[music: James Whiton and the Downtown Apostles]

Manny: We went through the whole process of starting and building a brewery. I had been in it for six years with Mac & Jack's and then I left. I kind of burned out a little bit on the brewing industry. I just wanted some time away from it. Roger and I were housemates at that time. We started discussing this. I was actually working in a software company and Roger was working in healthcare. We both didn't really like our jobs all that much so we just used to get together for beers at Fiddler's Inn over at Wedgwood and just talk about how much we hated our jobs and what we could do about it. Really, it was just about brainstorming about all kinds of businesses. Roger kept bringing it up. "Hey! Let's start a brewery!" I guess I agreed to do some research on it. We both agreed to do some research on it because one of the parameters that we had was that we didn't want to bring in any investors and we didn't want to bring in a huge amount of debt. So we started putting up a business plan for ourselves, really just for our benefit. At that time, we were pretty lucky because there was a lot of used equipment out there because this was the time when a lot of breweries had gone out of business. There was a lot of equipment out there and not a lot of buyers. It was pretty much name your price. So when we started finding those things out and putting numbers together, we figured out, "Hey! We can actually do this. We can make this go." We started home brewing extensively to try to come up with a recipe. We started coming up with a marketing plan. We started coming up with labels - anything we could do that didn't cost us anything like signing a lease or paying rent. We went from there and it kind of snowballed. The next thing you know, I got fired from my job. I was like, "Should I go back and get another job? No, forget it, let's do this."

[music: James Whiton and the Downtown Apostles]

Roger: Now we move forward with doing the research like he said and getting started doing product development and thinking specifically what we wanted our beers to be, or beer to be, and working on making it. We figured if we could homebrew a beer that we believed we would want to drink most of the time, we didn't think our beer taste was that far out of whack from the general public, so we figured, if we really believed in it, it would be easy to sell. Then we could test the product on our friends and then our friends liked it. They were having us brew beer for their wedding, or Halloween party or something like that. People who weren't our immediate friends were drinking it and enjoying it. I felt that was a pretty good opportunity for test marketing. Like Manny said, equipment was available, space was available. The stars were kind of in alignment. The more research we did, the more it looked like it would be crazier to not to do it than to do it.

[music: James Whiton and the Downtown Apostles]

Manny: When we first started out, we really wanted to work with a wholesaler. In my experience with Mac & Jack's, there was serious competition especially in Seattle for tap handles. What we wanted to do was to get just one tap handle out there. We figured that our best bet to do that was just to focus on a single product. We didn't have a lot of dollars to spend on marketing. We didn't have a lot of dollars to spend on tap handles, on t-shirts, on labels. We figured our best shot was to create one product and focus what little we did have on marketing that one brand. From the onset, we didn't really market Georgetown Brewing Company. We really marketed Manny's Pale Ale because we wanted people getting used to the idea of saying that: Manny's Pale Ale. Manny's Pale Ale. Our plan, and we've been sticking to that, was to release one new beer a year. This is our third year of business and later this fall, we're going to release a new beer. It's probably going to be a seasonal but we eventually want to become a brewery with a full portfolio. We figured, "Hey! Let's start real simple - one product. Get our wholesaler on board. Get the bars and restaurants on board just serving one beer and that will really help fund the company so that we start getting some dollars in the bank and we start using that to market other products later.

[music: Sean Bendickson: Communion Song]

Roger: It felt like a little bit of a risk at first but as a strategy, it really made sense for us. It's a little scary to put all your eggs in one basket, so to speak, but on the other hand, when you go out and you're selling beer, people ask, "Well, we don't really need a pale ale right now. What else do you have in your line-up?" "Well, nothing." They say, "What?" and we say, "This is our beer, this is what we believe in. This is what we think will pay the bills and make this company float." They see that we're serious and committed to it and it really gives the product some credibility, at least a little bit. Maybe people are just taking pity on us, I don't know, but a lot of them gave us a chance and that's really all you can ask for - a chance.

[music: Sean Bendickson: Communion Song]

Manny: Every successful brewery out there has a flagship brand. Alaskan Brewing Company has Alaskan Amber, Mac & Jack's has African Amber, Redhook has ESB, New Belgium has Fat Tire, Sierra Nevada has Pale Ale - the list goes on. These are successful companies that we wanted to emulate ourselves after. We dumbed it down even more and said, instead of making a portfolio of beers, let's make one beer that can be our flagship brand. From there, everything else is bonus. Everything else from that point on, we're brewing because we want to drink that beer versus we want to make a buck. We can have a lot more freedom; we can have a lot more fun with it. That's the whole point of brewing a Roger's. Roger's is kind of a pain in the ass to make because it takes so much longer to brew because it's a lager. But the fact is, we like drinking that style of beer so we make it. Having Manny's Pale Ale as our flagship brand allows us to be able to do that, to experiment and do other things.

[music: Sean Bendickson: Communion Song]

Manny: We brought in another business partner, another fellow by the name of Bret Chop. He was instrumental in helping us build this out. Roger and I wanted to build this out ourselves but we didn't have much of a mechanical background. We didn't even know how to plumb very well. So we ended up hooking with a friend of a friend. He's a mechanical engineer by trade but he had worked on other brewery projects in the past and he knew his stuff. He was an incredibly intelligent guy, hard working. We sort of developed a friendship with him because he would come out to help us sweat pipe, help us hang strut, help us bring the tanks in. He was just there helping us out the entire time.

Roger: Helped us keg beer.

Manny: Helped us keg beer. He was great. Over time, we just really developed a great friendship with him and we really started to trust him and his knowledge. Roger and I talked about it and it really came down to was if we really wanted to take the brewery to the next level, we need to bring on a guy like this. And that's what Brett is to us. He runs our operations so he is our third partner. His last name is Chop so we decided to make Chopper's Red Ale. It kind of goes with the Georgetown theme, because there are red choppers across the street, there's a motorcycle club out there, Magic Wheels, motorcycles that ride up and down Georgetown all the time at the bar so it kind of fit the theme. It's big, it's red, it's bad ass - that's about it. Lots of hops, lots of malt.

[music: Halie Loren: Kitty]

Manny: When we started this company, we feel that as employers, we have an obligation to our employees. We reinvest just about all of the profits we make in this company back in the company. The real reason for that is we believe in this company and we want to grow it. We believe in being able to provide our employees with opportunities for the future. And they're banking their futures on us. I hope, I think, that they're trying to build careers out of this place. In order for us to do that, they're counting on us to grow the business and to make it a healthy business so they really can stay here. Healthcare was something that we looked at and said, when you're young, you feel invincible, you feel you don't need it but if something happens, I mean, you've got to have it... break your arm, go down, you can be a real burden on your family financially. That's just too big of a risk to take. So we feel like it's an obligation as business owners to take care of our people in that way, even though it's pretty expensive for us to do. You know, Roger was in health care, in research, and figured out how we could make it work.

[music: Halie Loren: Kitty]

Roger: We ended up joining the Association of Washington Businesses because we could buy health insurance through them for a really reasonable price. And they offer really good health benefits, and we think that's something that's important. We have health benefits that everybody gets after they've worked 90 days. We make a simple IRA available to our folks. Can't afford to pay them a whole lot; their paycheck isn't the hugest thing in the whole world, but we try and compensate them with other things like health benefits and the ability to contribute tax-defer to a simple IRA, but the employer matching on part of that, and then, obviously, free beer.

[music: Halie Loren: Kitty]

Manny: If you don't know about the Ronald McDonald House, it was started off by all those little Ronald McDonald donation jars that you can donate money into at McDonalds all over the country. What it started is these houses that are available to families. This particular one, it's kids and families who are staying or are being treated at Children's hospitals here in Seattle. This is a regional hospital, so there's kids who come all the way from....

Roger:...Alaska, Washington, Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming.

Manny: Right, and they come here just to get treated, and then they get treated here, they have to stay here for six months, a year, sometimes it can be as short as two weeks... you know, a lot of insurance doesn't cover stays at hotels or whatever, and a lot of people don't have places to stay, so what's nice about the Ronald McDonald House is that they charge you, I think it's 20 bucks a day, but if you can't pay it, you don't have to pay it. And you get this beautiful facility, they have a common area with TV's, they have a kitchen where you can come and cook, and you basically get to stay there for free while your kid is being treated at a Children's hospitals. So the way we got connected with this charity was Bob, Bob Hirsch was a friend of ours. I was his camp counselor at Camp Good Times, which was a camp for kids with cancer, and we had become good friends just through camp. He was 16 when I first had him as a camper. Bob had relapsed once when he was 18. He's from Juneau, so he had to come back to Seattle for treatment, and then his mom would stay at the Ronald McDonald House. Then he relapsed again when he was 20, and unfortunately he passed away last year just after his 21st birthday. Sort of throughout the course of this entire process, when he would come to Seattle, we would spend time together, go watch movies, hang out; we became close. So it was tough to see, and it was actually Bob's brother's idea, Ken, because Bob loved beer. And I remember I went to Juneau for his 21st birthday, and one of the highlights that we had was that we got to go to the Alaskan Brewing Company, and they gave us the insider's tour there, and it was beautiful. It was awesome. He had so much fun. So Bob's brother Ken, when we were talking afterwards, suggested that we name our next beer after Bob. And I talked to Roger and Brett about it and kind of presented the idea of doing that, and we thought it was a great idea. And then we just thought, "Hey it's right for us to, maybe, take this beer and do something good with it." So we talked to his family about it, and they were totally jazzed about it, and we asked them to pick out the charity where the money was going to go to. And they chose the Ronald McDonald House, because it had impacted their lives. So what we do is we brew it once a year, and we release it on May 14th, which is Bob's birthday, and then, like you said, 100% of the proceeds go to the Ronald McDonald House. This year we should be able to raise about 11,000 dollars, which is not bad for a small company. And hopefully we'll be able to continue to make that grow every year. And it's a fun beer to drink, a fun beer for us to make.

[music: Bill: It Won't Hurt]

Manny: We just make draft beer, so we don't bottle. And that makes it kind of limited as to where you can get it, because you can't go to your Safeway or your key QFC to get our beer. So we'd like to say that we're contributing to society by making people be social, because you've got to get out to a bar or restaurant to get our beer, which is a good thing. So right now, we're distributed all throughout, obviously, out on King County. We go all the way north to Bellingham, then south to Olympia. And then we also cover the Kitsap peninsula, all the way out to Port Angelos.

Roger: Kitsap and Olympic peninsulas.

Manny: And Olympic Peninsula. And then we go east to Wenatchee, and then also to Spokane. And then our distributor in Spokane also takes it across the border to Cour d'Alene, Idaho. So that's where it's available right now. Our initial goal is to cover the state of Washington.

[music: Katie Davis: Tell Everyone]

Manny: I always think it would be fun to sit at a grocery store and watch somebody pluck a six-pack of our beer off the shelf. I think it would be really cool. I still get a kick out of sitting at a bar, watching somebody order Anani's. I look at them and I always think, "Do I know that person? Why are they drinking my beer? That's pretty cool." I think it's been a dream of ours to, at some point, bottle. I think it'd be a lot of fun. And then we can get our beer out to a lot further places. That would be neat. I think at some point we definitely want to cover Montana, we definitely want to cover Idaho. Alaska would be a great state to sell beer in. Those guys love their draft beer. But I think, like, northern California, or, like, going down in the Bay Area, that'd be really cool to sell beer down there at some point. The sky's the limit at this point. A lot of it really depends on... you know, we have real questions to ask ourselves as we grow, because Roger is married and he might want to start a family, and maybe I'll start a family someday, but how much you want to work and balancing your work life with how much time you want to commit to this place and how much money you want to risk, those are big questions that we're going to be facing in a couple of years, and you never know until you get there. We'll have to just sit back, or maybe we'll have an employee that's key that we can bring in and say, "Hey, you guys manage the place. You guys help push the place." A lot of it is bringing in the right people to work.

[music: Katie Davis: Tell Everyone]

Roger: Well, Georgetown is an industrial neighborhood, and it also is a residential neighborhood. It's kind of one of the few that goes both ways like that. So there's a lot of... big community that lives down here, and a lot of people are into coming by and picking up a growler picking up a half-gallon or a gallon of fresh beer, straight from the brewery, and actually, really, something we did not anticipate, that we would have this much business to go... that many people stopping by the brewery on a daily basis. It's pretty cool.

[music: Phonkbutt: Boomerang]

Manny: And one of the reasons we located here was, it's industrial, it's less expensive, and not a lot of people could find us, cause initially, we just couldn't... we would be pitching yeast or washing kegs, and somebody would walk in and say, "Hey, can I have a beer?" And as we started to get more popular or known, more and more people started to seek us out. That's why we built a little retail facility there, cause that's where we put all our schwag. It kind of looks like the Gap in there now, we've got t-shirts hung out. And that's where we do samples, and we also pour a lot of growlers there, so that's been really good. We hired a gal, Lisa, who's just doing a fabulous job down there. We do, surprisingly, sell a ton of beer out of that little, tiny place, and we sell a lot of t-shirts and a lot of hats out of there too. So that's been kind of fun for us, because then we see people wearing our merchandise around town, which is kind of neat.

[music: Phonkbutt: Boomerang]

Go to our website, it's www.georgetownbeer.com, and there's actually a lot of useful information on there about where we're actually served. We do sell a lot of kegs to go now, so we're set up for that, so if anybody has parties, they can buy kegs. We have various sizes. We have a small keg that's 2.61 gallons, which is like a case of beer, so if you want that for a small party, it's good, or you can buy a full keg, and we make it pretty easy for people. So just visit the site, and there's information. We have a mailing list, too, that you can sign up for, on, and we send a notice about once a week out that talks about our events, social events that we do, and....

Roger:...it gets you in the loop, more normal brewer's night. You can come out and win a t-shirt or a pint glass or something, drink a little bit of our beer at a pint night in an alehouse somewhere.

Manny: Just get people out. Be social. Drink beer. Drink good beer.

[music: Phonkbutt: Boomerang]