YouSaid · the spoken record

Ken Grossman

lines on the record: 79
first: 2020-03-30
most recent: 2020-03-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“My kids grew up in the brewing industry. I have two children still active in the brewing industry. My son's out in North Carolina and my daughter Sierra is here in Chico. So it's been a family business, but it's not an easy business. And even though a lot of people think being a brewer is romantic, it's been hard and it's going to stay hard. And I think we're still around because we're passionate about beer and passionate about having a great company.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The hard work part, I think, was a good component of it. When I opened, I mentioned, I think there were six of us and the five other craft brewers that opened in that same era have all failed. Today, I'm the last man standing. So we all sort of had an equal shot at it, I guess. Yeah, timing. I think we were at the right time in a sort of American culture when people were looking for better, unique, different, distinctive. There were coffee roasters popping up and bakeries and the restaurant scene was starting to grow. The work part of it, it's been a lot. And it was a lot for me, but a lot for my family. I mean, we...”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We actually came out of that in a pretty good place compared to a lot of our peers and the reason was as we were brewing 363 days that year, we were starting to ration and not ship to all of our markets and not ship all of our brands. We had some pent-up demand. So when we came out of that, I did do a big expansion right during that period of buying Paul Out, which also added stress and debt to the picture, but we pretty much doubled capacity that year, 97. And we were able to sort of immediately go into some of that pent-up demand. So we grew, I think, double digits when the rest of the industry was flat.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Special craft beards being brewed at a Stroh's brewery or whatever. So there was some negative industry PR that also probably hurt the industry a bit”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, we're sort of there today again, and who knows how we'll come out of our current situation with the industry will look like. But they were starting to be a saturation of craft players, but the imports really probably sort of reasserted their place in the market. And so Kraft had been somewhat the darlings during the late 80s and mid-90s. But then I think the imported beer started to realize that they had a place in the market and pushed. And I guess the craft industry also lost a little bit of credibility. Some of the bigger players back then were contract brewing, meaning they weren't brewing their own bear. They were going to one of the big brewers and having their beer made. And there was sort of an expose from some of the big brewers saying, you know, here's who's really brewing your...”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, if this goes well, it'll work. If it doesn't, you know, I gave it a good try. And that was right when if you look at a graph of the trajectory of craft brewing in America, it was that year that we did the deal that the bottom fell out and the growth rate had been slowing, but it essentially went down, I think, to 1% growth across the industry the next year. Wow.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I had a really great attorney in San Francisco, and we started looking at alternatives, and he brought in a friend of his who was very experienced with working with banks and structuring deals. And it was at a time when money was relatively easy to get compared to how it had been. And we got a couple proposals from some banks and put together a deal that it was as much leverage as I would ever want to have on myself and the company and sort of just rolled the dice and said.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so we explored, again, I didn't think it was possible for me to buy him out. And so we met with every group, you could imagine venture, lots of venture funds. I had lots of dinners with groups that told me they were going to be my best friend, but I got cautions from other people saying, watch out, if things go south, you'll be in trouble. So I started having real angst about, okay, so I'm going to have an investment group in as much as.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Projection. And so our first year in the new facility, I think we brewed about 20,000 barrels or next year 30,000 barrels or next year 45,000 barrels and the next year we were at a capacity again. And so we started doing whatever we could. We put tanks outside. We added brewing equipment. started brewing multiple times around the clock and I think we got to a point I think it was 19 We brewed 363 days, 24 hours a day. We took Christmas and Thanksgiving off, I think, and just other than that, just kept going. And that's right when I was trying to figure out how to buy Paul out. So very challenging period.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the brewery that I had designed in 87 and 88 when we moved into the new facility, I had designed for 60,000 barrels worth of annual capacity. If I think back to that time, that was more than anchor was producing. And they were the oldest of the sort of winners in the craft world. And we had produced a little over 11 or 12,000 barrels or so in 87. And so I thought, you know, these if we could grow four times that big or more than that, that would be an amazing achievement. And so 60,000 barrels seemed like a pretty lofty.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Evaluations across industry were sort of all over the place, but also were going up pretty steadily and 30 million, 40 million, 50 million. And this, me buying Paul out took years to work through with attorneys. And so, you know, as that time went on, we were still growing. And so the value of the business was growing. And I had a really tough decision to hamper the growth of the company in order to not have the number get bigger and bigger so I could potentially afford it or do I do what I think right for the business and continue to grow it. So, yeah, it was a really challenging time for me personally. We were in a market that was sort of exploding from some of our competitors. We're making big moves. And we were becoming hampered by our facility.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, initially I didn't think that was a possibility. I didn't have any money. And the thought of going into debt at the kind of dollars that we were starting to have the company valued at was just, it wasn't in my thought process that I could figure out how to do it.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it grew uncomfortable at times. I mean, early on, he lived in our house. I mean, he was just to save money. He was a roommate. But then as things went on, it became bigger and bigger friction point.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As the business grew and the value of the business grew, and we were 50-50 partners, it started to feel that I was doing a disproportionate amount of building value in the company. And so we started to have discussions in the late 80s of this is something I'm not going to continue doing for much longer and we've got to come to some resolution. As we moved into the new brewery in the late 80s and into the 90s, it became a bigger and bigger sticking point.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That there was certainly what I felt, and I think everybody around us who were involved in the business saw as well that there was a disproportionate amount of effort being put in. I mean, my days were always longer than his and more physical. So at one point it became a critical issue between us. And we did end up adjusting compensation, so I was making double what he was making. And so we did try to address it”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Start in the dark, and particularly as we grew, we needed to brew as much as we could. And so it was almost 24 hours a day. I mean, we typically have operated 24 hours a day.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I did all the brewing and all the packaging in the beginning, so I would brew three days a week and I'd package two days a week. And then as we got a little bit bigger, I was starting to focus on how to grow on expansion. So I was building tanks and welding pipes and adding things. And so I started to hire some brewers and then hired somebody to run packaging so I could free myself up to do all the expansion side of the business.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we just came up with every way possible to expand production. So we knocked out walls. We took over other metal buildings in the little street and put tanks outside and brood around the clock. So we eventually got the production up to about 12,000 barrels or a little less than 12,000 barrels in 87.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I bought their whole brewing side, so didn't get their packaging equipment, but bought the brew house and paid. Basically, the scrap value $15,000 to buy all the equipment. And we spent more than that crading it and shipping it back to the US. I went over with a high school buddy and we spent three weeks in Europe helping dismantle equipment and getting it out of the building and brought another business plan. Could not borrow money still, so we had this equipment sitting there in a crate We needed, and what we thought at the time was like a million dollars to sort of move into a new facility and to equip it with enough equipment to use that bigger brew house.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so my business plan called for us to brew hopefully 2,500 barrels of beer a year. I was able to brew 12, 10 barrel batches a month, so three brews a week. That was sort of our phase one. And we had planned in an expansion to go up to 3,500 barrels a year, doing some more modifications of the facility. So we did that pretty quick. We couldn't survive at 3,500 barrels of beer year. It just was not enough. Things cost more. There was always some financial need we hadn't planned on. So we pretty quickly realized we better, we got to grow. We got to figure this out quick. So I went over to Germany, I think end of 8283, and I bought a defunct brewery over there.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Calls from distributors with wanting beer. And then the grateful dead, actually, they somehow early on got hooked into the beer, and so when the dead would travel around, we'd have to watch where their concert series were and we'd get all these orders for beer ahead of them hitting town.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was just an amazing shot in the arm. We got this huge amount of publicity. And we were also very fortunate there was a beer buyer for one of the large grocery store chains whose daughter was going to Chico State. And so he would come up to visit his daughter. And he was into beer. And so he'd come by the brewery and have a beer with us. And so he started to run some promotions for us without us really being involved or knowing about it. All of a sudden we'd get a bunch of...”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, San Francisco Examiner, actually there was a, I think it was a five-page color spread on the brewery, the little brewery in Chico.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In our hometown, we got at least quite a few of the bars and restaurants to take a case. So in the hometown, since we had been in the press a couple of times about this little brewery opening up, we were able to get some placements. Once we started leaving Chiko and went to the Bay Area, it was a real slog. There was no craft knowledge, no internet. There was not a way for a business that didn't have any money to get much notoriety. We couldn't pay for any of it. We were really fortunate that there were a few writers who were intrigued by the whole startup of this craft beer scene and started to write stories.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, our man, we would just drive around and go knock on bars, restaurants, supermarkets, wherever, and try to see if we could convince him to buy a case of 24 loose bottles.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was what the higher priced imports are selling for on the shelf. So we thought, well, we're going to price ourselves and stylistically try to be like a unique import beer.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The van around and tried to sell beer. If you go back to that era, there wasn't a lot of options for draft beer. So if you went into a normal bar, they might have one or two or maybe three taps, but it was normal just for one or two beer taps. So we actually did not go into the bar trade at all initially. At least not on draft. We just said there's not enough money there, not enough tabs. Right. So Priced ourselves at the highest price we thought we could get by with. We did no market research, we just.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we looked at how we were going to go to market. We couldn't afford six-pack carriers. That was sort of out of our budget. So we had individual bottles, and we started out in all returnable bar bottles that we would charge a nickel deposit on. So we would buy used bar bottles at 85 cents a case from bigger breweries who had surplus bottles they're willing to sell us. And we would charge a nickel a bottle, so $1.20 a case when we sold the beer and we give them a nickel back when we got the empties back. And we pretty much loaded our van up. We bought an old van from a friend of ours, took the seats out, and that was our delivery van. I hired an old high school friend of mine, Steve Harrison, to be our first employee and salesperson. He would help bottle during bottle days, and he would drive”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, most. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, really? Most people? Most people didn't like it. No. Again, if you're used to drinking an American light lager style and you're hit with a very aromatically hoppy and bitter balance in your beer and just for a reference point and these numbers are sort of going to be meaningless, but just as a relative number today domestic lager beers might be in the eight to ten bitterness units and there's outliers to that, but that's about the range. RPL, when it came out and still is, is at 38 bitterness units. And so if you equate that to sort of chilies, it's quite a bit more than what people are used to drinking. And again, we were trying to feature. Very aromatic hops, you know, pine and citrus and all these other nuanced aromas that come out of hops. So we were producing a beer that was Polarizing, to say the least”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was piny and citrusy and had some real distinct character, but it wasn't what the German brewers who worked at big breweries were used to using, and so it really didn't find favor in the U.S. brewing industry until... Sort of our wave of craft brewers started to punch things up with aromas and characters that were way different than what beer had been before, at least beer brewed in America.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's like a flower flower. Okay, I got you. And the alpha acids, the bitter acids, and those aromatic oils are geographic in some cases, so a variety that's grown in Oregon may be different, same variety than it tastes in Yakima or Idaho, or if it's grown in France or in Australia. In this country, there wasn't really a Roma signature from the US hop industry until us and a few other brewers started to focus on a new variety called Cascade, which was bred up at Oregon State.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, hops are added to beer for their alpha acids, which are the bittering component or major part of the bittering component of the hop. And that's something that is varietal specific as far as those levels. So hops are a spice essentially in the brewing process. I guess you could think of them like chilies.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, one, we knew we needed to be consistent, and I think that's probably as big of an issue as anything. It's just that they didn't taste the same. So some of them fermented faster, some fermented slower, so they had different nuances in the aromas and character. So I think our concern was we couldn't make the same beer batch after batch, and we better figure that out first.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pretty good, I remember, and we were bottling a little bit and sharing it with friends saying, I think we're there or we're really close. And we brewed pale ale 4, and it wasn't quite right, and then we brewed pale ale5, and it was different. We ended up dumping all those beers.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I needed a hop strainer and I'd been trying to find a suitable used tank or container to use for a hop strainer and wasn't able to find one and didn't really have the money for it. And I had a few pieces of scrap metal, stainless steel left over from something else. And I said, okay, this is it. I'm going to go weld up a hopstrainer and we're going to brew beer tomorrow. And so sort of the last piece or two we just sort of made do and made five barrels of stout November 15th, 1980 and learned a few things, but it went okay. Took, I don't know, 12 or 13 hours to make 150 gallons of beer and more hours to clean up than that, but at least we were sort of on our way. And then started brewing pale ale the two days later and started realize we were not able to make batch after batch taste the same. They weren't bad. They were just pale ale 3 was excellent.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Backyard butcher shop that the county shut down that's got an old refrigeration system with a coil in it and you can probably have it or get it for a few bucks so went over there and in his backyard he would butcher chickens and hogs and things for neighbors illegally and there was a little cold box there so I took it to the brewery and started to clean it up and it was covered in blood and feathers and it was just completely corroded and I'm sitting there cleaning it up and I just thought to myself you know if we're down to this desperate of a situation we got no money making making beer still a few weeks off We're not going to make it.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there were a few points of desperation, and we were getting there. We were out of money for, I don't know, the 10th time and had gone to family and said, we just need another 5,000 or 2,000 or whatever, and we can get the doors open. We did that a bunch of times. And so we were at a point where it's like, we can't go ask for money again. We've told them this was the last time, like five times ago. We'd spent everything we had, and I said we'd borrowed enough that not going forward would have certainly been a big failure. So it was like, no, we got to do this. And we just didn't have everything together to start brewing. I needed a cold box refrigeration system.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then question Could I have ever really pulled off building a brewery and being a brewer for my livelihood instead of a bike mechanic? And so we had a thoughtful discussion. Katie and I about what should we do or what should I do and came down to, you know, I think you got to follow your passion, see if that's what you want to do. You should do that.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Doing it was tough. And we made a lot of sacrifices. She made a lot of sacrifices. We didn't have any money. And I was working all the time. So if I wasn't studying, if I wasn't welding, if I wasn't working because I was still having to work another job, if I wasn't building at the brewery, I mean, it was seven days a week, 12 hours a day. And I had the, I guess the early opportunity right when I was committing to build the brewery to actually buy one of the bike shops I had worked in. The owner was getting out of the business and he would have sold it to me probably preferentially if I said I wanted to do that. There was a point where I thought, you know, I could buy this bike shop and probably make a decent living. And it's a sure thing. But I was, you know, in my mind thinking, am I going to...”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, the commercial guys, the guys who were selling beer on the streets, they didn't have the same relationship, but the technical side of brewing brewers tend to stick together to help solve problems.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think that Fritz was probably the first one I leaned on a bit. And he had the same experience. So when he was starting out, when he bought Anchor, he didn't know anything about brewing or the brewing industry. And he would go and visit other brewers. And he was shocked at how open and supportive they were. We did have a really, I guess, open relationship with pretty much anybody in the brewing industry. I joined the Master Brewers Association, which was really the big brewers technical group very early on. But you could call up a technical person at another brewery, whether it was Gors or Anheuser-Busch and Lord Miller and ask a question, and they would talk to you”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Academic papers. And I've still got boxes of them today. And there were a couple really important scientific brewing techs available, and they weren't, you know, they weren't home brewing texts. If you're a brewing scientist, four or five hundred page tomes on every aspect of being a professional brewer, and I read them cover to cover, and so I was a fairly... Learned brewer from at least the literature side as we went into brewing commercially.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, we were fortunate. So UC Davis had one of the only university brewing schools in the nation. It was started. They have a big wine program there as well, but they started a beer program quite a few years back. And we availed ourselves of both their library, and I would go down with stacks of quarters. I would either read there or photocopy everything. I could get my hands on.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Taking my 57 Chevy and driving up and down the Sacramento Valley, up into Oregon and Washington and looking for old pumps and pipe and tanks and things that we could scrounge for basically pennies on the dollar to use to build the brewing equipment out of. And I got pretty lucky. The dairy industry was also sort of at a tough point where these little family dairies were closing and there were hundreds of them scattered throughout that would have one milk tank and it was sort of a side job. I'd get a lead that go down this road and you might find so-and-so sold dairy. So knock on the door and ask if they had any old equipment and they'd take me up the barn and there'd be a dusty pile of pipe and maybe a pump and occasionally I'd get a tank and 300 bucks. Or $500, I'd buy it all from them.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we came in, and in order to keep sanitation and quality in a brewing world, you need floor drains and you need separation between the brewing rooms and the fermenting rooms. So we went in and unbeknounced to the landlord we jackhammered through the floor, sawed and put in drainage and then poured slope floors on top of that. But we did all that ourselves and it took a really long time.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Found a little metal warehouse building 3000 square feet empty shell had been like a sheetrock warehouse in Chico in Chico right”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we went to all of our family and eventually some friends and got $5,000, $10,000 investments and thought we had enough money several times but kept running out of money. And we were so low on cash that we did not hire pretty much anything out. So we did the framing, the sheet rocking. I did the plumbing. I did all the electrical. I did all the refrigeration.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Between the two of us, I had sold my homebrew shop for $3,000 or $4,000, and I had some savings, and my grandfather had given me some bonds to go to college. I cashed all those in. And Paul had similar sort of all his savings. Not a lot of money.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who had no experience, no experience in the brewing industry. We'd never worked today for a brewery or a beard scribbler or anything like that.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anything that gave me access to use forklifts and drill presses and welders and everything else I needed to weld all the pieces together. I took some business classes, took refrigeration repair, I took a couple semesters of that, started just to build skills and started to build the equipment as we were trying to raise money. The banks pretty much said there's no way. And if you were a banker of... Of any sort back then, and you researched the U.S. brewing industry, you would have seen that it was pretty rapidly declining, at least small brewers were.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT