Most former homebrewers who “turn pro” learn the chemistry behind the carboy as they go, but award-winning Matt Brynildson came to his job with an understanding of brewing science in his back pocket, having graduated from Michigan’s Kalamazoo College with a bachelor’s in chemistry in 1993.

Brynildson’s original plan was to become a doctor, and he was initially part of the college’s pre-med program. But during his undergrad years, a fellow student helped him get a part-time job at the Kalamazoo Spice Extraction Company, or Kalsec, and a gradual course correction ensued. It was there that Brynildson first dabbled in hop chemistry and where he first took up homebrewing.

Brynildson really liked working in the hop lab, and when graduation neared, he was feeling burned out from his four years as an undergrad and decided to take some time off from academics. He accepted a full-time position at Kalsec, and so his first job out of college was as a hop chemist. After a short time, he was sent to the Siebel Institute in Chicago for additional course work in organic chemistry. While there in 1995, Brynildson learned that Goose Island Beer Company was building its production facility on Fulton Street. When founder Greg Hall approached Matt’s class in search of prospective employees, the seed was planted that he could actually make a living out of brewing.

By the time he took the cellarman’s job at Goose Island, his plans to become Dr. Brynildson were receding in the rearview mirror. His decision to work at a brewery for nine dollars an hour left his family, which had been expecting a medical career, puzzled and wondering where it all went wrong for Matt.

But Matt put his chemistry background to good use. He got the lab at Goose Island up and running, and helped get its quality control in line. Within a year, he’d distinguished himself enough to become the head brewer. By 2000, after a number of years in Chicago, the Wild West came calling and a restless Brynildson decided the true big leagues of craft brewing were on the West Coast. A native of Litchfield, Minnesota with German and Norwegian ancestry, he left the Midwest behind.

Brynildson took a job in California at the newly built SLO Brewing Company in Paso Robles, whose brewhouse was the same as Goose Island’s 50-barrel JV Northwest system. But a year later, owner Michael Hoffman had to shut down the brewery and the bank stepped in, letting everybody go.

But Matt and another SLO brewer, Jim Crooks, weren’t ready to give up quite so easily. What happened next is local legend around Paso Robles. The bank didn’t lock the doors or turn off the power. Maybe it was an oversight, maybe not. So Brynildson and Crooks came in and kept making beer while the brewery was still in receivership and continued filling orders. The idea was to just hang on and hope someone would buy the brewery. They both loved the area and the brewery that they’d poured so much into. The gamble paid off and their harebrained idea actually worked.

Brothers-in-law Adam Firestone and David Walker had founded the Firestone Walker Brewing Company in 1996 and established the distinctive logo featuring the lion and bear. They were having modest success offering English-style ales brewed in a small space rented from their family on the Firestone Vineyard estate in nearby Santa Barbara County. They decided to buy the former SLO brewery and came to look at it, talking with Matt about staying on. Despite showing up at his next meeting with the new owners in ripped jeans and a tie-dyed shirt after three straight Widespread Panic shows in Los Angeles, Brynildson, who didn’t initially realize the meeting was a job interview, hit it off with them.

The first task was scaling up the recipe of Double Barrel Ale, Firestone Walker’s first flagship beer. Next, he reformulated Windsor Pale Ale to its current incarnation as Pale 31. By early 2002, they started bottling Firestone Walker beers.

Brynildson has famously racked up a serious string of big awards for his beers since moving to California. The first came in 2001 at the Great American Beer Festival, when he won Small Brewpub Brewmaster of the Year for SLO Brewing, the honor coming ironically after the brewery had shut down. With Firestone Walker he has won the award for mid-size brewing company brewmaster four more times.

At the World Beer Cup, which hosts breweries from around the world every two years, Firestone Walker has won Champion Brewery and Brewmaster four of the six times the competition has been held.

In 2007, Matt was the recipient of the Brewers Association’s prestigious Russell Scherer Award for Innovation in Brewing.

The awards aren’t limited to the U.S. From 2012 to 2014, Firestone Walker won the gold medal in the Consumer’s Favorite category at the European Beer Star Awards in Munich, an honor chosen by attendees using a blind tasting.

When asked what he attributes this amazing success to, Brynildson laughs and doesn’t have a ready answer. For somebody so highly awarded and accomplished, he likes to avoid the limelight and doesn’t often dwell on his success. “Competition is definitely a combination of brewing really clean beers to style and making sure your beers are entered in the right style.” He’s also noticed that a lot of the early success came from the pale ale and more modestly hop-forward beers along with one or two other award-winning beers.

Firestone Walker did not introduce an IPA until ten years after the brewery had launched — Union Jack in 2007. For most of the brewery’s life it focused on beers no one considered extreme. The Double Barrel Ale was selling so well in the local market that there was no animus to shake things up. In the end, it was about nailing those beers, Matt believes, though he remains uncertain about precisely why his beers win regularly. “We focused on laboratory stuff and trying to brew to specs and really challenging ourselves to keep things as tight as we possibly could all the time.”

Nowadays, Firestone Walker is known as much for its “passion for the pale” as for its IPAs and barrel-aged beers. That wasn’t the plan from the beginning. The founders had a definite idea that they should keep to their core mission of making good middle of-the-road beers. But Brynildson was itching to try some new things. He started playing around with more extreme beers, putting some into barrels for aging – all without his bosses knowing about it. This led to him getting chewed out from time to time, and Adam Firestone even threatened his job a couple times. They were worried about him getting distracted and losing focus on the flagship beers. Matt’s underground beers kept garnering the brewery more and more attention and awards. Eventually the powers that be saw the light. When Firestone Walker’s 10th anniversary rolled around in 2006, they finally let Matt loose and he created the company’s first “official” barrel-aged beer, known as 10. It was composed of ten distinctive component lots including Abacus, Ruby, Bravo, Walker’s Reserve, Humboldt Hemp Ale, and a 100 percent oak barrel-fermented Double Barrel Ale. These beers were aged in six different barrel formats to create ten distinctive component lots that were then blended together and bottled as 10.

It was a runaway success, and finally everyone understood how such a program helped to build the reputation of the brewery. The barrel program has grown into Barrelworks, and another numbered anniversary beer has been brewed each year since then.

Between the barrel-aged beers and Union Jack as their first IPA, people outside of the Central Coast of California began to take notice of Firestone Walker’s beers, and the brewery began distributing further from home, keeping pace with the surge of interest in flavorful beer by adding additional states to its distribution territory.

In 2008, Matt traveled to Burton-on-Trent as one of four brewers from around the world invited to do a collaboration beer at Marston’s Brewery for the JD Wetherspoon chain’s annual International Beer Festival.

It was appropriate that Brynildson was tapped to brew at Marston’s, which was the sole British brewer still using a Burton Union System. Firestone Walker uses a modified Burton Union System known as the Firestone Union, which it developed and patented. Brynildson inherited the system from Firestone Walker’s first brewer, Jeffers Richardson, who tried to talk the founders out of using it. But they were adamant to use their winery’s chardonnay barrels after they were done holding wine. So Richardson took the Burton Union brewing method and adapted it for the California Central Coast.

Back in Paso Robles, Matt understandably believed that they would abandon brewing in used oak wine barrels and brew in stainless steel due to scale. But Firestone and Walker felt that process was part of the brewery’s identity and persuaded Matt to reconsider. A compromise was reached that ultimately benefited all of the beer Firestone Walker makes.

Firestone’s Union system now uses new, freshly toasted oak barrels. The beer is started in the stainless brewhouse, then transferred to the barrels for primary fermentation for six days, then moved back into stainless fermenters for a secondary yeast feast. The Double Barrel Ale that’s bottled contains 20 percent oak-fermented and 80 percent stainless steel-fermented beer, although at the brewery you can sample a 100 percent barrel-fermented version made on the Firestone Union system. It’s one of the most unique ways to make beer, a method thought to have been developed by monks in central England and put into large-scale practice by English brewers beginning in the 1830s.

The brewing community believes everybody should have a nickname, especially in California. It was once remarked that Matt “is the one who’s always dry-hopping in the dark.” From there, it didn’t take much of a leap off a tall building for him to be renamed for the Dark Knight, thus “Batman.”

The dry-hopping practice came about to avoid getting a mercaptan reaction, which gives beer a foul smell. “If light hits just hops, there’s no ill reaction, but if it hits iso-alpha acids in the presence of riboflavin — which is present in malt, it’s present on our skin, it’s present on a lot of organic matter — that will create a mercaptan reaction,” said Brynildson. “And in this brewery, we have a whole bunch of passive solar rays. I couldn’t tell you exactly how it happened, but we were up on top of a tank, and we had it open for too long, or something happened when we were dry-hopping, and the next thing you know we ended up skunking a whole batch of pale ale. So I made it a rule in the brewery that no one could dry-hop until the night shift.”

Around the brewery, there was another nickname that gained currency. Co-owner Firestone, who came up with the brewery’s bear and lion theme, began referring to Matt as “Merlin,” because of his wizard-like ability to make great beers.

Five years ago, Firestone and Walker gave Matt the first nickname that really mattered, which was “partner.” They made Brynildson a part owner of the business, giving him a small stake in the brewery. Matt refers to this as “golden handcuffs,” because it “gets someone fully vested in the future of the business.”

Matt insists that brewing is a team sport, and that all of his success can be attributed to picking and nurturing the right mix of talented people, starting with the owners. “I have to give a lot of credit to Adam and David because they’re just absolutely great owners to work for. They’re pretty hands-off when it comes to the creative side of things.”

As if everything he touches turns into, well, a good idea, Brynildson was instrumental in creating the Firestone Walker Invitational Beer Festival. He invited breweries that he knew well and wanted to pour at the festival, many of them not normally even available in the state. He also asked each one to pour a session beer and one of their more rare beers, and insisted that the brewer be present. Now in its fourth year, the festival held each May sells out of its 2,500 tickets in a matter of minutes.

Like everything Matt does, it’s the attention to detail that really matters. Whether creating a beer recipe, a better brewing process, or a collaboration beer, Brynildson is a perfectionist. You may not think so at first glance: Matt wears an unkempt beard, prefers dressing casually and loves jam bands. But his attention to detail is something you can taste and is obvious in every glass of Firestone Walker beer. Being around Brynildson, one can’t help but be taken by his easy manner and joie de vivre. He makes it look easy. And as any brewer will tell you: it’s not. He’s just that good.

As science writer Arthur C. Clarke’s third law of prediction states: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and so it is that beers made so well over and over again will likewise seem magical. Matt Brynildson as Merlin seems fitting, a brewer who makes magic in every batch he brews. Maybe it was his destiny all along.