Beer and running don’t always go together, but Goose Island Innovation Brewer Tim Faith makes it work. He’s racing his second Chicago Marathon after running last year’s (appropriately) in 3:12 and he somehow manages to balance his life as a brewer with a disciplined training schedule.
Tim first began running in high school and quickly became obsessed with the running lifestyle. “You could run as much as you wanted and you could eat as much as you wanted,” remembers Tim. “The regimented training also helped shape my attention to detail as a brewer,” he added.
While running cross country and track at Augustana College, Tim originally had a career in medicine in mind. But after an injury sidelined him from racing during his junior year, a friend suggested they take up home-brewing with their extra time. It was love at first mash.
“It took all my science classes and made them applicable,” recalls Tim, who was studying biology at the time. “Microbiology, chemistry, thermal dynamics, math, it brought everything together in home-brewing. I loved it.”
The following summer, Tim began keeping a logbook of all the beers he drank, noting their taste and characteristics in a beer journal he received from his parents. “I was on a medical internship in Australia at the time and I made it my goal to taste as many different beers as I could possibly find.”
He quickly filled the journal and started a new log in a composition notebook, pasting in peeled-off labels from the beers he drank. Ironically, by the end of his internship, it wasn’t medicine Tim was interested in. “I wanted to make beer.”
After graduating with a degree in Microbiology, Tim held positions at breweries in the Quad Cities and Michigan before coming to Goose Island in 2013. He has since been promoted to Innovation Brewer where he oversees the pilot system, new recipe development, and working on speciality release beers like the Bourbon County series. At this year’s Chicago Marathon, Tim is hoping to run the race in around 2 hours and 35 minutes—right around an impressive 6-minute mile pace.
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4 Comments
How do I get one of those singlets? I’d love to rock one at my next run.
Michael — a limited number will be on sale at the Chicago Marathon Expo: https://www.chicagomarathon.com/participant-information/expo-packet-pick-up/
And at the Goose Island Taproom!
Thank you!. I’m not running Chicago this year but I will see if I can get a friend to pick one up.