Nano Brewing, Macro Impact at Third Life Brewing Company

This Manistee brewery puts creativity (and drinkability) first

By Karl Klockars | March 9, 2024

On a Friday evening, near the end of a dark road but still within sight of the glow of Manistee’s Vogue Theatre, bright light pours from the corner windows at the massive Manistee Iron Works building. Inside, patrons huddle around the bright bar, chat at tables, play board games, and sip a variety of lagers, IPAs, and other ales.

This is the space where longtime brewer Jamieson Hanna opened Third Life Brewing Company in 2022, the eventual destination of a career that started—like so many others in the craft beer community—with a Mr. Beer kit.

Mr. Beer Inspiration

“I was living in North Carolina, and I got into the craft beer scene down there in Raleigh,” Hanna says of his origins. “I was the guy that would drive around and follow the distributor trucks to get all the whales”—beer slang for highly sought-after beers—“and I realized how ridiculous that was. I decided that I’m just going to learn how to brew. So like everyone else, I bought one of those Mr. Beer kits from Bed Bath & Beyond.”

Despite his first efforts (“turned out awful, as expected”) he jumped straight into all-grain brewing three months later and was off and running as a beermaker.

Entirely self-taught to begin, Hanna scoured online forums and watched videos while learning to make beer, and when he moved back closer to home in Michigan, he landed a gig at Thumb Brewery in Caseville. Over the next decade, he honed his skills at breweries including Griffin Claw, Draught Horse, Brooks Brewing, North Channel, and Loaded Dice Brewing.

“I just wanted to learn more parts of the craft,” he says. “There’s so much to learn, and there’s a lot of OGs in the industry, especially in Michigan. So I wanted to try and get as much experience working hand in hand with some of those folks, just to further myself and my knowledge in the brewing industry.”

Of those, Hanna credits Draught Horse most of all as the place he came to really refine his brewing skills. “I was jumping between brewing large batches and small batches … the 2.5bbl pilot system was the playground to tweak things before we scaled them up to [a] 10-barrel batch.”

Small-Batch Character

That small-batch character is kept at Third Life, which is technically a nanobrewery. (That’s smaller than a microbrewery, for those who remember their metric prefixes!) Hanna and his fellow Third Life brewer Tad Schmelling brew on a one-barrel system, 31 gallons at a time, double-batching into two-barrel fermenters. At the end of the process, the taproom is left with just four half-barrel kegs of beer per brew.

“It’s been fun applying production strategies to a smaller nanosystem,” he says, noting that they’ve had to expand their capacity twice in the past year just to keep up, “which is a lot sooner than I ever could have dreamed.”

It’s a fair amount of brewing work to keep Third Life’s 12 taplines pouring every week, with half the lines dedicated to their main beers and the other half rotating a variety of recipes. Their menu leans toward the lighter side of things, which isn’t just to please the local cadre of macrobrew aficionados but also the brewers themselves.

“Tad and I are big fans of Hamm’s. It’s our favorite beer in the world,” Hanna says. “A lot of our menu typically has a more heavy hand towards lagers, but it also plays into the area that we’re in, especially in the offseason.”

That lean towards lagers is also for drinking comfort—and part of a clever effort toward community building. “We try to keep our ABVs low. It’s nice to have people sit down and be able to have two or three drinks and not feel full, not feel guilty,” Hanna explains. “I wanted the concept here to be more community driven. It’s more of a community here than a bar, and for me that was really important and a lot of what drives what we decide to brew here.”

Constant Creativity

Lest ye worry that their beers are just a parade of Fill-in-the-Blank Light clones, a recent visit saw a Japanese rice lager and a dry-hopped pilsner on the menu alongside a more straightforward lager.

Third Life’s heftier, “crafty”-er beers include a stable of IPAs of the hazy, session, double, and 100 percent Citra-hopped varieties, a coffee porter, and a fruited wheat, plus an extra special bitter (ESB) with an interesting origin story.

The recipe for their Noble Knights Nectar started with a prompt on ChatGPT, but Hanna also used the generative AI to come up with some support content. “I’m sure we’re probably the first [brewery] to have it name a beer and create a theme song for the beer, and have it performed,” Hanna says. “One of our buddies was asking us to do an extra special bitter, and I was like, y’know, I don’t really drink this style. So I’m just going to try this thing out with ChatGPT.”

A few tweaks to the menu later, plus some more local ingredients, and one of the world’s first AI-inspired beers was in the tank. The creation of that beer also shows off the most notable, yet far less noticeable part of Third Life: Hanna’s dedication to independence.

“That was a really fun brewing project, and it just plays in line with what we do here, just having fun in different ways.” That kind of playful creativity—sadly absent from some of today’s craft breweries—stems from the freedom of being the only one he has to answer to.

“I’m the sole proprietor for the brewery here. I don’t have partners, or investors, or anything. So we get to call the shots,” Hanna says. “We just have fun and enjoy the freedom that we’re afforded to just do this stuff and not have to worry about answering to corporate individuals or anything of that nature.”

Hanna acknowledges the nanobrewery size has something to do with his ability to try new things.

“It’s fun at this level. Once you start getting a little bit bigger, it gets a little more hectic,” he says. “I see [other breweries] where … now they’re doing a coffee shop. They’ve got a pizza place. They have five locations. I can’t keep up with that stuff. And you know, I never want to find myself getting that big. I’m happy at the size we’re at, as long as it’s self-sustaining for the business and the staff.”

So if you’re looking for a local brewery with a fun, freewheeling, let’s-try-anything spirit, you might just find it within the four walls of Third Life.

Find Third Life Brewing Company at 254 River St. in Manistee. thirdlifebrewing.com