My problem then was that I didn’t have the time. I worked at an accounting firm and tax season meant working 60 to 70 hour weeks. In the winter it would be doable, but come the summer you can’t just shut down operations for tax season. Dan’s issue was that he didn’t have the space, but I had an unfinished basement in the new house we’d just built. That was a lightbulb moment for me. That’s really when we part- nered up and started brainstorming ideas. We both liked brewing hoppy-kind of beers, so that’s something we’d bonded over for a long time. Ideally, we would have started up a big brewery right away but we had a lot of consider- ations. We both have Masters degrees – I went to school to become a Chartered Accountant and Dan is an Engineer – and at the time I was working at KPMG as a Chartered Accountant and Dan was an Engineer at the University of New Brunswick. And that’s beside the fact that it’s a tough sell to the wives to quit your fulltime jobs to open a dream brewery. But they were supportive of us starting with some- thing small and testing the market. We incorporated in August of 2014 and within a week we ordered all our equipment and went for it. We started to drywall my basement and tackle all the ventilation work that needed to be done. We also had to get the basement licensed by the Department of Public Safety and through NB Liquor – in the end, my basement was licensed as a commercial brewery. It was a lot of work but we’d heard about so many people doing it, so we figured why not us. We started with a one barrel system, or a 1200 litre system,
and we were doing that two to three days a week. So in the beginning, we were both in my basement brewing for a minimum of twenty hours every week and all the while working full-time jobs. “And that’s beside the fact that it’s a tough sell to the wives to quit your fulltime jobs to open a dream brewery.” Right from the start, people really liked the beer. It seemed like we were always behind on orders. The accounts we had from the start, like the King Street Ale House and 540 and some of the more popular spots, were buying up our kegs – which is all we were packaging in back then – and they were very pleased with our product because we were often outselling the established craft beers. Not a lot of people were brewing the style of beer we do, so it was a pretty good indicator that we were on to something. We weren’t sure how the American-style we’d adopted from Maine was going to be received, but it was a hit. That’s why we really went for it – that and my wife wasn’t too happy with me working 60 hour weeks and then brewing beer on the side. We started here at 280 Main Street with four ten-barrel fer- menters with the hopes of brewing twice a week – that was the original business plan. We quickly realized that we could
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • SEPTEMBER 2017
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