SAFETY HARBOR — Denis Phillips cracks a pop-top and pulls a can that looks a lot like him to his lips.
"It's got that citrusy feel to it," he says. "Which is a Florida thing. That's not bad."
Indeed, there's a grapefruit finish to Rule #7 Hurricane Saison, a new brew produced by Safety Harbor's Crooked Thumb Brewery in tribute to Phillips, the longtime chief meteorologist for WFTS-Ch. 28. The beer will be released Sunday at the brewery, in cans modeled after Phillips' signature suspenders, tie and banker stripe.
It's a high honor in craft beer-crazy Tampa Bay, and this limited release has caused a social media stir. Hundreds of fans have already bugged Crooked Thumb and Phillips for a can. Phillips himself plans to buy 10 cases to give as gifts.
The idea sprung up during Hurricane Irma, when co-owner Kip Kelly settled on Phillips as his bar's unofficial forecaster. He wasn't alone — Phillips said his Facebook following grew from 70,000 to 200,000 that week. Kelly especially liked Phillips' "hurricane rules," seven reassuring guidelines written for Hurricane Isaac in 2012 to help panicked viewers stay sane.
Rule #7: "Stop freaking out ... until I tell you to. We're fine."
"He definitely came across to my household, and to the folks at the brewery, as a real calming influence during all of the hysteria," Kelly says. "So we wanted to do something to say thanks."
Before the impending hurricane season, we sat down over tallboys of Rule #7 to talk beer, suspenders and lessons learned from Irma.
Let's start with the most important question: Should you have beer in your hurricane supply kit?
If it helps you to be a little bit less stressed, maybe that's not a bad thing. I think everybody knows after last year what the important things are that their family needs — generators and whatnot — but yeah, having a little bit of beer to top it off, I don't see why that's a bad thing.
Ever been to a really raging hurricane party?
I'm always working. I've never actually gone to one. Back in '04, when Hurricane Charley was coming, one of our reporters, Don Germaise, kind of started the whole "hunker down" thing in this area. It got so bad that every time he was out there doing a live shot and he'd go, "Hunker down," you'd have to do a shot. People were just stumbling home after that.
Crooked Thumb adopted you as their house meteorologist during Irma. Whenever you hear that a viewer has made that decision — "Denis Phillips is my guy" — what do you think they're seeing in you?
I think it all boils down to tone. What I was sensing, especially with Irma, was a lot more people were getting their weather from national media sources. CNN, Weather Channel, whatever the case may be. Folks up north were freaking out because they were hearing the worst-case scenario: "You better get out of there now, because you're all going to die." On a local level, we knew that probably wasn't the case, or at the very least, it wasn't a sure thing. What I tried to do is provide a bit of a realistic view for our local area, and say, "Look, we all know what the worst-case scenario is. I think we've got that pretty clear. But maybe it won't play out that way."
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Explore all your optionsIrma's legacy might be the fear of God that it put into people. It was a wake-up call for the Gulf Coast.
We had one with Charley back in '04. A lot of people, myself included, thought it was our storm. That's actually how I started wearing these suspenders. I had one pair of suspenders to my name, and I happened to have them on. I was on the air 35, 40 straight hours. After the storm missed us and the station did all this research, the question was, Who did you like? Who did you watch the most? The overwhelming response: "I have no idea what the guy's name was, but he was wearing a pair of suspenders." My boss goes, "That's your new schtick."
Did you ever think about changing your name to, like, Storm Stratus or Buddy Thunders?
I used to work in Los Angeles, and the most popular meteorologist in L.A. is named Dallas Raines. But that's his real name. But no, I've always just fallen back on, I consider myself a gregarious person. I get into what I'm talking about. For some people, that's over the top. For some people, they'd prefer a little more mellow delivery. That's not me. Was Irma a turning point for you in any way?
If there was ever a doubt in my mind that social media and digital platforms are the wave of the future, there is no doubt now. With social media, more people now know that I exist. But what I did learn from Irma — and this was my biggest lesson — is that storms can be the most frightening thing that a person has to go through, because they have no control. When I went into work that Saturday morning, I'm loading every picture, every hard drive, every scrapbook I had in the back of my car. My neighbors are coming outside, and they're looking at me, like, "Denis, what are you doing?" I said, "It's just in case." And the look on their faces, that stuck with me. Because it wasn't even fear. It was sadness. When the weather guy is loading his car up with pictures, it just got real. It really hit home that it could impact their lives directly.
So how close were you to enacting Rule #7?
When the Hurricane Center track changed directly over our coast as a (Category) 4, that's the first time in 25 years I've ever seen that. If it had stayed 60 or 70 miles north and the center of the eye didn't cross over Cuba, we probably would have been crushed. It was that close.
How would you rate the suspenders on the can?
I've been very fortunate over my 30 years of doing this to get several awards and things of recognition. This has to be the highlight of my career. How many guys can say you had a beer named after you? Honestly, this is the coolest thing ever.
Contact Jay Cridlin at cridlin@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8336. Follow @JayCridlin.
