What you can learn from brewing beer

Our quarterly strategic planning sessions always include an activity that's interesting, fun, and team-building. We've done kart racing and snowmobiling in the past, and recently decided we were going to brew our own custom beer. We found Barleycorn's Craft Brew in Natick, MA, and made a reservation to brew a red and an IPA. It was an interesting process with several steps including weighing the ingredients and getting familiar with Barleycorn's custom brewing equipment.

The whole brewing process, from start to finish, took about 2.5 hours. They allow you to bring in beer to drink as you brew, so we essentially hung out, drank beer, and brewed our own custom brew, too. After the beer fermented for three weeks, it was time to bottle it. This wasn't as fun as making it. It consists of washing bottles, and then waiting while your custom beer is loaded into three bottles at a time. After you close each bottle, you adhere a label to your creation and pack it up. Since we'd made so much beer, we were bottling for a little over three hours. This was made more manageable by "testing" our custom brews extensively. A slight decline in productivity, but nothing major.

While bottling wasn't so much fun, it was fascinating to learn about the business during our two visits to Barleycorn. Due to Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) regulations, Barleycorn can't brew and sell their own beer. But you are buying ingredients from them and leasing time on their equipment when you brew beer at their establishment. This allows them to qualify as a "home brewery" so they don't have to charge taxes or comply and with certain regulations to which commercial breweries must adhere.

While there were many first-timers at Barleycorn, there were also tons of regulars coming in and out, mixing their unique beers and chatting with the owner. The facility--if that's what you want to call it--was lively and fun. If you can get past the intense smell of hops, you'll have a great time not only because you're drinking, but because it's clear how much passion the owner has for what he does. He took something he loved--beer--and turned it into a real business venture. This is how to be happy and successful as an entrepreneur: transfer your passion to others while working with what you love each day (in this case, it's beer). In addition to passion, the owner of Barleycorn also has integrity. He demonstrated this when one of our beers came out a little differently than we expected. Sensing our disappointment with how the batch turned out, he offered to let us brew more beer for free to make up for it. While we didn't take him up on his offer, the fact that he even offered made me a huge fan.

It was great to be able to make beer brewing a part of our strategic planning session this time around. It was also a great opportunity for us to support a local business, and get some really great beer out of it. We'll be serving the fruits of our labor, Grassshopper Red, the Premium Beer for Entrepreneurs, at our company bbq in a couple of weeks.