JB // I know I’ve told this story a bunch of times, but our history goes way back. If you go to ... our very first issue, which was, of course, an IPA issue—I wrote a feature on barrel aging. As a corollary to that, we did a little thing on barrel aging at home. And, of course, your homebrew barrel-age projects are featured in that very first issue of the magazine. And you were a blind-panel judge for the first couple of years. As we look back now, with a decade of experience between then and now since we became friends … and that “friends” thing is the other cool thing: So much of this industry came from a group of passionate beer drinkers [and] homebrewers. It’s kind of fascinating—this is our story, this connection over a shared passion for beer, but it’s not just our story. It’s so many stories throughout craft beer—so much of what we now refer to as the craft-beer industry is made up of passionate individuals who are driven by that interest, by that shared connection. And it’s amazing to see how business connects us now, but it was friendship and the shared passion that got everything started. I think that’s just one of those beautiful, unique features of the craft-beer world.
NF // I couldn’t agree more. I think it was especially evident [on February 8], hosting the [WeldWerks] Invitational for the first time since 2022 and having you there and 44 breweries, including WeldWerks. ... Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in [whether] the industry, as a whole, is down right now. And I think some of that gets overblown. Some of that worst-case scenario creeps in too much, the doom and gloom. And you forget that at its core, and the reason this has been successful, why so many of us love this, is that passion. It’s that excitement for craft beer. [The Invitational] for me was just a huge reminder that there’s still so much excitement, there’s so much momentum, there’s so much growth. At the core of why we’re all so excited, it’s that passion for beer and for craft brewing and homebrewing and all the things that make it so special. And it’s the people.
JB // It’s been a couple of years since we last talked in any kind of serious and personal way outside of a group panel. Get us up to date on WeldWerks. What’s been the story for the past two years?
NF // As part of our kind of 10th anniversary celebration, we brought back the Invitational as kind of a way to celebrate. It’s surreal. Obviously 10 years is a milestone that you don’t really think about when you open your business, your brewery. You just hope you don’t close.
JB // And there have been so many milestones for you guys. You opened, and it was a pretty standard approach to beer. You didn’t even sell 500 barrels that first year. And it was the standard, almost ’90s-holdover craft-beer styles with a few exceptions. You pivoted quickly after that first year, and things kind of took off.
NF // I think a lot of it for us was a little bit of your influence as a friend. You put a bug in my ear about a new style, hazy IPA, and maybe I should consider it. And then Juicy Bits, shortly after our one-year anniversary, really changed that trajectory. I think a lot of it was just not being committed to “this is exactly how we have to do our businesses. This is what we’re going to make, and this is who we’re going to sell to.” It was always having an idea of “we’re not going to chase trends. We’re also not going to be just shut off to things.” I think diversification, creativity, innovation is kind of how we got there. I’d love to know more about you guys. It’s been more than 11 years, right?
JB // We incorporated in September 2013, were operational by December 2013, and had our first issue out in March 2014. And it’s the same story—I think that this is a common story, not just within beer, but in business. … These days, people are talking about how craft beer’s keg has kicked and it’s dead. But statistically speaking, we’re a couple of percentage points down after an epic tear—a growth streak that is unprecedented in the history of industrial beer production. We all see stock market run-ups, right? There’s always a correction. Maybe we’re in a correction phase right now. But the idea that somehow this isn’t relevant, or it’s done—it seems ... vastly overstated. We started a multifaceted media business with print magazines. If you were to ask someone, “What do you think of the idea of starting a media business with print magazines?” in 2013, everyone would have said, “Are you insane? That’s the worst idea that you could possibly come up with.” And, they’re not wrong. I think that’s a kind of a corollary [to] where we are with craft breweries today. Should you start a craft brewery? The default answer should probably be, “No.”
NF // And if all of us agreed that is the most sensible thing, no brewery would open. But every act of entrepreneurialism is an act of optimism. You have to be an optimist. You have to think that tomorrow is going to be better than today. In 2014, 2015, we started talking about opening a brewery ... in Greeley, Colorado. For those not in Colorado, Greeley is just a very different place from Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins, the Front Range as a whole, and obviously the Western Slope. There was a lot of skepticism that you could create a successful brand based in Greeley—making beer that would sell not just to the rest of the state, but maybe to the rest of the country. And I think that if I had listened to everyone who gave me advice, we absolutely would never have opened—and certainly not in Greeley, and we certainly wouldn’t have called ourselves WeldWerks in a kind of homage to our area. I think if everyone were to take the most solid, sound advice, it’d be to never take these kinds of risks.
JB // Even in 2013, 2014, there was a lot of talk out there that craft beer was already too big, that the growth phase was over, that there was no room for any more breweries, that the bubble was going to burst. It was the end of growth, and why would anyone start another brewery? When we launched Craft Beer & Brewing, that was a prevailing narrative. Maybe there is just an inbuilt “sky is falling” kind of nature. There’s an optimism, but also, an inbuilt pessimism that goes along with that. And everyone was convinced that it was so good that it couldn’t last forever, that the other shoe had to drop. But it was growing 300 percent.
NF // Even now, I think the resounding sentiment is that there’s just no growth to be had. Meanwhile, we’ve not had a year without growth since our opening. Even last year, even 2023, we had much more modest growth than in the past, but over 7 to 10 percent over the past two years, and [there’s] still growth on the horizon. I think anybody who is going to invest the time to learn about opening a brewery or finding the resources they need, [that] just demonstrates that if you’re passionate and you can find the resources you need, you can be successful, even when maybe the industry as a whole is not growing like it was 10 years ago. We’re all getting kind of fatigued by the headlines like, “Is Craft Beer Done?” And I can’t say for sure, for everyone. I can say definitively, for a good number, that it’s far from that. There’s still some optimism and growth.
JB // I’ve had a bunch of conversations with brewers about that. And I think that this is the thing: When the markets are going nowhere but up, it creates a lot of opportunity for anyone who wants to get into a business. And there’s just success because things grow. I think we saw that for a lot of craft beer’s history, a lot of businesses maybe weren’t managed as well as they could have been. They didn’t need to be well-managed because growth just means more cash, and more cash means we can take on some more risk, and we can grow, and we can buy new things, and we don’t have to worry about it because we’re always going to keep growing. I think what we’ve ultimately found is that there are a number of businesses that just didn’t have the discipline with that kind of growth. They forecasted incorrectly. They planned for growth. It didn’t materialize. They took risks based on some of that growth, and they stepped out off the overhang and didn’t have enough rope to hold them up. So there have been some real challenges around that. Some really great breweries that I think were making incredible beer have, unfortunately, not made it through this. It’s not simply a story of, “you didn’t make good product, and now you’re not in business.” It’s not that simple. And there’s no easy answer as to what is causing these things. Some of it is very geographical, down to street and city level. Some of it is state-level challenges. Some of it is economic operations. Some of it is different kinds of state laws.
NF // I think what you’re saying is that every recipe for success is different. With someone who wants to open a brewery in 2025, the immediate reaction—if you were to ask a group right now in craft beer—they would groan. What do you think in 2025 will make a new brewery, or even an established brewery, successful? I think there’s some real positives to no longer just being able to put out a product, whether it’s quality or not. We’ve had to get sharper as businesses, as breweries, in order to succeed. Today, the quality standard is so much higher.
JB // The quality is table stakes. You’ve got to make great beer to even be in the conversation. And if you don’t, your business is not going to go right, so I think that’s now almost the given.
NF // So, what is it beyond that? I’m excited for the fact that we won’t have to have this quality discussion as an industry like we did five years ago, where it was like, “Those of you who are putting out bad beer are really hurting the rest of us.” That’s not a conversation anymore. … So, what is past that baseline? What do you think will really help those that stand out in the next 24 months?
JB // If I look at it for craft beer, and especially small craft breweries, I think that probably one of the biggest challenges that small craft breweries face today is being too small and finding it incredibly expensive to operate the business. ... Any hospitality business is going to have a large number of staff, and the more people in your business, the more challenging operating that business is. It’s just math—people are the most wonderful and the most challenging part of every business, even more so than cash flow and marketing and everything else. So, in that sense, finding a critical mass of revenue that can support the resources that you need to build into that business, so that you can operate it properly, so that financially you can reserve cash, you can manage your cash flow, make sure you’ve got the money that you need when you need it—to build resources, to manage the staff in a more efficient way that’s fair to them and fair to you. And I think that that scale piece is probably one of the most challenging things. How do you feel about that as a brewery operator?
NF // I think that’s exactly the challenge: How do you overhead labor? There’s a certain scale—and I think we’ve crossed that threshold, where the efficiency gains from going from 6,000 or 7,000 barrels a year to more than 15,000 barrels a year. On paper, it seemed really scary, but the efficiencies you gain, and helping amortize that overhead over a bigger footprint than some of these positions are—you kind of need them. No matter what size brewery you are, you need that kind of personnel. You need specialized labor. … Some of it does scale. Obviously, you make more beer, you buy more ingredients—those are easy. The COGS side of things is easy. But it’s the overhead, it’s the fixed costs that you really—especially as labor costs come up, and everything else—you have to figure out that critical mass.
For us at WeldWerks, that was one thing we were really cautious about—growing and adding our biggest expansion to date, a little over two years ago, to add our 30-barrel brewhouse and everything that came with that. [We were] hovering around 10,000 [barrels a year], giving us the runway to go above that and be coming over the 15,000 mark that we’re at today. But the challenge is that it’s a lot of risk, a lot of taking on debt at a scale we hadn’t before. Talking close to $2 million—that was significantly more than we’d ever taken on to do anything. But in the grand scheme, it wasn’t as big a risk as we’ve seen. We’d seen some pitfalls of going too big—like “let’s do a $10 million buildout and renovation.” And by 90 days from that completion—or even from financing that—you have to have the tanks full. So, you have to go from a 10,000-barrel brewery, you have to be 25,000 within 12 months or you’re not going to make it. And we’ve seen so many of those stories, especially legacy brands that today are so different than they were. And we just wanted to make sure we could position ourselves where we could still grow but not be pigeonholed to where if we don’t [grow] by 50 to 100 percent in the next 10 years, we’re out of business. I think that’s a challenge a lot of businesses are figuring out. How do we right-size our growth, our team, our personnel, our resources? And then how do you get from where you are today to where you want to be? Maybe that’s 5 percent, and maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s flat. Flat is not necessarily bad, if you can figure out how to accomplish your goals as a business and as an entity.
JB // And I think the other thing is also being honest about what those opportunities are. When you find yourself going down a road and the circumstances change, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be the right thing for you, then not being afraid to say, “Hey, that’s not the thing for us. We’re going to do something else.”
NF // What makes you excited about continuing to tell the craft-beer story? Because I think it’s more valuable than you probably even think about. From the industry’s perspective, you guys have done a job that no one else has done. In terms of the last decade of telling stories, giving people opportunities to learn, to interact, to engage. There’s plenty of events and festivals and things that do that in different ways, but I just don’t know of any one entity that’s kind of carried that torch more than Craft Beer & Brewing. What makes you excited about doing it in 2025?
JB // What else can I do? I still love it. I get to do this thing—work that I love to do in a community that I love to be around, working with friends of mine in the industry all the time, and that just bleeds across. It doesn’t feel like work when it’s something that you love to do. And I joke about that—if you love what you do, you’ll work every day of your life. But I know that the things that drive me, like last year in writing an editor’s review of a Kros Strain barleywine that ended up making it into our Beers of the Year—because Kros Strain, for whatever reason, has now had three beers of the year, because they can’t stop just crushing it with different styles. But I remember tasting that beer, and it’s going to sound cheesy to say it, but I just felt this welling up of emotion and this excitement that beer could be this. And I taste those beers from time to time that are like, “Oh my god, I just can’t believe beer can taste like this—that it can bring back the sense memories.” I am constantly thinking about time, place, smells, and tastes and how those connect to those things. And it’s almost like the movie Ratatouille, when the critic tastes this dish, and you go through the historical montage of life. And I think about that, and I still experience that. I think most of us do, when you have something that’s really, really special. And that’s the space that beer is still at for me. I mean, I know that if it’s ever not, then it’s probably time to hang it up.
This excerpt from Episode 400 of the Craft Beer & Brewing podcast has been edited for clarity and length.