Up until this point, things had been deeply, relentlessly frustrating. Every single property we looked at felt like a puzzle with missing pieces. On my end, I was pouring dozens of hours into each potential site—analyzing how a floor plan change affected our daily operations, estimating buildout costs, mapping out plumbing, and stressing over potential dealbreakers.

And every single one of them ended up being a dead end.

We were five or six locations deep, and after months of grinding, measuring, and burning midnight oil, we had absolutely nothing to show for it except lost time. But this is the exact point in the story where frustration morphed into something much wilder.

Things began to spiral.

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The Build-to-Suit Breakup

We got wind of a brand-new commercial development going in on the north side of town—specifically on the southeast corner of River and Douglas. It is arguably the single busiest intersection on the entire north side of Holland. The accessibility was a little tricky, but the sheer volume of daily eyeballs drove John Cash and me to take a meeting with the developer.

This was pitched as a build-to-suit anchor project. They were looking for a high-profile restaurant or brewery to set the tone for the entire strip center, meaning we could essentially dictate the square footage of our space.

By this point, my original vision of a modest taproom serving hot dogs had completely vanished. I had modified the business plan to match our growing desperation: a larger brewhouse, a full-service restaurant focusing on pizza, and a much bigger footprint.

A build-to-suit arrangement meant we wouldn’t need as much cash upfront for core structural construction. But as we sat down with the developer to negotiate rent terms, the numbers started to look insane.

When John Cash and I ran the financial models, the math told a brutal story. Sure, the business might generate enough top-line revenue to survive, but at the end of the day, the landlord was going to make a hell of a lot more money off our sweat than we ever were. Worse yet, because John was looking for an eventual exit strategy down the road where I would buy out his equity, taking on an astronomical lease made a future buyout mathematically impossible.

I called the developer to politely pass on the deal.

To say he was pissed would be a massive understatement. He was furious that we had wasted his time. Before I could even finish my explanation, he slammed the phone down in my ear and never spoke to me again.

Just like that, another door slammed abruptly shut.

Buying the Dirt

After picking up the pieces from that phone call, John Cash sat me down for a reality check.

It was equal portions exactly what I wanted to hear and the most frightening thing ever was when he said “What if we just do this on our own instead of working with a developer? Forget paying someone else’s inflated mortgage. I’ll buy the land, build the building, and that can be my equity return. Let’s just go big.”

From an investor’s perspective, his logic was completely sound. By funding a ground-up build, John would own a securable real estate asset. If the brewery failed, he could still sell the dirt and the physical shell to recoup a massive chunk of his capital.

Anyone who knows anything about commercial construction will tell you that launching a ground-up brewery from scratch is a ridiculously expensive proposition. But at this point, I was getting desperate. I was still operating under that stubborn, high-horsepower athletic mindset: You’re standing at the plate; you’ve got to swing the bat.

So, we went for it.

We locked eyes on a prominent vacant lot just down the road on Ottawa Beach Road, sitting right next to the longstanding local staple, the Itty Bitty Bar. It checked every imaginable box: it was close to the north side population center, captured heavy seasonal beach traffic, had great road presence, and was practically in my own backyard.

I sat down at my laptop and overhauled the business plan for the third (or sixth) time.

The new model was a $2.5 million to $3.0 million monster: a ground-up facility holding a massive full-service restaurant, a large production brewhouse, and ambitious plans for regional distribution.

Looking back, it was completely and totally over my head. An inexperienced, first-time business owner taking on a $3 million ground-up development is a recipe for absolute disaster. But when you are running on pure adrenaline and desperation, you convince yourself you can handle anything.

Monopoly Money and Stainless Steel

We retained a local commercial realtor and hired a talented architect to run a comprehensive feasibility study on the Ottawa Beach site. Ground-up commercial development requires navigating a labyrinth of local codes: surface runoff retention ponds, parking ratios, utility hookups, and proper traffic ingress and egress.

It was genuinely exciting to see real blueprints taking shape. We even approached the owners of the neighboring Itty Bitty Bar about a mutually beneficial arrangement. They were looking to reconfigure their entryway, so we designed a site plan that featured a single, shared main entrance off Ottawa Beach Road, expanding available parking for both businesses. On paper, it was a brilliant, win-win setup.

Around this time, I started holding regular strategy meetings with my friend Barry Johnson.

I had met Barry years prior at the bar of 8th Street Grill back in the early days of Holland’s craft boom. Barry was a wealth of industry knowledge having been in the Michigan brewing industry from day one. He was the original head brewer at Saugatuck Brewing Company, and at the time, he was working for Craft Works Brewing Equipment—a high-end, bespoke equipment manufacturer based out of Detroit.

Barry and I would sit down to map out the physical realities of a major production facility: grain handling, glycol piping, fermentation capacity, and custom stainless steel layouts.

The custom Craft Works brewhouse we spec’d out cost considerably more than the entire real-world budget I would eventually put into building Brewery 4 Two 4 years later. The numbers were so absurdly large that the money didn’t even feel real anymore. It felt like playing Monopoly. We were throwing around millions of dollars on paper, convincing ourselves that this mega-brewery was actually going to happen.

We had a feasible site plan, an architectural blueprint, and a fully flushed-out business model. It was time to buy the dirt.

The $225,000 Middle Finger

The vacant lot on Ottawa Beach Road was officially listed on the market with a local commercial broker for $200,000.

After reviewing the site feasibility with our team, our realtor submitted a fair, market-rate offer of $160,000. Following standard commercial real estate protocol, the offer included explicit contingencies: the sale was dependent on receiving township site plan approvals, environmental sign-offs, and the necessary special-use permits to operate a brewery.

A few days later, my phone rang. It was our realtor.

“Well,” he sighed, “I’ve got some good news and some terrible news. We have a counteroffer, but I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

Turns out, somewhere during the negotiation process, the owner of the land discovered our site plan idea to create a shared entrance with the Itty Bitty Bar. To this day, I have no idea what ancient local history caused it, but the landowner possessed a deep, burning, apocalyptic hatred for the Itty Bitty Bar—and alcohol sales in general. Old school Dutch Reformed teatotalers I assume.

Finding out that we were partnering with their mortal enemy to open a brewery pushed them into an apparent rage.

Their response to our $160,000 contingent offer on a $200,000 parcel?

A counteroffer of $225,000—a full $25,000 above their own asking price—all cash, with ZERO contingencies.

It wasn’t a counter-negotiation. It was a batshit crazy, $225,000 middle finger for even daring to ask. The counter was so completely unhinged and unprofessional that the seller’s own listing realtor was deeply embarrassed, apologized profusely to our team, and fired the landowner as a client on the spot.

Needless to say, the deal was dead in the water.

After almost a year of work, thousands of dollars burned on architectural feasibility studies, and endless late-night spreadsheet revisions, we were shoved right back to square zero.

We had nothing to show for our effort except a stack of useless blueprints, a mountain of wasted time, and a negative bank balance.

And as we would soon learn... this was going to become a very common theme. Desperation leads to another major change of venue in episode 7.

Start from the beginning of this story in episode 1 by clicking here.

Before we officially crossed the Rubicon into business planning, Erin and I were just taking casual notes and snapping pictures of things we liked and hated at other taprooms. But it wasn’t real. It was a side hobby. Living the enviable lifestyle of dual income, no kids (DINKs), we spent a massive amount of our time and disposable income traveling to the great beer destinations of America.

Just about every single vacation we took was beer-centric in some way, shape, or form. We jetted off to Asheville, San Diego, Denver, Tampa, Boston, and the heavy hitters of the Pacific Northwest across Oregon and Washington. We even made a specific pilgrimage to coastal Delaware just to see how Dogfish Head ran their operation.

It was a great life. But eventually, it was time to stop drinking other people’s liquid, sit down at a desk, and organize those scattered notes into a real, breathing business plan.

At the absolute beginning of the process, I naively thought that putting the numbers together and securing a commercial location would be the easy part of the gig.

I was wrong. As I mentioned briefly at the tail end of the last chapter, the building the brewery currently sits in today holds a bizarre, frustrating piece of our history: it was both the very first location we explored, and the thirteenth. In the early going, it felt like every single piece of real estate we touched either completely fell apart or carried a massive, hidden flaw.

Looking back, maybe that should have been an omen. Because as this story progresses, the real estate hunt only gets worse. If this were a work of fiction, you’d probably put the book down because the plot points feel too over-the-top. But reality has a funny way of being stranger than fiction.

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321 Douglas, Suite 120 (Take One)

Our current home at 321 Douglas, Suite 120, was the literal starting line. It was a space I already had my eye on for two very distinct reasons.

First, it checked the physical boxes for my partner John Cash and me: great visibility, high traffic counts, an end-cap unit, and most importantly, no miserable basement to haul spent grain out of. At this stage, we hadn’t fully decided if we were going to run a full food operation or stick strictly to the beer only model. John, being the savvy businessman he was, wanted a food revenue stream, but he wanted it high-margin and mechanically simple.

Our grand strategy? Hot dogs.

It required a tiny footprint, it was fast, and it was easy. We wouldn’t need an industrial dishwasher or a front-of-house serving staff, but we could still capture a quick lunch crowd.

The second reason I loved the location was a deep personal connection. My best friend and former college roommate, Andy, had initially grown up right here in the Holland area before his parents separated and he moved up north, which is where we met. I had visited him down here during the summers over the years, so I was well aware of the building. More importantly, Andy’s dad, Rusty, actually owned the strip center along with several apartment complexes around town. I knew the landlord, I knew the building, and it felt like a total slam dunk.

When I sat down with Rusty to lay out our proposal, he liked the idea, but he had one small, reasonable request: stop into Sluggo’s Pizza next door and make sure the owner, Don, was cool with the plan.

What I didn’t know at the time was that my partner, John Cash, had already stopped in to be neighborly and talk to Don. And without thinking through the psychological connection between beer and pizza, the conversation had gone completely sideways. Don didn’t hear “small neighborhood craft brewery.” All he heard was: A packed taproom is going to steal all my parking and compromise my quick to-go lunch sales with their fast hot dog concept.

So, when I walked into Sluggo’s to clear the air, Don came at me absolutely guns blazing. He wanted nothing to do with us.

I tried to gently smooth things over, calm the waters, and ask if we could just start the conversation over from scratch, but they were absolutely not having it. Now, a grumpy neighbor didn’t technically eliminate the building from contention, but we were incredibly green in this process. I knew right then that I did not want to sign a long-term lease with a next-door neighbor who was already completely pissed off that we existed. That wasn’t the kind of cross-promotional food relationship I wanted to build.

On top of the toxic neighbor dynamic, that specific end unit had a persistent, ongoing roof leak. No one could figure out exactly where the water was coming from or how to fix it, which promised to be an operational nightmare if it wasn’t fixed.

With a hostile neighbor and a leaky roof in front of us, we decided to walk away.

Chasing Dead Ends

Remember, at this point in the timeline, we had no rigid blueprints. We had no real grasp on just how massive or how small this project was ultimately going to be.

With the Douglas property off the table, we immediately looked at an old Blockbuster Video location in a shopping complex on the corner of River and Lakewood. It was a much larger unit, but the visibility was solid. I pulled out my measuring tape, took down the specs, and actually sketched up floor plan drawings for the space. Because of the size, the hot dog plan was out; we would have built our own internal pizza kitchen and run a much larger, full-service establishment.

But as we got deeper into the weeds and started ball-parking estimates for a buildout of that size, the math began to unravel. Compounding the issue, the landlord was not super flexible on a few things we needed to execute, so we pulled the plug and walked.

Next, we decided to go completely against our geographic instincts and checked out the south side of Holland at a spot in Washington Square. It was a beautiful, historic space with a ton of character, but it violated the prime directive I learned during my apprenticeship at Our Brewing Company: thou shalt not brew in a basement. The building had an old timber construction, and trying to brew on the main floor with a hollow basement directly underneath it simply wasn’t structurally viable for the weight of the tanks. Strike three.

We kept hunting. We looked at a commercial space that was operating as a karate dojo. The internal specs actually checked out, but the unit was tucked squarely on the backside of the building. Sure, we could have put up a sign on the road, but the taproom doors were completely invisible from the main thoroughfare. John Cash immediately invoked the financier’s veto. He wasn’t about to deploy capital into a retail location that couldn’t leverage high-traffic road visibility.

Next, I looked at another unit right down the strip from the old Blockbuster location, but the layout was a total mess. It was far too tight, and the back alley access was entirely inadequate for a commercial truck to drop off raw materials and pallets.

By the time we walked away from an old outlet mall location due to the same exact trifecta of poor visibility, tight spaces, and predatory rent terms, we had looked at five or six different properties.

The Terrifying Pivot

We were only five or six locations deep, but it had already been at least eight months of constant grinding, measuring, and negotiating. The frustration was getting real.

Standing in the wreckage of half a dozen dead deals, John and I realized something fundamental about the market: a “beer-only” taproom simply wasn’t going to generate enough top-line revenue to survive the rent environment in Holland and be profitable without some real creativity. Ironically, this was an important realization.

But at the time? It was terrifying.

The small, simple taproom dream was officially dead. The model morphed into a massive, full-service restaurant brewery. I went back to the spreadsheet and tweaked the business model, which massively inflated our projected revenue, but also exploded our startup costs and daily overhead liabilities to a degree that honestly scared the hell out of me. It was way over my head.

But when you are running down a dream, you have to be flexible enough to realize that the destination rarely looks like the map you started with.

We set out into the wild looking for a piece of real estate that could handle a plan much bigger than we had ever originally envisioned. And while the first eight months had been an exercise in frustration, this is the exact moment where the timeline shifts from frustrating to flat-out ridiculous.

We’ll get into that in Episode 6.

Let’s talk about the beer.

I mentioned earlier that during my sophomore dumpster-fire year at Grand Valley State, my beer preferences consisted almost entirely of Milwaukee’s Best. After all, it says “Premium” right on the can, so who was I to argue? It is a pretty massive stretch to go from hauling thirty-racks of “The Beast” into a college apartment to becoming a proficient brewer and craft beer aficionado.

So, how exactly did I get there?

It started with a look of absolute disgust. During our sophomore year, my roommate and best friend, Andy, had gone to London for a study abroad program. While he was over there, he developed a taste for British pub culture. He came back to the States drinking the likes of Guinness, Fuller’s ESB, and Beamish.

I distinctly remember the first time he made me try a Guinness upon his return. I took a sip, and I am pretty sure my face turned completely inside out. I hated it. I had not developed any kind of palate for bitterness. I didn’t like roasty flavors, and I wasn’t even a coffee drinker at the time. There was absolutely nothing appealing about that thick, dark liquid to me.

So, my evolution wasn’t exactly a fast turn. But Andy’s curiosity for different styles planted a seed.

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Barside Founders

By the time Andy and I both turned twenty-one, we were working at Kent Country Club on the northeast side of Grand Rapids, but we were living all the way on the southwest side of town.

Geographically, sitting exactly right in the middle of our commute was the original location of Founders Brewing Company.

If you know anything about craft beer today, you are deeply familiar with Founders. They became one of the largest craft brewers in the entire country before eventually being majority acquired by a European macro-brewer. But back then? They were just a little fella.

We made the old Founders taproom an almost daily habit. We were regulars sitting at the bar, soaking in the atmosphere. As one naturally does when exposed to a constant rotation of craft beer, you start trying things. My palate finally started to wake up. I officially swapped out Milwaukee’s Best for Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, which was my gateway drug into the wider craft world.

I was far from being a craft beer snob, but I was officially “craft curious.” It was the beginning of a hobby that would grow aggressively alongside the industry as the American craft beer boom began to take shape. I found myself traveling to more breweries, trying different styles, and learning how flavors were built.

I started to really appreciate the history, the cultural background, and the culinary science of it all. I wanted to know why these beers tasted the way they did.

My Future Wife, The Brewer

It wasn’t too many years after that era that I met Erin, who would become my wife.

There were a lot of things about Erin and I that clicked immediately. She is originally from Wisconsin, just like my entire dad’s side of the family. She was a die-hard Packers fan, as was I. She was also a two-sport college athlete at Ripon College, competing in basketball and track. Because she was an athlete, she implicitly understood the weird, psychotic coach’s mindset I operated under. She understood the grind.

Also, anyone familiar with the Midwest knows that Wisconsinites do not play around when it comes to drinking.

At the time we met, Erin had just finished grad school at UW-Green Bay and moved to Michigan to pursue a job in the Lansing area. On our first date, I walked into her place and was more than pleased to find that she had a functioning kegerator right there in her house. She had bought the place, was renting rooms out to several friends, and it definitely still maintained a fun, grad-school party vibe. The half-barrel of Labatt Blue sitting inside the kegerator fit the aesthetic perfectly.

Many of our early dates consisted of going to local breweries, sampling flights, and enjoying the scene. But here comes the really important part: Erin and her roommates had a homebrewing setup.

They lived not terribly far from one of the legendary, early homebrew shops in Michigan called Things Beer over in Williamston. They had begun brewing their own batches, honestly, probably just to keep the overall cost of beer down for the house.

So, I often tell people it is an absolute truth: I learned how to brew from my wife.

Initially, it was just a fun little weekend activity. But eventually, when Erin and I moved in together and bought a house on the lakeshore in 2006, we started actively amassing a serious homebrew equipment collection. Most homebrewers will tell you that the gear acquisition never really ends. You get to a point where you have everything you functionally need to make liquid, but there is always something bigger, shinier, and more precise that you can buy.

We bought all the stuff.

By the time we settled on the lakeshore, I was brewing at home a lot—usually a couple of weekends a month. I had built a massive custom kegerator that held six Cornelius (”corny”) kegs, meaning we usually had three, four, or five different taps of homebrew pouring at any given time. This is incredibly handy when you’re young, childless, and hosting parties.

It was through these constant repetitions in the garage that I truly fell in love with the process. Brewing is equal parts cooking, chemistry, and art. You have to have a grasp on all three to be any good. Understanding the chemistry is vital to making clean beer that is actually repeatable, and having culinary creativity is the only way you grow beyond just downloading other people’s clone recipes from the internet.

I became pretty solid at it. I was making custom beers for friends’ birthdays and weddings. I was brewing so much volume that we ended up giving most of it away just so people could try it and give me feedback. I wasn’t actually interested in drinking five gallons of my own pale ale; I just wanted a 12-ounce pour, a notebook for flavor notes, and the runway to start the next batch.

And unlike a lot of homebrewers, I kept drinking every commercial craft beer I could get my hands on. I think that is a key to keeping yourself in check and not becoming “homebrew-blind.”

Soup to (Beer) Nuts

A regular haunt for Erin and me at the time was the 8th Street Grill in downtown Holland.

This was the early days of the craft boom, and Holland—with its incredibly conservative, Dutch Christian Reformed population—was naturally going to lag behind the rest of the country when it came to alcohol trends. 8th Street Grill was a fascinating dichotomy. On one hand, it was known as an old people’s hangout. They had an all-day soup bar, senior discounts, and the elder population of downtown literally ate it up.

But Mike, the owner, saw where the beer market was going. He started bringing in more and more craft options. Eventually, they started getting allocations of rare beers that were hard to find anywhere else in West Michigan. It was the place to be for beer in Holland at the time.

We were in there enough to be on a first-name basis with basically all the bartenders. We met dozens of “beer friends” sitting at that bar who are still our good friends—and loyal taproom customers—to this day.

One of those bartenders was a guy named Clay.

There was a brand-new startup brewery in planning just down the street called Our Brewing Company, and Clay was going to bartend there as well and was very excited about the new addition downtown. He had gotten to know the owners, Trevor and Dane, during their build-out phase.

Crucially, Clay had also drunk a fair amount of my homebrew. He knew I wasn’t just messing around in my garage; I could actually make some highly drinkable beer. So, Clay introduced me to Trevor, Dane, and their head brewer, Ed.

I brought over a load of my homebrew one day, and we all hung out in the basement brewery at Our Brewing, chatting, drinking, and having a grand old time.

This was right before they officially opened their doors to the public. Like almost everyone in this industry, they were opening on a total shoestring budget. Because capital was tight, they had decided to launch the brewery using a half-barrel Sabco Brew-Magic system. The Sabco is a legendary little pilot system that has launched several successful breweries, but during the absolute height of the craft beer boom, relying on a half-barrel system to supply a commercial taproom was incredibly, painfully undersized.

Opening night at Our Brewing was absolute chaos. The place was packed to the walls, with a line out the door. It became painfully clear about two hours into the shift that they were going to burn through a stock of beer that was supposed to last them for two weeks in a single weekend.

After enjoying a few too many of those beers myself while sitting at the packed bar, I leaned over and half-drunk blurted to Trevor: “Hey, if you guys ever want me to brew to help catch up... let me know.”

Trevor didn’t miss a beat. “Sweet. I’ll see you Sunday.”

Sunday Slow Jams

Trevor and I started brewing together on the weekends just to keep the taps flowing. Ed would brew his brains out during the week, and Trevor and I would knock out a batch or two on Sundays. It was just a side gig to help out some guys I liked. I’d come up with the occasional recipe, and we’d listen to a lot of R&B slow jams while mashing in. That became our Sunday ritual for three or four months until their order for larger commercial equipment finally arrived.

Through that basement apprenticeship, I got to meet a lot of other people in the local industry. OBC took me to several beer festivals where they were pouring. I got to stand behind the jockey boxes, talk to actual customers, and watch complete strangers enjoy a beer that I had a hand in creating.

That feeling is infectious. It grabs ahold of you.

It started to pop into my head: Maybe I could actually do this professionally.

At one point, I even approached Trevor about the idea of buying in as a partner at OBC. They were, for very obvious and mathematically sound reasons, not interested. A small brewery with two owners splitting the equity is already a tight squeeze; there isn’t a whole lot of pie left to take home. Adding a third mouth to feed didn’t make sense.

But that idea falling through planted the real dream in my head. I wanted my own place. At the time, I definitely didn’t have the financial resources to do it myself, so it remained a pipe dream. We’d go out for drinks with our good friends Nate and Haley, and we’d just toss around “what if” scenarios about what it would be like to own a brewery.

And that brings us right back to where we left off at the end of Chapter 3: at basketball practice with my assistant coach, “John Cash.”

John, the private credit/finance guy, became highly aware of my homebrewing obsession and my weekend moonlighting in the industry. Being the savvy financier that he is, he looked at me and said the magic words:

“So when are we going to open a brewery? You work up a business plan. We’ll figure it out.”

Now, for people like my wife and me—who were at the time incredibly straight arrows following a traditional track from high school, to college, to safe public sector jobs—the idea of tossing all of that stability out the window to launch a startup was horrifying. At least to me it was.

On top of that, as I mentioned in the very first chapter, I knew the brutal, unvarnished perils of owning a small business. I grew up inside one. I knew what it did to your schedule, your stress levels, and your family dynamic.

Erin didn’t have that specific childhood trauma. She was, perhaps, a little blissfully unaware of exactly how much of a psychological grind it actually is. Because of that, she pushed me toward the edge of the cliff a lot harder than I wanted to go myself.

I distinctly remember laying out the stakes to her. I was hyper-aware of the risk. I told her, “This is a massive gamble. Everything we’ve ever worked for could be gone. We are not going to have any days off, let alone weekends off, for years. It is going to be brutal.”

Erin looked right at me, and in her classic, no-nonsense fashion, snapped back:

“Well fine. We’ll just work our stupid government jobs the rest of our lives and never do anything cool.”

It was blunt. It stung. But it was exactly the wake-up call I needed to hear. She was already all in and believed I could do it.

You only live once. You have a guy with the funding ready to make it happen. He believes in you. Your wife is pushing you to take the leap. You are standing at the plate; you have to swing the bat.

So, John Cash and I started getting serious. We began talking about what the model would look like, what I needed to do to prepare, and how we were going to find a location.

The Non-Negotiables

Through the process of helping out at OBC, I learned a few very specific lessons about what I absolutely would not tolerate in a commercial building.

They brewed in the basement. They did not have a service elevator. When the grain delivery truck would arrive, they had to manually slide all the 55-pound bags of grain down the stairs. Then, you mash in. The grain absorbs the water, meaning that spent grain now weighs four times as much as it did when it was dry.

Now, all of that heavy, soaking-wet, boiling-hot grain has to go back up the stairs. They had to shovel it into five-gallon buckets, carry them up two at a time, and dump them into farm barrels outside.

As much as it is a good workout, I wasn’t going to do that every day.

Grade-level access and no basements became an operational non-negotiable.

On John’s end, as the finance and business guy, having the right premium storefront with high visibility was his absolute non-negotiable.

Finding a spot that checked my industrial requirements and his retail demands was going to make finding the right location more than a little difficult. Additionally, we very much wanted to stay on the north side of Holland, not downtown. But the north side doesn’t have cool, 100-year-old brick manufacturing buildings. It was all woods and farms 100 years ago. These factors made the building hunt very difficult. In fact, the building we are currently sitting in today holds a very special place in our history.

It was both the very first location I looked at, and the thirteenth.

But we’ll get into the details of the hunt in Episode 5.

Start from the beginning with Episode 1 here.

You opened an article about building a craft brewery from scratch, and here I am, pulling up a chair to talk about high school basketball. Confused yet?

Stay with me.

Right as I was finishing up my degree at Grand Valley State, pulling double duty with Penn State’s turf program, I took on another job that would fill the gap of the golf course off-season. It was a job that paid next to nothing, consumed well over a thousand hours of my life every single year, and became an accidental, fourteen-year executive training program.

I got into coaching high school basketball.

Up to that point in my life, basketball was the single solitary thing I had ever truly applied myself to. I loved it. I played a lot of sports growing up, but basketball was my first love, and it always will be. The truth is, I massively underachieved as a player. I had potential, but I lacked the work ethic to actually unlock it—a classic theme of my early life. In my sixteen-year-old mind, I was working hard. In reality, I had no clue what that actually meant. But I still loved the game at twenty-one, and I harbored this quiet, persistent belief that I had some insights that could help kids avoid making the same mistakes I did.

So, with zero experience other than playing and a healthy dose of unearned confidence, I fired off a stack of resumes to athletic directors all over West Michigan.

Most of them went straight into the trash. But I received one response that changed everything, from a guy named Brett Lambert at Wyoming Lee High School. Brett pulled double duty as both the athletic director and the head varsity basketball coach.

He took a flyer on me. And I walked right into a massive, necessary culture shock.

We’re Not in East Jordan Anymore

To understand Wyoming Lee, you have to understand the geography. It is the smallest public school district by land area in the State of Michigan—just over one square mile in size—wedged tightly between several massive, inner-city districts in the Grand Rapids area. Because of its tiny footprint and high density, the student population has an incredible amount of turnover, and it is phenomenally diverse.

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For a kid like me who grew up in the deep monoculture of Northern Michigan—where the most diverse thing you’re going to find is someone with a killer tan in the middle of August—walking into the Lee gymnasium was different.

Our roster that first year consisted of African-American kids, Dominicans, Mexican kids, Puerto Ricans, and exactly two white kids (who happened to be brothers). It was a proud, lower-income neighborhood where a vast majority of the players came from single-parent households.

It was exactly the eye-opening experience I needed. When you go to college, your natural instinct is to self-segregate into a comfortable lump of people who look, talk, and think exactly like you do. Lee blew that comfort zone to pieces. It forced me to realize that there are entirely different cultures, experiences, and ways of processing the world operating right outside my doorstep. If you want to lead people, you have to learn how to communicate across those lines.

The beautiful part of the setup was that Brett Lambert was, and still is, an absolute hardass with a heart of gold.

Brett believed fiercely that when you are coaching kids who come from tough, chaotic, or unpredictable upbringings, the greatest gift you can give them is radical discipline and unshakeable structure. It might be incredibly painful and frustrating for them in the moment, but a predictable, high-standard framework is the bedrock of growth—albeit incredibly difficult to execute. Looking back on it now, his philosophy was dead on.

Brett was intensely passionate, intensely driven, and we clicked instantly. He brought me on that first year as a “we will see” assistant. Every day, I’d attend practice, but once games rolled around, I would go scout our next opponent. He wasn’t just taking some clown off the street to game nights.

This is where my high-horsepower work ethic met a bottomless pit to throw itself into.

I didn’t just write scouting reports; I wrote manifestos. I spent hours breaking down player tendencies, scribbling baseline out-of-bounds sets, and looking for any weakness we could exploit.

My scouting career lasted exactly three games.

After reading my third report that I had put together for film and practice, Brett said, “All right, this is stupid. You are way too valuable to be out in the wild. I need you sitting right next to me on the bench.”

The Unhinged Sideline

Coaching suited my personality perfectly because it is an activity where success is often a function of out-preparing the other guy. It is a bottomless pit of effort. If you want to put in eighty hours a week watching film and practice planning, the game will happily let you do it.

But I had more than one flaw back then. When I was younger, I had an incredibly difficult time controlling my emotions. I had a short fuse—both in school and in sports. It’s something that has taken a lifetime to control. But learning how to compartmentalize frustration in certain situations was a vital skill that started here.

Ironically, pairing up with Brett Lambert was the perfect cure for my irrationality. On the sidelines during a game, Brett was an absolute madman. He was completely, wonderfully unhinged at times—screaming, stomping, pouring every ounce of his soul into motivating the kids and working the officials. (The ultimate irony, of course, is that after Brett retired from coaching, he became a fantastic basketball official, spending years taking the exact same lyrical abuse he used to hand out).

Because Brett had the “unhinged motivator” role completely covered on our bench, it forced me to do something I had not done around the game before: relax. I got to be the good cop, which was pretty easy when you are twenty-one coaching guys that are only three years younger than you.

I couldn’t be the screaming maniac because we already had one. It forced me to sit back, keep my heart rate down, and focus on the quiet, mechanical details of the game. I became the calm counterweight to his storm.

And the extra fun part? We were pretty damn good. In my four years as the varsity assistant at Lee, we were 63-17 in the regular seasons. We built something sustainable out of that one-square-mile district.

Importantly, during my entire tenure at Lee, we had basically zero parent issues. These families had actual, real-world struggles to navigate. They had things to worry about like putting food on the table, working three jobs, paying rent, and keeping the lights on. They didn’t have the luxury of time or energy to complain to the athletic director about their kid’s playing time on a Tuesday night. We spent more time working with parents to alleviate those issues than talking about playing time.

Change of Scenery

Right before my final season at Lee, I took the day job managing the athletic turf at West Ottawa Schools down on the lakeshore (the toxic trap we talked about in Chapter 2).

For an entire winter, my life was a frantic, white-knuckle sprint. I would work my full shift at West Ottawa from 6:00 to 2:30, drop my stuff, hop in the car, and drive forty-five minutes in a blind hurry to get to Lee in time for practices and games. It was exhausting, unsustainable, and I loved every second of it.

Eventually, the geography had to give. I made some incredible friends while working at West Ottawa, and every summer I played on the staff softball league. One of my teammates on the diamond happened to be Doug Ammeraal, the head varsity basketball coach for West Ottawa.

Doug knew I was a basketball junkie. He saw me driving all over Hill and Dale just to coach at Lee, and ahead of the next season, he offered me a spot on his bench at West Ottawa. It was a massive relief for my schedule, not to mention getting flexibility from work.

Cue culture shock number two.

West Ottawa was a completely different animal than Wyoming Lee. While it had its own pockets of diversity, it was a district defined by lakeshore affluence, wealth, and a heavy dose of parental entitlement.

Unlike Lee, we had plenty of parent meetings at West Ottawa. Our coaching staff was relatively young, which apparently made us prime targets for the local rumor mill. You could look up into the stands during any given game and see clusters of parents actively gossiping, analyzing every substitution, and critiquing the young varsity staff. If a kid sat on the bench for two minutes too long, it became an existential crisis that required administrative intervention. We ran headlong into that toxic entitlement wall during my first year, and by the end of that season, Doug was out as head coach.

Jeff Van Fossan, who had been running the freshman squad, was promoted to the varsity head coaching seat, and he immediately backfilled his old position with me.

I would spend the next seven years as the head freshman basketball coach at West Ottawa.

Let me tell you something about head coaching any of the three teams at the high school level: it is a full-time job disguised as a stipend. The work never actually stops. Your summers are entirely consumed by youth camps, team camps, and open gyms. During the season, in addition to running my own freshman team, I spent every free window watching varsity film, breaking down tape, and sitting on the bench for all of their games.

It was easily well over a thousand hours a year of pure, concentrated basketball operations, stacked squarely on top of my forty-to-fifty-hour day job.

For over fourteen years, I essentially ran a full-time job and most of a second one simultaneously. It didn’t make me any real money—high school coaching stipends break down to about four cents an hour if you do the math—but it gave me a brotherhood. The men I coached with over those fourteen years became my mentors, my anchors, and my best friends.

They say your five closest friends are a direct reflection of who you are. The men on those benches made me a hell of a lot better. As a young coach at West Ottawa, I had to have the whole program in mind. I had to be the face of the program for those freshman kids. I had to introduce them to how we do things. Often that meant a bit too much intensity. I was, and still am, working on having some chill.

Eventually, the wheel turned again. At the end of my twelfth season, the administration let Jeff go as the head coach. I had zero interest in coaching under a brand-new regime, so I hung up my whistle. I was done.

Our retirement from the game lasted about three weeks.

Mickey Cochran, a legendary local coaching icon with nearly forty years of experience over at Zeeland East, needed someone to run his JV program. Jeff and I jumped at the chance to join his staff, and it was a great decision on many levels.

Closing out the final two years of my coaching career under Mickey was a masterclass in leadership. This was a man who had forgotten more basketball than I will ever know in my entire life, yet when we sat down to game-plan, he still genuinely valued, considered, and implemented the entire staff’s opinions and solutions. He didn’t let his ego or his legendary status get in the way of finding the best path forward. Mickey taught me how to lead by absolute example, how to be the quiet center of gravity in a high-stress environment, and how to implicitly trust the people you put in place to do the jobs you don’t have the personal bandwidth to handle.

Fourteen years on those sidelines rewrote my mental wiring. It was the ultimate, high-stress incubator. Dealing with an entitled, red-faced parent in the hallway on a Tuesday night because their kid sat out the fourth quarter taught me more about conflict resolution than any HR seminar ever could. You learn how to speak different emotional languages to different people. You figure out when a kid needs a sharp kick in the pants to find their motor, and when they need an arm over the shoulder. Motivation isn’t a stock locker-room speech; it’s a highly customized, rapid-fire negotiation. It’s the exact same muscle you use when an angry taproom customer is complaining about a late pour, or when an employee needs to be steered back on track.

But more than anything, coaching taught me how to have a massive plan and execute it . Building a basketball squad year after year requires a massive, overarching plan. You have to coordinate youth clinics, schedule summer camps, budget for gear, manage parent issues, and align a staff—all while constantly rebuilding the talent pipeline as seniors graduate. It is an annual cycle of setting a vision, aligning a hundred moving parts, and delivering on it when November rolls around. If you can handle the logistics and the emotional gravity of a massive athletic program for hardly any money, running a physical business starts to look a lot less like a mystery and a lot more like a familiar playbook.

Basketball to Brewing

All of this brings us back to the ultimate question: Who gives a shit? How does fourteen years of riding school buses, drawing up 2-3 zones, and managing hormonal teenagers connect to a craft brewery?

During my stretch as the head freshman coach at West Ottawa, I needed a new assistant coach. I ended up hiring a guy named John Cash. (A few times through this series, I am going to use pseudonyms for folks that I know don’t really want to be mentioned—obviously, this is one.) I had coached both of John’s sons years prior, and John—who had a deep coaching background himself—had always been incredibly complimentary of how I managed my teams and handled the benches. He was a natural fit, and we spent years running those squads together.

On the sidelines, we developed a perfect good cop, bad cop dynamic.

I was unequivocally the bad cop. I was super intense, demanding, and relentless about execution. I pushed those kids right to their limit. But John was the crucial counterweight. He was the one who would pick them up right after I got on them. He’d dust them off, translate my high-volume feedback into constructive instruction, and make sure they understood the “why” behind the intensity. We kept the ship perfectly balanced.

But John didn’t just know basketball.

In his day job, John is a finance guy. He ran his own business consulting and equity firm—buying, selling, restructuring, and flipping businesses. He was a guy who looked at balance sheets, capital allocations, and market risks for breakfast.

For years, John Cash sat on the bench next to me. He watched how I handled problems. He watched how I organized chaotic systems. He watched how I motivated people, how I managed stress, and how I poured psychotic amounts of preparation into a goal. He saw somebody who could lead.

More importantly, through those years on the bench, I was learning lessons that would form the cultural foundation of our future business. I learned the delicate art of human management—specifically, when to push for more out of people, and when to back off (including backing off myself). I also spent those fourteen years trying to teach young players a simple, unshakeable truth: doing the right thing is always the right thing. We drummed it into their heads on the court, in the classroom, and in the community. Over a decade of repeating that sermon eventually engrained it so deeply in my own head that it became our organizational compass. It’s the exact reason why, years later, the brewery would become known for throwing its weight behind constant charity events and community outreach. We weren’t just selling liquid; we were trying to act as stewards.

At the end of the day, it wasn’t really my idea to open a brewery.

It was John’s.

I had started playing around in the industry and was getting closer to the beer industry.

But there was still one massive, glaring problem with John’s grand idea.

I had never run a business. I was a homebrewer who had some friends in the industry. Not exactly a slam dunk. Why did this idea make any sense at all?

That requires a whole separate set of stories, mostly involving my wife, Erin, and a hobby that completely consumed our household.

We’ll get into that in Episode 4.

Click here to read the entire story from Episode 1.

When you’re young, almost every single injury you sustain is entirely self-inflicted. You spend your twenties running headfirst into walls of your own making, slowly realizing that the universe doesn’t care about your potential or plans.

But before the walls start hitting back, you get to live in the blissful ignorance of being a big fish in a very small pond.

The Big Fish Illusion

Growing up in a town of 2,000 people in Northern Michigan was an incredible gift. I wouldn’t trade my childhood for anything. It was the kind of place where you could roam free and feel like you owned the world.

But small-town life has a side effect: it insulates you. It wraps you in a warm, comfortable blanket of false security. It tricks you into believing you are incredibly special and unique.

In high school, I was the classic overachiever who didn’t actually have to try. I carried a 3.7-ish GPA. I made varsity in four different sports. I coasted through math and science because my brain just happened to process those concepts easily. The only thing I ever truly poured my soul into—the only thing that forced me to dig deep and actually work—was basketball.

Everything else? Kind of a breeze. I had zero concept of what real, bone-crushing hard work felt like. If you have a decent baseline aptitude in a small town, you are treated like you are something.

Naturally, because I was good at math and science, I decided I was going to be an engineer. Not just any engineer—a civil engineer. I wanted to build massive steel and concrete structures, bridges specifically.

I applied to a handful of state schools, got accepted, and settled on Michigan State as one of a handful that actually had a Civil program. I paid my housing deposit and was ready to go to East Lansing. My life was mapped out on a clean, predictable grid.

And then, the butterfly effect flapped its wings.

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Thirty-Second Decision

You look back at your life and realize there are tiny, seemingly insignificant moments that completely rewrite your entire biography.

I remember this one vividly. It was fifth-hour study hall during the spring of my senior year. I was sitting there, likely doing anything but studying, when my two buddies, Andy and Brad, walked in.

They had just decided they were going to Grand Valley State University (GVSU) in Allendale. They knew I was headed to State, but they also knew I had been accepted to Grand Valley as a backup. They pitched me a classic, half-baked, eighteen-year-old plan:

“Hey, why don’t you come to Grand Valley with us? We can all live together freshman year, you can get your general education classes out of the way, and then you can just transfer to Michigan State next year.”

I thought about it for approximately thirty seconds.

“Yeah, okay. Sounds like a plan.”

That was it. No pros and cons list. No deep parental consultation. Just thirty seconds of teenage logic. I swapped a massive Big Ten university for GVSU on a whim.

I would never make it to Michigan State. That thirty-second decision changed the trajectory of my life forever.

The Cold Shower of Reality

The transition from a high school class of less than a hundred kids to a university with tens of thousands of students is a bucket of ice water to the face.

I walked into GVSU’s engineering department expecting to coast the same way I had in East Jordan. Instead, I ran directly into a brick wall.

It turned out that every single podunk town in the state had sent their smartest math and science kid to the exact same building. And the schools bigger than my whole hometown? They had sent twenty of them per high school.

Worse yet, these kids had taken advanced AP Calculus and Chemistry classes that my high school didn’t even offer. They weren’t just smarter than me; they had a multi-year head start. While I wasn’t flunking out, it was painfully obvious that the students who were going to excel in this program were lightyears ahead of me.

By the end of my freshman year, I knew two things: I was going to change my major, and I had absolutely no clue what the hell I was going to do next.

I knew myself well enough to know that if I took a gap year or a “semester off” to find myself, I would never go back. So, I forced myself to keep taking classes.

Growing up in Northern Michigan, I spent a lot of time outdoors. I hunted, I fished, mountain-biked, skied, and snowmobiled. I figured, why not try Natural Resources Management (NRM)? It was still science, but a lot of the classes were labs held outside. It felt comfortable.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that NRM was widely known among GVSU students as standing for “No Real Money” or “Not a Real Major.” The State of Michigan was on a hiring freeze, and the job prospects were bleak.

I was officially a rudderless ship. And then, the storm hit.

The Dumpster Fire Year

Your sophomore year of college is supposed to be when you start finding your groove. For me, it was a complete, unmitigated disaster.

The perfect storm of personal “crises” hit all at once. My best friend and roommate, Andy, left the country to study abroad in London. Brad dropped out. At the exact same time, my long-term girlfriend and I split up.

Suddenly, the guardrails were gone. I was fully on my own, feeling completely disconnected from my life, my goals, and my identity.

I became a walking dumpster fire with glimpses of being a functioning student.

I missed way too many classes. I dropped a bunch of courses, lowering my credit load to a joke. I was drinking like a fish at random times that one should not be drinking, and waking up with a headache and a hollow feeling in my chest.

If I had brought that protective cup with me from high school, I had officially thrown it out the window. I was actively committing one self-inflicted wound after another, spiraling into the worst version of myself.

I survived that year mostly on luck and a part-time job I managed to land at The Meadows, the GVSU campus golf course.

I didn’t take the job because of some grand career ambition. I took it because I needed money, and I liked working with my hands outdoors. There is a quiet, therapeutic beauty to physical labor. You start the day with a chaotic, overgrown stretch of turf, and by the afternoon, you can look back and see a perfectly manicured green. You can physically see your accomplishment.

Getting up at 5:30 AM to mow greens after drinking Milwaukee’s Best until 2:00 AM is a special kind of hell, but when you are twenty-one, your body is still made of rubber. You can pull it off.

Pivot and Grind

That summer, I went back home and got a job at the Charlevoix Country Club, digging deeper into the mechanics of the golf industry. By the time I returned to GVSU for my junior year, a spark had finally lit in my brain.

I sat down with my boss at The Meadows and asked her what it took to actually make a career out of this. She pointed me toward Penn State University, which had recently launched one of the very early online programs in Turfgrass Management.

This was the early Wild West of online education. There were no sleek web portals or digital quizzes. I had to have my exams physically proctored by a GVSU professor who would vouch that I wasn’t cheating.

I decided to run both tracks simultaneously. I spent my last year and a half at GVSU finishing my degree while grinding through the Penn State turf program. At one point, I was carrying an insane load of twenty-five credits between the two universities, all while working as many hours as The Meadows would give me.

It was an absolute, relentless grind. My schedule was a chaotic mess of dawn-patrol turf maintenance, lectures, studying, and proctored exams. But this relentless schedule was exactly what I needed.

And for the first time in my life, I realized something vital about my own psychology:

I loved the pain of the grind. I reveled in the exhaustion. I liked being the guy who worked harder than everyone else. I liked knowing that while other kids were sleeping in until noon, I was up at 5:00 AM, earning my keep.

In December of 2002, I graduated from Grand Valley. Later in 2003, I wrapped up my Penn State credentials. I had moved on to a job at Kent Country Club, a high-end private club in Grand Rapids, and started hunting for assistant superintendent jobs.

It didn’t take long to land a gig at Cedar Chase Golf Club in Cedar Springs—my first stint with people under me at the ripe old age of twenty-three.

The 100-Hour Club

The head superintendent at Cedar Chase was a guy named Alistair Lynch. Alistair is only five years older than me, and today, in another weird twist of fate, he is my insurance agent.

Alistair had cut his teeth in the industry under a legendary, old-school superintendent affectionately known as “Wild Bill”—which should tell you about the “work hard, play harder” mentality of many in the industry. Bill taught us the simple reality of the turf industry: if you aren’t living the job, you aren’t trying hard enough. Alistair had survived years of 100-hour work weeks under Bill, and he was determined to pass that work ethic down to me now that he was the head guy.

The golf industry is a beautiful, brutal, cult-like space. If you want to succeed, you don’t just do the job—you live it 24/7, at least six months out of the year here in the north.

I became a card-carrying member of the 100-hour club. I would arrive at the course at 5:00 AM, work a grueling twelve-hour shift, and then stick around to play in the course league two nights a week. There were weeks on end where I did not see my apartment in the daylight.

We lived that work hard, play hard life and we took it literally. We would sweat through our shirts all day, and if we didn’t golf after, we were at a bar or salmon fishing on Lake Lake Michigan until far too late, slept a couple hours, and did it again the next morning.

But a fire that burns that hot eventually runs out of fuel.

By the mid-2000s, the golf industry was beginning to contract. The real estate bubble was swelling, and the massive build-out of new courses was grinding to a halt. Head superintendent jobs—the brass ring we were all chasing—were becoming incredibly rare. The ladder was running out of rungs.

So, when a stable job opened up managing athletic turf for West Ottawa Schools in Holland, Michigan, I jumped at the chance.

Stuck in the Mud

On paper, the West Ottawa gig was perfect. It was stable public school funding, great benefits, and a clear path to the top. The guy who hired me told me flat out that he was planning to retire in a few years and wanted me to be his successor.

Then, reality intervened.

A couple of messy divorces and a mountain of private school tuitions later, my boss’s retirement plans evaporated into thin air. He wasn’t going anywhere. And frankly, he was threatened by having the guy he handpicked to take his job still on his staff.

I found myself trapped in a stagnant, fairly bureaucratic, and deeply toxic work environment. The promises of advancement were gone, replaced by institutional inertia and workplace politics.

I stayed there for eight years.

Looking back, I ask myself how the hell I let myself tolerate that toxicity for nearly a decade. The truth is, I hadn’t built up the internal confidence yet to make another massive leap. I was comfortable, even if I was miserable.

But there was another reason I stayed: West Ottawa was the perfect platform for my true passion at the time, which was coaching high school basketball. More on that later.

School district budgets across Michigan began to crater. When public institutions face budget cuts, they don’t look at talent, dedication, or credentials. They don’t care that I had a dual background and a relentless work ethic.

They use a blunt, brainless instrument: seniority.

As the least senior full-timer on the turf staff, my position was summarily cut. Just like that, I was going to be out of a job.

The Government Ceiling

I was in my early thirties, about to be out of work, and trying to figure out my next move.

My wife was an environmental health sanitarian. She had worked her way up through several Michigan county health departments and was currently working for the FDA. One of her former colleagues had recently taken over a leadership role at the Ottawa County Health Department, and they had an opening.

I had the science background, I had the work ethic, and I needed a job. So, I pivoted once again, entering the world of government environmental health.

If you give me a work task, I am going to execute it as fast and as thoroughly as humanly possible. That’s just how my brain is wired. I treated my county caseload the same way I had treated the greens at Cedar Chase or the varsity basketball schedule.

I put my head down and worked. The number of files I got through was my scoreboard. I was so effective that I ended up winning the David H. McMullen Young Sanitarian of the Year Award, identifying me as the top new public health professional in the entire State of Michigan.

But government agencies are not designed for hard-charging self-starters.

Because I wanted to stay on top of my cases and keep things moving, I was frequently putting in unpaid hours, meeting at job sites after hours as favors to the installers who loved the service.

In the private sector, working extra hours to ensure exceptional results gets you a promotion or a bonus.

In the government sector? It results in a staff meeting about working outside of 9 to 5.

To be fair, it wasn’t just me. Most of my department was working extra hours to keep up with the load. We all got scolded and told to work our 40, and if people have to wait six weeks, it is what it is.

I sat there, frustrated, and the realization hit me like a physical blow.

The system didn’t want my work ethic. It didn’t want my drive. It wanted compliance, mediocrity, and predictability.

I had spent my entire twenties learning how to work, how to grind, and how to survive. I had built a tolerance for massive workloads and high-stress environments. And now, I was being told that my greatest asset was a liability.

This was part of my realization that I didn’t want to work under others’ speed limits. It was time to build my own road.

Start reading from the beginning of Episode 1 here.

“Man,” they say, usually with a wistful sigh. “You’re living the dream. I’ve always wanted to do something like that. That must be fun as hell.”

Nine times out of ten, this comment comes from the corporate types. Guys and girls who have spent their entire adult lives inside the warm, fluorescent embrace of a highly structured setting. They’ve got org charts, HR departments, quarterly reviews, and a defined lane. To them, owning a craft brewery looks like the ultimate escape hatch. It looks like freedom. They picture me standing over a kettle, smelling the hops, high-fiving regulars in a packed taproom, all while hammering IPA’s and counting cash.

And look, I get it. Having the autonomy to steer your own ship is incredible. I wouldn’t trade it… at least at the moment. There have been times I would trade it in a heartbeat, but I digress. In reality, there is a massive, gaping chasm between the idea of small business ownership and the cold, hard, unvarnished reality of it. There is an entire universe of friction, chaos, and psychological toll that the guy working a 9-to-5 never sees.

It’s probably for that exact reason that I never actually dreamed of owning a business. I understood at a young age that when you work in an office and the roof leaks you put in a ticket to building maintenance. When it’s your small business, you get your ass on the roof and figure out what is going on, and I hate heights.

Despite having done this for over a decade now—and by all measurable accounts, being pretty okay at it—this was never my childhood manifestation. If you would have pulled me aside as a kid and told me I’d grow up to run my own company, I would have told you that you were completely out of your mind. No chance. Not in a million years. Not interested. Despite getting my MBA later in life, as an undergrad, business would have ranked lowest on my interest scale.

Why? Because I didn’t grow up watching business ownership on television or reading about it in magazines. I grew up inside of it. I saw the gears grind, and I saw what it took out of the people who ran it. While it is an admirable and necessary profession, it takes a different breed.

Daycare at the Five and Dime

The story doesn’t start with beer. It starts with hardware and five-and-dime department stores in Northern Michigan.

The year before I was born, in 1978, my grandfather, started the family business in Charlevoix. JDE, Inc., which stood for Janette and Donald Enterprises, named after my grandparents. Grandpa was a company man through and through. From the time he was a teenager, he worked for the Schultz Brothers Department Store chain (Schultz Bros. Co.). He started at the absolute bottom—a stock boy throwing boxes—and methodically worked his way up the ranks as the company grew. He became a store manager, then moved into the corporate structure, which eventually required relocating the family to the Chicago area where Schultz Bros. headquartered as many as 51 stores across Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, and Michigan from Lake Zurich, Illinois.

That move was the catalyst for everything. It was at Lake Zurich High School in the Northwest Suburbs of Chicago where my parents met. Around that same time, my grandfather and the family started taking vacations up north, falling hard for that distinct, crisp, Northern Michigan vibe.

When my dad got out of the Army, and eventually my uncle out of the Marines, they were recruited into the family business. They went to work for Grandpa. In 1978, they pulled the trigger and opened that first store in Charlevoix, Michigan.

Originally, the business stayed close to Grandpa’s corporate roots. They opened a Ben Franklin store, which was essentially an old-school, small-town five-and-dime. Later, they adapted, modifying the footprint by franchising with True Value Hardware. At its peak, the family operation grew to three stores in Northern Lower Michigan: Charlevoix, East Jordan, and Mancelona.

I was born shortly after that first Charlevoix store opened. And because it was a true, all-hands-on-deck family enterprise, that store became my daycare many days. Eventually my Uncle Dale would take over Charlevoix and my parents took the East Jordan location relocating us there in 1987.

Think about that dynamic for a second. My mom and dad were there. My aunt and uncle were there. My grandparents were there. If you needed a family member, you didn’t call the house; you walked down the aisle to the plumbing section or the checkout counter.

When you grow up in an ecosystem like that, you absorb lessons through your pores before you’re even old enough to understand what a profit margin is. The first and most brutal lesson you learn is a fundamental truth about small business economics:

When an entire extended family relies on a single retail business to put food on the table, the business doesn’t just come first—it consumes everything else out of absolute necessity.

The business is a living, breathing, hungry animal that demands to be fed 24/7/365. Long, lazy family vacations? Forget it. Regular, uninterrupted days off? A myth. The idea of sitting down for a family dinner without a business emergency cutting it short? Possible but often interrupted.

Then there are the interpersonal logistics. When you put that many family members under one roof, under that kind of intense financial pressure, friction isn’t a possibility; it’s a guarantee. Regular kerfuffles are just part of the ambient noise. When the stress and the pressure of the margins came to a head, people took it out on each other. Not because they didn’t love each other, but because frankly, within the walls of a small business, there nowhere else for that pressure to go. It’s a closed loop.

It was life. And it was exactly why none of us wanted anything to do with it long-term. Not me, not my sister, not a single one of my cousins. We looked at the sheer grind of it and unanimously opted out of becoming the third generation. We wanted clean, predictable, regular lives.

Or so we thought.

Jumping in Dumpsters

My introduction to the labor force started early. I worked here and there in the store from as far back as my memory stretches.

My after-school entertainment was often such fun tasks as being sent out back to jump up and down inside the cardboard dumpster so we could compress the empty boxes and fit more in. I did the mindless, dusty tasks in the back room that a child can do. Occasionally I would help a customer find something if Mom or Dad was busy. By the time I was 13 or 14 I was mixing paint and doing more meaningful tasks albeit, like the boss’s kid, pretty uninspired.

Looking back, that was an masterclass in human psychology. You learn very quickly how to deal with cranky people, demanding people, and downright rude people. Not lessons that are taught but absorbed through osmosis of watching and listening.

See, running a small-town hardware store is entirely different from running almost any other kind of retail. People don’t wander into a local hardware store on a Tuesday afternoon just to browse and see what looks interesting. This isn’t Lowe’s or Home Depot where you push a giant cart around looking at patio furniture.

When someone walks through the door of a small-town hardware store, they are almost always in the middle of a domestic crisis. They are frantic. It’s: “I need this exact compression fitting right now because there is currently water leaking into my basement and my wife is freaking out.”

They are stressed, their pocketbook is taking an unexpected hit, and you are the only thing standing between them and a ruined house or a delayed project. You learn to absorb their anxiety, de-escalate their panic, and find the part.

But the real fun of running a hardware store in a town of 2,000 people—like my hometown of East Jordan—is that anonymity does not exist. Every person you come in contact with knows your parents. A drive across town in Dad’s Suburban yielded waves from about 80% of the oncoming cars.

Everyone knew where we lived. We lived right in town on a prominent corner. Everyone knew it was Dan’s house. And because they knew it was Dan’s house, they knew exactly where the keys to the True Value were kept when an emergency popped up.

If a pipe burst at 9:30 PM on a Sunday, or a water heater blew up at 7:00 AM on a holiday, people didn’t wait for business hours. They walked right up to our front porch, knocked on the door, and said, “Hey man, I’m in a brutal bind. Is there, any way you can run down and let me in to get this part?”

My dad’s reaction to this was fairly predictable. Internally, he would stomp around the house. He would be visibly pissed off. He’d be deeply annoyed that his personal space, his family time, and his boundary lines were being invaded simply because someone else failed to plan ahead. He’d vent in the kitchen, grab his keys, and walk out the door.

But the moment he stepped onto that porch and faced the neighbor in need? The transformation happened. He would he would put on a genuine happy face, look the guy in the eye, and say, “Let’s go take care of it.” And he did. Every single time.

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The Ultimate Boss

That right there is where I learned perhaps the most critical lesson of entrepreneurship. It’s a lesson that most corporate dropouts learn the hard way, usually about six months after quitting their jobs.

When you start a business, you think you’re doing it to “be your own boss.” You think you’re escaping accountability to another person.

The reality? You don’t have fewer bosses when you own a business. You have thousands of them. Your customer is the boss.

And when you live in a tight-knit community, and your name is on the sign, you take care of those people. Period. It doesn’t matter if it’s a massive inconvenience to your evening. It doesn’t matter if you’re barely making a nickel on the transaction. It doesn’t matter if you’re exhausted.

Small businesses aren’t just commercial entities; they are stewards of their communities. The owners who understand that—the ones who realize that service requires a level of self-sacrifice—are the ones who build deep, generational trust. They are the ones who build a brand that people will protect when the economy turns south. The ones who don’t have that attitude? They don’t make it. They flame out, blaming the market, when the reality is they just didn’t want to put on the happy face to hide the never ending grind. Not saying it’s healthy, it just is what it is.

But when you’re 12, 15, or 17 years old, you don’t possess that kind of high-level perspective. You don’t see “community stewardship.” You’re just as annoyed as your dad is that someone is knocking on the front door while you’re trying to watch TV.

To a teenager, it just felt like an endless gauntlet of stuff. If it wasn’t a customer at the door, it was some other out of the blue thing. And as for flexibility, forget it. Your freshman basketball game starts at 4:00pm? Hope you make it to varsity kid. That’s the only way you are going to see both parents in the stands.

You quickly realize that a small business owner wears a thousand different hats, and none of them can be hung up until tomorrow. Things never break when you’re standing there holding a wrench during business hours. They break when you’re finally sitting on the couch, or when you’re out of town, or when it’s 10°F outside. It is relentless, and it is inherently annoying.

I watched that play out many days of my youth. The lesson was crystal clear, and among many other reasons the reasoning was clear: I have no interest in doing this to myself.

Life’s Tough, Wear a Cup

Yet, for all the frustration and the lack of boundaries, there was a massive, undeniable positive to growing up in that environment.

You see firsthand that the people who work hard survive.

All those things you don’t want to do? All those annoying, inconvenient, exhausting tasks that pop up at the worst possible moments? That is literally the job. That is the differentiator.

The world will always, always have a place for people who are simply willing to get it done. No matter what time of day it is, no matter what plans they had before the phone rang, and no matter how tired they are. A relentless work ethic always has been, and always will be, the great equalizer for anyone who chooses to strike out on their own and survive in the free market.

It was completely subliminal to me at the time. I thought I was just surviving a “different” childhood in a family business. But that environment was quietly etching a blueprint into my brain. It was hardcoding a grit that would become the absolute bedrock of everything I did later in life in a number of different careers. It helped me navigate varied workplaces, it helped me navigate the curveballs life throws at you, and ultimately, it became the exact trait I had to call upon when we decided to risk everything and brew the first batch at Brewery 4 Two 4.

Life is tough. Wear a cup.

I think I headed south to college with the cup in my bag. I just didn’t have a clue where to put it yet.

We’ll pick up right there in Episode 2.

It’s been over three months since a fire gutted our home, and a lot of you have been asking for updates. It’s not just the physical tasks keeping me too busy to respond; it’s the sheer cognitive load of the whole situation. When your life gets turned inside out on a random Tuesday, your mental bandwidth drops to zero. Interest in the market and economics falls off pretty hard when you’re just trying to figure out where you’re sleeping next week.

But we’ve finally found a sense of a new normal, and the bottom line is the same as it was the day after: Everyone is safe. Erin, our son, the dogs—we all made it out, and at the end of the day, everything else is just stuff.

Here is exactly where things stand, how we got here, and why—despite the chaos—we are doing completely fine. If you missed the initial story you can read it here.

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Two Left Hands Covered in Thumbs

The number one question you get after “Is everyone okay?” is always: ‘How did it start?’

I was there when the fire inspector conducted his walkthrough. It started at an electrical outlet in our closet pantry. That specific section of the house had been wired decades ago by a previous owner. I know from my own 19 years of working on that house that he was a DIY handyman—albeit one with two left hands covered entirely in thumbs. We knew some of the wiring in the house was quirky, but it had survived over 25 years that we know of without an issue. Then, out of nowhere, with zero changes to anything, that outlet just went into meltdown.

You could see the hole burned into the drywall where the temperature reached thousands of degrees in seconds. A wooden coat rack full of coats right above it provided the perfect fuel, the flames crawled up the wall, and away it went.

The immediate aftermath was a three-week stint in a single hotel room. If you want to test the structural integrity of your family unit, try putting two adults, an eight-year-old, and two dogs who love to bark at every hallway footstep into a single room for twenty-one days.

But you have to hunt for the micro-wins in those situations. For me, it was the hotel breakfast. I started getting up at 6:00 a.m. when the coffee got brewed, sat in the lobby, watched the news, and knocked out brewery emails in the quiet. By 7:30, I was making fresh waffles for my son as he woke up. You take the wins where you can get them.

Eventually, the walls started closing in a bit. Our insurance policy covers “loss of use” housing for up to a year, but actually finding a place in this tight housing market is a completely different story. After a couple of weeks of striking out on single-family homes with yards, I took the reins from the relocation company and tracked down some high-quality townhomes on the south end of town. We signed the lease, and on a Monday morning, the relocation company’s box truck backed into the driveway.

A crew showed up in a big box truck and basically unloaded a templated version of a functional life: beds, couches, TVs, pots, pans, dishes, and towels. You go from having nothing but the hand full of salvaged clothes still giving off smoke, to having a fully operational household delivered to your door in a single morning. We felt incredibly blessed.

Pro Tip

I can’t state enough how everybody in this process has been fantastic. My insurance agent, the adjustor, the relocation company, the personal property cleaning company, reimbursement specialists, and our remediation/builders John Grace Construction. They have all been efficient, empathetic, and easy to work with. I have friends who have had very different experiences with this process and we are grateful for all of them. If you are in West Michigan and want a great agent/team call my guy Alistair Lynch with Farm Bureau. Alistair and I worked together 25 years ago and he has been a good friend since.

Curious friends have asked me what they should check for their own insurance. Here is my advice; meet with your agent and discuss your policy. The past 6 years of inflation have made everything much more expensive and you may be short on coverage if you haven’t updated your policy. Make sure your replacement cost is sufficient. Make sure your personal property coverage is good including any call outs for specific high value items. Make sure you have “loss of use” on your policy which covers the relocation and everyday expenses that I mentioned above. All in with cleaning, demo, reconstruction, upgrades, personal property, and loss of use, the total cost of of our event is going to be north of $600,000. You don’t want to be on the hook for that to save $500 a year on your premiums. Finally once a year walk through your house and take a video of everything from pictures to closets to storage. We were able to inventory our smoky remains. but if you lose everything it’s very difficult to remember what you had and proving it is even harder.

The Eleven-Year Purge

That brings us to the first major silver lining of this entire ordeal: the Great Purge.

I started planning the brewery back in 2015, opened the doors in 2017, and honestly haven’t had many days of real downtime since. When you’re grinding out a small business every waking hour for a decade, your home life takes a back seat. Tools from the original brewery buildout, random equipment, and eleven years of accumulated household clutter had been piling up in our basement and garage. It was a constant, nagging stressor. Easy enough to ignore until you are looking for something you need. I distinctly remember telling my shrink a few weeks before the fire that I had finally made my peace with the fact that the mess wouldn’t get organized until I retired.

The fire forced our hand. Before the restoration crews could even start, I spent three weekends throwing things away to my heart’s content. I filled one and a half 15-yard dumpsters with pure clutter. The items that didn’t need to be inventoried. It is an incredibly aggressive way to get organized, but clearing out a decade of physical noise was a massive psychological victory.

When the insurance inventory company arrived to price out our personal property for the payout, my inner ADHD overachiever kicked into high gear. Normally, an inventory takes a couple days and many days of work on their end. Instead, I emailed the rep an 800-line master spreadsheet detailing the replacement value, age, and category of every single item we owned. When she showed up for the inventory we spent 20 minutes on-site taking pictures and said, “Your list looks great, this is easy.”

Because I took control of the process, the actual cash value lump sum for personal property was approved and paid out relatively quickly. And that’s the next bright spot: we now have the rare opportunity to replace everything at once. No mismatched furniture accumulated over twenty years. Insurance pays you a depreciated value and then as you recoup goods you get the remainder of your expense in future payments.

Ripping It Down to the Studs

Right now, we are staring at the framework of the past and future. In a matter of five days, a crew of a dozen guys took our house from a charred, smoky mess down to nothing but bare studs.

Walking into that shell for the first time was deeply disorienting. You live somewhere for twenty years, and suddenly you have to scratch your head to remember where the bathroom wall used to be. It’s unnerving to stand in your garage and look straight through the skeleton of the house to your back bedroom, but it’s also a beautiful sign of progress. Next week, they scrub and then shellac every square inch of exposed wood—from the subfloors to the rafters—to permanently seal in any remaining smoke odor, and then the rebuild begins.

Of course, rebuilding a house in a post-pandemic, post-inflation world is a completely different animal than it was five years ago. My background usually taught me what it used to cost to pay the man, but today’s prices are wild. You start with a long list not knowing if you can cover all or just a few of those projects. Insurance pays to put you back exactly where you were, but we want to make some serious upgrades while the walls are open.

That led to the ultimate banking bottleneck. I went to our original lender to update the home equity line of credit we used to open the brewery, only to hit a wall. Traditional banks won’t touch a house that’s a burnt-out shell because it won’t appraise. I had to spend weeks making phone calls, researching, and pulling levers, but we finally secured a much larger line of credit from a different lender to fund our improvements. The permit is submitted, the septic system upgrades are scheduled, and the blueprints are set.

Anyone who has ever built a home will tell you it’s a stressful, grueling process that takes a year of planning before you even break ground. We are basically building a brand-new house inside an old frame, navigating a clunky three-way escrow process between our builders, the insurance company, and the banks—and we have exactly one year from start to finish to execute it.

The Ultimate Business Continuity Test

It is a lot. But the only reason I am able to maintain my sanity through all of this is because of the team we built at the brewery.

Before the fire even happened, I had already planned to take some intentional time away from the business this summer. My assistant brewer, Casey—who doubles as a school teacher during the school year—takes over the heavy lifting in the brewhouse the second school lets out. The fact that he and the rest of our staff have completely stepped up to run the day-to-day operations without me needing to manage all of this has been an absolute lifesaver.

There is a massive operational lesson here for any small business owner: Hire people you can trust with your entire livelihood. Not just so you can take a vacation, but because life has a funny way of sneaking up and biting you when you least expect it. If your business can’t survive you stepping away during a personal crisis, you don’t own a business—you own a demanding job.

We are not out of the woods yet. I still have to answer a million questions regarding paint colors, doorknobs, and flooring over the next few months. But the trajectory is right, the family is safe, and we are incredibly grateful for the avalanche of support from everyone who has reached out.

Since the markets tend to hit a summer lull and my mind is a bit too frazzled for deep thinking, I’m going to use this space over the next few months to do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I’m launching a summer writing series breaking down the raw, unvarnished history of how we built the brewery from scratch—the setbacks, the heartaches, and the brutal lessons of turning an idea into bricks and mortar. I have done an event for this in person a while back and people seemed to really love all of the backstories. There is a good chance this will become the framework for a book about those stories.

Stay tuned. It’s going to be a wild ride, but as we’ve proven over the past decade, we know a thing or two about building from the ground up.

Bezos looked right into the camera and said the bottom half of American earners should pay exactly zero percent in federal income tax. Not a reduction. Not a tax credit. A flat, hard, absolute zero.

He gave this great, evocative example: Why are we asking a nurse in Queens making $75,000 a year to write a $12,000 check to Washington? We shouldn’t be taking her money, we should be sending her an apology.

It sounds incredible. It’s punchy, it’s populist, and if you’re that nurse in Queens, you’re nodding your head thinking, Finally, a guy at the top gets it.

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But let’s step back from the studio lights for a second and look at how things actually work on the ground. Because when a guy worth over two hundred billion dollars starts talking about tax policy for the working class, you have to look at the game being played.

First of all, let’s stop using the word “billionaire.” It’s too clean. It’s a sterile, abstract word that hides the math. Let’s call a billionaires what they actually are: a thousand-millionaire.

Can you wrap your head around a million dollars? Sure. It’s a nice house in a good school district and a decent retirement. Now imagine one thousand of those people standing in a room. That is the baseline for a single billion. Jeff Bezos is worth over two hundred fifty thousand millionaires. When you frame it like that, the scale of that class is put in much better perspective.

So, when a thousand-millionaire starts advocating for the bottom 50% to pay zero taxes, we have to look at the economic reality of what he’s proposing.

We don’t have to guess what happens when you do this. We literally just ran this exact simulation a few years ago.

Back in 2022, my guy Josh Brown wrote an absolute banger of a post on The Reformed Broker called “You weren’t supposed to see that.” He was talking about the post-pandemic labor shift, but the core economic truth he hit on applies perfectly to Bezos’s tax fantasy.

Think back to the Covid stimulus. We ran the greatest economic experiment since the Great Depression. The federal government printed $4.3 trillion and dropped it onto the economy like candy being thrown at a parade. Direct payments, PPP loans, restaurant revitalization funds. Everyone’s bank account got a direct deposit, and for a brief moment, it felt like we’d cracked the code.

But what happened next? The exact thing that always happens when you try to shortcut the laws of economics.

When you eliminate federal income taxes for the bottom half of the country, you aren’t magically creating more houses, more cars, or more groceries. You are simply handing half the population an ongoing, permanent, infinite stimulus check. You get a massive surplus of capital instantly chasing a constrained supply of stuff.

High demand + flat supply = inflation on steroids.

A few years later, the market inevitably balances out—but it balances out at a much, much higher price point. Eggs are ten bucks. Rent has doubled. Your standard used car costs double what a new one did in 2019. Meanwhile, wages lag behind inflation, just like they always do.

The reality is that since the end of Bretton Woods taxes have not served as a way to fund the government. We all know the obvious that our government consistently spends more than it brings in. Taxes aren't just revenue; they're the brake that keeps the economic train from hitting runaway speeds.

So where does that leave everyone?

Right back where they started. The exact same people who were struggling before are still at the bottom, except now they’re drowning.

And the truly marginalized—the folks living below the poverty line who already paid zero federal income tax—become the walking dead of this economy. They didn’t get a single extra dollar from Bezos’s plan because they weren’t paying taxes to begin with. But now they’re completely priced out of the grocery store because the cost of basic food has tripled.

To top it all off, our now completely underfunded government looks at the wreckage and says, “Sorry, there’s nothing we can do to help you. We didn’t collect enough tax revenue.”

This doesn’t fix inequality. It exacerbates it on a dystopian scale.

This isn’t an argument against taxing thousand-millionaires much more—we absolutely should. But you can’t engineer a painless society from the bottom up by printing a “zero” on a tax form.

Josh laid this out perfectly in his piece, cutting right through the fairy tale of the “free market” to show how the system is actually designed:

“Look here, look there, look anywhere else. Just don’t look at the almost-liberated wage slaves being put back into their places. How dare you ask for more, how dare you expect more?”

The harsh reality is that capitalism is an adversarial game. For there to be winners, there have to be losers. The system is designed to have a bottom, and it can’t function without one. If everyone is “winning” because of an artificial cash flood, then no one is winning. The currency becomes worthless, and asset prices become meaningless.

Bezos’s proposal is a beautiful fantasy wrapped in a populist bow. But out here in the real world, the math always wins. And when the math wins, it’s never the thousand-millionaires who pay the price. It’s the nurse in Queens and the patients she provides care to.

The macro narrative shifts so fast it’ll give you whiplash. Just a few months ago, the consensus was arguing about how many rate cuts we’d get this year. Today? The conversation has flipped entirely.

Following last week’s scorcher CPI and PPI prints (detailed in the latest BLS CPI Report), the bond market took a look at the data and panicked. According to interest rate futures tracking on the CME FedWatch Tool, the odds of a rate hike being the next Fed move have skyrocketed to 63%. Think about that. We went from pricing in a soft landing with easing credit to prepping for another turn of the screw. As of 5/19 the 30 year sat at 5.177%, the highest since 2007.

The panic makes sense on the surface. Inflation is sticky, the prints are hot, and the Fed is staring down the barrel of its price stability mandate. However, if you really look at why parts of the core inflation measures seem sticky right now, it makes far less sense.

To understand why a rate hike any time soon is completely batshit, you have to look at how things actually get made. Let's trace the logistics of a single pint of beer at my brewery, starting thousands of miles away from my taproom.

The Supply Chain Tax

Imagine you're a farmer out in Montana harvesting brewing barley. The diesel tank at your farm gets topped off to fill up your combine. According to Stacker's Montana Fuel Analysis, diesel is sitting at roughly $5.48 a gallon right now. A year ago? It was $3.46. That is an incredibly brutal 58% spike in fuel costs in just twelve months.

That massive fuel premium is baked into the cost of the grain before it even leaves the dirt. From there, the supply chain absorbs hit after hit:

• The Field to the Malt House: The farmer loads the harvested barley onto a truck or a train—both powered by diesel—to ship it to a malt house in Wisconsin.

• The Kiln: Malting is an incredibly energy-intensive process. It requires massive dryers and kilns to sprout and dry the grain. The electricity bills at these facilities are soaring due to surging grid demand, fuel costs, and the massive, unyielding draw from new AI data centers.

• The Malt House to the Distributor: The finished malt is loaded onto another diesel semi and shipped down to my wholesaler's warehouse in Ohio.

• The Final Leg: That distributor puts it on a final diesel-burning truck to deliver it to my loading dock in Michigan.

How many stops along the way did the production cost increase? Every single one of them.

And let's be entirely honest for a second: none of this was an accident. This entire inflationary spike was completely preventable, driven 100% by a series of catastrophic geopolitical choices. This is what happens when you go off half-cocked into a war, miscalculate the escalation, and then act shocked when the response is a retaliatory blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Choking off a massive artery of the world's daily oil supply makes the entire global economy suffer for a localized diplomatic failure.

It’s the exact same economic malpractice we see with sweeping tariff regimes—a top-down political decision to disrupt an established market, followed by an institutional refusal to own the fallout. You cannot break global trade patterns by decree and then blame the local business owner when the bill arrives at the pump… but I digress.

When Interest Rates Hit a Brick Wall

By the time that grain is mashed, fermented, kegged, and poured into a glass, I have no choice but to raise the price of my pint. When that price hike hits the tape, it shows up as a tiny fraction of a percentage point in the "food away from home" category of the CPI.

The macro analysts see that line item rise and scream, "Look! Core inflation is entrenched! The consumer is too strong!"

But that increase isn't driven by roaring consumer demand. It’s 100% a reflection of fuel spikes driven by geopolitical conflict and structural energy strains. The Fed sees these hot numbers and gets twitchy. Because unemployment is low and the labor market looks stable on paper, they feel they have the green light to raise rates again to cool things down.

Here is the problem: The Fed’s toolkit has literally zero impact on an exogenous energy spike.

A higher federal funds rate cannot magically produce more crude oil. It doesn't lower the price of diesel in Montana. It doesn't make a malting kiln in Wisconsin use less power.

Instead, throwing another rate hike at this economy acts like pouring a fresh layer of ice on top of a completely frozen housing market. It breaks the remaining leverage ordinary people have, like drawing on a home equity line to fix a roof or renovate a kitchen. For the people at the bottom of the economic ladder who are already struggling to get by, it simply makes the cost of living entirely impossible.

The Top-Down Pullback

Simultaneously, the threat of higher rates—which the bond market is already pricing in—drives up the cost of capital and depresses equity values.

The spending patterns of the top half of the economy are a massive structural driver for the broader service sector. High-earning households have significant disposable income, and when they feel wealthy, they spend money. That spending directly employs millions of people in hospitality, travel, retail, and services.

When equity portfolios take a sustained hit and the "wealth effect" reverses, those affluent households pull back. Let’s assume this tightening plays out later this year, right as the manic capital expenditure boom around artificial intelligence starts hitting a wall.

We are already witnessing a quiet depression for entry-level white-collar jobs. A generation of young professionals looking to start families, build savings, and buy houses are finding out that the junior analyst roles they targeted have been completely swallowed by large language models (LLMs).

If the Fed hikes into this layout, you get a compounding effect:

1. The bottom end of the consumer base is crushed by structural inflation and high borrowing costs.

2. The top end pulls back as asset markets cool and the wealth effect shrinks.

When every segment of the consumer base starts pulling back and shrinking at the exact same time, you create the perfect recipe for an economic implosion. And through it all, the one variable that triggered the entire cycle—the price of energy—remains entirely unaffected by monetary policy.

Regime Change at the Eccles Building

There is an old adage on Wall Street that the markets always find a way to test an incoming Fed Chair.

Kevin Warsh has officially been confirmed to take his seat as the 17th Chair of the Federal Reserve and will be sworn in on Friday.. Following a razor-thin, historically divisive Senate confirmation vote, he is stepping directly into an absolute hornets' nest.

Warsh has spent years criticizing the central bank for being too slow to react to post-pandemic inflation, earning a reputation as a traditional policy hawk. He wanted a regime change, and now he has one. But his biggest challenge won't be changing the Fed's communication strategy—it will be resisting the urge to over-correct.

Earlier this year, the institutional obsession with cutting rates into a sticky inflation environment was completely wild. But swinging the pendulum entirely the other way and executing a rate hike into a supply-driven energy shock is equally dangerous.

The best the Fed can do with an exogenous energy spike is let it run its course and wait for high prices to cure high prices. The worst they can do is use a blunt demand tool to fix a structural supply problem, setting the entire economy up for an absolute wreck. All eyes are on the new Chair to see if he knows the difference.

I’m sitting here on spring break, coffee in hand, looking out over the water from my hotel in Clearwater Beach. I should probably be enjoying a mimosa, but instead I’m reading a multi-sector inflationary dynamic paper from the Brookings Institution. I know—I’m a real blast at parties.

But when you’re an owner, you have to keep an eye on the horizon. The “macro” is just a fancy word for the truck that will eventually back up with your delivery. And right now, the indicators are starting to flash.

The Rocket and the Feather

We’ve all seen the headlines. Conflict in the Middle East kicks off, and gas prices go vertical. It’s what economists call the “Rocket.” Prices shoot up because refiners are panicking. A recent piece in the Wall Street Journal highlights a massive disconnect in the market right now: while “paper” futures for crude are bouncing around the high $90s, the “physical” market is in a total frenzy. Refiners are actually shelling out as much as $145 a barrel on the spot market just to guarantee they have actual product to refine.

But then, a tentative cease-fire is announced. You’d think the price would crater, right? Wrong. That’s where the “Feather” comes in. Retail prices float down slowly—if they come down at all. Gas station operators and the big corporate suppliers above us are in no rush to pass those savings along. They’ve just spent weeks with their margins getting absolutely crushed by that $145 wholesale spike, so when costs finally dip, they hold the line to expand their margins and recoup their losses.

While I haven’t seen the invoices jump at the brewery yet due to the situation with Iran, this cycle usually means it’s only a matter of time before those “fuel surcharges” start appearing on the bottom of my supply orders.

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The Ripple Effect: Why Diesel is the Real Killer

It’s easy to look at a gas station sign and think, “Well, I don’t drive that much.” But in the world of illiquid assets, every single thing you touch is moved by diesel. And diesel right now is a nightmare—hitting astronomical levels in places like California.

I’ve seen this movie before. We saw it with COVID. A shock hits the system, and suddenly every invoice has a “shipping surcharge” or a “logistics fee” tacked onto it. Those fees are like a guest who shows up to your party, drinks all your beer, and then decides to move into your guest room permanently. They don’t go away.

Take grain. In our industry, grain is a commodity. When the brewing industry shrinks—which it is—demand destruction usually keeps those prices somewhat under control. But even if the price of the grain itself stays flat, the cost of farming it, harvesting it, and trucking it to my door is tied to the price of fuel.

When the oil shock recedes, the big multi-national suppliers aren’t always quick to send out “we’re lowering your rates” emails. They often pocket the difference as margin. Meanwhile, I’m the one eventually standing in the taproom having to explain to a regular why their favorite IPA just went up another dollar.

The Brookings Reality Check

This is exactly what Afrouzi and Bhattarai were talking about in the paper I’m currently reading. They talk about a “multi-sector” economy where some sectors are “flexible” (like energy) and others are “sticky” (like us).

When a productivity shock hits an upstream sector—like a war-induced energy spike—it forces a realignment of relative prices across the whole economy. Even if the Fed manages a “soft landing” and unemployment stays low, inflation can stay elevated because the “downstream” sectors—that’s us—are still trying to adjust to the new reality of our input costs.

Inflation isn’t just about “too much money chasing too few goods.” Sometimes it’s just the visible footprint of an economy trying to figure out how to function when the cost of moving things from point A to point B has fundamentally shifted.

The Death Warrant

There are those in my industry that are not going to want to hear this. Eating all of these hikes and protecting your price point isn’t the solution.

There are breweries all over the country right now that are terrified. They see the shrinking market and the rising costs, and they react by trying to be the “value” play. They keep their prices at 2019 levels, despite post-COVID inflation and now this next price shock, thinking that volume will save them.

It won’t. It’s a death warrant.

When you keep your prices artificially low while your suppliers are expanding their margins at your expense, you aren’t being a “friend to the consumer.” You’re just subsidizing your own bankruptcy. You are signing your own death warrant with margins that are too thin to sustain a single equipment failure, let alone a prolonged economic shift.

Worse, you’re often confusing the customer. When a struggling brewery nearby sells a dumbed down IPA for $5 made with closeout hops from the 2021 crop year because they are a “steal” at $3 per lb, it’s bad for everyone. This super “mid” product impacts not only that brewery’s reputation, but makes the customer question why my IPA is $7. It might have something to do with higher quantities of $18 per lb specialty hops from the 2025 crop year we are using. But to the casual customer who isn’t a beer geek (80% of our customers), we look expensive.

Ownership is About Hard Choices

Being an owner means you don’t get to live in the “paper” world of futures markets and economic theories. You live in the “physical” world of real-world shipments and bank balances.

The ripple of an oil shock isn’t always a one-time event; it can be a structural change to your cost of goods sold. You can either adjust your prices to reflect that reality, or you can watch your equity evaporate while you wait for “things to get back to normal.”

Spoiler alert: they rarely go back to exactly where they were.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, my coffee is getting cold and I have more “riveting” reading to do here in paradise.

Macro Views, Micro Brews. And this morning, Beautiful Views.

Dave

My guy Josh Brown over at Ritholtz Wealth Management has been on CNBC since February banging the desk about something he calls the HALO trade.

If you haven’t heard the term yet, it stands for Heavy Assets, Low Obsolescence. For the last fifteen years on Wall Street, “Asset Light” was the only strategy that mattered. If you owned a factory, a fleet of trucks, or a warehouse full of inventory, the Ivy League analysts looked at you like you were wearing a powdered wig. The goal was to own nothing but code. Software was the king because it was infinitely scalable and cost nothing to distribute.

But then the AI surge hit.

Suddenly, the market is realizing that software is actually quite fragile. Bits are easy to copy; atoms are not. If your entire business is built on code, AI can probably be taught to rewrite that code by next Tuesday. If you provide a non-tangible service—legal research, basic accounting, data entry—AI is coming for your lunch.

The “Software Slaughterhouse” is real. But for those of us living in the physical world? It turns out the “HALO” might be shining brightest on Main Street.

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The Final Mile of Reality

Wall Street is currently scrambling to find HALO stocks. They’re buying power grids, data centers, and pipelines. They want “Atoms” because they’re realizing that in an AI world, the only thing that isn’t a commodity is something you can actually touch.

But while the big firms are fighting over utility stocks, here on mainstreet we are living deep in the HALO world.

Specifically, small businesses that deal directly with the customer in the physical world.

Is there a time, way in the future, when your 3:00 AM plumbing emergency will be answered by an autonomous robot showing up in a self-driving van? Maybe. But we’ve been hearing about self-driving cars for thirty years, and we don’t seem much closer to that reality today than we were five years ago. Reports still abound of Waymos and Teslas doing all kinds of stupid things because that final mile is so impossible to program.

The “final mile” of physical service is incredibly hard to automate. Taking a wrench to a leaky pipe in a cramped basement or troubleshooting a customized HVAC system requires a level of physical dexterity and human problem-solving that a server farm can’t replace.

The Human Pushback

We’ve talked about this before: the more the world goes digital, the more people crave the analog.

There is a growing pushback against the “Data Center-ification” of our lives. People are getting tired of not being able to talk to a human. They’re tired of “Support Bots” that don’t understand their problem.

Small business stands on the front line of that pushback. We don’t have the option of being an “unreachable” tech giant. We have to look the customer in the eye. That face-to-face interaction isn’t a bug; in an AI world, it’s the ultimate feature.

Brewers Don’t Panic

AI is not going to make your local craft beer pint.

Sure, we’re going to use AI on the office side. We already are. It handles the boring stuff—accounting, social media copy, bookkeeping—and it allows us to stick around longer by increasing our efficiency. Like any other industry, the businesses that don’t adapt and use these tools will disappear.

But the physical part of brewing? The smells, the temperature control, the actual manual labor of moving grain and cleaning tanks? That’s here to stay.

I’ve seen plenty of reels on Instagram of brewers making the joke: “When is AI going to take my job?” Usually, they’re asking with a smile while they’re elbow-deep in a mash tun. They aren’t panicking.

Compare that to your average SaaS (Software as a Service) company. Those guys are sweating. Wall Street seems to agree, thinking many of these software businesses are totally cooked because their barrier to entry just dropped to near zero.

But I don’t talk to any small business owners who are losing sleep over Gemini. Maybe some of that is naivete, but most of it is a realistic understanding of what we do. Interacting with customers and providing a physical good is not something an LLM can do, or at least not in the way that we do it.

The Margin Expander

Here is the secret: AI is actually a gift for the “Atoms” business.

In the software world, AI is a disruptor. It lowers the barrier of entry, meaning any kid with a laptop can now compete with a firm that has 500 engineers.

In the Small/Mid-sized Business (SMB) world, AI is a margin expander.

It handles the “boring crap” we don’t want to deal with anyway. It makes our processes smoother, our marketing more professional, and our scheduling more efficient. It does all of that without threatening our core service.

We keep the physical moat, but we get the “Asset Light” efficiency on the backend. That is a recipe for profit growth.

The Last Man Standing

The Lindy Effect: The longer something has existed, the longer it is likely to exist.

Plumbing has been around forever. Heating and cooling have been around for a century. Drinking alcohol with your friends? That’s been around since we crawled out of the caves.

I know, the brewing industry has its headwinds right now (believe me, I know), and maybe I should take the “permanence” of the bar business with a grain of salt. But people are going to keep drinking, just like they’re going to keep needing their toilets fixed.

These things are not going to be disrupted by AI. While Wall Street is freaking out about which software company is going to be “Amazoned” by OpenAI, Main Street is quietly focusing on its HALO.

A local HVAC company has a much clearer line of sight for what 2035 looks like than some “revolutionary” AI startup has for 2027. That clarity is an advantage that is finally being priced into the public markets for companies that have it and do not. On the small business side, it’s not an advantage that is talked about often, but it definitely exists.

The Bottom Line

The HALO trade isn’t just for Mega-cap stocks or utility conglomerates. It belongs to the entrepreneurs who own the physical infrastructure we live in every day.

It belongs to the people who provide the face-to-face services we need to exist as a society.

Don’t chase the bits; own the atoms. Looking around the brewery right now, I see a hell of a lot of atoms.

I think we’re going to be all right.

It had been a minute since my wife and I had been out for dinner. We were enjoying a cocktail on our way to a 6:30 reservation next door. I was halfway through a unique twist on a Negroni—the kind of drink you’re supposed to sip slowly and appreciate—when my phone lit up.

It was the babysitter.

She sounded out of breath. Exasperated. “There is a fire. I called 911. Everybody’s out of the house. The Fire Department is on the way.”

Hoping I was misinterpreting her, I ran outside to the sidewalk where it was quiet, trying to make the words make sense in my head. I called 911. Everybody is out. It clicked. This wasn’t a false alarm. This wasn’t a burnt piece of toast. There was a real, legitimate fire in my house.

I ran back inside, looked at my wife, and told her we had to go right now. I slapped a fifty on the bar and we flew for the door. Still inside the bar, she asked, “Is it Des?”

“No.”

“Is it the dogs?”

“No.”

Now officially outside, I told her the house was on fire. Panic set in.

The fifteen-minute drive home felt like three hours. You know that feeling when you’re racing against a reality you can’t see yet? Your mind populates the void with the worst-case scenarios. We rounded the corner approaching our house and it looked like a movie set—eight fire trucks blocking the road, one of them parked directly in my driveway. I told my wife to go straight to the EMS truck where our son, Des, and the babysitter were waiting.

I ran up the driveway and the visual hit me like a physical blow: thick, black smoke pouring out of every eave, every soffit, and the attic vents. You hear the cacophony of it—the sirens of more trucks coming, the alarms, and the sound of glass shattering inside as the heat does its work. They cracked a garage door and a solid wall of black smoke erupted into the air. Firefighters in full gear emerged, immediately ripping down the ceiling in the garage looking for signs of it spreading through the attic.

Our babysitter was a rockstar. Hannah—the daughter of my buddy Andy—had managed to get our eight-year-old out front and the dogs out back before things got too bad to do so. She saved more than just lives; she saved the chance for us to have anything left to return to.

The only one missing was the cat. We found him later after the flames were out, hiding in the lowest spot of the basement—the best place he could’ve been. He was fine, beyond being terrified.

Once the place was ventilated enough to breathe, I went inside with the fire captain. It was shocking. My entire home was black. Not “charred in spots,” but fundamentally transformed. The bathroom and the closet where the fire started were basically gone—non-existent. The light fixtures had gotten so hot they melted, hanging four feet down from the ceiling like a Salvador Dali painting. The mini-split air conditioner 35 feet from the fire got so hot it also had started a slow crawl down the wall. The shattered remains of the skylight litter the hallway due to the rising heat looking for an escape route.

Firefighters were still hunting hot spots with infrared thermometers, ripping down the dining room ceiling. I headed for the basement to check on the cat and stepped directly into a half-inch of standing water. Everything we owned was either charred, melted, covered in toxic soot or soaked. In twenty minutes, the “stuff” was screwed. Reality had officially shifted.

The hoses eventually get rolled up. The firefighters spray the soot off their gear and head for the trucks. The captain shakes my hand, his face weary but professional. “It’s all insurance stuff from here,” he says. “I’m sorry for the loss.”

He isn’t just being polite—those guys did a hell of a job. If they hadn’t knocked it down when they did, five more minutes would have turned the whole structure into a pile of ashes at the bottom of the basement.

Then the trucks pull away, the sirens fade, and the silence hits like a freight train.

I was left standing alone in the smoky remains of my life. My feet were soaked, and my clothes were smeared black with soot from crawling around the floor searching for the cat. It was just me and the quiet in this black shell of a home. I looked at the wall and my heart sank. There were six custom-painted portraits of our past dogs—painted by a great friend. They were blackened, faded, and ruined. It was the one thing in the entire house I couldn’t replace with something better from a catalog.

The “what ifs” started to loop. The “why us” creeps in, followed by the mental checklist of anything that could have been done differently. That was the first of several nights where sleep wouldn’t even be an option. When the adrenaline leaves, the reality of the void settles in. You realize that “home” is a concept that requires a place to stay, and suddenly, you don’t have one.

I called my parents. I texted the staff at the brewery to let them know the damage. My buddy Andy, who I’ve known since the fifth grade, was the first to arrive on-site and see this mess. He and Hannah came out that night to help me board up broken windows and purge the refrigerator—a grim but necessary task to keep the scent of rotting food from joining the “campfire air freshener” that now permeates every square inch of the house.

In a small town, bad news travels at the speed of light. I didn’t want any fish stories hitting the streets, so I took a few photos and posted the reality to my beer group—300 of my closest beer buddies—and the brewery’s business page. I asked for patience; the time I’m about to spend on this mess is going to hit my ability to produce beer. Lastly I asked people to just support the business and my staff.

What followed was a humbling, phone-melting experience.

Literally hundreds of comments, DMs, texts, and calls flooded in. I’m getting messages from finance friends in Manhattan and Toronto, and from my former athletes I coached. It feels like every person I’ve ever crossed paths with is reaching out. On zero hours of sleep, ten hours of phone time and scheduling is an absolute sensory overload.

No less than ten people offered us their homes. Andy took the cat while we moved from his basement into a dog-friendly hotel. Des returned to school to find a new backpack waiting for him, fully loaded with supplies. The PTO was already organizing clothes and essentials. Things just keep showing up. The brewery has had one of our biggest weeks ever due to people coming out to support us. We were—and are—in great shape because we have the financial means to bridge the gap until insurance checks start coming. But seeing our community mobilize was something else entirely.

The adjuster gave us the ballpark: 9 to 10 months for a full interior gut, remediation, and reconstruction. This isn’t a sprint; it’s a marathon through a charred landscape and it’s going to be miserable.

For 14 years, I stood on the sidelines of high school basketball courts, harping on teenagers about many things but often two specifically: their attitude and their body language. As a lifelong Cubs fan, I quickly adopted Joe Maddon’s 2015 mantra: “Attitude is a decision.” Back in Illiquid Assets #4, I discussed the “Vaccine of Difficulty”—the idea that doing hard things makes hard things easier. Marathons, health struggles, the brewery stress, the MBA—all at once. These are the voluntary hard things that make real hard things, like this, more tolerable. Like all of them, it’s not pleasant, but you know you will get through it due to that experience with toughness.

Despite the hundred-plus phone calls and the sleepless nights, I feel oddly locked in. My main objective is protection. I want to keep the weight of this burden off my son and my wife, Erin. I want them to feel as normal as possible, even if “normal” means a hotel pool.

Erin is a total boss. She makes three times my income, and I’m secure enough to say it. My role is often about flexibility—adapting to her unplanned work travel and keeping the balls in the air as a solo parent in those moments. But as a man, there are times you wish you could do more. This is that time when I actually can. I have this under control. Des can be excited about the pool at the hotel; Erin can be excited about redesigning the house. This isn’t masculine bravado; this is what I trained for.

I talked to my uncle, who went through this a few years back. He told me, “This is going to be the worst for a year, and then when it’s all done, it may be the best thing that has ever happened to you.”

He’s right. We have an opportunity for a fresh start. 20 years of house projects that we would like to tackle but don’t want to “pull the Band-Aid” that would lead to 10 other projects. The “Band-Aid” is officially off. Time to do it all.

But the real story here is that most people are good. The Golden Rule all comes back around. When you take care of others, they take care of you. And that is one of many things I am very thankful for this week.

Thank you to everyone who reached out. Your kindness isn’t lost on us. We’re going to be fine. I promise we have what we need, and the ability to get anything that we don’t. For those that gave us much-needed space to process and do what has to be done, you are also appreciated and it feels great to know you are all behind us and understand how busy something like this can be.

This episode is dedicated to every one of you who sent a text, made a call, or offered positive vibes from afar.. We feel the love. It is the most valuable asset we own, and it’s the one thing the fire couldn’t touch.

Be good to each other.

— Dave

It’s 8:20 PM on a Friday. In the civilian world, this is the “relaxing” part of the week. My wife is out for a rare girls’ night, and I’m home with the kid, finally leaning into the couch and watching March Madness. The stakes for my evening were supposed to be limited to Minecraft assistance and bedtime stories.

Then my phone buzzes. It’s Casey, my Friday night bartender and assistant brewer.

In this industry, a text from your staff at 8:20 PM on a Friday is never a “just checking in” message. It’s a flare sent up from the trenches. The text contains a suggestion for a new beer name. At Brewery 4 Two 4, that’s our shorthand for “something incredibly dumb just happened.” Most of our tap list names are essentially monuments to human absurdity. This time, the absurdity had a name which we will call “Mr. Pascal” for the purposes of this story.

Casey informs me that Mr. Pascal is officially 86’d. This guy—a first-timer—had spent the last two hours physically working his way down the bar like a slow-moving social virus. He’d start at the far end, talk way too loud and way too close to a stranger until they finished their pint in record time just to escape, and then he’d slide one stool over to the next victim. He was a one-man churn machine for my customer base.

Casey, being a pro, cut him off politely. No scene. Just the “it’s time to go, man” talk. I’m watching the security feed on my phone from my living room, watching the replay of the guy walking out, thinking, “Okay, crisis averted. Back to the couch.”

Ten minutes later: “He’s back. Looking for a backpack he never had.”

Then: “He’s come back four times. Go ahead and call the cops.”

I’m now 911-dispatching from my house while watching a live-streamed psychodrama on a four-inch screen. Casey tells the guy he texted the boss to check the cameras to see if he had a backpack when he came in and to wait on the patio until we figure it out, a smart move to keep the floor clear, while I’m scrubbing through footage of the last two hours like a low-budget detective. Spoiler: There was no backpack. There was never a backpack.

The police arrive, they trespass him, and they give him the “if you set foot here again, you’re going to jail” speech. From my phone feed of the parking lot camera, I see this going down and when done with the officer, he wanders off into the night. We call it a win. In the alcohol business, this isn’t exactly “common,” but it’s a known line item on the emotional balance sheet. You sell the social lubricant; occasionally, the gears slip.

Twenty minutes pass. My stress level is coming back down.

Then Brooke, another one of our bartenders, heads out to the garage for supplies. She hears a hissing sound. She looks over, and there’s Mr. Pascal, crouched down by Casey’s truck in the dark, manually letting the air out of the tires.

Now, Brooke is a professional, but is not one to be crossed and is capable of a vocabulary that would make Samuel L. Jackson take notes. She unleashes a tirade that probably echoed halfway to Lake Michigan and bolts back inside to call the police for round two. Pascal vanishes into the shadows again.

Now the manhunt is on. We have at least two police cruisers circling the block, shining their spotlights into the dark corners of the neighborhood.

At this point, the “Regulars’ Militia” assembles. We have guys who have been sitting at that bar for years; they see Casey and Brooke as family. They’re out by the truck, checking for damage, playing sentry. Good news is there is nothing missing other than air pressure.

I tell Casey to go change the battery on one of the security cameras just in case this clown comes back for a second round of brain-dead vengeance.

Casey is walking around front to perform the battery swap. And then, like a villain in a movie who forgot the script, Mr. Pascal just... walks by. Right down the sidewalk in front of the brewery. Casey runs back inside and tells Brooke to call the cops back as he is right in front and runs back out with the regulars to keep an eye on where he is headed.

The cops, who were already circling the block, come flying back and find him at the building right next to ours. Manhunt over. Mr. Pascal is given silver bracelets and is hauled off for a restful night on a concrete bed.

Later, the officer calls me for the full rundown from my end and asks for the security camera clips to build the case. The kicker? The guy only had two beers over two hours at our place. This wasn’t a “he had one too many IPAs” situation. No signs of being drunk.He was either just very unstable or more likely, he was as high as giraffe balls on something else entirely before he ever stepped through our door.

After uploading my clips to the Sheriff’s Department portal and discussing all this stupidity with Casey, I finally crack a beer of my own and go back to the couch to resume March Madness while searching the recesses of my brain for how to prevent the next round of stupidity whenever it may pop up.

Just another relaxing Friday night in the alcohol industry.

This is the first installment of Unfiltered Ownership, a new recurring special series here at Illiquid Assets. It’s an occasional departure from our usual Macro Views to focus on the Micro Brews—and the messy, chaotic, often absurd world of alcohol entrepreneurship. Subscribe now and don’t miss future stories from behind the bar.

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There is a widening chasm between Washington D.C. and Main Street. In one world, the Federal Reserve is obsessing over “neutral rates” and a “dot plot” that looks more like a Rorschach test than a roadmap. In the other—the one where we actually live and work—the economy feels like a high-performance engine that has been making strange noises, and now the “Check Engine” light just flashed red.

On Wednesday, Jerome Powell and the FOMC did exactly what the market expected: they stood perfectly still. The federal funds rate remains parked at 3.5% to 3.75%. It’s the second consecutive pause of 2026. While the loudmouths on Twitter debate whether we’ve landed the plane or just stalled the engine, those of us running small businesses are feeling the turbulence in real-time. But the scary part is that the turbulence isn’t coming from the things the Fed actually controls.

Jerome Powell likes to talk about his “tools.” But as we’re finding out, the Fed’s toolbox is remarkably sparse. It all comes down to a fundamental mismatch of scale. They are essentially trying to perform acupuncture with a pitchfork. The pitchfork isn’t necessarily the wrong tool for the job—it has tines, and if you’re incredibly lucky, you might hit the right pressure points. But the instrument is too heavy, the points are too large, and the stakes are too high. Push just a millimeter too hard, and the patient doesn’t find relief; the patient bleeds to death.

The “Hiking” Whisperers

Leading up to this meeting, there was a growing hum in the financial press that “higher for longer” wasn’t enough. There was actually talk that the Fed needed to raise rates again.

TheStreet and other outlets recently noted that interest-rate futures were pricing in a non-negligible probability of a rate hike in 2026—a scenario that seemed laughable just six months ago. The logic is that inflation is “sticky,” the conflict in Iran has sent energy prices into a vertical climb, and the “last mile” of getting inflation back to 2% is proving to be a marathon through deep mud. High Frequency Economics Chief Economist Carl Weinberg even suggested the Fed might need to get ahead of an inflation rate that could hit 3.5% by summer.

Think about the absurdity of that for a second. We just lost 92,000 jobs in February, the housing market is essentially a frozen tundra, and there are serious voices calling for tighter money. It feels like watching a doctor lean into that pitchfork because the patient still has a headache, ignoring the fact that the skin is already starting to tear.

The “Zero Job” Warning & The AI Freeze

It isn’t just the hawks making noise; the recession-watchers are sounding a much darker alarm. Economist Claudia Sahm, creator of the famed Sahm Rule, recently published a sobering update titled “A Year With No Jobs—But No Recession.” Sahm points out that after the massive 2025 benchmark revisions—which effectively erased over one million jobs from the previous year’s totals—the U.S. has essentially seen zero net job growth over the last year.

Sahm describes a “low hire, low fire” environment where the labor market has effectively frozen. This aligns perfectly with what we’ve been outlining here for weeks: the AI-driven white-collar freeze. While we aren’t seeing a mass “AI apocalypse” in the headlines, we are seeing the “invisible layoff.” Companies aren’t firing everyone today; they’re just using AI to justify a total halt on entry-level hiring and junior knowledge work.

When you combine Sahm’s “zero job” reality with the AI-driven headcount reductions, you get an economy with zero “buffer.” We are incredibly vulnerable to shocks—like $110 oil—because there’s no hiring momentum left to absorb the blow. If no one is getting hired, there’s no safety net when the layoffs finally do start.

The Ghost in the Machine: Sticky Shelter

Perhaps the most frustrating part of this “pause” is that the Fed is being held hostage by a statistical ghost: Owners’ Equivalent Rent (OER).

Despite the housing market being almost completely stalled—with 30-year mortgage rates hovering above 6% and existing home sales stuck at a floor—the Fed’s preferred housing metric keeps climbing. Recent BLS data shows OER rising 3.2% year-over-year, even as actual market rents in the real world have begun to drop.

Why the disconnect? Because OER isn’t a measure of what people actually pay; it’s a survey of what homeowners think they could rent their houses for. It’s a lagged, theoretical metric that typically runs 18 to 24 months behind the actual market. The Fed is essentially looking at a Polaroid of 2024’s housing market and using it as a reason to keep the pitchfork pressed against the patient’s neck in 2026. This “sticky shelter” inflation accounts for over a third of the CPI. It is single-handedly keeping the “Headline” numbers high, giving the Fed the cover they need to keep rates restrictive while the real-world housing market is frozen solid.

The Discretionary Drain: Gas vs. Everything Else

There is a specific “playbook” for what happens to consumer behavior in the first 90 days of an energy shock, and we are currently on day 30. Recent data from Wells Fargo analysts led by Ike Boruchow suggests that sustained $4+ gasoline siphons roughly 180 to 240 basis points away from consumer discretionary spending almost immediately.

For every $10 increase in the price of crude, another 24 cents is added to the pump, which translates to a massive redirection of household spending. This is effectively a “regressive tax” that consumers cannot avoid. As Raymond James recently noted, these rising energy prices act as a direct squeeze on both individuals and businesses. You can’t interest-rate-hike your way to cheaper gasoline when the problem is a supply chain broken by war. Instead, households do the only thing they can: they preserve the “Staples” (groceries, utilities, rent) and sacrifice the “Discretionary.”

The View from the Taproom

From where I sit, the Fed has a fundamental mismatch between the “illness” and the “medication.”

As a business owner, I see the squeeze from every angle. My labor costs aren’t going down, and my raw inputs—everything from grain to CO2—are getting hit by the “Everything is More Expensive to Ship” or the “tractors run on diesel” tax. But the real kicker is the shrinking customer wallet.

Consumer discretionary spending survives on “disposable” cash. But when gas hits $4 a gallon, that extra pint at the end of the week becomes a “maybe next time.” When it hits $5? That “maybe” becomes “we have (shitty) beer at home.”

In a tourist destination like Holland, Michigan, this is existential. We depend on people having the discretionary urge to take a road trip, stay in a hotel, and visit a brewery. When $4 gas filters through to the grocery store, the consumer doesn’t just “cool off”—they shut down. Raising rates, or even holding them steady for that matter, to combat an oil shock induced by a war in the Middle East isn’t just a mismatch; it’s a mistake. You can’t interest-rate your way to more oil production in a war zone.

The “Anecdata” of Inflation

On the flip side, I understand why the Fed is paralyzed. If they cut too fast, they risk reigniting the fire.

Call it “anecdata,” but I know my own behavior. If rates dropped to zero tomorrow, I’d be the first person emailing my mortgage guy to do another cash-out refi to do major projects on the house that was a stretch for us 18 years ago and is well below our means now. I’d probably also be looking at financing a couple of new pieces of brewery equipment that I currently have no interest in paying business loan rates for.

I am the demographic that drives inflation when money is free. This is the impossible task: The Fed has to ease the pressure enough to save the person whose job was lost in the February slump, without pulling back so far that the person (like me) starts using cheap debt to drive prices higher.

The Bottom Line

The biggest issue with “Data Dependency” is that the Fed is driving a car at 80 mph while looking exclusively in the rearview mirror. By the time the “data” shows we are in a massive stagflationary ditch, we’ll have been there for months.

In my opinion, the Fed needs to stop worrying about the ghost of 1970s inflation for a moment and start looking at the very real stagflation of 2026. They best get back to cutting—and quickly—or the “soft landing” is going to look a lot more like a crater.

Micro Brews, Macro Views

Dave

If you read that post and felt like we were headed for a Wall-E style existence where we all float around in chairs staring at screens while robots bring us nutrient shakes, I don’t blame you.

But there’s a funny thing about humans: we are terrible at staying in one place. Whether it’s a stock market bubble or a cultural trend, we have a biological inability to avoid overcorrecting.

Today, we’re making the counter-argument. We’re going “Long Humanity.”

Because if there’s one thing we know about markets, it’s that the most crowded trade is usually the one that’s about to break. And right now, everyone is “Short Fellowship.”

It’s time for the Mean Reversion of the Soul.

The Pendulum and the Pivot

Most markets, driven by human behavior, spend 90% of their time swinging toward extremes and only 10% of their time in the “rational” middle. Human behavior itself is no different.

For the last decade, the extreme has been “Efficiency.” We wanted our groceries delivered without talking to a clerk. We wanted our meetings on Zoom so we could wear pajama bottoms. We wanted AI to write our emails so we didn’t have to think.

We got exactly what we asked for. We removed the friction. But in doing so, we removed the “social lubricant” that makes life worth living.

The “Great Social Atrophy” was the swing to the far left. But the snap-back could be a coiling spring. You can’t yet see it in the data. But anecdotally, you see it with the pushback and NIMBYism of data centers. Most people are somewhere between indifferent and hating the growth of AI. It’s not often we see society shift in a way that a majority of people hate—at least not without power-hungry rabble-rousing political leaders taking us there. People are realizing that “efficiency” is a great way to run a warehouse, but a miserable way to run a life.

We are genetically programmed for interaction. You can’t patch out 200,000 years of tribal evolution with a few software updates. At some point, the “Covid Kids” we discussed in IA #8 are going to wake up and realize they are starving for something a screen can’t provide. They are going to come out to play. I have regrets about not being social enough in my younger years… and I could tell ridiculous stories about my younger exploits long enough to drink a brewery dry.

Brewery Nostalgia Of The Future

There’s a specific brand of nostalgia that hits when you reach your 30s and 40’s. You start looking back at the places where you felt safe and connected.

For the Gen X crowd, it was the mall. For Millennials, it was probably the coffee shop or the dive bar. But for the generation currently entering the workforce, their childhood “Third Place” was often a brewery. Not as a drinker, but as the generation of children that grew up during the great brewery boom.

Think about it. These are the kids who were dragged to taprooms on Saturday afternoons while their parents shared a flight of IPAs. They played LEGOs on wooden benches and watched the world go by while their parents talked to neighbors. At the time, they probably had their heads buried in a tablet or a coloring book.

But nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

As these kids grow up in an increasingly digital, sterile world, they aren’t going to crave more “digital-first” spaces. According to recent reporting from CNBC regarding the “Analog” shift, Gen Z is already showing a massive desire to get offline, trading their smartphones for “dumb phones” and seeking out physical, small-business hubs. They are going to crave the smell of boiling hops, the sound of a heavy keg hitting a concrete floor, and the sight of people actually laughing in person.

The breweries again could become the “Public House”—a term that has existed for centuries for a reason. It’s the secular church. It’s the community center that doesn’t require a membership. It’s the place where you go to be “among” people, even if you aren’t “with” them. I still see my customers doing something that I have done dozens of times: sit at the bar and make a new connection that may become a new friend. I have hundreds of “beer friends,” and most of my closest friends developed directly from that connection.

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Presence as “Proof of Work”

This is where the AI pushback vs. dystopian future gets interesting.

In the crypto world, “Proof of Work” is what gives a token value—it’s the literal energy expended to prove something is real. In a world dominated by AI and remote work, Physical Presence is the new Proof of Work.

When an AI can generate a perfect video of a sunset, the actual sunset becomes more valuable. When an AI can write a heartfelt letter, the hand-written note becomes a luxury good. And when AI can simulate a “conversation,” sitting across a table from a human being and seeing their pupils dilate when they laugh becomes the ultimate status symbol.

AI makes digital content infinite and, therefore, worthless. It commoditizes “connection.”

But you can’t digitize the “vibe” of a Friday night at a local spot. You can’t download the feeling of a cold pint glass or the ambient noise of a crowd. That friction—the very thing we tried to eliminate for a decade—is now the “moat.”

If you want to prove you’re actually living, you have to show up. You have to put skin in the game.

The WFH Backlash and the Search for a “Second Place”

The Work-From-Home movement was sold as the ultimate freedom. No commute! No “forced” socialization at the watercooler!

But for many, it turned out to be a gilded cage. Without a “Second Place” (the office), the boundary between “Rest” and “Work” evaporated. People are now working in the same place they sleep, eating lunch at the same desk they use for Zoom calls, and realizing that they actually missed the “forced” interactions of the office.

This has created a massive vacancy in the human psyche. I see it in my wife, who generally works remote. When she gets the call for a work happy hour in person, the excitement is real. You can only vent so much over Slack. It’s not the same as bitching about some idiot you all deal with in person where there isn’t a trail for your IT guy to read later.

Since the office is no longer the “Second Place” for millions of people, they are over-indexing on the “Third Place” to fill the void. The brewery or bar isn’t just a place to get a drink anymore; it’s the place where the “Work-From-Home” tribe can go to remember they are part of a society.

We are seeing a mass existential crisis where people are realizing that “Independence” is just a polite word for “Isolation.” The snap-back is the realization that we don’t want to be independent; we want to be interdependent. And it’s coming. Over-indexing and mean reversion is what we do.

The Bottom Line: Only the Real Survive

Not every business is going to survive this shift. The “commodity” bars—the ones that offer nothing but over-priced booze, backless steel stools, and super-mid super-expensive tacos—might still continue to shrink.

But the physical spaces that lean into community, fellowship, and face-to-face interaction are building a moat that Big Tech can’t touch (other than Google Maps changing our listed hours every other week for no reason).

As much as the Silicon Valley crowd wants us to live in our headsets and use data centers for every human need, they are fighting against our DNA. You can’t undo millennia of genetic programming with a Vision Pro or whatever the next stupid wearable is.

We aren’t headed for a dystopian mess where we all forget how to talk to each other. We’re just in the middle of a massive mean reversion. The “Great Social Atrophy” was a warning, but the “Great Social Snap-Back” is the opportunity.

Only the strong will survive in the hospitality business. But those who do will be the keepers of the one thing AI can’t replicate: the human spirit.

Long Fellowship. Short Isolation.

Dave

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The usual response from someone who has worked a corporate desk job their entire life is incredibly predictable. They usually lean back, sigh, and say, “Man, that’s awesome. I would love to do that someday. You’re living the dream.”

Here’s the thing they don’t tell you about living the dream: Nightmares are dreams, too.

The Treadmill of Success

In business, every step forward, every accomplishment, and every metric you hit doesn’t mean you get to coast. It just becomes a newly raised bar that you now have to clear again and again.

You brew a smash-hit IPA? Great, now your customers expect three more just like it next week. You hit your revenue target for the quarter? Fantastic. Now, do we reinvest that income? Which means you need more space, which means you need more staff. Sometimes you’re raising that bar for your customers, sometimes you’re raising it for your staff, and sometimes you’re just sadistically doing it to yourself.

That treadmill can be absolutely exhausting. You never really arrive; you just unlock the next, more complicated level of the game. To be clear, my business is super small. The model isn’t all that complicated. But that also means I am the “Director of Everything.”

Because I grew up in a family-owned business, I went into this with my eyes wide open. I knew most of the downsides of striking out on your own. People love the idea of “being your own boss.” Let me disabuse you of that notion right now. True, you might not have an actual human manager breathing down your neck, but make no mistake—you absolutely have a boss.

The business itself is your boss. Your customers are your boss. The inevitable reality of things breaking at the most inopportune times? That is the ultimate boss.

Don’t get me wrong. Probably 80% of the time, I absolutely love what I do. I love the flexibility it provides. Yes, the to-do list is a mile long and never truly finished, but in theory, I can usually tackle it when it works best for me and my family.

But it’s that other 20%—the dark, grueling, soul-sucking 20%—that the hustle-culture gurus conveniently leave out of their inspirational social media threads on entrepreneurship.

Risk, Ruin, and Rooftop HVACs

First, let’s talk about the risk. Pretty much anyone you’ve ever met who built a physical, brick-and-mortar business took a massive, stomach-churning financial risk at some point. You can study finance, analyze balance sheets, and model out cash flow projections until your eyes bleed, but a spreadsheet can’t prepare you for the reality of putting everything on the line.

There is a specific, metallic taste in your mouth when you realize your mortgage is directly tied to how much beer you sell on a rainy Tuesday in November. Personally, we essentially leveraged every single dollar we’ve ever made—including the equity in our home—just to get the brewery doors open. It was the ultimate illiquid bet.

And naturally, because the universe has a sick sense of humor, we found out my wife was pregnant exactly one month later. We’ll save the full panic attack of those specific stories for future episodes, but it’s crazy. It’s stupid. It is absolutely wrought with risk. Aside from a handful of second-generation, hand-me-down business owners (and frankly, even most of them), every single founder you know took that burden on in some form or fashion.

The next part of that shitty 20% is the mechanical failures. And let me tell you a secret about commercial equipment: it rarely breaks when you’re actually in the building. It’s as if these machines wait in the bushes, watching through the windows for you to drive away.

Currently, as I write this dispatch, one of my countertop canners is down, and my keg washer is refusing to cycle properly. Neither is a quick fix I can magically figure out with a wrench and a prayer. Both will require a trip somewhere else for specialized maintenance after I have already spent hours trying to be the shade tree mechanic. That trip has to be carved out of my already fully scheduled week. So, just as I thought I was finally coming up for air after drowning in end-of-the-year paperwork, I’m getting pounded right back below the surf by another wave of broken metal.

But that’s just a standard Tuesday. I once spent four agonizing months trying to run down a leak in one of our rooftop HVAC units that the actual professional repair guys—both roofers and HVAC technicians—could not figure out. Just me, a ladder, a flashlight, and a creeping sense of madness as water dripped onto the floor no matter what we patched.

The Unmodelable Human Element

You can build the most robust financial models in the world. You can forecast yeast attenuation and grain needs with pinpoint accuracy. But you cannot model the general public. There is no spreadsheet cell for the sheer, unadulterated chaos of human behavior.

There is no line item for the busy Friday night when a bartender accidentally hands a customer someone else’s credit card, letting them walk right out the door while the taproom is packed shoulder-to-shoulder. You can’t project the ROI of waking up to a deranged one-star review and a string of unhinged messages from someone promising to “end our business” when we had barely gotten off the ground. The vulnerability of pouring your heart into a business, only to have a complete stranger try to destroy it online for sport, is a uniquely modern kind of torture.

And then there are the phone calls. The “hey, sorry to bother you” texts that make your blood run cold. Like the time my bartender called to say they weren’t 100% sure, but they were pretty confident the guy at the end of the bar was casually doing cocaine. Or the time I was trying to sit down and eat a peaceful dinner, only to get interrupted because a regular customer suddenly lost their marbles and started screaming obscenities at the staff.

These are all real stories. I could go on literally forever.

The Panda Express Epiphany

There are millions of us out there who feel compelled—by a million different, irrational reasons—to build something for ourselves rather than clocking in for someone else. But being successful at it requires a level of white-knuckle intensity where you often kind of forget about yourself.

It can be incredibly lonely. It can be depressing. It is relentlessly hard.

Ironically, as I was scratching down notes for this piece, I was scarfing down my very first meal of the day. It was 3:15 PM. I was shoving lukewarm Chinese takeout into my face after racing out the door to go sit in the chaos of the school pickup line to get my son. And the fortune cookie at the bottom of the bag? It read:

“Make time for your passions.”

Like, thanks a ton, Panda Express.

It’s bad enough that this mediocre takeout is my first real sustenance of the day, but for dessert, I get a side of existential crisis. A passion? Other than work? I’d be thrilled just having enough time to get the “passion” of my business done, much less cultivating a hobby that didn’t just involve trying not to be a walking mound of goo by the time I turn 60, or finding ways to actually retire someday. Those are my hobbies now.

But that’s what we do. This is our passion. The grind, the risk, the broken keg washers, the unhinged Yelp reviews, the 3:15 PM lunches—it’s all part of the package.

If you own a business, good on you. I see you, and I feel your pain. If you’ve never had to experience that specific brand of joy, take a second and think about a friend of yours who has. They’ve probably been through the exact same wringer, waking up in the middle of the night wondering if the cooler is going to fail.

This shit ain’t easy. But it is the lifeblood of our economy and our local communities. These are the crazy people who sponsor your kid’s Little League team rather than spending that money on a nice weekend away. These are the businesses that happily donate gift cards for the high school drama club raffle, even when the canner is broken, the roof is leaking, and the margins are tight.

We all need to support them more.

Myself included.

Micro Brews, Macro Views

Dave

In my very first piece, we touched on the “graying of the taproom.” The core demographic—the people actually keeping the lights on—is getting older. The 20-somethings who used to pack the place on a Thursday night are increasingly absent.

It’s easy to blame shifting tastes, the rise of mocktails, or the mainstreaming of cannabis. But if you look at the macroeconomic data and the shifting structure of the modern workplace, a much darker reality emerges. The young, newly employed professional with disposable income—the exact demographic that underwrote the entire craft beer boom—is being systematically dismantled.

Here is how the great social atrophy is playing out, and why the traditional “happy hour” is on the endangered species list.

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The Disappearing Ground Floor

For decades, the path into the white-collar middle class was remarkably consistent. You graduated from college, moved to a tier-one or tier-two city, and took a job doing the grunt work. You were a junior equity researcher, a data entry clerk, a spreadsheet jockey, or a low-level CRM manager.

The pay wasn’t incredible, but you were young, single, and you had disposable income. Crucially, you were in an office. At 5:15 PM, you and four other co-workers walked out of the building, headed to the corner pub, bellied up to the bar, and spent three hours drinking IPAs and bitching about your managing director.

That was the ecosystem. That ritual was the foundational unit of the hospitality industry’s most profitable daypart.

Today, that entire ecosystem is collapsing, starting with the job itself. AI just broke the corporate pyramid.

According to recent analysis from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, early-career workers (ages 22-25) in AI-exposed fields have already seen a 13% relative decline in employment. By the first quarter of 2025, the share of jobs listed globally as “entry-level” plummeted 45% below the five-year average. As of late 2025, the U.S. unemployment rate for young college graduates hit 9.5%—nearly double the general adult rate.

This trend is only going to accelerate as public companies face the music: massive, multi-billion-dollar capital expenditures in AI must eventually translate into higher profit margins and lower headcount.

The math for corporate America is simple: why hire five 22-year-olds to clean up data when a single senior analyst with an enterprise AI Copilot license can do the same work in half the time? The foot-in-the-door jobs are vaporizing.

Earlier this week, Citrini Research published a piece of pure macroeconomic nightmare fuel—a thought exercise projecting a full-blown economic meltdown by 2028, driven entirely by the AI automation cycle kicking off right now. The dystopian roadmap they laid out went predictably viral across the financial web, and for good reason: the entire scenario is terrifyingly plausible.

The Ghost Town Office

Now, suppose you are the lucky 22-year-old who manages to land one of these increasingly scarce entry-level gigs. Where are you actually working?

Probably from your childhood bedroom, or a cramped apartment you share with three roommates.

Return-to-office mandates generate a lot of financial press headlines, but the boots-on-the-ground data tells a completely different story. According to late 2025 Gallup polling data, among U.S. employees with remote-capable jobs, a staggering 78% are either fully remote (26%) or hybrid (52%). Only 22% are on-site full-time.

This means the physical on-ramp to corporate culture has been severed. You aren’t learning by osmosis, you aren’t grabbing coffee with the senior VP in the breakroom, and you definitely aren’t organically organizing a post-work pub run with colleagues you only know as floating heads on a Zoom grid.

When you combine fewer entry-level jobs with sky-high housing costs, disposable income evaporates. The modern craft beer industry, and specifically the $9 pint of hazy IPA, was built on the backs of Millennials who enjoyed entry-level corporate salaries and pre-inflation, pre-2020 rent. Gen Z is facing the exact opposite: runaway housing costs where median rent eats up an unprecedented share of early-career take-home pay. You can’t drop $40 on a Tuesday tab when you’re terrified of being automated out of your hybrid job and your landlord is bleeding you dry.

The Galloway Principle: Get Out and Drink

NYU Professor and market commentator Scott Galloway has been aggressively pounding the table on this exact dynamic. He argues that remote work, while a fantastic “unlock” for a 45-year-old caregiver, is an absolute disaster for young professionals.

According to Galloway, the office isn’t just a place to format Excel models; it is a feature, not a bug, of adult social development. It’s the ultimate “mating and dating” ground. Historically, one in three relationships began at work. It is where you find friends, mentors, and mates.

But Galloway goes a step further, pointing out that the push toward remote work has collided with a broader anti-socializing movement. His blunt advice to 20-somethings? The long-term medical risks to your liver from having a few beers are entirely dwarfed by the catastrophic mental and professional risks of social isolation. His prescription is literal: get out of the house, go to a bar, drink more, and make a few mistakes. Because the alternative is sitting in a 600-square-foot apartment, alone, while your social and professional skills completely atrophy.

The Kicker: The COVID Cohort Comes of Age

Here is where the demographic tidal wave truly hits the shore.

Think about the kids graduating from college right now, entering this exact economic meatgrinder. These are the exact same kids who were in high school during the 2020 and 2021 lockdowns.

We took their formative social years and replaced them with screens. We actively discouraged them from gathering in physical spaces. Now, they are graduating into a white-collar economy where the entry-level jobs are scarce, the ones that exist are remote, and the cost of living is punishing.

The social muscle memory simply isn’t there. A study comparing generations found that today’s 15-to-24-year-olds spend barely half the amount of time socializing in person as Millennials did at that exact same age.

This is an existential threat to breweries and bars. Beer is fundamentally an acquired taste, and that taste has historically been acquired through forced social repetition. You drank it because that’s what everyone else was drinking at the table while you blew off steam about the commute. Without the physical office to force the proximity, and without the entry-level income to fund the outing, that repetition never happens. The result? Craft beer’s rate of sale has recently fallen by over 10% year-over-year, with a sharp drop-off in adoption among 21-to-34-year-olds.

The Takeaway

As the older generation of craft beer drinkers ages out of the taproom, the replacement rate isn’t just slowing down—it’s falling off a cliff.

The traditional happy hour was never really about the alcohol. It was a physical “third place” subsidized by corporate friction and entry-level disposable income. It was the necessary decompression chamber between the physical office and the physical home.

When you eliminate the friction with AI, eliminate the office with remote work, and price the young worker out of the neighborhood, you don’t just change the labor market. You eliminate the happy hour. For the hospitality and real estate sectors relying on that 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM pop, the writing isn’t just on the wall. The wall has already been automated.

This is bleak. But it’s anything but certain. In the coming weeks, I’ll take a look at the counterpoints to this dystopian picture of the future of the industry. Stay tuned.

Micro Brews, Macro Views,

Dave

I’ve spent the last couple months trying to figure out exactly what Illiquid Assets is supposed to be. Is it a brewery operations manual? A macro-economics deep dive? A finance guy’s diary?

The answer is: Yes.

I used to worry that not having a “lane” was a bug. But looking back at my career, I’ve realized it’s actually the feature. My entire professional life has been a series of pivots, humbled egos, and “one foot out the door” moments that somehow landed me exactly where I need to be.

The Small Pond Fallacy

I was raised in East Jordan, Michigan. In a graduating class of 83 kids, if you can solve for X, they tell you you’re an engineer. I believed them. Then I got to Grand Valley State and realized that every other high school in Michigan had sent their own “Math and Science Guy”. Or more likely, 20 of them.

When the guys in the front row are doing differential loops around you in Calculus, you have two choices: stay and drown, or pivot. I pivoted. I liked the outdoors. I liked science. I moved to Natural Resources Management.

I liked the classes, but I didn’t want to work for the government—which was lucky, because the state was on a hiring freeze anyway. I was moving forward, but I had no idea where the destination was.

The 100-Hour Grind

While finishing my degree at GVSU, I found I really liked the “science of the surface” while working at The Meadows golf course. I decided to double down. I finished my Bachelor’s while simultaneously grinding through a two-year Turfgrass Management program at Penn State.

I became an Assistant Superintendent at Cedar Chase. If you want to know what “illiquid” feels like, try working 100+ hours a week in the summer for terrible pay, chasing a “dream” course of your own. It’s the kind of job that works when you’re young and hungry, but I could eventually see that the path didn’t lead where I wanted to go. But, it taught me how to grind in a way that would serve me very well later as a business owner.

The Eight-Year Wait

I moved to athletic turf at a local high school, thinking I’d found the “forever” spot where I’d eventually take over. I spent eight years waiting for the man in charge to retire. He had one foot out the door for nearly a decade... but he never actually stepped through it.

Lesson learned: You can’t build your future on someone else’s timeline. Seeing the writing on the wall, I went back to my environmental science roots and joined the Ottawa County Department of Public Health.

The Pivot and the Hedge

I excelled in public health, but the “fumble” continued—I started the brewery while I was there. One foot in the office, one foot in the mash tun.

Then 2020 happened. COVID hit, the world locked down, and suddenly my “liquid” business (the brewery) felt very fragile. I didn’t know if we were going to make it, and I wanted options if I was forced to do something else. That’s when I began working on my MBA.

Today, the MBA is done, and I still have one foot in that finance/economic lane and one foot in the brewery. I think I’m just built to fumble my way through things until I find what works.

The Advice from “Mount Rushmore”

As I was fumbling through the launch of this blog, I reached out to my personal “Mount Rushmore” of finance bloggers—guys who started as voices on the internet and have since become friends, Ben Carlson (of A Wealth of Common Sense), Michael Batnick (of The Irrelevant Investor), and Josh Brown (of The Reformed Broker).

**Give me a second to pick up those names I just dropped.

Ben’s take on what this should look like definitely resonated with me:

“...documenting what it’s like to be a small business owner and what it’s like to run a brewery would be really fun to learn about. I think the real-life stories and examples resonate with people.”

That’s the mandate. This blog isn’t about being a “guru.” It’s about being a practitioner.

The Case for Sucking at Something

If there is a takeaway message in all this career-hopping and blog-fumbling, it’s this: Try things you’ve never done.

If you’re fortunate enough to be in a place in your life where you’ve already checked off a lot of the things you have to do, and you haven’t tried anything new in a while... try something. Try something you might actually suck at.

Like writing a blog.

You never know what you might find when you’re willing to be a beginner again. For me, it’s a way to organize my own thoughts and stretch my wings on bigger issues than the ones directly in front of me. It’s about being authentic, even when it’s unpolished.

What’s Next?

So, look for a mix. Some days it’s economics. Some days it’s brewery updates. And, coming soon, I’m going to start a mini-series on the absolute chaos of opening the brewery. People have told me I should write a book on it; for now, you’re getting the “Director’s Cut” right here.

Thanks for coming along while I find my voice. It might be a fumble, but those are usually the plays where the most interesting things happen.

Micro Brews, Macro Views

Dave

Total sales for the day? $130. For a business with the overhead of a production brewery, that is a sobering number. It was our worst weather-affected day in recent memory. But the silence wasn’t a mystery; it was the result of a successful experiment coming to an end.

For the last several months, we hosted a local dart league on Wednesday nights. We did it because Wednesday—once our strongest “Mug Club” night—had softened. We needed to inject new energy and find new regulars. In that regard, the league was a win. We met great people, some of whom have become consistent faces in the taproom even when they aren’t throwing.

But the league was too successful. It physically dominated the space. If you weren’t on a team, finding a seat was a gamble, and the energy in the room was dialed up to a level that made a “quiet pint” impossible. Without a doubt, these are good problems for a nine-year-old business that has been forced to reinvent itself again and again.

We solved the Wednesday problem in the short term, but in doing so, we inadvertently “trained” our non-dart regulars to stay home. We broke their habit. Now that the league has wrapped up for the season, we are left with the void: the dart folks are taking a well-earned break, and the “old” regulars are still operating on the assumption that Wednesday is “Darts Night.” I already have plans on how to get the room full again on Wednesday, but this is the dance.

Welcome to the Experience Treadmill.

The Death of “Good Enough”

In the early days of the craft beer boom, the business model was simple: Make good beer, turn the lights on, and wait.

Those days are over. In a world of infinite options and inflationary pressure, “good product” is no longer a differentiator; it is the entry fee. To get people off their couches and into your seats, you have to offer an experience. Trivia, live music, dart leagues, fundraisers, euchre—we’ve done it all.

But there is a hidden cost to this innovation. When you move from being a “Product” business to an “Entertainment” business, you stop being a part of someone’s daily habit and start being an “event” on their calendar.

The Macro View: Tentpole Churn

This isn’t just a brewery problem. It’s a structural challenge for almost every modern business, even huge corporations.

Look at Netflix. The streaming giant spends billions on “tentpole” content—shows like Stranger Things or The Mandalorian (for Disney+). These events drive massive spikes in new subscriptions. Wall Street cheers the growth.

But the moment the season finale airs, the “Experience Treadmill” kicks in. A significant percentage of those new users cancel. They weren’t loyal to the platform; they were loyal to the event. This forces the streamers into a “Red Queen” race: they have to run faster and spend more every year just to keep their subscriber count from shrinking. They’ve trained their customers to “binge and bolt” rather than stay for the library.

On a smaller scale, look at Boutique Fitness Studios. A local yoga studio might bring in a “Star Instructor” for a specialized 6:00 PM Wednesday class. The room is packed, and the revenue per hour is at an all-time high.

But the “logistics of success” kick in. The regular members who used to come at 6:00 PM for a quiet, general workout find the room too crowded. They can’t get their favorite spot. After three weeks of feeling “dislocated,” they find a new gym. When the Star Instructor eventually moves on or the class ends, the studio owner looks around and realizes they didn’t just lose the class; they lost the “background” members who were the foundation of the business.

The “Responsive Tax” on Habits

In my previous post, I talked about the “Responsive Tax”—how small businesses are held to a higher standard because we have a face. The same applies to habits.

In economics, we talk about Switching Costs. Usually, this refers to something like the difficulty of moving your data from an iPhone to an Android. In the world of small business, the switching cost is mental. A regular’s “habit” is a moat. It protects your business from the competition. But that moat is fragile. It takes months to build a Wednesday night habit and only one or two “inconvenient” experiences to break it. If a regular drives to the brewery, sees a full parking lot or a taproom taken over by a league, and keeps driving—they’ve just lowered their switching cost to zero.

By solving our Wednesday revenue problem with an event, we unintentionally lowered the switching cost for our “Mug Club” regulars. We gave them a reason to try the brewery down the street or, more likely, stay home and save the $20.

Re-training the Room

Before I go further, I want to be clear: we appreciate every single person who joins us for a night. Whether you are here to throw a high-ton in darts, spin a record on vinyl night, battle it out at trivia, or just sit quietly with a pint of your favorite IPA—you are the reason we do this. Every customer brings a different energy to the taproom, and we need all of it to keep this community engine running.

Innovation is mandatory. We will continue to host leagues and try new events. To ignore “programming” in 2026 is to choose a slow death.

But the lesson of the $130 Wednesday is that we have to be more tactical about how we innovate. We have to find ways to attract new regulars without “dislocating” the ones we already have and are therefore more sustainable. We have to ensure that our outreach events are sustainable.

This week, we are back to work “re-training” the room. We’re reaching out to those Wednesday regulars, reminding them that their favorite seats are open again. It’s harder to restart a habit than it is to keep one, but in this economy, the “habit” is the only thing that survives the treadmill.

Life, like a taproom, is about balance. You need the noise of the league to find new blood, but you need the quiet of the “Mug Clubber” to keep the lights on.

Micro Brews. Macro Views.

Dave

At Brewery 4 Two 4, we recently started using AI-generated images for some of our social media announcements. For a small business, it felt like a superpower—a way to bridge the gap between our humble budget and the glossy, high-production marketing of national brands. Suddenly, we had the professional capacity of a Fortune 500 company. We could create high-fidelity visuals for events that would have previously cost us thousands in photography and graphic design. That is money we’d rather spend on grain, hops, and our local payroll. But, I could see the problem coming. Weeks ago I began the blog notes for this very issue. Like everything AI, it got here faster than I expected.

The response? Initially, it was great. Engagement was up, and the posts looked sharp. But then the “Your AI images are destroying the world” comments arrived. I removed all of our posts featuring AI. I woke up this morning to brewery friends experiencing the exact same thing.

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The irony of these comments is thick enough to chew on. They were posted on Facebook and Instagram—platforms where you cannot scroll for fifteen seconds without being prompted to “Try Meta AI.” They were delivered via an algorithm that is entirely AI-driven, typed on a device that uses machine learning to predict every word, while the users likely spent their day being “nudged” by AI-driven recommendations from Netflix and Amazon.

But because we are a small business that actually responds to its customers, we are the ones who get the lecture. Welcome to the Double Standard of AI.

The Invisible Machine

The average consumer interacts with a massive, invisible AI apparatus before they even finish their first cup of coffee. But because it isn’t “visible” like a generated image, it doesn’t trigger the same moral outrage.

Consider your daily “Invisible AI” footprint:

• The Grocery Store: Your rewards account isn’t just a way to save fifty cents on eggs. It’s an AI-driven data harvester that analyzes your buying habits to generate “dynamic pricing” and personalized coupons.

• The Logistics: Large corporations like UPS and Amazon use AI to set efficient routes and warehouse staffing. This isn’t for your convenience; it’s to identify exactly how many human jobs can be eliminated to increase the quarterly free cash flow.

• The Financial Nudge: Your credit card fraud detection, your mortgage approval, and the high-frequency trades that dictate the value of your 401(k) are all managed by black-box AI algorithms.

Large corporations use AI in ways that are massive, invisible, and focused entirely on increasing shareholder value. Because you can’t “see” the megawatts being burned in a server farm in Virginia to predict your toothpaste brand, there is no public outrage.

But when a local brewery uses an AI image to tell you about a new beer? That’s where the line is drawn.

NIMBYism and the Inevitable

Locally, the pushback against data centers has reached a fever pitch. It’s on the news every night: packed planning commission meetings, heated public hearings, and a clear message of “Not In My Back Yard.”

I don’t think these people are being insincere. Most of them truly don’t want to live in an AI-driven world. They see the physical footprint of these data centers and they want to opt-out. But the reality is that the technological toothpaste is out of the tube.

Nvidia isn’t a $4 trillion company because this is a passing fad. This is the structural reorganization of the global economy. NIMBY may keep the server farms out of our specific township, but the infrastructure is going to be built somewhere. We aren’t going back to a world of paper ledgers and analog logistics. We are living in the cloud whether we like the view of the data center or not.

The disconnect is that the same people rallying against the infrastructure are still using the tools. They organize their protests on Facebook. They coordinate via Gmail. They use the very products they are trying to keep out of their backyards. They aren’t hypocrites; they are just caught in a transition where the tech is everywhere, yet they hope if they don’t see the building, they aren’t part of the machine.

The “Responsive Tax”

Small businesses are held to a higher moral standard because we have a face. This is what I call the “Responsive Tax.”

When you yell at a multi-billion dollar tech giant, you’re screaming into a hurricane. Nothing changes. When you yell at us, you’re yelling at the person who might be pouring your beer or sponsoring your kid’s Little League team.

Because we are responsible to our community, we have to adapt. We’ve pulled back on the “visible” AI images because the “distraction” isn’t worth the engagement. We’d rather have a quiet comment section than a moral crusade over a picture of a pint glass.

Behind the Curtain: The Choice That Isn’t One

But here is the hard truth: To stay competitive as a business, we have to use AI. In most cases, it’s not even a choice we make—it’s the water we swim in.

I use QuickBooks for our accounting. Every single day, AI algorithms are categorizing our expenses, identifying trends, and predicting our cash flow. I use Square for our Point of Sale. It uses AI for data analysis, sales records, and searching. If you have an issue with a transaction from a month ago, I can find it and fix it in under a minute thanks to Square AI, which allows me to tell the system exactly what I am looking for without a filtered search or manual hunting.

I didn’t “install” an AI to do these things. They are baked into the services I pay for just to keep the doors open. I literally have no choice but to use them.

And frankly, it feels a little gross that every business you touch uses it—and they might not even know it. But it’s here. Unless you are sitting in a yurt most of your day, there is a good chance that almost everything you interact with that is web-enabled is using some sort of AI.

It feels like we are being forced to hide the very tools that allow us to survive, while the giants use them openly to replace human labor with code. We are using AI to try and drive business that supports local jobs, while the massive corporations are using it to eliminate them.

The Coming Rationalization

We are currently at the tip of the spear. AI will change the landscape for all businesses—small and large—massively over the next 24 months.

I don’t know if most small business owners see the “rationalization” that is coming. The transition is going to be ugly. Large corporations will continue to use it to optimize their margins and “efficiently” replace human labor. Meanwhile, small business owners are being shamed for using it to simply look professional on a Facebook page.

To survive, we have to be smarter, faster, and more efficient than the giants. We have to use the tech. But if the double standard holds, the small business of the future will be a paradox: A facade of “artisan” hand-crafted simplicity on the outside, and a highly-optimized, AI-driven machine on the inside.

We’ll be using the tech to keep the lights on—just like every other business, whether they know it or not—we just won’t be talking about it in the comment section.

Micro Brews. Macro Views.

Dave