STEFAN NEUMANN Brooks Meats, Walton, Kentucky *

STEFAN NEUMANN Brooks Meats, Walton, Kentucky * * * Date: April 21, 2014 Location: Brooks Meats, Walton, KY Interviewer: Sara Wood Transcription: Shelley Chance, ProDocs Length: Thirty-eight minutes Project: Cured South Stefan Neumann, Brooks Meats, Page 2 [Begin Stefan Neumann Interview] 00:00:00 Sara Wood: Here we go. So it’s April 21, 2014. This is Sara Wood with the Southern Foodways Alliance. I’m here with Mr. Stefan Neumann at Brooks Meats in Walton, Kentucky. Stefan would you be so kind as to say hello, introduce yourself, and tell me where we are and what you do here? [Interviewer’s note: I forget to ask Mr. Neumann for his date of birth, so I asked him off the record post-interview. Mr. Neumann’s birthdate is November 6, 1969.] 00:00:19 Stefan Neumann: My name is Stefan Neumann. I’m a German master sausage maker. I moved to Kentucky in September 1998. I started my own company [Detlef Koeppe in Florence, KY] right after I moved here. In—in 2007 we decided to close this company because of some issues we incurred and ever since I’ve been working with Brooks Meats in—in Walton, Kentucky as their Production Supervisor and we are a retailer, wholesaler, and a food processor of mainly locally grown products and we do up to forty different varieties of sausages, cured meats, and jerky—beef jerky, hams, bacon, and any—any other variety of sausage that you can think of. 00:01:16 SW: And Stefan I’m wondering if you could start and just—I have a couple questions for you about your beginnings. Where are you from in Germany and—and what made you decide to come here in—in 1998? ©Southern Foodways Alliance | www.southernfoodways.org Stefan Neumann, Brooks Meats, Page 3 00:01:26 SN: My hometown in Germany is called Neunkirchen which is in Saarland which is for most people would know it as the Outer Lorraine area. And call me crazy but I always wanted to do something like that and I worked in Africa before I moved to—to America and started looking for—for places, outside of Germany to work, and we—I finally wound up here in Kentucky. And it’s—to be a master sausage maker you go through a six-year program. You go—you start off— our school system works totally different than it works here. You get—when you—we only go to school to ninth grade and then we start a three-year apprenticeship program unless you would go further onto a university but for most people at fifteen you start a—working apprenticeship which means for some professions you work five days and you go to school one day or you work three weeks and you go to school a whole week. 00:02:32 And that is for three years and then you get a journeyman certification and after that you got to work as a journeyman for three years before you can go onto earn your master’s degree. 00:02:44 SW: What made you decide to go with sausage making? 00:02:48 SN: My parents owned a restaurant back home. I’m the youngest of six [brothers: Arthur, Heinz, Dieter, Guenther, and Markus]. And two of my oldest brothers [Arthur and Heinz] are butchers as well. Then we have a baker and we have two car mechanics and I guess I decided food was my passion and so I decided to be a butcher also. ©Southern Foodways Alliance | www.southernfoodways.org Stefan Neumann, Brooks Meats, Page 4 00:03:09 SW: Did you have—were there—was there a sense of—in terms of curing traditions did you grow up with that in terms of curing meats or eating cured meat, just the tradition where you come from in Germany? What was that like? 00:03:23 SN: Food and especially cured foods have been [Phone Rings]—that’s okay. Okay; somebody got it. It has—our long tradition especially in Europe. I mean curing is—was usually the way of making things shelf-stable or—or during the wintertime or they killed hogs or—or animals in the wintertime to—and they had to sustain through the summer, so this is where—where people started curing meats and we have a big tradition especially in the—in the Black Forest region of Germany where—where those traditions are still being—being upheld until today. And if you go further into Switzerland or into Italy it’s—it’s even more pronounced as—as it is in Germany now with the—the new ways that are possible where I can—where it took me three months to— to cure a product I can do that today in ten days or—or even shorter—shorter terms. 00:04:37 And those traditions always intrigued me and especially the new techniques intrigued me even at a young age. And that’s why I chose to do something like that. 00:04:47 SW: Did you—did you like sausage and cured meats growing up? Did you heat ham and all of that? ©Southern Foodways Alliance | www.southernfoodways.org Stefan Neumann, Brooks Meats, Page 5 00:04:51 SN: Oh of course. I mean if you look at me I’m you know I love food and I always loved food and my—my parents—in my parents’ restaurant we killed our own animals in—in the basement and we further processed them right there. So we made our own salamis, we made our own bacons, and—and things like that and our own hams and—and it’s just part of my life. 00:05:16 SW: And if we could stop for a second; what are your parents’ names and what was the name of the restaurant? 00:05:19 SN: My parents’ names, my—my dad’s—that passed away today five years ago his name is Guenther and he was actually a coal miner and my mom, her name is Luise and she—she was the owner of the restaurant. And the restaurant’s name was Marien Schenke way back then and this is—this is how—how it all started. That’s where I grew up in—in the restaurant. 00:05:45 SW: Did your parents put you to work as soon as you were able to? 00:05:48 SN: That’s one thing that—that a lot of people say, “What do you mean you started working when you were five and six years old?” And I said, “Well you know there was empty bottles that needed to be taken down in the basement and sorted out and this is what we started doing.” We—we worked. It’s just family business. ©Southern Foodways Alliance | www.southernfoodways.org Stefan Neumann, Brooks Meats, Page 6 00:06:06 SW: And I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about you know what is—what is the process; you talked about your apprenticeship, your journeyman, doing the—the six-year program but what was the learning curve like of learning to cure? Did you already know a lot of this stuff from what your parents were doing or did you—was your mind kind of blown open? 00:06:26 SN: Well the—you kind of sort of grow into—into things but once it gets started with the apprenticeship you actually learn the whole techniques behind it and you—you get more in- depth training on things like that. And this is when it gets really technical about, you know, the amount of salt, how many percent salt, how many percent nitrates and so on and so forth. And— and this is where—where it—really your passion for things like this grow. Once you get started you almost can't stop. 00:07:02 SW: Why is that? Why were you so compelled to it besides—I know you said you’re a big food lover but—? 00:07:07 SN: For—for—for me if I start something I like to finish—. I’m not the most competitive person in—in the world but I like to at least finish in the top ten and for me when I started my apprenticeship I wanted to make sure we—we started with three apprentices in—in the company that I worked for an I wanted to make sure that I came out on top. And so my—my hunger for— ©Southern Foodways Alliance | www.southernfoodways.org Stefan Neumann, Brooks Meats, Page 7 for information and for—to learn more than all the others did just drove me to—to be better and—and excel and those things. 00:07:48 SW: Were you—were you there around the clock and watching the meat cure, like how—how did you do that? 00:07:54 SN: Well I had—I developed a special relationship with one of the—the masters that did work there and so while everybody else was always striving to get out of the house I always liked to stay behind to learn more, to get more information, to get more knowledge. And when it came— came time—. [Phone Rings] And when it came time to learn how do you operate the curing equipment or the—the smokehouses I was always the first one to volunteer because I wanted to know? I wanted to have that knowledge. I wanted to have that edge above everybody else.

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