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Mike Stevens and Dave Engbers first met in college, became friends, enjoyed brewing at home and later decided to do more than talk about starting their own brewery. Three years after they opened the doors, however, their Founders Brewing Company was literally within a week of ceasing operations. “Brewed For Us” is not simply a catchy marketing phrase or a clever line on a mission statement. It was the survival strategy that saved Founders from being another flower memorial along the Craft Brewing Highway.
Mike and Dave recently took some time to give us more details about how they started, how they survived in the brewing business and why they are now thriving under a major expansion of their operations in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
(Editor’s note: This is part one of a two-part series. The second post will cover the early years of Mike and Dave’s friendship, favorite beers and flavors and thoughts about homebrewing.)
BC: What motivated you to start brewing?
Mike: Sierra Nevada Pale Ale is what got me motivated. I’ve always been a passionate guy, a tinkerer. I like to do things on my own. I like the unknown areas. It’s always been a fun challenge to see, ‘Hey, I wonder if I can do that sort of thing?’ It wasn’t big in my personal circle at the time but the idea of it really, really intrigued me. I had a trip to the Pacific Northwest early on where I tasted the Red Hooks and the Sierras and saw what was really going on in the early craft scene. It motivated me to see if I could do that. As crazy as this is in conservative West Michigan, there was a homebrew shop up in Rockford. I got Charlie Papazian’s book, read that cover to cover, bought all my supplies and made my first batch of shitty beer. I kept at it but really I don’t think turning that hobby into a career was so much motivated by my brilliance as a homebrewer. But it was enough to get me thinking about the next question, the next unknown: I wonder if I can start a brewery?
The bottom line is I think there is a fundamental difference between a true entrepreneur and someone who runs a company. There are less people who can be entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur looks for the unknown and embraces it while someone who runs a company professionally tries to minimize risk and the unknown. An entrepreneur excels in the unknown world. That’s where the greatest companies are formed. The Rockefellers, the Carnegies those guys gambled everything. The brilliance comes out of the unknown. Not too many people want to tackle that.
Dave: My brother was a homebrewer and he dabbled in winemaking and even mead. So I tried some of his homebrews and that led to my parents buying my first homebrew kit when I was 19 just a couple of years later. They saw I had an interest and they even pushed me a little into it.
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