Thanks for Five Years!
We just want to take a second and say thank you for yesterday!
They say it takes 5 years for a business to establish itself. I have no idea who came up with that saying, or even how true it is, but what I can say is that five years of owning a small manufacturing company (which is also more like 7 years if you count the years it took to just get open!) feels like a friggin’ lifetime. Some days the minutes seem to go on forever, but when we look at it in a wider, retrospective view, the years have flown by so fast.
For better or worse, as a business, we’re still just 3 people running this whole thing. We have some help in the food truck, and to pour beer in the summer now (thanks Dianna, Kelsey and Sarah!) but the same 3 people still own and operate the business. I feel obliged (in the best way possible) to stress this every year, WE ARE NOTHING WITHOUT YOU. As some very smart person once said, small businesses don’t have investors, they have customers. This rings so damn true in our heads every day. So often it feels like we’re chasing our tails trying to catch up on this or the next thing. When we finally take a second to step back and look around, so much has changed for our little brewery in 5 years, and for that, we very literally have YOU to thank.
When we started the brewery (i.e. the planning/buildout stages in 2015) the 3 of us were 22, 23, and 24 years of age at the time. I don’t think most people expected it to work out. I don’t even think we really expected it to work out either. Hell, looking at it in retrospect, I'm genuinely not sure we would be able to make it happen again. We started on the tightest budget imaginable (translation: wayyyyyy too little money) and just hoped people would want the beer we were making. You guys responded in a big way. It’s deeply humbling in a way we’ll never be able to properly express in written words.
We still don’t have investors to answer to, and we’re still focused on the same core idea that we founded the brewery on: make the best beer we possibly can. Push ourselves every day. Keep getting better. Don’t get complacent. This simple, but core concept continues to drive our decision making day after day. How do we make the best beer we can? What do we need to do in order to make sure that while you’re drinking our beer that you’re having a good time? These are not always the easiest questions to answer conclusively, but we’re always evolving and striving to improve, and ultimately YOU have been, and will continue to be, the final authority on whether the decisions we’re making are the right ones or not.
Every year we have some version of “thank you” that we gradually add more adjectives to to convey our undying gratitude; and I’ll be honest, we’re running out of synonyms to use! So five years later, we’ll keep it classic, simple and clean. THANK YOU! We’ll never fully be able to express our gratitude in words what it means to us that as a result of you buying our beer, we can do this (I.e. own and operate a brewery) for a living. It’s wild that you come to drink beer on our front lawn and that until a few months ago, you were also cool about buying beer from a 100 square foot shed. It’s amazing. Thank you. We love you. We are nothing without you. We’re forever grateful that you guys want to stay on this ride with us drinking our beer. We can’t wait to see what the next 5 years look like.