I’m Bryan Roth, and you’re listening to the Good Beer Hunting podcast.
We talk a lot about successes in these episodes. Challenges overcome, exciting innovations, and new approaches. But it’s rare we focus on failures. In this period of worry about health and financial hardship for businesses, it’s inevitable the beer industry will be having more conversations than usual about things that go wrong. That idea is at the center of this episode.
In November 2017, we published a marathon conversation with Erik Lars Myers, then the founder and CEO of Mystery Brewing in Hillsborough, North Carolina. At the time, his early-2010s model of a rapidly changing portfolio of beers and taproom-focused sales was ever-so-slightly ahead of the time. I called him a futurist, but as life would prove, the future wasn’t set to include Mystery.
Myers closed the brewery in 2018 amidst a slew of equipment malfunctions, bad luck, and, as you’ll hear from him directly, some poor business decisions. His experience of losing a company he’d built—and built with people he came to love—was devastating. But as you’ll hear, those events may also have been affirming. In the strange way that life tends to weave together good and bad, the closure sent him on a new path he’s since come to appreciate.
Myers is back on the podcast this time as director of brewing operations for Durham, North Carolina’s Fullsteam Brewery. We won’t be talking about beer styles and recipes, but rather reflecting on what happened to him and how his experiences are being echoed today, at a time when the coronavirus pandemic is creating daily hardships for breweries all over.
As you listen to Myers and hear how things change for businesses, consider this. Failure is hard, it is unpleasant … and it hurts. But so often, in the end, it’s also tied to what we come to see as success. Or, at least, growth. I hope Myers’ story offers some context and affirmation that, even when things go wrong, and hard lessons are learned, that isn’t necessarily the end.
This is Erik Lars Myers of Fullsteam Brewery. Listen in.