Many businesses felt the shock of COVID19, and more of these couldn’t survive. So what does it take for a business to survive and thrive past a pandemic setback? Stephen Jaye answers these questions and more as he talks to Aaron Uhl, founder and owner of Uhl’s Brewing Company in Boulder, Colorado. Aaron walks us through how he got into brewing, what he learned, and how he helped pilot his business through the COVID19 crisis. Learn more about Aaron and his experiences by tuning in.
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Steering A Business Through A Pandemic Setback With Aaron Uhl
Colorado has been my home for years. For anyone who knows what it’s like here, it is longer than most people. There are a lot more new entries and a lot of people are moving here. The area of Colorado, especially the Front Range, Denver, Boulder, and Fort Collins, is known for the craft brewing scene. We have a pretty robust scene in that particular sense of one of 5 or 6 places where there is a lot of people doing a lot of experimenting with different types of beer and formulas. My guest is Aaron Uhl, who started his own brewery. He is the owner and head brewer along with 6 or 7 other roles. We talked a little bit about the idea of wearing many hats with Uhl’s Brewing, for anyone interested is located near the corner of Arapahoe and 55th on the East end of Boulder.—Aaron, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me.
Tell me a little bit about Uhl’s Brewing, your story, and what you are all about.
It all started with a passion for homebrewing, competitions, and loving craft beer, in general. When I first started brewing, it was simply because I couldn’t get a certain beer from beer trading because beer trading was a big thing back in early 2010 and on. With that, I whined a little bit. My girlfriend bought me the book that everyone gets, The Complete Joy of Homebrewing by Charlie Papazian. That nudged me along to do my first brew with a friend who had an all-grain system. He showed me the ropes on the first brew. After that, I was at home homebrewing.
There was a tile in the kitchen that was available on my side of the table. There was going to be a fermenter there. By the end of the first year, I had the beer that I couldn’t trade for a mimic of it, an Imperial stout aging in a five-gallon bourbon barrel in my basement. That was in 2012 or so. Fast forward to 2018, I won a lot of awards at different competitions across the state and region. I ended up winning regional gold medals for an Imperial stout and Imperial IPA with AHA competition that gets run annually. That’s the best of the show for me of all things, also a trip to the Great American Beer Festival with Jeff Griffith from FATE Brewing at the time, who is now at Twisted Pine.
The eventful night led me to sign a contract with another brewery to start the brand in 2018 of February at the Fresh Hop Competition. I ended up winning about 5 or 6 awards and then took best to show. The funny thing was people that I would assume to talk with dropped a tank into their system and started brewing. They showed up to the brewery where the competition was having its final rounds of judging and award ceremony. They were like, “What are you doing here? We are honestly not to ask you. You own a brewery.” They live in the area and wanted to check it out. I told them that I had about eight different beers in the competition and they should sit down at the pro-am table, hang out for the award ceremony, and try the brewery’s beers that they were at.
They sat down and their eyes were raising every single time I won an award because when I talked to them, that’s what I wanted to start doing, brewing one and done recipes and easy IPAs. They are like, “Everyone thinks they can do that, but can you brew anything else other than that?” It landed in their head that, “If this guy is winning medals across broad spectrums from lager to British bitters to smash American sours, maybe we got something here. Maybe he is not full of hot air.” I signed the contract and started brewing Uhl’s Brewing company in 2018.
The first batch was delivered the week of the Great American Beer Festival. It was called the Wayward Hop Volume One. It was 10.5% double Hazy IPA. During the Great American Beer Festival, a lot of folks from out of town come in, eat up all the liquor stores, and drop off little goodies here and there. By the end of the Great American Beer Festival week, I had about 35 to 40 accounts, all selling Uhl’s beer. My first one was Hazel’s and the second one was Liquor Mart, but Liquor Mart is no longer, unfortunately.
First of all, there was a certain type of beer that you wanted to have that you couldn’t trade for, and your instinct was to go and do something about it. A lot of people, when they have problems like this, they get caught in the trap of ruminating, sitting, and whining about it. Did you fall into that trap at all? Did it ever cross your mind, or did you instantly go into action mode in a sense that, “I’m going to brew this beer myself?”
The beer trading continued in 2011. In 2010, when Bourbon County Rare came out, it set the next level for everyone. That wasn’t even the beer that I was after. I was after the normal Bourbon County, but they had a small return batch. When that Rare came out, it went from trading dollar for dollar or ounce for ounce, which was a respectful way to trade to, “This bottle is worth $200. I’ll value your beer at what I believe it’s valued at, even if it’s below sticker price.”
The pay to trade game, I couldn’t get into it. I had my regular traders, but that fizzled off as I started homebrewing more and more. The training completely stopped. I had developed quite a seller and ended up having to give most of it away as I ended up moving out of a house that I lived in for years abruptly. I didn’t have any place to put it. It was also a way for me to try everything I could get my hands on with different flavors, styles, and sought-after Rare bottles. It was like a chase and it was fun. It was a nice little hobby, but it almost doubles or triples the price of the beer because you end up playing the ship it back and forth game.
The homebrewing did come out of me complaining about still not being able to get that bottle, but it came out of the sense of my girlfriend giving me a gentle nudge with, “Do you like to cook? Do you like beer? Do you like Hops? Try this.” I had never thought about the idea of brewing it all. I never bought one of those, “Let’s go make a beer kit and bring it home.” I went straight to all-grain. I had three kettles, and I did all the math on a couple of different programs that are available to everyone online.
I started designing beers. I would look at other folks’ recipes and delve into why we are only using certain percentages of these and those malts. Looking at other aspects as to where do the Hops go, what Hops are we using? How much is enough? It got pretty crazy. I pushed some of the batches beyond what normal people would do at a professional brewing level.
The other thing I’m wondering about this part of the story is what made you believe that your beer was good enough to start marketing it to other people at all these places that you had mentioned?
People that moved to Boulder, Colorado, at least was to get in the outdoors every single day I possibly could. I didn’t realize I was moving to a beer mecca. I was moving out from Fairfax, Virginia, which is Northern Virginia. I like to call it DC because we were twenty minutes away. It’s the same mentality that’s going on at the Capitol. It was the hustle and bustle. That is the reason why I wanted to get out of the city into the mountains. I found Avery Brewing of all things. They had Hog Heaven, Reverend, high gravity beers, and all different styles.
They were able to nail Belgian golden, Barley wines, Russian Imperial stouts, Imperial IPAs, you name it. Those guys were in it in 2015 or 2016. Once I started to expand, people lost a little love with them, but that’s how it goes when you get bigger and you got to put out more beer to make market demands high. I would hang out with those guys a lot. They were a lot of fun. I ride bicycles. I used to do summer to race all the time professionally. These guys were avid road riders. They would go out on Saturday morning, brewer rides. I get invited along, tear the legs off after a day of riding, and they would drink under the table.
I’m used to going with Adam Avery on training rides. We would go up to Lions over to Raymond, down through Ward and then back up over the hill to get into Boulder 72 miles or something like that. He would sit on my wheel and I would go as fast as I could to get him some good training rides. They kept creating and listening to their clients. A couple of the beers they made were based on their employees’ requests, which some of them are named after them. They were revolutionizing barrel-age and barrel-aged sour beers at the same time.
A lot of companies are hitting it on every note. They had one beer that they had to recall. One beer out of those first 50 that I collected has had no infection. It’s not bad for barrel aging, especially for the amount that those do. How often were they bottling, kegging, going between sour? Eventually, I ended up homebrewing. They were still in the alley, I bring them some of my recipes, and I get critiques from the brewers. I started to get serious. I would start making some ABV beers and double IPAs back in the day that was suitable for West Coast drinkers with the Colorado flare to them.
When you have to sell something, you have to have a government warning and a UPC to make your stores happy. Share on XI got some good feedback. One of them thought I had the recipe for Rumpkin because I made a 15% strong American ale that I flavored like Rumpkin without aging the rum barrel. They were like, “Where did you get this from?” I’m like, “I made this.” I got to the point where I was working at University Bicycles. I was working with another fellow employee whose name was Gabe Cutter. He was the son of Matt Cutter, who was one of the owners over at Upslope. I got introduced to some Matt at the University Bicycles whisky bacon party that they hold in the fall, and I was in charge of the beer. I had some homebrews like my maple pumpkin pie and a cellared keg of a pumpkin ale from Upslope.
The only reason that I got introduced to Matt from Upslope is because his son told him that I had found a keg that was a year old and Matt wanted to try it because he has never aged a beer that long and wanted to see what it tastes like. We got to talk and I told him what I had done. He was interested in seeing 5 or 6 beers that I brewed and bottled up for a century and perception to see what they thought about. They were never able to find flaws. They dug some of the recipes I came out with. Matt was trying to expose their brewers to the creativity of homebrewing to bring that back into Upslope.
They have a lot of experimental IPA recipes. At that time, I was still working at University Bicycles, they let me write my recipe with the ingredients that they have at their facility. We brewed an experimental IPA, and it moved pretty quickly. Matt was pretty happy with it. After that, I brewed with VisionQuest. We did one of their first bottle offerings. It took three years to carbonate up in the bottle because of how high the alcohol beer was.
At that point, it was constantly people asking me to brew kegs for, “We are having a party for 50 people. How many kegs do you think we will need if everyone wants three pours?” I brew the beer, carve it up, take one glass of it to make sure it was carved properly, and then go and deliver the beer and trade for homebrew gift cards is how they paid me. In that way, I could go out and brew again.
I’m constantly going to certain competitions and walking away with 6 or 7 ribbons every single time. I’m challenging myself to like, “I want a pro-amateur” I am entering as many competitions that have pro-am skills to only be picked in Boulder, Colorado of all places. I want to nail the AHA competition. I did that. It’s best to show for beer. That was awarded to me in the last homebrew competition that I was allowed to be in. Everything was wrapped up right then and there. It’s like, “You are done homebrewing. It’s time to move on.”
I want to point out to my readers the two key aspects of this story. You interacted with other people that are already doing it and have already had success doing what you are starting to do. The other one was that you were always looking at being creative, looking at different combinations of malts, or how to age it a little bit beyond what anyone else has done before. For those reading, no matter what you are looking for or inspired to do, what industry you’re trying to break into or what business you want to build, it’s a good idea to interact with those who have already done what you’re trying to do or what you’re doing.
I started interacting with the folks at Avery because I was going to my local bottle shop. My clerks were leaving because Avery was hiring a lot of people at the time. The first person that ended up leaving was Harvest Wine & Spirits. They were great crews that worked there. The first person that left was Ross and then he became their cellar manager. The next person to leave was Phil, their taproom manager. Phil recruited Matt to come out to be an assistant taproom manager, and they pulled another person out there.
If you create a relationship with your local bottle shop clerks, they like to talk. It’s almost like a salesperson relationship, “I’m homebrewing. Drop off a couple of homebrews and let me try Russian River.” “You don’t even need to worry about that. You don’t even have to call. Have a shelf in the back with your name on it.”
That’s how cool Harvest was back in the day. I followed those guys over to Avery, and Avery was ever-evolving. It was great to see how they grew from a tasting room. It was just a kegerator in the break room to a stand-up sheet of a bar that had wheels on it to a full built-out bar with a new cold room, maternity warehouses, and then taking over the rest of the facility all around them. I’m looking at this place that I’m renting, I know the eventuality of it all to be followed in the same footsteps as the other folks.
Upslope eventually ended up taking the lease out in a much bigger building. They left their original facility there to do all their experiments in barrel-aged beers, which is great. I am tucked in the corner of this little development at 5460 Conestoga Court. There are a lot of places that I can move into here once these others folks’ leases are up.
When I looked at this place, I was looking at it with the same idea as, “Where can I move if I need to be here? Will the landlord let me take those spaces over?” “If your growth numbers are big enough, we can talk about moving other folks out.” Our landlord is very generous. He helped us out tremendously during the pandemic because we didn’t get any PPP money. He covered the rent for us and paid triple net for quite a few months in 2021. I want to thank my landlord for that.
That is a good segue into the next part of your story. You talked about distributing in 2018 and then you opened up your place and had some issues with the pandemic.
I got the key to the brewery on February 1st, 2020. I was in here anywhere from 14 to 18 hours a day, every single day, so much that my girlfriend tried to break up with me three times. We had been dating for years. I can see the stress level, and I understand it, but I do love her to death. I had to make that very apparent to her. There’s a lot of hard work to start with learning a system that was new to me and completely alien. I’m trying to put it all together in my head according to how the other brewer who was instructing me that sold me the place. I was stuck in here, brewing away, brewed up fourteen different beers a month and a half. March first rolls around, and the indoor tasting room needs to be redone.
The whole crew of owners and investors came in and helped pitch some ideas. We look around and figure it all out. They went ahead and did all the construction on the front of the house, which I’m grateful for because I didn’t have any time to take care of that myself. They are talking about the pandemic in the first week of March, “What is this Coronavirus?” It shut us down. We opened on March 14th, 2020, which was a Saturday at 12:00 PM. A lot of the other bigger places were shutting down. We needed to get this run out. We ethically didn’t know what was going on. There wasn’t enough information. We figured as long as we were cleaning things and wiping down everything after customers have left and making everyone happy.
I had a line out the door until 5:00 in the afternoon, and then it started to down a little bit. On Sunday, we had a good day, and on Monday, we got shut down. It was okay. We went from tasting remodel to wholesale distribution with no tasting room. Since I had already been playing that game, it came down to pivoting on a dime and trying to figure out how to get it. There was a company called CODI Canning in Golden, Colorado. In the first week of everything being shut down, they offer their services for free as long as you paid for the materials.
They brought their canning machine out here and rented a huge generator. After that, it took them two days to can everything up. The packer canning machine took it up to Gunbarrel Brewing. Marie, the owner, had them put it in place, and then she eventually ended up buying the thing. It’s still there. I get to see it occasionally. I go up there and talk to Marie on a Sunday, whenever she was bored. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a big tasting room with a whole bunch of space. After we put everything in the cans, it took us a week to label everything because when you have to sell something, you have to have a government warning and UPC to make your stores happy.
It’s not just about, “Let’s sell it any way we can.” It’s, “Let’s sell it and make it a little bit convenient for the accounts that we have. In that way, it’s not letting them scrambling to pick up the pieces we left off.” Each can get three labels, a UPC, a government warning, and the name of the beer with the alcohol volume, which are all the requirements. They were all silver cans.
We put those clear mailing labels on them. They sold hotcakes because people were like, “What are these silver bullets?” No labels, and completely guerrilla marketing. It drew a lot of attention to the brand immediately. With people at the stores, we could see where the pull-through was in certain styles. It was a lot of fun. After that, we ended up turning around and focusing on our barrel projects.
It's hard to bring on your friends as employees because you don't want your professional relationship to get in the way of friendship. Share on XWhen you were first hearing about this pandemic and how they were locked down in Wuhan, where Italy and Iran started doing all that stuff, as well as when the order to shut down all bars and restaurants came in that week in March 2020, did you ever panic at all or immediately go to, “This is what’s happening, this is what we can do, we know how to distribute cans, we know these people, and can hopefully figure it out?”
The only panic I had was how to figure out how to get everything into cans and package itself because I didn’t want to do everything off. That would have taken forever. It’s a lot more man-hours we put into everything. It was a lot of spinning on darts. I’m outdoor-oriented. I’m an endurance athlete. I can raise 24 hour raises when I’m in shape to do it.
I’ve done a one-man 24-hour event and that wrecked me. I do duos, and we team up in teams of four. I’ll also do 50, 70, 80, and 100-mile mountain bike races. I push myself. I’m the type of person that wants to find a challenge and see that challenge can hurt me. Not in a bad way, but hurt me enough to push through and persevere. Those types of challenges where you can do that make you stronger.
It gives you more will, fight, and substance for having all these problems every single time we turn a corner at the brewery, which has been nonstop with the pandemic. I bought an old brewery, a glycol machine that goes out mid-summer the first summer I bought the place. I don’t know anything about glycol, but I got to replace it. That’s another $4,000.
After that, we end up getting through the year, and they are like, “We are shutting down indoors again. We got to pivot on a dime and buy fireplaces.” I don’t have money for fireplaces. You’ve got to put them on a credit card. At the same time, it’s like, “What do we do? We shift hours from 12:00 to 6:00 because that’s the only time we can be open. It’s zero degrees outside, and people want to be in the sun when it’s cold.”
It was constantly figuring out problems and having a staff that was able to help figure out problems. It’s not all on me. I’m the production manager, operations manager, business owner, the list goes on and on, but we delegate out some of those responsibilities to some folk. Those folks happen to be not just good employees, but good friends. It’s hard to bring on your friends as employees because you don’t want your professional relationship to get in the way of your friendship.
There has to be a level of respect that each person that I bring on either has for the beer, not to sound egotistical, but also for me and respect what I’m doing. They know that I’ve been through a lot. They know that I can handle a lot of pressure and can take on a lot of responsibility when necessary. They’re family. They know that they can call me last second and say, “I can’t open now. I don’t know what’s going on. I have a fever. I got COVID test negative.” I’m there on the last resort. They all know it. They all have a certain level of responsibility when they walk through that door.
I have an assistant brewer that was the cellarman. I had a salesperson. When the salesperson had to leave, I had to take over that role again. I turned my cellar man into an assistant brewer. I gave him a huge raise. I made sure he was happy. He is in charge of the back of the house. He has been brewing Uhl’s beer since we’ve opened. I’ve been there with him every step of the way to fix problems that need to be fixed. He is so good now. Everything here is manual. There is no push-button operation. We’ve got to pick up, mix the grain, put the water and the hops in, and pull the grain out all by hand.
It’s quite a manual labor-intensive facility. I’ll be there to help mash in which is dropping grain into hot water to extract the starches. Having that staff too helps out a lot. A lot of trust goes into each one of them as well because the first day they walk in, I put a key in their hand and tell them that they’re in the family and were hired for a particular reason.
I don’t think it’s egotistical to expect people to respect you if you’ve done something deserving of respect, whether it be starting your own business or finding that right, unique combination to serve the market, as well as having all that trust for the people around you. Very few things are done alone. People who try to do everything by themselves end up spinning their wheels a lot. Who has the time for all that?
A lot of people starting businesses of any kind have another job that they have to do to keep their lights on or the engine coming in. You want to be around people you can trust. If you can’t trust the people, you shouldn’t be working with them anymore, for that matter. In your journey with Uhl’s Brewing, you continue to respond to market forces and be creative with the beer you brew. Tell us a little bit about what you’re brewing and what you’re seeing in the market.
We focus predominantly on the Hazy IPAs, heavily fruited sours, sometimes smoothies fruit sour, and barrel-aged strong ales. The market is pretty interesting in Colorado because in any large liquor store you walk into, you could find a new brand every day and be happy with trying something new every single day that you walked in there.
You can go to the singles aisle and end up picking up a 6-pack of 6 different IPAs, all to your favorite hops that you want to drink. Some stores have better pull through or sell through on certain SKUs, whether it be IPAs or sours. You’ve got to pay attention to that when you’re selling to your accounts. You can’t push IPAs on an account that doesn’t sell through fast enough on them.
If there is a count that pushes 3 cases a week of IPA and 1 case a week of sour, then you need to pay attention. It’s interesting because this is demographically dictated. One liquor store in Centennial could push nothing but sours and then across the street, all they sell are IPA’s. Catty-corner to them, they will sell IPAs in styles like they’re going out in style. It’s a matter of knowing when you open these accounts what they’re selling, how fast they are selling them, and how to service them properly. In that way, you’re not sitting with beer on the shelf going, “Why is this still here three months down the line?” We have to buy a back-product. I personally buy back-product from accounts to get new products on the shelf.
If it’s too old, we end up having to throw it away. If it’s still in a sweet spot, we’ll bring it back to the tasting room to make sure that we can keep our eyes, ears, and mouth on it because we listen to our customers, “It’s digging the malt profile on this beer. I like the hops in this one. The mouthfeel on this one is wonderful.” As long as we have the ability to bring the beer back to the tasting room and monitor it as it ages, we can still use that product to our benefit not have to worry about throwing it away.
Unfortunately, I hired a salesperson and gave a very long niche, and that didn’t happen. It opened my eyes also to realize that even though I give everyone a key, sit down, and tell them I trust them, I need to be a little bit more direct and of a manager when I bring on another salesperson down the road. I need to teach them the way that I sell.
A lot of the accounts, when they found out that I was coming back there, they were A) Extremely happy because some of them were getting neglected, B) They wanted to talk and let me know how it went with someone else in charge of sales for a while. The feedback was positive and negative all over the place, but at least I got to know that my brand is back in my hands, and I’m the only one that is solely responsible.
It sounds like it’s important to you to receive feedback both from the sales numbers and trends of your accounts, as well as the verbal feedback you’re getting in the tasting room to inform what you’re brewing, what you’ve run more of, or how you’re transitioning any of your products. What would you say for anyone in that similar situation when you talked about a salesperson who wasn’t doing it properly?
Without a good marketing plan and a good publicist, you're probably not going to reach a lot of people, no matter how much you spend on Instagram and Facebook. Share on XWhat have you learned about providing that clear direction to the next salesperson so that you can find that fine line between being micromanaging to the point where it becomes like, “Why even hire someone when I have to do it myself,” and also making sure that what happened to you last summer-fall 2020 doesn’t happen again?
It comes down to follow-up. I ended up losing all my front-of-house staff except for one person in spring 2021. It was, “I’m getting married. He lives in California.” She applied for a job in California and got a $200,000 raise. Those are great instances as to why people had to move on. They were not moving on out of spite or anything like that. They had opportunities. I’m not going to stop anyone from taking any opportunities because, just like me, I had opportunities. They weren’t handed out to me. I had to earn. These people earn them as well. It’s life.
I lost the front-of-house staff and everything was on my shoulders. I was learning everything from the backend side of things for all the sales because I had someone sell-through on volume because we have to report to the Federal government and state government. I had to take all that on myself and then realize that I had that on top of hiring and training employees. A salesperson started coming in every day asking for a job. I hired him due to the fact that he was persistent. I thought I could trust him, but he wanted to sell just our brand. That says a lot to me.
What I’m trying to think to myself after that salesperson didn’t work out is how do I have check and balance limits. The check and balance came to me by thinking about another brewery. I’ll use Gunbarrel Brewing as an example. She has a salesperson that goes around and sells everything, and Marie personally delivers everything. The accountability of keeping up with the accounts comes from the delivery person. That keeps the owner and the salesperson operating as a sales team, which allows me to pick up pieces like, “They only had two units of coffee roasters. I’ll be back next week with another two cases.” You’ve gone through two cases minus two units in a week. It’s going to keep pushing.
It is that and then spreadsheets that are very informative for each account, what do they sell the most? What works best there? We have a spreadsheet with the name of every account that we have. There’s a color code if they are fast, slow, or medium speed on sell-through. When it’s slow, we usually try to set up hand sales or tastings. The pandemic tasting has been a little bit hard with indoor mask restrictions and such.
For the medium ones, we make sure that they are still pushing through the beer, put it on sale at a certain point, if necessary, and try to coach the accounts along. The fast sellers, we make sure we hit them once a week. The original salesperson that I hired did do a good job on the back end of things, recording everything, knowing what we had in stock and all the SKUs, and keeping track of it all on spreadsheets.
He didn’t leave me high and dry. At the same time, the blueprints for moving forward past the distribution footprint that I had started were right in front of me. The salesperson sells, and he will also be in charge of the tasting because that salesperson is the sales director, which is what I’m looking to hire. That encompasses all sales, whether it be front of house or wholesale.
I will end up picking up the back end by doing deliveries. I will make the invoice, go out, and keep track of things the way that I need to according to how I’ve set up the system. Whoever it may be will have a very good blueprint. The first couple of weeks, I’ll be going around with that said person to all the accounts introducing them so that they know that they have my full support.
It sounds like what you have is a process that allows you to know if something’s going wrong, if a customer is not being served properly, not shipping the right amounts of things, or being left hanging, that by virtue of your involvement in it, you’re going to know. Once again, it seems like another example of what you’re gaining from still being in touch and interacting with the other players in the field that these other breweries, you see what they’re doing.
It seems like everything you’re doing as well as everything that we’re looking at in the business world going forward is there is competition. In Colorado, I’ve seen the liquor stores. I’ve seen how you could see so many options that make the sure head spin. You can get into some decision fatigue, but also that there is something to be said for interacting with all these competitors and figuring out what they’re doing and if there’s anything you can learn from them.
It is what we like to call a nice little family. Everyone will help you out however they can. A lot of it is advice. We first started in 2021 with the idea of having distributors manage our core brands, which are Hop Down and Coffee Roasters. I was trying to follow another business model by foreign noses where their core brand was held by a distributor, and they distributed their special product.
That didn’t work out too well because you don’t have control of the brand if it’s at a warehouse somewhere else. You have another company trying to sell your beer. They’re not so inclined to sell your beer if it’s new to a lot of people in their markets. Trying to get onto a shelf at a liquor store that has never heard of the brand takes a lot of convincing.
You can bang down the doors as hard as possible by going to festivals, Instagram, and social media accounts, but without a good marketing plan or a good publicist, you’re not going to reach a lot of people. People that are beer nerds they’re going to get it, but the average folk that owns a brewpub or a tap house that takes on kegs, if they haven’t heard of you, your chances of getting into those places are pretty slim, unless someone comes in asking for your beer. That’s picking up a little bit here.
This seems like the thing that picks up once you first get noticed. That leaves our audience with a good point about how in general, whatever business you’re in, you’re going to have in most situations, the other beer nerds or other people who are into it to know about you. You have to, in some capacity, reach the general populace, especially if your business is something along with the B2C category, which means you have a little bit of both. Your end customers are the people who drink the beer and who want to drink the beer, whether it’s straight from your taproom or through one of your distributors.
Before we go, I want to ask you, if anyone reading wants to get a hold of you, whether it be to find out about distributing your beer or wanting to hear anything you have to say about the beer market or how to build a business in general. Would you be willing to share some contact information with everyone?
The simplest way to reach me is to send an email to Contact@UhlsBrewing.com or reach out to me via phone at the actual brewery itself, which is listed on Google. It’s pretty easy to look up. One of those two ways will get a response.
It’s on the East side of Boulder, Colorado. If you are in the Colorado area, it’s very easy to get to. The nearest intersection is at 55th and Arapahoe.
There are two landmarks right next to us. We’re right across the street on 55th from the Boulder Dinner Theater. We’re in the same complex as Blackbelly, which is an amazing restaurant.
'If there is something that is completely out of your control, has already happened, and there is no way to turn it around, why even think about it. Accept it .... and move on.' Share on XAny last words of advice regarding endurance, perseverance, and how to handle setbacks that you want to give to the audience?
I read a lot of news articles from the Washington DC area. I read three newspapers a day before I left there, and all varying scopes and opinions as well, never sticking to this one. I wanted to see it from all angles. One of the best things I can tell you as a business owner, there is going to be a lot of things that are not in your control. I was ditched to pandemic on opening year.
We thought we had the magic sauce, but with the pandemic squashing us every step of the way, just accept the losses, not losses as far as momentarily or beer-wise, but the losses of winning a battle and move on. If there is something that is completely out of your control that has already happened and there is no way to turn it around, why even think about it?
Become better at accepting these problems and not letting it get to you to a point where you’re boiling over, then move on. You have to accept the fact that something that was out of your control happened, then move on. In our first year, we brewed 87 batches of beer, and not a single one of them was the same beer. We lost one batch of beer. I’ve heard of so many breweries that have said, “When we started, we threw away hundreds of gallons of beer.” That’s because they were starting brewing. They hadn’t homebrewed or gone through what I had gone through.
They were trying to brew something but didn’t realize how to make that happen, or they were learning their system and certain things happened along the way. Mistakes always happen in a brewhouse. The same thing in 2022, I brewed 107 batches, and we had one mistake. Unfortunately, when the mistake ends up being in a can or cake at that point, it’s the most expensive mistake to make but it doesn’t bother me. Mistakes happen. Human beings are human. They make a lot of mistakes. The processes we put in place and religiously following them help us to make fewer mistakes.
That was a great final message for everyone out there reading. There is going to be a setback, whether it’s your own mistake or something that happens outside of your control. There is the instinct to ruminate on it. Some people even fall apart when these setbacks happen. It’s not a matter of if. It’s a matter of when. Something is going to happen. A common occurrence for a lot of people in business is a similar business opens up nearby and you have to make an adjustment. It’s great to accept the loss or setback, move on, and figure out what to do going forward. I would like to thank you so much for joining us on the show and telling us your story about persevering through this pandemic and bringing your product to the world.
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
All you readers out there, thank you for reading. I encourage you to tune in again to other episodes of the show, where we talk about talking with other people who have built something or followed their passions in one capacity or another, whether it comes from having experienced not being able to get their favorite beer. These are all people that are bringing interesting things into the world. I encourage you to read again. Until next, then. Have a good one.
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