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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, I mean, I guess in hindsight, it was not a pretty detailed business plan after seeing more formal business plans. It was what we thought was a good business plan. So we had printed off articles of sort of the trends that were happening in beer, one on Fritz Maytag and one on sort of what was happening in the import space starting to grow in the US. the demise of sort of much choice in the beer industry we thought would give us a small slice of the pie that was rapidly being cut up. So I think we wrote several drafts of that business plan. The original one I think called for $50,000 total and went to banks and we actually started. So we started to pool our money. I started to buy equipment. I started to build equipment. I enrolled back at the junior college at Butte in welding classes, machine shops.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, thinking back then, with Fritz, I don't think I yet had the notion that I wanted to try to go commercial. When I went and visited Jack, it was starting Jel that, yeah, this is maybe something I can do. I got together with one of my homebrew shop customers, Paul Kamuzi, and he was buying homebrew supplies for me and from other homebrew suppliers. And we decided let's see if we can raise some money and open a brewery”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jack McCullough, who started that breedery. And he had sort of gone pretty much homebrew and opened up a commercial brewery with all home-built primitive basic equipment, very small batches, about 45 gallons per batch. And after seeing his operation, realized that it was feasible to do as an independent, glorified homebrew setup and sell beer commercially.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At this conference, Brooklyn. Well, I didn't meet him at the conference, actually went over to his brewery, and he gave me a tour, me and a small group of folks, and pretty primitive at that time. It was no automation and not a lot of sophistication in the brewery. And I was fairly sophisticated as a homebrewer, culturing some of our own yeasts and doing things like that and making 20 gallon batches. And I think at that point, he was making maybe 50 barrel batches. And that sort of inspired me a bit that, you know, maybe you could do it as a startup, as a homebrewer. And then I went and visited New Albion, which was really the”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he helped sort of create what is now the craft brewing industry by realizing that if you're going to be a small boutique brewery in this country, you better, one, produce a unique product and two, figure out how to charge enough of a price that you can survive as a small producer.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, actually, I went down to a conference in Oakland. And on that trip, we arranged a tour to go see Fritz Maytag at Anchorbury.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think as craft brewing and as beer culture evolved, I think people became much more appreciated of beer styles that really have a lot of character.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, they weren't. And I don't know what percentage of my friends actually like the beer or the ones that told me they did. But I'm sure it was off-putting for the majority of people who were used to drinking regular lager beer. And it was even that way when we first started the brewery, you'd go to a tasting and 90% of the people were like, wow, this is way too bitter. I can't drink this or I don't like this. But then you'd find somebody who's like, God, I just love that bitter character. And so the human power.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, part of it, I think, was the allure of the alchemy, you know, just the ability to take. Things such as disparate as a bitter leaf off of a plant, the hop and the sweet malt from barley and yeast and sort of see that magic happen of converting those basic raw ingredients into something that has lots of nuances and character and flavor and can bring joy and social setting. So I think the process was as intriguing as the finished product”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, there was no knowledge of craft beer, and homebrew was not necessarily viewed in a positive light and based sort of on what most people had tasted if they ever tasted homebrew. It was highly alcoholic, acidic, and it looked murky, which today is in again. But back then, you know, beer was supposed to be clear. And so most people were pretty put off by it. But I made some pretty decent beer, and I started to have a following of friends who wanted my homebrew.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it was malt syrup primarily, although we were pushing and teaching classes and trying to get people to actually brew from grain, which is back to the beginning of the process. You buy malted barley, which is barley that's been soaked sprouted and germinated and dried at a maltster. And that creates the base for then converting the malt into sugars. Sugars are boiled with hops. And so we stocked hydrometers and crocs and tubs to brew in and glass carboys.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We could sell $60 worth. That would be a really big day. But out of the $60, you made maybe $20, and then you had to pay the lights.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we couldn't pay the rent some months, and so we worked out a deal where we'd be the janitors for the place in lieu of rent. So Katie and I did that for a while.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Little whom it was just a bare shell which we ended up doing all the woodwork and finishing up and turning into just a little shop next to us was a potter and a used record shop and jewelry store and a little teeny antique store so there were just a bunch of little artisan crafts and shops up there”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we found a little teeny building in what had been an old downtown hotel in Chico that was being converted into a bunch of little shops and studios. And so for, I don't think it was about $60 a month rent, we could rent this. Wow.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was probably fairly advanced by that time, so I was doing a little bit of roasting my own grains in the oven and sprouting my own wheat to make wheat beer. And so I was pretty experimental. And at that point, my wife and I were sort of back to the landers. We had a small herd of goats. We had chickens. We were making cheese and bacon bread. So making beer sort of fit into our lifestyle.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were certainly not interesting beers. I got you. Okay. Gotcha. All right. I mean, the U.S. brewing industry has had a history of making generally good quality products, but they're not necessarily products that...”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably not even anything that expensive. Again, we were young and didn't have a lot of money, so we were probably drinking buckhorn and the spring beer out of Meyer Burn Company in Los Angeles. I mean, there were a handful of cheaper beers that were probably what our age group would be drinking.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was pretty much the approaching. Regional breweries were in very difficult place with trying to compete with the national brands and so the beer industry was consolidating very, very rapidly through the really since Prohibition, but 50, 60, 70s, hundreds and hundreds of breweries went out of business and it got down to right about the year we started in 1980 for the brewing for the brewery got down to the low point of 43 independent breweries in the US. It's amazing. The whole U.S., yeah. That included the biggest and the”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I had after my parents got divorced, I didn't get a lot of support. I think I got $100 a month go away to school. So I had to keep working. So I kept part-time job as I went to school. And then eventually I got the opportunity to go manage one of the bike shops that the owner in Chico had recently purchased in the town at Oriville. And so the two of us got a dinky little one-room house sort of in the foothills of Orville, and I ran that shop for a few years. Our daughter was born, Sierra, and born at that house at home. We had all of our kids' home birth.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I met her. She was going to Chico State, and I was transferring to Chico State. We connected and been together ever since.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So I got a job at a bicycle shop, which was a family-owned business with father and two sons working there in a pretty frictional environment. The dynamic was not great. And after less than a couple of months, I sort of had to change your heart and said, Well, maybe I should go to school. And so I applied at the junior college to study chemistry and ended up eventually transferring to Chico State and continued to take science classes. I met my girlfriend and then later wife through a mutual friend about the same time.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Good to know. The alcohol, the pH, and the hops are all inhibitory to toxins. Not that you can't make bad beer, but it's pretty impossible to make beer. You're killing yourself, those kind of toxins, yeah”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Terrible terrible, okay Well, I had to hide them from my mother and I actually made a batch of wine first, which was pretty tragic, which was out of Welch's can of Welch's grape juice and some bacon yeast.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was. So there were actually some homebrew supply stores just getting started. And you could buy beer and wine making supplies at that point homebrewing was still illegal, but they did, you know, nobody got arrested for buying mulder hops. But if you, I guess, think back to that era, there was still a bit of a carryover from prohibition brewing. And so you could buy malt extract even at hardware stores. And it was sold with a croc and a package of yeast and a little block of some pretty lousy hops. But there were ingredients that were still available, I guess, from the Prohibition area. Again, no good information on how to make great beer at home. It was just for those people who wanted brew a batch of home brew.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cal Moller, you since passed away, but Calvin Moeller, and he was, I say, a very early adopter of the science of brewing. So most homebrewers back in that day were using English old sort of crude books on how to make cheap beer, but not necessarily how to make grape beer and how to do it at home with sort of a science-based. He approached it from a pre-scientific side.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had a small neighborhood group of boys growing up through elementary school. So I met my neighbor, I think it was second grade. And his father was a, even back then was making home beer and home wine and was a And his son and I were best buddies for many, many years. I ended up moving up to Chico when he attended Chico State.”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of the businesses that we depend on to sell our products are severely challenged right now. And having this kind of financial disruption happen to tens of thousands of small family-owned and run bars, restaurants, liquor stores across the nation is going to have a huge toll on the lives of those people and the economies and those communities. So it's been one of the most difficult and stressful weeks in our existence. I've had a lot of them over 40 years. It's been a lot of sleepless nights, but this is sort of at the pinnacle of things for us to have to work through and to make decisions about”
2020-03-30 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sierra Nevada Brewing Company: Ken Grossman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were out of money for, I don't know, the tenth time it had gone to family and said we just need another $5,000 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 him this was the last time, like five times ago. And I just thought to myself, you know, if we're down to this desperate situation, we got no money. 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