Goat Island brewmaster Matthew Schumacher, seen in August 2020, is a quiet-spoken midwesterner who ended up in Seattle’s thriving beer scene back in the mid-2000s before more recently looking for a small-town change of pace.

What Cullman may lack in a deep, decades-old craft beer culture, it more than makes up for as a relatively blank canvas where an experienced brewmaster can get creative.

That’s the hope of Goat Island brewmaster Matthew Schumacher, who arrived in Cullman by way of the Pacific Northwest with his family back in May — just as the coronavirus pandemic ensured his new role at Cullman’s sole microbrewery wouldn’t get off to a rushed start.

“There’s been a bit more of a learning curve than I’d thought, and a lot of that simply has to do with some of the unexpected things that have happened in the transition,” says Schumacher, a quiet-spoken midwesterner who ended up in Seattle’s thriving beer scene back in the mid-2000s before more recently looking for a small-town change of pace.

“Mostly, since I’ve gotten here, I’ve been working on getting everything up to speed as far as practices and procedures go, along with recipe development. It’s definitely been a bit different because of COVID, but I knew early on that I was working with good people. We’re slowly getting our footing.

“There’s been some downtime in the tap room for sure, but we’ve remained active throughout the lockdown with our canning. And you know what? The beauty of having a tap room like this is that you can try anything you want in small batches, and see what sticks. It looks like things are finally beginning to be a little more normal, so I think — I’m hopeful, anyway — that some interesting things will start happening as we get into the fall.”

Schumacher’s move to Cullman was as close to a blind leap of faith as you can get. His only real acquaintance with Alabama came years ago, visiting a college friend who lived in Auburn. He’d never been to Cullman, and his wife — a Northwest native — had never lived anywhere else.

“One big thing that brought me here is that my wife and I have two little kids, and we were looking for a better place to raise a family,” he says. “My wife grew up in Washington; had never lived outside of Washington state. But I’ve been all over the place. I looked closely at a lot of things that were important to us here, and the more I saw, the more I realized that I liked this area. The good news for us is that we’re not too far away from that sort of big-city atmosphere, if we start missing it, and really, that was a drawing point for us too: Cullman can be kind of a hub, with a lot of spokes going to a lot of places that are within reach.”

Schumacher’s experience in Seattle’s deeply entrenched craft beer community equips him well to head a microbrewery anywhere, but it’s Alabama’s late arrival at the craft beer party that actually has him most excited to helm Goat Island’s beer strategy. “Part of the reason I accepted this job is, I felt like we had a good foundation and something we could build upon — the potential for something grander, if you will,” he says.

“Working in the Seattle thing, and being there for a long time, things are kind of established. The culture can get kind of congested up there, and even though I was at a brewery that everyone knew and talked about, the overall culture was no longer a place that people were super-interested in, because for them, beer wasn’t brand new. They all liked the beer and would all drink it, but it wasn’t a case of people seeking it out. It’s fair to say we’re on the opposite end of that here, which I think gives us some good opportunities.”

While he’s more than happy to talk until last call about beer varieties and all the esoteric knowledge that connoisseurs love to share, Schumacher knows how to make his expertise accessible. He likes what he likes, and he’s just fine with you liking what you like, too. There’s no particular air of beer snobbery or evangelical pressure to buy into whatever current fad might be inundating the craft beer market.

Asked about his own favorite beer, he’s refreshingly down to earth, sounding a whole lot like a regular beer guy whose tastes easily ace the common-sense sniff test. “I like to say that there’s a beer for every moment. Obviously I don’t want something big and heavy when I’m, you know, mowing the lawn; nor something light and watery while I’m sitting by the fire at Christmastime,” he says. “Honestly, I drink mostly IPAs. IPAs, and ‘light yellow’ beers.”

On site, the tap room at Goat Island has only just recently begun to welcome guests back to something resembling a normal operating schedule, but co-owner John Dean says the brewery’s canning schedule has remained busy — so busy, in fact, that the company eclipsed last year’s canning volume in the first six months of 2020 alone. Schumacher says he’ll soon begin toying with new small-batch recipes to gauge how guests react from across the bar — all while keeping Goat Island’s most popular retail brews flowing to stores and restaurants throughout the state. Just don’t expect to see him basking in the local spotlight.

“I always consider myself the ship’s engineer, so to speak — the guy who keeps the boat running,” he jokes. “Just think of me, if you think of me at all, as a silent background presence.”