Today we’d like to introduce you to Pete Ternes.
Pete, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
In 2011, one of my partners, Nick Burica, shot me an email about starting a brewery that gives 50% of its profits to local charities. We’d been homebrewing for years, and spending large chunks of our paychecks on beer for just as long. We walked out of one too many beer bars having spent upwards of $50, right past a homeless man and woman using newspapers to stay warm, and thought, “we should really be leveraging this major luxury to improve our community.”
After teaming up with Bryan Grohnke, our third partner, we were off to the races. We made our first batch of beer, a dark saison, with help from our homebrewing community. To our enormous surprise and joy, the batch sold out in just a couple weeks! We made a donation to Cure Violence and got back into the brewhouse right away. After lots of successes, paired with lots and lots of failures, we felt we learned enough to take the next step. We recently signed on a brewpub space and should be opening on Armitage Avenue in Logan Square in late 2018. We’ll continue to brew experimental, European-influenced beers, but we’ll gradually be converting our charitable donations into a social work/employment program focused on at-risk 18-25 year-olds.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It’s been very rocky! We brew our beer in other breweries’ facilities. This makes for an enormous number of logistical obstacles–e.g., getting grain delivered to the wrong location, shifting hops among all of our contract breweries, nearly losing whole batches of beer. I could go on and on.
The biggest obstacle, however, has been staying above water! I quit my job about three years ago to focus full-time on Middle Brow. In that time, the brewery’s grown slowly but surely, but we still haven’t been able to justify paying me a salary. That’s meant a lot of odd jobs with weird hours. For several years, it’s been 18+ hour days of work, black beans, and rice for lunch and dinner 4 days a week, lapsed friendships, etc. If you want to start a business in a highly competitive industry, be ready for a hectic lifestyle. On the plus side, though, I spend nearly every one of those 18+ hours of work having fun.
Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Middle Brow Beer Co. – what should we know?
We brew beer in Chicagoland and distribute it in Illinois, Indiana, and California. We specialize in Belgian and European-influenced beers, very broadly speaking. On a more granular level, we like to experiment with yeasts and blending. For example, our best-known beer, Robyn, is fermented with a blend of Saison and Belgian Abbey yeast strains. This makes for the greatest hits of Belgian flavors and aromas: bubblegum, banana, black pepper, clove. Our IPA series, Sells Out, is fermented with four (!) different yeast strains, imparting fruits, spices and a touch of funk.
One of the things we’re proudest of as a company is our proclivity for finding ways to brew weird beers that are fairly unique to us, all the while without sacrificing approachability. Our beer is simple and delicious on the surface, but hiding underneath that simplicity is complexity and creativity that bring you back again and again!
The other thing we’re proud of, and that really sets us apart from other breweries in this city and the vast majority of the country is our stakeholder ethic and our donations. We give away over 50% of the profit we make on each beer! And we’ve been doing this since we brewed our very first beer in 2013. We knew this *sounded* right and good when we started the company, but we never realized how hard it would be. We’re proud to say that we’ve kept to our promise and grew in our own, very unorthodox way.
Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
What’s more important to our success? First, we’re only at the end of the first steps here. We can’t call this “success” yet. But hopefully soon! But what’s gotten us to where we are? A willingness to work from 5 am until 1 am every damn day! I guess the word for that is passion, but frankly, that word is too romantic. I reckon I was born with super-hyperactivity in my genes.
I wish I could say “empathy” has been important to our success, too. We do our best to practice empathy in our every interaction. But we’re imperfect practitioners.
Pricing:
- Four packs of our beer go for $8.99 at most Whole Foods Markets in Chicago.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.middlebrowbeer.com
- Email: pete@middlebrowbeer.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/middlebrowbeer/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MiddleBrow/
Image Credit:
Polly Nevins
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