Drinking Wyoming: At Lander’s Pushroot Brewing, It’s All About The Foam

Cowboy State Daily’s 'Drinking Wyoming' is presented by Pine Bluffs Distilling.

To most Americans, a foamy beer is just a bad pour. More foam means less beer, and less beer … well let’s just say that makes us all sad.

But there are beer-drinking cultures that do celebrate foamy beers, and some of those unique pours are now finding their way into the heart of Wyoming at Pushroot Brewing Company in Lander.

The craft brewery just opened up last fall, with an entire slate of Czech pours, as well as very unique beers. Oaxacan green corn lager, for example, which is a pale, all-American lager brewed from heirloom Oaxacan green corn from Sugar Creek Malt in Indiana. Or the 3-grain dry stout, which is a nitrogenated, Irish-style stout, brewed from oats, wheat and malted barley, that tastes just like a roasty, cold-brewed coffee with a dash of chocolate on top.

The menu warns the buyer if they order one, they’ll want another. And the menu isn’t wrong. It’s really good, and the novelty of drinking a beer that tastes like coffee instead of beer is just fun.

But it’s the Czech pours that are the most fun at Pushroot. There’s the hladinka, which is the closest to an American pour, with about an inch of foam on top. Then there’s the snyt, which is half foam, half beer. But the one that really pops the eyeballs is the mliko, or “milk” pour. 

That is a glass that’s entirely full of foam, from top to bottom.

Say what? A beer that’s a glass full of foam?

Don’t knock it until you try it, a bartender suggested to Cowboy State Daily.

That was quickly followed up with a free, sample-sized glass of one milk-poured beer. It was a sight. A glass full to the brim with silky soft, creamy foam. It looked a lot like the chocolatey crema on top of a good cup of espresso.

Do you wait a while to drink it? this reporter wondered.

I would drink it right away, the bartender said, shaking her head.

It turned out she was right. The first exploratory sip of that foamy beer was marvelous. Like sipping on some luxurious crema from the top of an expertly brewed espresso. But the texture of that creamy foam starts changing the instant it’s poured, and it really is the most delicious the instant it comes from the tap. 

The taste was so smooth, just like a dollop of cream. Below, a thin dark line of chocolate beer was already falling out underneath the storm cloud above. But the flavor of that dark, slightly bitter line was greatly enhanced by the smooth dollop of creamy beer on the top.

Mind blown. And more sips taken — and not just taken, but enjoyed.

The Brewer Behind Pushroot 

Getting these types of pours to America is the vision of Matthew Gubanich, who started Pushroot Brewing in an old, abandoned service station garage next door to the recently renovated Lander Motel.

Gubanich had no plans of opening a brewery when he moved to Lander, though he loves beer and is a master brewer. He had kind of given up on the whole brewing industry, in fact.

“It was like a fairly challenging industry for an employee to be in,” he said. “It was really hard. It was expensive and it was low pay. Not that it was hard to get jobs, but it was just everyone was like trying to work in that industry, so it was tough.”

So he took a job in Maryland for a time, doing unrelated but lucrative work in defense contracting and project designs at Johns Hopkins University. 

But in the back of his mind, there was that niggling little beer itch that never quite went away.

What finally opened the door for him was the COVID-19 pandemic. Work let him go fully remote. Suddenly, he could choose where he wanted to live. That allowed him to move to just the right place in the world. Lander, Wyoming.

“Just exclusively because we loved it,” Gubanich said. “We had no intention of opening a brewery. And it would have been a terrible decision in 2020, maybe. We just loved the community, loved the people, love the town, love the wilderness access and hunting and climbing and fishing.”

The couple bought a house, settled in, with no thoughts or plans of opening a brewery. But then one day, Gubanich heard about someone planning to buy or thinking about starting a brewery in Lander.

“I had this moment of like, ‘Boy, if I don’t do this now, like I don’t want to be that person who, in 10 years, is looking at someone else’s success and saying, like, I had an idea, I had a thought, and I could have done that.”

That put a little fire under his feet to throw together a business plan. 

“I took that to a bank and said, ‘I’ve never done this. I don’t know if this good, bad, or right, wrong, or whatever,’” Gubanich said. “And they said, ‘Well, you’re most of the way there. Go do this research, discover this, and find this out, and do this, and, if we can get to this, then we can, if we can get to these numbers, if we can get this information, if we can get to this comfort level, then we’re interested in helping fund it.”

All of that intention from Gubanich ultimately met up with Fabian and Krista Lobera, who were renovating a terribly dilapidated motel at 569 Main Street, a place most would have thought doomed to a wrecking ball — along with the abandoned garage next door.

The Loberas had bought that abandoned garage, too, with parking in mind — but they also could see a lot of potential to having something fun next door to their renovated motel.

Deals were struck, grants were obtained, and the Gubanichs went all in on this dream, liquidating their 401Ks, putting notes against their home, and ultimately opening a completely renovated brewery space in the garage last fall.

The place is already finding a healthy following, Gubanich said, and, on a recent Saturday when Cowboy State Daily was there, the place was full of customers both inside and out, enjoying all kinds of foamy beer pours.

Czech Pours Aren’t Easy, And They’re Expensive

Getting Czech pours to America for this big dream was no easy task, but it’s something Gubanich felt strongly about.

“We had a vision of doing something lager-focused,” Gubanich recalled. “Most of our beers being lower alcohol beers, more like what the industry would call a session lager. It’s beer that is easy to drink in volume. So our goal was to build a system that would accommodate that kind of beer.”

He had himself experienced different kinds of foamy pours at craft breweries in Denver, as well as on trips abroad to Europe.

“I’ve been to Germany, and I’ve drank beer in Switzerland quite a bit,” he said. “I spent a month after a research trip to Switzerland traveling around Belgium drinking beer when I was in college. And that was my only goal. I was there to drink beer.”

Those amazing experiences contributed to his decision to bring something entirely different to America, and led ultimately to his radical Czech pours, which take a unique — and expensive — custom-built tap system as well.

It’s made by a small company in the Czech Republic with about 20 employees who make all of their taps by hand.

“The taps are four to 10 times more expensive than the taps you would see at most brew houses,” Gubanich said. “So, there’s a significant barrier to entry.”

But the company is one of the best in the world, Gubanich added.

“This company is producing and selling a huge number of taps in the Czech Republic, and they’re starting to gain notoriety in the United States,” he said. 

Pouring beers the Czech way was a huge learning curve. And resulted in a lot of wasted beer, down the drain. 

“When we put the first keg of beer on tap, the bar manager and I were like trying to get our line links right, trying to get the system balanced, and trying to get the taps sorted out,” Gubanich said. “And we poured through an entire barrel, an entire keg of beer. I think we were both like, ‘Oh my gosh, did we really just dump an entire keg of beer down the drain in the last 40 minutes, just trying to get these lines dialed in and get this thing to work the way it’s supposed to.’”

That would not be the last keg that got dumped down the drain, Gubanich added.

“It was a process to get everything just right and to start learning about how to pour these beers,” he said.

That Vanishing Pinpoint Of Perfection

Today, the process is still evolving, Gubanich said, but it’s much closer to that infinitely receding point of perfection that the master brewer is after.

“We get closer all the time,” he said. “But I know we’ll never hit it.”

The pinpoint of perfection is all part of Gubanich’s personal beer philosophy.

“There are brewers in the world who take the outlook that the only thing a bartender does is screw up their product,” Gubanich said. “The product is perfect when it’s in the tank or when it’s in the keg, but then once it goes into the glass, the bartender has done nothing but start to degrade or damage that product.”

Gubanich’s approach is completely different. He sees it as teamwork making the beer dream work.

“We have to both be doing things right, for the experience of the customer to be what we want it to be,” he said. “And so this is not a job that just any bartender can walk in off the street and do.”

There’s a huge learning curve to making the Czech’s milk pour just right, Gubanich said, as well as the hladinka pour, with its minimal foam, and the half-and-half snyt pour. And there’s a whole process that requires more time and more care than usual.

“We pre-chill all of our glassware in a water bath,” Gubanich said. “Because pouring into a cold, wet glass reduces that CO2 from breaking out of suspension.”

That’s also the reason all the glassware is washed by hand, as is the tap system itself. Because detergents, particularly for the dishwasher, include chemicals that keep a glass sparkling clear, but also interfere with the proper retention of that lovely beer crema on the top of every beer poured at Pushroot Brewing.

Eventually, Gubanich hopes to take himself to the Czech Republic to learn more about the beers from the natives. Maybe he’ll even brew a Czech-style brew or two of his own. 

The Czech Republic, Gubanich added, drinks more beer per capita than anywhere else in the world, and has for the last 29 years, so they know a thing or three about beer. 

“This (pouring method) does take longer, and it’s more work and more time and energy for my bartenders,” Gubanich said. 

But it is so worth it in the end, Gubanich believes, for the fun it’s bringing to the beer journey in Lander, where there’s a master brewer who always has his eye focused ahead on the next fun beer experience.

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.