This is part 2 of the story on how I built up Brewery 3. I suggest you go back and read Part 1, it’’ll make a bit more sense. LinkedIn says it’s a 2 minute read, so hop on over 😁

When I left off in part one, I had shared some of the chronology of how Brewery 3 got going. I also showed some of the impact it had on folks at the brewery, but I hadn’t explained how it became an organization. In the process of writing this post, I realized there was a mindset change that caused it to become an organization. It’s purpose had changed and this caused it to become an organization. It became an organization because it needed to become one. I’ll point out this moment, but I think the interesting bit is the sense of purpose that led to that point. I’ll break out the mosaic of purposes this Brewery serves and hopefully you can draw parallels to your life, to your fun project, side hustle, or even to your personal purpose.

The building blocks

From the start of Brewery 3, I kept telling my brewers and my bosses that I wanted this system to be so popular that I’d have to fight for time on it. The goal was always to be the seed crystal, and that it would outgrow me. This started with talk and dreams, but now it’s beginning to come true (our next brew day is overbooked and the one after is nearly full). The limiting factor, as it turns out, is fermentor and kegarator space. There’s seltzer in the mix, we’re working on a ‘tiered’ certification program for the brewery, and there might be a competition team too! Much of this seems like a logical, and natural evolution, but there was plenty of active steering to go along with happenstance. I credit my mentor with helping me realize what was happening so I can do this active steering. The sense of purpose helps define the next steps, the ‘success’ metrics, and provides reasons to be excited and press on!

Why Brewery 3?

So let’s start explaining the first ‘why’ of Brewery 3. It all started as a way for me to drink some interesting beer. We make a lot of beer at the LA Brewery, and the beer we make is great beer (we recently set the record for the best ‘sensory score’ in the brewery’s history!). However, when you step back and think about it, there’s a whole, vast world of beer that we don’t make. We don’t make anything dark/roasty. We don’t make anything with tea in it. We don’t make anything dry hopped. We surely don’t make anything funky/sour. So if I wanted to drink any of those things, I could either buy it, or I could figure out how we could make it. So this was the first purpose of Brewery 3: make something cool to drink. This is the story of Part 1.

“I want to do what I want to do”

After that first batch, the purpose shifted from make something different to create an activity that was enriching and enjoyable. About 4 years ago, I decided that “I want to do what I want to do.” On the face of it, this sounds circular and silly, but as a decision rubric, it’s a powerful thought. A similarly circular, but true statement is I do well in environments I enjoy and when I enjoy the environment I’ll do well. Where these two come together with Brewery 3 is I was in a position of power to make something happen, and Brewery 3 was something I wanted to make happen for myself and the others who had showed interest. I thought, “how cool is it to tell your friends that you make beer?” (Hint: very!) Well imagine if you can tell your friends that you make several lifetime’s worth of beer, and on top of that, you get to design some of it! You get to make something unique. You get to experience something unique. You get to share something unique. This is what I wanted to do, so this is what I worked towards. So the second, evolved purpose of Brewery 3 was to create this unique moment to experience at work. For me, personally, when I was spending hour 10, 11, or 14 at the brewery working my tail off, I could stop down and visit Brewery 3 and it’s happily bubbling fermentor of “English Cuppa.” When those who joined me think about what it’s like to work at the brewery, they think “we do cool things every day, and this one time, I got to do a really cool thing!” It was the first and second purpose for the brewery that I shared with my mentor; that was as far as I had gotten when we had chatted. He elevated my thinking to the third purpose, building an organization.

The moment Brewery 3 was an organization

When you work at a large company, your horizons are both very vast, and very narrow. On the one hand, you have massive resources at your disposal and you’re deciding how to deploy them. On the other hand, things are built; it’s a large company. There are SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures), there are best practices, there are other breweries that have done it before, or something similar. This doesn’t mean that you can’t come up with something better, but often the problem has already been solved, and the smart, efficient thing to do is to localize and adapt the solution. Budweiser is Budweiser whether you have it in St. Louis, St. Petersburg, or delivered via beer cannon to the top of Mt. St. Hellens (once you let the foam settle). That’s the whole point and what makes AB such an impressive enterprise. And while you must optimize for equipment, changes in ingredients, and even changes in tasters, you’re driving a bus. You don’t want to crash that bus. With Brewery 3, there isn’t an SOP on what it means at our brewery. I was (and still am) defining what everything will look like. Brewery 3 could be a mini-company, and I could be the founder of it. Mind. Blown. 🤯

Organization and beyond!

This mindset is a game changer. If Brewery 3 is a company, it needs products. It needs labor. It needs customers. It needs to be bigger than one person’s vision. It also changes the list of things the brewery does. It now develops talent. It recruits. It has marketing. It has a reputation that goes beyond the individual participants. No longer are the beers we make “Ethan’s home brew,” they’re “Brewery 3’s latest offering!” so with this in mind, my activities took on a different focus. Since this is a fun ‘side project,’ we have to justify our costs with our tangible and intangible benefits. Our ‘products’ were home brew (tasty, for sure!), but it was also engagement (aka, making the brewery a kickass place to live). Since we were making beer on a small, hands-on scale, we were offering ‘upskilling.’ To maximize our ‘profit,’ we had to offer enough engagement, knowledge, and good will to offset the expenses for ingredients, new equipment, and people’s time. Draping our activities in our company’s jargon became marketing to participants and gatekeepers alike.

Since Brewery 3 was now an organization, as its leader, I had to change my activities and mindset too. Instead of just making sure I had enough participants for a brew day, I was attracting and retaining talent. For example, the folks who wanted to dive head first into a brew day, these will be brew day leaders and nascent Brewery 3 ‘Brewmasters’ (recruiting/developing talent). That brewer who said “maybe the next brew day you have, I’ll watch,” is someone who will remember that day fondly and share with others (engagement is our ‘product,’ this is also building the brand). I identified the lack of a unifying identity, and found someone with artistic talent, and enlisted their help to create a brand for our little organization. Offering for other managers to join or send their employees to our brew days is building good will (increases our ‘profit’). Even the challenge that our system isn’t well documented and all knowledge is learned ‘on the job’ or passed from person to person is a ‘profit’ opportunity. The documentation process is an opportunity for brewers and managers to use the company’s organizational tools to create SOPs. What about our potential achilles heel, the fact that we a cost center? This was also an opportunity! We can work with maintenance (the folks who’s budget was funding us) to create a Brewery 3 budget and we can work on ‘cost/benefit’ analysis on upgrading the brewery (a chance to practice). All of this from the mindset that Brewery 3 is a mini-company.

“Brewery 3 matters because in the grand scheme of things, it totally doesn’t”

Which brings in the fourth purpose of Brewery 3: it’s a sandbox. What we’re doing with Brewery 3 matters because in the grand scheme of things, it totally doesn't. When we screw up a batch because we didn’t properly clean, we ‘wasted’ our time and maybe $50 worth of ingredients. But we learn that cleaning is important and the next time we’re running a cleaning cycle on our 700 BBL brew kettle (that’s 230 thousand beers by the way), maybe we’ll remember the time we didn’t clean our home brew rig properly and our Belgain Wit didn’t come out right. When we write a justification to maintenance on why we need a $250 mini freezer to temperature control, we’re learning how to tell headquarters we need $250 million on a new reverse osmosis system. The list goes on, but y’all get the point; these are the training wheels, the Sim Theme Park, and an art studio rolled into one (Brew)Magic system!

This focus on maximizing our benefits, and minimizing our costs will sustain Brewery 3 beyond my time at the helm. We’ve seen a change in leadership (folks moving on to bigger and cooler things), yet we continue to exist because we provide benefits to the participants and the organization. We exist because we can articulate those benefits. We exist because we don’t ‘cost’ that much. And we exist because people like that we exist. Being mindful of this allows us to prolong our existence and build until we reach a point where we exist because of course we exist.

Brewery 3 and you

So unless you’re also working at a brewery and about to start a Brewery 3 of your own, you’ll have to read this and try to generalize. What I’ve been able to do is generalize our activities and understand what function they’re serving. Your version of a fun work project is probably serving many of the same functions. The fact that you think it’s fun is a purpose enough, but having a purpose mindset will help you figure out the specific benefits. By knowing what your mini-business’ activities are and what purposes they’re serving, you can tailor them to meet your greater organization and navigate changes in leaders or priorities. Most importantly, this mindset will help you practice in your own sandbox and help you develop yourself and others around you.

So what’s Part 3?

For my next post, I’ll make some bold predictions about where I think Brewery 3 is going next. This’ll be a fun way to share my ideas, make bold predictions, think on paper, and perhaps even laugh at how wrong (or right) I end up being!

Until next time! 🍻