Depending on the day, you might find Troika Brodsky at a Yoga Buzz event, Ices Plain & Fancy or working as executive director of the St. Louis Brewers Guild. After 14 years at Schlafly, Brodsky became a one-man PR machine for the Guild’s 40-plus area breweries. Here, his thoughts on the power of St. Louis beer.
Which came first: your love of beer or your job at Schlafly? I got into beer because it was a job, and I stayed with it because it was a really cool job at a really cool company in a really cool industry. I fell in love with all three of those things, and at the same time … I really fell in love with my city.
What do you do as the Brewers Guild’s executive director? Our city is awesome. What we haven’t always been awesome at is telling our story. … (This year), we will have more breweries operating in our city historically than ever before. … So my job is to tell really good stories about them.
What’s the mission of the Brewers Guild? At its simplest, it’s beer tourism. Its mission is really one of education and promotion. … It’s about supporting its member breweries so that people know who they are, and hopefully purchase their products and visit their places.
You credit much of the STL beer scene’s success to the return of neighborhood breweries. They have created their own little communities around themselves, and those communities are still big enough to support these paths of growth. … Part of what’s so awesome about our beer scene is everyone is doing their own thing.
Where do you see the local beer scene in five years? I think you’re going to hear us talked about as much as any of the other big cities (with) beer scenes. … What’s going to differentiate us is being able to historically connect it back. … I think a lot of people think of Anheuser-Busch, and they don’t understand that we have had over 200 breweries here.
How will STLBG commemorate the 10th anniversary of Heritage Festival on June 11? We are moving the event to the riverfront. … We wanted to do something really big to celebrate the milestone and where the beer community is right now. Throwing a world-class beer festival underneath the Arch and the Eads Bridge is as St. Louis as you’re going to get.
You co-founded Yoga Buzz, which hosts yoga events at local breweries and businesses, with your wife, Elle Potter. How is the work there similar to what you do at the Guild? You’re creating community, and you’re operating as a connective tissue. There are a bunch of yoga studios, but Elle isn’t competing with them, she’s helping to promote them. … I’m not my own brewery and competing with them; I’m doing something to promote that whole community.
You also co-own Ices Plain & Fancy. Why did you take that on? Ice cream is delicious, that’s why.
Fair point. But why open another ice cream shop? Of course there are ice cream shops in St. Louis, but this is really, really good ice cream made in a really cool way. … St. Louis’ bullshit meters are pretty good. So if someone shows up and is screaming at the top of their lungs how cool they are, it’s going to raise some red flags for most of us. It’s put up or shut up. And that’s where we’ve had a lot of success.
What beer is in your fridge now? I have two cans of Stag. I have a bottle of (Perennial) Abraxas on my dining room table, and I also have an Urban Chestnut sampler pack on my porch left over from a turkey fry.
This article appears in March 2016.