At Vector Brewing, Beer Isn’t Always Linear

Somewhere over in the east side of Dallas rests one of the best brew pubs in the country: Vector Brewing. They’ve been knocking it out of the park since opening shop in 2020 with their consistent lager program and wood-aged, mix-culture offerings. All of their beers pair gloriously with what’s coming out of their scratch kitchen. This is one of those places where the food is way better than it has any business being—a spot where the brewers, chefs, and front-of-house staff all CARE and just GET IT.

When Next Glass Director of Strategic Business Development John Gross nominated Vector Brewing as one of Hop Culture’s 11 Best Breweries of 2024, he spotlighted the Texas-based brewery’s architecture, label, art, food, and, of course, beers.

These include a crazy Pho-inspired rice lager, an oak-aged Brett lager with golden beets and grapefruit, a classic American lager, and a semi-core German smoked wheat beer.

At Vector, started by Craig and Veronica Bradley, the path has never been linear. And yet, it’s almost always seemed to lead to a pot of gold.

“Seemingly everything they touch comes out perfect,” wrote Gross. “Amarillo fresh hops? Smoked Lichtenhainer? Table beer? Vector just gets it.”

He adds, “Everyone needs to taste what’s happening in the Lone Star State.”

So we did.

The Trajectory of Vector

Photography courtesy of Vector Brewing

Bradley’s story starts like most—with a homebrew kit given as a gift from his wife. But here’s where it veers a little off course. When it randomly snowed in Dallas one day, shutting down the entire city, Bradley found himself with some time on his hands.

“I didn’t know what the hell I was doing,” Bradley says, noting that when we chatted, it was almost fourteen years to the day when he decided he “might as well start homebrewing today.”

While working in advertising, Bradley met a guy at his agency who took homebrewing pretty seriously. He started hanging out with him and learning.

“That guy,” Wim Bens, left their ad agency in 2010 to start Lakewood Brewing Company.

“We all quit our day jobs to help him out,” laughs Bradley, who became employee number three and worked as the creative director for six years at Lakewood.

While Bradley loved working with a brand that grew very large very quickly, he always joked about opening his own boutique brewery. One that brewed less, moved at a slower pace, and had more time to prioritize ingenuity.

“In Texas, everyone is trying to be the next Shiner Bock—the biggest, the hugest, the brewery with beer everywhere,” says Bradley, who fell in love with the more community-driven craft cultures in California and Colorado and on the East Coast. “Instead of making the same beers over and over again … I loved the idea of craft beer being a creative outlet as much for art as creating unique and interesting beers.”

But it just never seemed like the right time to venture out on his own.

When Bradley’s mom passed away in 2017, he had an epiphany.

“Life’s short, and if I don’t do this now, when the hell am I going to do it,” he says. “Let’s just do it!”

What’s In a Vector…Brewing?

Photography courtesy of Vector Brewing

In 2020, Bradley launched Vector Brewing as a smaller taproom-based, community-focused brewery “where we could create beers we don’t typically see,” says Bradley, “a lot of things that excite us and keep creativity flowing.”

To drive the innovation, Bradley tapped former Lakewood brewer Tomás Gutierrez.

A lover of mixed-culture and Brett beers, Gutierrez admits that he also enjoys a good clean lager. “I just like beer in general,” he says with a big smile.

Bradley estimates that lager makes up about sixty percent of what they do at Vector.

“We really love lagers,” he gushes.

In fact, there are times you can walk into Vector, and you might only see one IPA on the tap list or none at all (gasp!). “That blows people’s minds,” laughs Bradley. “We like getting people out of their comfort zone.”

Photography courtesy of Vector Brewing

Interested in an IPA, but don’t see one on the menu? Well, try Mountain Child, Vector’s hoppier German pilsner. Gutierrez starts with Weyermann Barke and Extra Pale Pils malt. “That’s a really cool combo,” he says. Then he layers in his hops—Tettnang, Perle, Magnum, and Hallertau Mittelfruh. He does a first wort hop, one at thirty minutes and fifteen minutes, and a whirlpool late addition to create a hoppy pilsner that Vector serves from its side-pull LUKR faucet.

“That’s what I drink eighty-five percent of the time,” says Gutierrez.

For someone who comes into Vector as a Miller Lite drinker, Bradley directs them to the brewery’s classic American lager, Bullpen. If they like that, he’ll show them Mountain Child, which has a “little more pop.” He loves seeing people work their way up to Moonsmoke, the brewery’s evocative smoked beer.

Primarily named after Bradley’s love of vector art and his favorite design program, Adobe Illustrator, Vector also alludes to “a plot, a path, a journey,” explains Bradley. “Beer is a journey to me.”

And Vector is simply there to be a choose-your-own-adventure.

Up in Moonsmoke

Photography courtesy of Vector Brewing

If Mountain Child is the stepping stone at Vector Brewing, then Moonsmoke might be like a rocket ship.

Considered a Lichtenheiner, an old-school tart German smoked wheat beer, Moonsmoke starts with a base of pilsner malt and smoked peach and cherry wood from TexMalt, a craft malt house in Fort Worth.

“They have a little smoker out back that they built to smoke five hundred pounds at a time,” explains Gutierrez, who tank-sours the 3.4% ABV beer until it reaches 3.6 pH. At this point, he reboils everything and adds El Dorado hops in the whirlpool, “just to get it up to 16 IBUs so it’s not too bitter but offset a little bit.”

One of Vector’s quintessential beers, Moonsmoke isn’t a style you see on many breweries’ tap lists.

“In Texas, it’s hot as hell out,” laughs Bradley. “You want something light and crushable that has a tart, lemony quality.”

But it’s the smoky character that really reels in people. “What the hell did I just drink,” says Bradley, is a refrain he hears quite often. Although smoked beers are foreign to many drinkers, Bradley says when he connects the dots to mezcal or scotch, “it really clicks.”

Those are the moments that make Bradley and Gutierrez the most proud. At Vector, there isn’t one simple, straightforward path. The compass is constantly changing, and they’re simply following whichever way the wind blows.

We’ll avoid more cliches here because that doesn’t feel right at Vector, but suffice it to say that getting lost is half the fun. And they don’t care what anyone else says.

“Everyone said if you put a smoked beer on tap, it will sit there for six months, and no one will drink it,” says Bradley. “I call bullshit!”

At Vector, they’re brave enough to make beers outside their comfort zone, so they encourage you to be brave enough to try them. “We don’t just have nothing but IPAs,” says Bradley. “We make cool, unique beers that make people go, wow!”

Photography courtesy of Vector Brewing

Photography courtesy of Vector Brewing

For that reason, Gutierrez says many of the beers he makes at Vector are one-and-done. However, the Texas-based brewery is starting to evolve into a core lineup of four to five beers. “The beers everyone comes in and asks for,” says Bradley.

Those like Mountain Child, a Czech-style dark lager called Tmavé Pivo 13º, that Bullpen classic American Lager, and now even an easy-drinking IPA, Figures of Light. Others like Moonsmoke and a table saison called Sittin’ at the Kids table are what Bradley calls “sub” core beers “that we try to keep around most all of the time.”

For this West Coast-style IPA, Gutierrez starts with a base of Briess MaltGems®, Brewers Malt, and a little bit of Carapils. He adds Mosaic Incognito on the hot side, Simcoe in the whirlpool, and a dry-hop of Chinook and Strata.

Beyond these regulars in rotation, Vector has become known for what they call “culinary-inspired” beers.

Everything But the Kitchen Sink

Photography courtesy of Vector Brewing

Hot dogs, curry, pho—nothing is off the menu at Vector. And we’re not talking about the food.

Inspired by what he cooks at home or a dish he’ll eat, Gutierrez loves to play around with culinary flavors in the brewhouse. “If I’m making something at home that I think would be cool to throw into the whirlpool, [that] sparks my interest,” he explains.

A Chicago hot dog-inspired beer called Double Barrel Sha Boing Boing featured everything that goes into this iconic city-specific dish: tomato, white onion, green relish, sport peppers, poppy seed, mustard seed, celery salt, fresh dill, and oak-smoked Texas pilsner malt.

The beer started as an inside joke. Something to coincide with baseball season.

Gutierrez starts with a base of ninety percent pilsner malt and ten percent smoked malt before adding celery salt to the mash. “I also got the idea to acidify the mash with the vinegar the sport peppers came packaged in,” shares Gutierrez.

All the other adjuncts and veggies Gutierrez added into the whirlpool. “I used an immersion blender to turn them into a puree more consistent with a Michelada mix,” he says.

While Gutierrez says this hasn’t been his favorite beer he has made at Vector, he is still proud of it.

“Will I make it again?” he says. “Most certainly!”

Photography courtesy of Vector Brewing

A curry stout called Dhani riffed off all of the fragrant spices you’d find in a curry. Gutierrez went to a local Indian bazaar to find a bunch of peppers and spices that he toasted himself—everything from curry leaf to turmeric.

A Tom Kha-inspired IPA included a bunch of coconut and galangal.

And a rice lager called Pho Sho emulated all those lovely aromatics from a steaming bowl of Pho, literally.

“We turn the homebrew kettle into a pot of soup,” says Gutierrez, “and we make a soup beer.”

A collab with Intrinsic Smokehouse and Brewery that they try to do once a year, Pho Sho has everything aromatically found in the classic Vietnamese dish.

Gutierrez starts with a rice lager base of 70/30 Pilsner malt to flaked rice before adding a pinch of carafoam and acidulated malt.

All those aromatics—Thai basil, Thai chiles, fresh lime, lime leaf, fresh mint, lemongrass, galangal, candied ginger, fennel, shitake mushroom, coriander, cinnamon, star anise, clove, cardamom, and black peppercorn—go in with late addition hops. “That way, it gets a little time in the boil without volatilizing any delicate aromatics,” Gutierrez explains.

Gutierrez and his team process everything by hand in the back of the house. “Just cutting boards and knives,” he says, along with a Robot-coupe from the pizza kitchen to chop up the peppers.

“If you think of it in terms of sitting down at the table with a bowl of soup,” says Gutierrez, “all of those ingredients come on the side to provide a freshness to the soup.”

It’s one of the beers that caught Gross’ attention and pushed him to name Vector one of our top breweries of the year.

It probably also helps that the actual food Vector serves is top-notch, too.

Beer First or Pizza First?

Photography courtesy of Vector Brewing

If you’re not from the Dallas-Fort Worth area, you’d probably consider Vector a brewery.

And you wouldn’t be wrong.

But in a two-mile radius around the brewery, “people know us more as their local pizza spot,” laughs Bradley.

Legally required to serve food in its East Dallas neighborhood, Vector specializes in stone-deck pizzas featuring its own sourdough starter and a whole host of crazy handmade toppings.

“We sell a crazy amount of pizza,” shares Bradley, who noted the brewery went through over 1,000 pizzas just in the last two weeks. The brewpub owner says he knew that the quickest thing that would kill them was if they made great beer but shit food. “We had to make the food as good as the beer; pizza and beer is a no-brainer.”

While the standard cheese and pepperoni pizzas are the most popular, you’d be missing out if you didn’t try some of Vector’s signature pies.

For instance, Angry Bee has cheese, shaved habanero, spinach, white sauce, and hot honey with, wait for it…edible glitter and an edible flower in the middle.

“It’s sparkly and spicy,” says Bradley, who has folks ask all the time, “Why is the honey shimmering?”

Another favorite includes the Fine Swine, an ode to Southern cuisine featuring collard greens, bacon, sausage, caramelized onions, and roasted garlic.

You’ll also find a rotating pie that lets the kitchen flex its muscles, along with sandwiches and share plates.

“People come in for the beer,” says Bradley, but they leave saying, “‘damn, y’all’s pizza is really good, too!’”

The Upward Trajectory

Photography courtes of Vector Brewing

About to celebrate its fifth anniversary, Vector seems to be heading in the right direction. Up, up, and up!

Just in the last five years, the brewery has racked up a host of awards, including D Magazine Best Brewery of 2023, Texas Craft Brewers Guild 2023 Small Brewery of the Year, 2022 Advocate Readers Choice Best Pizza & Best Patio, 2022 Dallas CultureMap Brewery of the Year, Dallas Observer 2022 Reader’s Choice Best Brewery, Dallas Observer Best of 2024 Best Local Brewery, and, of course, Hop Culture Best Brewery of 2024.

What’s the path forward? Unknown.

But what we do know? Vector will always keep it fresh and exciting, plotting a new course every day.

“If we go down,” says Bradley, “we’re going down making beers we want to make!”