressed. “We don’t really know where we’re going, and that’s exciting. We’re trying to keep it fun. We don’t owe anyone any money and we haven’t had to take out a loan. The beer more than pays for the materials.”