Darryl Postelnick has a pretty simple description for himself, one that many could relate to: He's a dad who likes to cook and drink beer and wine.
"That's just kind of what I do," he said.
Except he's not like everyone else. The Chicago-area businessman is the star of the viral TikTok page "Cooking with Darryl," which transformed into a success after creating its second video and has since ballooned to more than 2 million followers.
There's no secret sauce to Postelnick's videos: He introduces a recipe and the equipment he's using, mixes the ingredients — with fancy, battery-powered salt and pepper grinders — and then cooks it all together, ending each one-minute segment with a bite into his creation and his signature catchphrase: "Are you kidding me?"
Oftentimes, he pairs his dish with a beer or a glass of wine. And several of the beers he has featured come from a prominent craft brewery in Michigan: Saugatuck Brewing Co., where one of Postelnick's longtime friends is an investor.
That relationship is now the inspiration for a new West Coast-style IPA from Saugatuck called R U Kidding Me? that's brewed with hops from Great Lakes Hops in nearby Zeeland. It's available in the Chicago area now and will come to Michigan by early spring.
The hops featured in the beer include Pragmatic and Bergamot, which result in the citrusy, flowery aromatics and flavor you often find in hazy New England IPAs but with a malt bill and clarity that's more like the West Coast style.
"I like a hoppy beer, but when you get into the tons of hops, it just gets overpowering," Postelnick said.
'It just went nuts'
Postelnick is not a cook by trade. He's the senior vice president at Opia Limited, with previous executive sales experience at Microsoft and the Walt Disney Co., but he loves cooking as a hobby and often makes dinner for his family of five.
He started getting into TikTok — a fast-growing social media platform that specializes in short-form videos — when he dropped his twin children Lexi and David off at Arizona State University in fall 2020. When he got home, his youngest daughter, Lindsey, then 12, approached him about creating a cooking channel. He initially bristled at the idea; he wasn't on any social media except LinkedIn.
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But as any good salesperson would do, Lindsey persisted.
"She came with the comment that 'this is something you and I can do together,'" Postelnick said. "I said OK, but she had to create the page and run it."
The first video, about a beef and broccoli stir fry, netted the fledgling "Cooking with Darryl" account nine followers, mostly Lindsey's friends. Three days later, however, on a football Sunday, he made a family favorite: beanless chili with an IPA in hand. It took off to the tune of 2 million views overnight.
"It just went nuts," Postelnick said. "I didn't know what it all meant. (Lindsey) got all excited. Her and her friends said now you have to keep doing it."
From there, "Cooking with Darryl" exploded. It started with a story in the State Press, Arizona State's student newspaper, and that was followed by appearances on NBC's "Today" and "The Kelly Clarkson Show." It's routine for a video to get hundreds of thousands of TikTok views, but not so routine to get millions. Postelnick's shrimp fried rice video has more than 32 million.
He now does his own editing and has invested in ring lights and remote controls to upgrade the video quality. (He never uses scripts, however. As a salesman by trade, he doesn't need them.) There's also an Instagram page and a website for buying merchandise. Fans have taken a particular interest in Postelnick's battery-powered salt and pepper shakers, and he now sells his own.
The page's rising popularity caught the attention of Ted Tlapa, who met Postelnick while attending Northern Illinois University in the mid-1980s. Tlapa had become a fan and amateur brewer of Saugatuck Brewing Co., which opened in 2005. He began investing in the brewery in 2011 and representing it at various Chicago-area events.
"So I asked him, 'When are you going to put one of our Saugatuck beers in there?'" Tlapa recalled. "I drove from Chicago to Saugatuck, picked up a bunch of cases and brought them back to his house. This was around Christmas 2020, and Darryl was gracious enough to put our beer in there."
Among the Saugatuck beers he delivered were Paled It!, a 5.5% alcohol-by-volume pale ale, and Blueberry Lemonade Shandy, a 5%-ABV seasonal radler with blueberries. Postelnick began drinking the beers in his videos, sometimes while wearing a Saugatuck Brewing Co. shirt and cap.
From there, a quasi-business partnership was born.
Let's brew a beer
One of the unique aspects you'll notice when visiting Saugatuck Brewing Co.'s home base — a renovated 25,000-square-foot warehouse in Douglas, which neighbors Saugatuck to the south — is the brewing system along the northern wall in the brewpub.
It's the original 3.5-barrel brew system that founder Barry Johnson used when he opened Saugatuck Brewing Co. in 2005. Today, it's the focal point of the brewery's Brew on Premise program, which allows customers and groups to brew their own beers using Saugatuck's recipes, ingredients and staff expertise. It's the only program of its kind among Michigan's 400-plus craft breweries.
"It’s a great resource not only for local beer fans, but also we’ve done some things where accounts have come in and brewed a beer," said Tom Gardner, vice president of sales. "One of our best accounts in Chicago is called Monk’s Pub, on Lake Street in downtown. It's one of those places where you can throw peanut shells on the floor. So they thought, 'How about (a beer) with peanuts?' That's how we got our Peanut Butter Porter." (That beer was featured in a previous Free Press story.)
It's no wonder, then, that Saugatuck Brewing Co. would look into collaborating with Postelnick on a new beer. Given that Postelnick is "an IPA guy," it was always going to be an IPA. The two sides worked out what kind of IPA it would be, taking into account Postelnick's personal preferences: hoppy, but not overpowering. The name — derived from Postelnick's trademarked "R U Kidding Me?" catchphrase — was a no-brainer, too.
The beer clocks in at 6.7% ABV and is already available in the Chicago area, where Postelnick and Tlapa reside, along with Pennsylvania. It will ship to Florida and Nevada soon.
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Soon, Postelnick will create a recipe using his own beer, likely a Chicago-style Italian beef dish. And Saugatuck Brewing Co. hopes to host a cookout featuring Postelnick at one of its brewpubs this spring, if not all of them. (It also owns a brewpub in Kalamazoo and Creston Brewery in Grand Rapids, which it purchased in 2021).
Not bad for a dad who just likes to cook and drink beer and wine.
"I don’t plan these," he said. "I think of what we want to have for dinner, and that’s what I make. ... I try to stay authentic, I guess, and I just do it."
No kidding there.
Spirits of Detroit writer Brian Manzullo covers craft alcohol for the Free Press. Contact him: bmanzullo@freepress.com and on Untappd, bmanzullo and Twitter, @BrianManzullo and @SpiritsofDET.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Saugatuck Brewing Co. partners with TikTok star on new beer
