MEET: Johnny Osborne, Night School
Johnny Osborne, brewer and owner-brewer of Night School, talks Paulie Gee’s pizza, Cosmic Bowling + brewing Deep Fried Beer.
Interview: Susie Davidson Powell
Art Direction: Susie Davidson Powell
Photos: Konrad Odhiambo/The Dishing
Location: Night School, Athens, N.Y. — Home of Deep Fried Beers
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Johnny Osborne is the owner of Night School, a brewer-owned-and-operated pizza parlor and cocktail bar in Athens, N.Y. known for enormous artisanal pizzas, smash burgers, craft cocktails and local craft beer. Night School is also the tasting room of Deep Fried Beers, Osborne’s nanobrewery which, along with Night School, was named one of the top new breweries in the world last year by Hop Culture. Deep Fried specializes in juicy, robust sours and big, textured double and triple hazy IPAs packed with hoppy flavor like their popular Neverminding (DIPA) and Macrowave (Triple IPA) as well as Recess Red, an American Red Ale. Osborne might be familiar as the former head brewer at Crossroads Brewing in Catskill but you likely don’t know that he honed his pizza skills at the infamous Paulie Gee’s slice shop in Brooklyn.
SDP: Johnny, thanks for chatting with me. How are you rolling into the week? Any big plans?
JO: Just trying to get some t-shirts made for our new little bar game that we’re calling Cosmic Bowling. We're getting t-shirts made with the Night School logo in two different colors so you pick a team and you're in the league through like next season, next year. We’re doing it every month on a Saturday, changing out all the lights on the bar to black lights and putting in like a bunch of stupid little like black light stuff like glow posters all over the place and two miniature, kid-sized bowling lanes in the bar, around eight o'clock once a lot of the dinner crowd is gone.
SDP: You’ve just celebrated your first anniversary. When did you officially open Night School?
JO: I was trying to be clever and do these little beer-wine-cider permit event days like a soft opening starting in late December 2023 but I wildly overestimated when we were going to get our license. We didn't actually have our full liquor license issued and our kitchen operational until early April last year. And actually our phone number is 518 high 420 – that’s (444-4420 - and one Saturday that year that was 420 so we were like, “well, that's obviously the anniversary” and it stuck.
SDP: I read that your interest in craft beer started at Carleton College in Minnesota where you studied economics. Were there any signs growing up that you'd end up brewing beer?
JO: Well, I had considered going a science route in college but in my kid brain, I was like, oh, I gotta do whatever I'm best at so I ended up in like a math-oriented field versus science. I grew up in the south in Hernando, it's just a little bit south of Memphis. Both of my parents are actually from the northeast but they moved down there when I was three. I went to a math and science magnet school from my last couple of years to high school, but I got kicked out because I was drinking and smoking weed, having a good time there. I guess my mom encouraged me to start cooking for myself at about 10 or 11, so I was making myself like grilled cheeses after school and cooking dinner for my sister sometimes. It was something I enjoyed doing…if anything, I think my mom indirectly had a significant effect in terms of my like proclivity to be good as a brewer. My sister is a phenomenal baker, which is about the closest thing to brewing. My mom was the most competent cook you could ever be in your life but she wouldn't write anything down on any recipes, so everything was just rewheeling the whole time. I'm going to be honest, there was a lot of variability in that cooking that drove me and my sister crazy, so now we are the most locked in, recipe oriented people. Indirectly, I think she made a really good brewer and a really good baker.
SDP: You were the head brewer at TALEA Brewing in NYC and the head brewer at Crossroads Brewing in Catskill. How did you make the leap to launch Deep Fried Beer and do you actually brew it onsite at Night School in Athens?
JO: My experience, even my job prior to TALEA where I was on the R&D team at Six Point, gave me a lot of confidence that at least I understood how I could get something going and off the ground. I had got to the point in the R&D facility where I got to have a few of my own original recipes made so, you know, getting that was really exhilarating.... At TALEA, we were producing our beer out of another facility. We’d design recipe changes in a small, I mean, small, 20 barrel brewery in Red Hook, but then there were things that needed to be adjusted in that process so that it could be implemented at the 600 barrel brew house where Six Point was primarily produced. I spent a lot of time thinking about the exercise of building recipes, in a way where I understand them to a degree that I can tell somebody how to do it in a totally different place.
When I left TALEA, I felt like I was at a point where I was ready to go. I wasn’t really interested in pushing the hop-loads of IPAs thing on an intellectual level. I started making my beer out of Alewife brewing in queens. They were kind enough to let me use their facility. And I didn't understand my process at that point – like, I was making that up. There's there's no books on how to properly add the amount of vegetal matter I'm putting in a tank into a beer. When I was first starting out, there were like a good amount of breweries in the US that were hopping beers on the same level then that I’m at now. I'm probably in a peer group of maybe like 20 or so operations in the world that are pushing it that far…
Yeah, and I used to do absolutely everything 100% percent myself, even though I was in other people's facilities. I worked at Alewife for about a year, but they kind of ran out of space for me, and at the same exact time, Crossroads had an opportunity so I bounced over there. Really Deep Fried Beer was it was born out of an opportunity – and COVID, I think, gave me time to think about where I wanted to be. I was lucky to to fall in with enough people willing to accommodate the nonsense I was trying to do and that allowed me to go after that.
SDP: You have all these school themed references in your beer names and cocktails like the P.S. 518. How did you brand Night School and Deep Fried Beer?
There's one person that’s the biggest carryover between the two which is Anika Lindenberg. She is a really talented artist with a focus on typography and she has a number of really cool, like mental health-related mural projects that she does around New York City. She created all the original brand assets for Deep Fried Beers – our flame logo, the fryer basket, the lettering, and I felt like if she was the logo and branding creator for Night School too, that that would create an intrinsic visual cohesion.
Anika created brand assets for Deep Fried and then our label artwork is actually done by Emily Perlman, visual artist that I found during COVID and just thought her aesthetic was really cool and could fit our beer labels because if you are creating a label that has to transit between states, you fall under like federal legislation around how that label has to be designed in terms of how large all of the brand name and manufacturing location and alcohol content and flavor name need to be. But since we sell our beer exclusively within New York State, we're only under the state registration laws, which are actually a lot more permissive. There're a lot of really cool breweries that have some really amazing labels that are basically tiny little pieces of art in a lot of ways so to have an artist that I'm interested in creating our new stuff all the time just seemed like the right way to go there.
SDP: Anyone who follows you on Instagram will know you crushed pints of Hamm’s beer (“a MidWest classic for 150 years”) on a mission to get a keg at Night School. Did you finally get some in?
JO: [Laughing] yeah, it’s this preposterous regional brand that looks like a great soda - it comes out of a bright purple can…and it felt like like it was very much in the territory of cheap shitty beer but there was this surge of interest for Hamms after they did an American lager casing and the top beer was Hamm’s. It validated a lot of people's opinion that it’s pretty good for what it is and I think that created a bit of momentum for that brand within very deep beer culture and brewers became interested in just having it around. You would see people at major festivals that would pack suitcases with Hamm’s to bring to friends. I really enjoy it personally, but I thought it would be a really fun thing if we could get it out to Night School to have becauseI want Night School to be a place that is a place where like people that aren't even like considering themselves craft beer people should feel welcome. It's intentional that if you just want a beer we're not pricing you out of having that.
DeCrescente is the only area distributor that I'm aware of in the northeast, like east of some parts of Pennsylvania, that has any Hamm’s whatsoever so I tried to follow up with the team at and with the team at Hamm’s. I tried to find connections at Molson Coors, their parent company, But I was on no one's radar so I was like I got to do something stupid and silly that might get a little attention. I thought maybe I'll chug a Hamm’s every day and then I was like, actually, that’s not masochistic at all so I got a big old 20 ounce mug leftover from Crossroads and the 12 ounce cans of Hamm’s so I would walk down to the gas station Stewart’s around the corner and pick up one of their energy drinks to top it off. Then had to chug that every day. I did that for a total 114 days, and eventually I got in touch with the right guy and then it was off to the races. They ended up bringing us Hamm’s kegs for a little while so we had draft on for a bit, but they weren't moving through enough of it quick enough and I think the warehouse that ships Hamms out east like they couldn't justify getting a shipment more than about once every month. BUt we had it for I think about five months and it was a fun little window time. It was fun to say we were like the first bar in New York State to have Hamm’s.
SDP: You may make the largest pizza pies in the Hudson Valley. I know you got your start at Paulie Gee’s in Brooklyn. Are these oversized Paulie G pies?
Yeah, I would not characterize them as oversized, although, it’d be disingenuous if I didn't say those were oversized Paulie’s. The 4 H club looks an awful lot like a certain pie on Paulie’s menu which is a really good pie. But like I said, I think a lot of the principles of what I understand about cooking and and baking and how a pizza operation should flow are taken from there, and I had the really good fortune learning best practices and good habits. I also knew I didn't have the knowledge to execute a really good New York style operation on my own so I put out a call to all my pizza buds. I was like, “okay, who's gonna come out here and help me get this going and like I like I need somebody that's been out like a New York slice shop too.” One of my good buddies from Paulie’s is Wesley Scott - actually he's out West in Seattle now doing pizza there- and he volunteered to move back out from Seattle for half a year and help me get it rolling. Wes is a super talented guy and I knew we could build… So I’ve been able to take what I've learned about Neapolitan imported to New York-style. We continued to try to work with the environmental conditions, with changing humidity and and temperature all throughout the year and figuring out how to continue to execute that. Like, what is best – do we let it rest overnight? How long's our fermentation?
We kept testing and came up with at least 48, if not 72, hours of cold fermentation for all of our batches of dough and using dough just about three days after after we ball which adds like a lot more flavor and character. And these local flours are pretty expressive but we experimented with going all local flour and it was actually too much, too expressive so we had to sort of palliate that a little bit with some big, big brand, consistent high gluten flour added and multiple ferments just trying to let that fermentation process be pretty active and get a tangibly more fermentation-forward character into our dough. We get a lot of comments of people being like “oh, this is sourdough, right?” And we’re like, nope, it’s a yeast pit. We just let it ride, go hard, and get a lot of character into there.
**INTEL update: Chris Lenaghan, an Albany native who worked with Johnny at Paulie Gee’s in Brooklyn, is back in the Albany area and now working at Night School.
SDP: What about all the crazy flavor toppings? Do you dream up all the combos for Pie of the Week?
JO: Mostly like me having silly thoughts, yeah. I I generally I set up a pie of the week because we have a lot of ideas for things that have maybe temperamental ingredients on them, where we don't want to have folks reheating a slice and trying to make it work. It's like, “hey, you know, this is a weird pie. Order it by the pie, be ready to have a couple of people there. It may or may not be the right ingredients to hold up super well in your fridge. Um, but uh, just be ready to go after that.” So we have a lot of fun combos that we've done like variations with the salad on top, and just doing silly things like crumbled up gas station snacks on top.
We did a blue Hawaiian, where we had our SS pepperoni and charred pineapple, and red onion, gorgonzola, and then we finished it with crumbled up blue Takisand that's been the super popular one. Oh and the Doritos Locos where we were doing like essentially a combo of a cheeseburger pie and a taco pizza and, you know, we had our smashed burger patties chopped up on that with shredded lettuce and crumpled up Doritos and ranch sauce and even a squeeze lime over the top that really like brought it all together. It’s fun for me and creates a fun experience for the customers.
SDP: Do you have a favorite dish or drink in the area?
JO: Growing up in the South, I'm in love with sausage gravy and biscuits for breakfast. That hits so hard for me, in terms of just something being delicious but also with that comforting nostalgia. So when I've got a little bit of a lazier morning I do pop over to Lindsay's in Leeds, it’s a little diner. It's solid. They’ve got some biscuits, they’re not massive, you know, but they're good. I'm pretty picky on that food type to be totally honest but also I'm in upstate New York and it's pretty dang good. It hits the spot.
For drinks, I love Nate's cocktails at Night School – as you know, they're really, really good. A lot of times if I'm going out I take a little time to get away from beer. I do a lot of beer drinking in a very structured way, and sometimes I can't turn my brain off that well when I'm thinking about and drinking beer so to hang out and have a good time I'll switch to wine or cocktails. My boys over at Hemlock in Catskill – I’ll have any of their variations of a Penicillin cocktail. They're squeezing all the juice literally right there on the bar as they serve it to you. They’ve got great bartenders, the vibe’s good, the drinks are fantastic. And then I gotta throw a nod to - oh, what is it, 2006 I believe is the name of the drink - over at Padrona in Hudson, which is just a pickleback. I think a Genesee and a shot. And you know what? I've never not had a good time when I'm having that over there.
SDP: This might overlap a little, but we like to ask for three restaurants you recommend in the Hudson Valley or Capital District for breakfast, lunch and dinner?
JO: Okay. So I've already given Lindsay’s a bit of a shout out in the category for breakfast. But if I'm going the other direction and having like a little bit more of an indulgent breakfast, I’d say Cafe Mutton over in Hudson. Oh my God, like, they have the weirdest stuff on their menu and it's all good. Everything is so good. I've not had a single dish there that wasn’t enriching…. That could be lunch too though since they're open till three… brunch, lunch.
When I'm getting up into Albany, I really enjoy Albany Ale + Oyster. Their food program, their whole place is great. To be honest with you, I know I'm a beer guy, and they have kind of a beer bar identity, but they're good at everything, everything's super satisfying and good, good vibes, so I definitely love hitting them up. I haven't done I haven't done Deep Fried Beers distribution for a little while. They used to carry it, but we're getting back out to market with Deep Fried, so I'm hoping people will be seeing Deep Fried Beer and Night school even more in the heart of the Capital Region and Albany in the next few months.
For dinner I'm gonna go with Avalon Lounge in Catskill. Annie is cooking up some of my favorite Korean food that I’ve had, and it's in the middle of a tiny town in upstate New York, and I feel really lucky for that.
SDP: How about music? What are you listening to lately either in Night school or at home?
JO: Nate does a lot of the playlists. He’s taking the initiative to create different vibe playlists out at Night School. I do have a dream playlist for the bar and it's too much, it’s too high energy for a bar that's open as many hours as we are so I can't use that all the time. Personally, I never grew out of Indie sleeze, you know, like, I'm still listening to fucking LCD sound system all the time.
SDP: What’s your style? Do you have a preferred clothing brand/work brand?
JO: The way I live my life, I tend not to wear my nice clothes all that often, but when I am busting out the good threads the brands I really like are Billy Reid that fits me well, being US made and kind of like a Southern boy from Alabama. He makes lall his stuff at warehouse out there. Also Rogue territory makes really good stuff too. I like enjoy supporting so if I'm gonna spend money on clothes, I like quality American made stuff. Oh, and Imogene and Willie out of Nashville. Those are probably like my my three go to brands for like anything other than just like dumb graphic crew necks.
SDP: Where would you go for a quick trip if destination, cost and reservations were no issue?
JO: Yeah, I mean, I think if yeah, money and reservations are no object. I gotta go with the city as I lived there for six years so I think I know enough incredible restaurants around the city that I have never been able to go to really realistically at the price point. But as a place I love to get out to just for fun and that's a little bit more doable for me to kind of live it up out there, I’d say Richmond, Virginia. That's one of my favorite weekend type cities where there's a ton of good food and eating and really nice museums and beautiful scenery, but just two or three great days there.
SDP: Given the focus on workplace culture and mental health these days, how you create a culture of wellness at work? How do you relax?
JO: What I try to do for the team since, you know, it’s a small company and we're not making money yet, and I think people understand it's not in the model yet to be providing health care and really taking care of people the way largely speaking employers have to in the US – (but I do hope we get to the point where we can provide that in the future) – but in the interim, I’m very mindful to never intentionally staff double shifts for anybody. It is never programmed into any of the schedules with somebody working more than eight hours. I mean, unless I've specifically talked to them because maybe it's actually easier or preferable for them to work long shifts in a single day.
I try to be really mindful about keeping a comfortable working environment. I remember I had to brew in un-air conditioned garages in the middle of summer where it would get to like 166 degrees on a hot day. And that's awful. If you employ grown adults it’s unreasonable to put them in a room that's 120 degrees. So we a have a split AC unit inside of our kitchen with a very powerful hood and, if anything, we're probably one of the only kitchens you're ever going to work in where it's a bigger issue that it's colder in the winter than that it's too hot in the summer! I don't think we crack 90-degrees in our kitchen and it’s pretty tight and we're cooking a lot of stuff in there. And lastly I focus on little things I can do like being generous with staff meals and drinks and stuff. It's not the kind of work where people make a lot of money and there are a lot of people in the field who don't have a lot of security for food or finances. I get all our food at cost so I’m like eat while you're here, eat if you're hungry, get hydrated with soft drinks.
For me to relax… well, I am actually a 100 percent hardwired extrovert so my relaxation is just, oh great, now I can go do friend time. If it’s too late at night to be hitting folks up I’ll just go home, eat some ice cream, watch Netflix and go to bed. But if I have the chance to do what I want with an evening, I’m definitely reaching out to friends to go hang out. I'm lucky my work has me around people all the time because that makes me feel really energized and I enjoy the whole dynamic of working there. I like working as much as I do because I'm around cool people so much. One of the things I love about brewing is like at a it's a team activity and a sort of ‘hurry up and wait’ type work where you move real fast in between doing things and then it's your job to watch a thing that's running for an hour and a half and make sure it doesn't mess up. It’s actually a very social job.
SDP: We've seen a shift in dining trends since the pandemic, fewer walk-ins, restaurants and bars doing more programming, people eating earlier or staying home. What do you see for the future of third spaces in terms of restaurants and bars, cafes, lounges and for Night School?
JO: All the advice that I've ever gotten from people that were established in the field, with multiple locations or inordinately successful with a single one or two, is universally to be consistent and do the same thing and let people know exactly what they're going to get when they're coming in. Let the people that are going to want what you do, find you, and build it and sit in it and wait for it to develop. A lot of my favorite bars and restaurants are places that literally never do anything. There's never a band. There's never a DJ. There's never half-price apps. There’s nothing. There's no programming whatsoever. But every time you go in, it's a collection of people that want to be there because they like what the place is foundationally.
That said, I don't know if that's super viable for most startups. Like, if you’re opening a spot, and you can let it marinate and take it time to get there financially because you've got the kind of resources to float it, it may be the right move. I don't know. As a small business, in a small town trying to get folks out, I intuitively knew we had to do our thing, do it well, and that meant doing events and throwing parties…I realized it moves the needle and gets people out by doing fun stuff and identifying what matters to the people in your community so you can be the space to fill that. So much of it is related to the saturation of places relative to population. Like, for me, as one of four places that serves alcohol in a town, or really three places people can go grab a drink, throwing dance parties, karaoke nights, turning the lights down and having DJs come out to play music gives people a reason to come have a good time. That's where Cosmic Bowling came from and we’re doing that once a month now.
SDP: You were recently recognized as one of the best new breweries in the world. What's the future for Night school and Deep Fried Beer?
JO: I’ll continue to expand options for Night School. I want to have a broader portfolio so we have a better on premise array of options and start leveraging Night School as a brand that can succeed on shelves in a liquor store, or on tap at an average Joe restaurant that isn't craft oriented. So hopefully people will start seeing Deep Fried Beer in their grocery stores in the next few years. Deep Fried Beer is an ultra premium product that has a crazy different set of forces driving its demand. It's expanding throughout the world. We're currently and regularly exporting to China, Japan, South Korea, the UK, a huge amount of the EU – probably going to be in Sweden pretty soon.
…the excitement for us is that people internationally are excited enough about high end U.S. craft beer that they're willing to pay high price points for the best of the best. I saw a picture from a shop in Japan selling individual cans of my beer for between like $18 to $20! So there's room and margins for international exporters to make money and retailers to still be making money because they can command such a high price. There's something to be said for the fact that it's only the most acclaimed beers that are getting interest from high end craft exporters… they know they gotta have something that's gonna wow the customer on the other side. I mean, there could be a pretty dang good brew that does something similar to what I do in most states in the country, but no-one here wants to pay $20 a can for that. [Laughs.]
SDP: Johnny, thanks for talking with The Dishing. I’m looking forward to spreading the good word about Night School and Deep Fried Beer. Hopefully we’ll collaborate on a pop up soon.
JO: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We’d love to get you out here any time.
(*This interview has been lighted edited for length and clarity. )