Tiffanie Favrat, sales director and Jack's right-hand woman, juggles between the Cluses brewery and the Chamonix bar, ensuring each beer finds its audience. Between management, strategy, and a passion for craft beer, she flies the flag for Big Mountain.
My name is Tiffanie, I am the sales director at Big Mountain and the right-hand man of Jack who is the founder of the brewery.
The birth of Big Mountain
The Big Mountain project was born thanks to Jack who went to the United States, he saw what was happening there in terms of “craft”, craft beer. He said to himself that in Chamonix there was the outdoor connection but not the good beer. With a friend of his, Matt, they started working on the brewery project and little by little, they found a recipe which is still the same, our IPA. Today, we have a good team and also two sites: the brasserie in Cluses and a bar in Chamonix. We are roughly between 15 and 16, it fluctuates a little with the seasonal staff.
A growing project
What excites me is the project because we started from not much with Jack to get where we are, it's a great adventure. We meet lots of people who want to contribute to it and in the project itself, it is to be able to offer good local beer, to be able to interest restaurateurs or end customers, to be able to challenge them on what 'We propose. We have almost 10 different beers that we brew throughout the year. On top of that, we brew a new beer per month so we have a whole range of ephemera, we have a very varied choice in what we do. We have a lot of restaurateurs and bars who have our beers like our friends at Bivouac Malté. We are also at Atelier B in Cluses, you can find us in a wine store, in a supermarket but if you want to find everything at the same time, you have to come to the bar called the Big Mountain Bar in Chamonix.
Beer production
Brewing starts with the basic ingredient, malt. The first step is to crush the malt, to grind the seeds, it then goes down into the mashing tank, and after that we start with filtration, fermentation which takes between 3 and 4 weeks. Depending on the recipes, we sometimes add things like in the tropical one, we add fruit purees. Then, we will have our beer packaged in bottles, in barrels depending on the formats.
Installation in Cluses
We looked for premises for a while. Here, it's big and tall, and it's something quite hard to find. In the brewery environment, we have the constraint of tanks which are high so we need a certain height and here, it was the ideal building. It's big, maybe even a little too big but it's cool because we'll be able to grow as much as we want.
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