Local restaurant owner DeWayne Schaaf brews up plans to the future

DeWayne Schaaf had bad timing.

A New York Times story featuring the restaurateur came out March 20, 2020, shortly after New York City announced quarantine procedures. A still-unfamiliar virus had crossed the ocean and was spreading with alarming rapidity. The story was published four days after New York City public schools locked down, three days after a complete shutdown of every restaurant and bar in the city.

Two days later, the "NYS on Pause" program began, forcing all non-essential workers to "stay home, save a life." The New York Times article was obscured under a wave of COVID-related news.

Schaaf owns multiple establishments in Cape Girardeau — Ebb and Flow Fermentations at 11 S. Spanish St. and Celebrations Restaurant at 615 Bellevue St., along with two catering operations. With these businesses and a cattle farm owned by his father-in-law, Schaaf has seen his multiple ventures support one another through vertical integration.

Today, he shows no signs of slowing his culinary blitzkrieg — what Schaaf described as "a push out of the kitchen" and into the realm beyond.

Last week, Schaaf returned from a nine-day sojourn in Belgium, the country behind a style of unique, wild-fermented beers called lambics. Unlike the vast majority of commercial beers, lambics take a gamble on Mother Nature, using the wild yeast and bacteria naturally present in the air rather than the more reliable, laboratory-cultivated varieties.

It's a type of improvisation that appeals to Schaaf's personality, and his fondness for so-called "mixed fermentations," those which produce sour, funky, or otherwise unusual flavor profiles.

In an industry recently dominated by IPAs and a sometimes singular obsession with hops, Schaaf's 15 years of homebrew experience pushed him in a different direction. With a bohemian sensibility, his focus shifted away from imported hops — notorious for their narrow range of cultivation — toward local microorganisms.

These overlooked yeast and bacteria contribute just as much character to a beer as hops, but are far easier to find and cultivate locally.

Through wild yeast, a sense of locality and environment emerges — often called "terroir" in the wine world. It's a sense that comes through in everything Schaaf sets his mind to. He coined an expression around the particular work ethic that takes pains in every detail: "If it's not a pain in the ass, it's not worth doing." Schaaf even produced shirts with the motto emblazoned on them.

Before the demands of business drained his private obsessions, Schaaf boasted a home library of about 185 different strains of yeast, all painstakingly isolated from the wild. His best-known yeast blend, dubbed "Mud King," saw global distribution.

"It was my project, built from wild yeast isolates I received from other people," Schaaf explained. "It's now on six continents, 43 countries, and 30-some-odd commercial breweries use it to some degree in their wild culture brewing."

Beginnings

Never much of a party animal, Schaaf was driven by boredom. In the mid-1990s, he found himself making ends meet by crafting optical surgery instruments, but the day job wasn't enough to keep him stimulated.

"I didn't drink, I didn't party, I didn't do a lot of the things other people did. I loved art, but I could only go to the same art museum exhibits so many times," Schaaf remembered. "One day, I was just kind of ranting and grumbling that I needed a second job at night, just to keep me busy."

Schaaf's complaints paid off. Ironically, his unwillingness to numb his boredom with alcohol landed him a position at an Irish pub called McGurk's. There, Schaaf, who had studied cinematography for a career in film, found himself blindsided by an unexpected passion.

"Literally on day one, I fell in love with the English-style beers they served," he recalled.

The newfound obsession for beer coincided with the first wave of the craft beer craze in America.

By the time the movement began to fizzle out, Schaaf was already inextricably tied into the hobby of homebrewing. Within it, the obsession that began with English-style beers soon became more esoteric as Schaaf entered the mysterious, almost mystical world of Belgian-style brewing.

"English beers just run the gamut from light to dark. But in Belgians, you get everything from weird 'sours' to really crazy phenolics. It's a different level of diversity. Whether they were 'saisons' or 'trappist' or 'sours,' I really got into that," Schaaf said of his conversion to the mysterious and ancient Belgian style. "I really dived deep into the pool of mixed fermentation. I taught myself how to catch wild yeast, isolate them on petri dishes, build them up and make some cultures. I shipped them all around the world."

As his hobby fermented, Schaaf soon developed an interest in Brettanomyces (Brett) — a genus of yeast traditionally found in aged Belgian beers.

Originally discovered in a "spoiled" English ale and associated with the flavor of "horse sweat," the unusual organism was found, under the right conditions, to add pleasant, fruity complexity to otherwise boring brews. Thanks to his foray into Belgian-style brewing, Schaaf discovered how Brett and lactobacteria, previously dismissed as "spoilage" organisms, could create distinctive, delicious and memorable beers. During his recent trip to Europe, Schaaf was a keynote speaker at an international beer conference called "Carnivale Brettanomyces," billed as "a celebration of 'Brett' and other wild yeasts and bacteria." But Schaaf's story hasn't always been a party.

Community

Recalling the roots of the journey that led him to Belgium, Schaaf described the pain of watching his father clash with a terminal illness, after a sudden diagnosis in 2015.

"That's really where all of this started," Schaaf explained.

The same year he was diagnosed, Schaaf's father passed away from cancer.

In response, Schaaf, who scorns heavy drinking, threw himself into work — the meticulous study and cultivation of microorganisms. When his mind was on microbiology, Schaaf discovered, it wasn't as consumed by grief. So, with the fanaticism of a man driven by demons, Schaaf achieved excellence in his field — propelled to the forefront of a niche community like a bubble rising in beer.

Other than YouTube and a lot of trial and error, Schaaf said he received help from a few microbiologists whom he befriended through a brewer's group called Milk the Funk. Known for its emphasis on unusual microorganisms, the group is well known in exclusive circles — a community that means a whole lot to a very few people.

Schaaf recalled sending the scientists samples of his own discoveries and being honored to receive "a lot of feedback" in return. Their expertise allowed him, he said, to progress rapidly.

"One (of the scientists) was a cancer researcher up in Canada. The other one went on to start his own commercial yeast laboratory," Schaaf said. "It was really cool having that kind of access to really high-level people to critique homebrew-level stuff."

It wasn't long before Schaaf found himself occupying the same "high-level" he once admired at the start of his "homebrew-level" voyage. Yet, the brand of fame afforded to brew-greeks — champions of fermentation like Schaaf — wasn't exactly mainstream. Schaaf said friends often referenced an old Tom Waits song, telling him that he's only "big in Japan."

"My friends have always said, 'Dude, you're big in Japan.' As in, 'Nobody knows who you are here,'" Schaaf explained. "But when I go to brew fests, they wonder how the hell I know everyone."

Schaaf's smalltown spirit — a tendency toward generosity and friendship — filled in the spots where traditional celebrity fell short.

"I shared a lot of yeast with people when I was a homebrewer. So, I had connections in advance. I got a lot more national press than a business could rightfully expect in its infantile stage," Schaaf said.

The future

The passionate brewer has today found himself at the heart of a niche community, with friends and fellow brewers everywhere from Norway to Korea. But he still called himself "a chef, first and foremost." From humble beginnings, Schaaf's future dreams now loom large.

"I started off cooking when I was 14. I didn't drink and, honestly, had a horrible palette as a kid," Schaaf said. "Now, the push out of the kitchen will integrate a farm where I can eventually raise my own lamb and pork. Then, wine grapes, hops, fruit trees — so Ebb and Flow and Celebrations can integrate all these things together, so we're producing more of the product and not relying on a supply chain — one that's been discovered, the last two years, to be delicate."

"So, if we can control more supply ourselves, raise animals the way we want to raise them and butcher them the way we want to butcher them, the product quality goes up and I can control the cost a little better," Schaaf said.

Switching gears back to brewing, Schaaf, a father of four, said he doesn't consider his popular yeast blends as his offspring.

"No, they're not my children — more like pets," Schaaf said with a laugh. "But I definitely have an affinity for what I've done with them and how other people have played with them. It's always crazy when I run into someone I've never met before, but they know me through my yeast. It's kind of neat hearing and seeing where the yeast has gone, what people have done with it and what they've shared along the way."