9/21/2023 0 Comments Harpoon fest fall 2012![]() ![]() ![]() “I think that colors the collective imagination of craft brewers as a whole. “What I do worry about is when you have companies who are selling to people whose brand story is not so compelling, who are not the founders,” Ms. “But to go from 50,000 to 250,000 and break into the top 10 craft brewers, you have extra infrastructure requirements, and that’s where a partner like Riverside can be helpful.”Īs such deals become more common, some wonder how this will change the industry’s culture. “Going from zero to 50,000 barrels requires branding, strong culture and great distributors, and this can be accomplished by a special entrepreneur with a strong core team,” he said. Steve Rice, Riverside’s vice president, says his firm saw an owner who had brought the company a long way but needed a boost. Hamill took an investment from Riverside, which offered capital for growth as well as a payout for the shareholders. I was looking to give Uinta the growth it deserved and not hold it back.” with that, but I’m looking at another $10 million in investment. “I’ve been doing it all on my own and I owed a lot of money. “I’ve always grown organically and reinvested in the brewery,” Mr. He wondered if the business needed more than his skills. Even after a recent $18 million investment, projected growth of 30 to 35 percent this year would put the brewery again at its capacity limit. One is Will Hamill, who has spent 22 years building Uinta into a craft brewery with a 144,000-barrel annual capacity. How does the company move forward? Can it do so under ESOP structure as well as with founders with a strong vision? And debt is a whole other level of consideration.”įor other brewers, the way to grow is to bring in outside money and expertise. “But it creates its own set of questions. “The ESOP has become a popular solution to cash out a founder or some owners and you’re not selling to Anheuser-Busch or Coors,” said Benj Steinman, president of the industry journal Beer Marketer’s Insights. Fish has instituted a similar employee stock ownership plan at Deschutes, taking on debt to buy out partners and then distributing their shares to employees. To bring in new capital without taking on investors looking for an ultimate sale of the company, one path is to offer employees an ownership stake. “We’re happy managing growth around the 10 percent mark.” Fish, whose company brought in just under $100 million in 2014. “We have a lot of runway in front of us,” said Mr. The number of brew pubs and regional and microbreweries jumped from 1,521 in 2008 to over 3,200 in 2014, according to the Brewers Association, a trade group that defines craft brewers as those that produce fewer than six million barrels a year and are less than 25 percent owned by a large beverage maker.īut for brewers who have shunned such investments, like Gary Fish, who founded Deschutes Brewery in Bend, Ore., in 1988, the way forward is reasonable growth. How it turns out will go a long way in determining craft beer’s future identity.īy any measurement, craft beer has been on a great run since it took off in the mid-1980s. The clashing perspectives are surfacing throughout the industry as breweries look to manage the need for growth and the liquidity needs of founders who want to cash out. ![]() “The idea of selling Harpoon, to anybody, didn’t ring true to who we are as a company.” “To me, having grown up in this industry, philosophically it just fits really well with craft beer - independent, authentic,” Mr. Wow, margins aren’t as good as we thought,’ ” he said.īut his co-founder, Dan Kenary, and other shareholders have a different vision for Harpoon and its 190 full-time employees: that craft beer can continue to be a business of independent local operators with close relations between workers and management and constant, reasonable growth. “I think that opportunity exists now and will exist even more when the exuberance cycle has run its course and people say, ‘Wow, I have a lot of capacity. ![]()
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