Welcome to the respecting the beer podcast. My name is Gary Arndt and with me as usual are Bobby Fleshman and Alison McCoy Fleshman, the proprietors of the McFleshman Brewing Company. In our last episode, we talked about kind of the origin stories about how as a four year old, you started, took your first taste of beer quite illegally but in this episode, we kind of left off where you, you, you went to beer school and I want to ask you a little bit more about that because I think You've mentioned several times that there's a lot of science and brewing and that that's obviously the true, but there's also an art to it as well. And I think in a lot of disciplines that are similar to this, people learn through an apprenticeship. You go, you learn under someone, and then over a period of time they teach you the ropes, and then you kind of figure it out yourself. So what, what, what does one do at beer school? You said you had to have some sort of STEM degree to even be admitted. What do they do that you're not going to get, or they put a different emphasis on from just beer school? Working at a brewery.

Right. As you're, as you're describing it that way, I'm thinking about the flow chart to getting craft beer to opening a brewery and it's like spaghetti dropped on a table. It's, it doesn't make, there isn't a way to become a brewer.

I'm about to say that's one of the funnest questions. When we meet other brewer brewery owners, we're like, what was your, what was your last job? Because it was never, I, I started brewing and I've always been brewing. It was always something else.

If you go back to 1970, 1980 and prior, It would have been a very clear path. You would go work for one of these four breweries really large breweries You could be trained potentially on the job You might come in with a degree But you would be doing a very small thing and a very big machine and you'd be doing it You would be doing it very well, but with craft beer. Yeah

I was just gonna say to back to Gary's question about what what things did you gain from the brewing program? I think that they were, they were these different sections that you would cover, like, pretty much every aspect of brewing a beer from packaging and the mechanics and the engineering associated with the packaging systems to like what sort of things to think about in terms of like grain ingredient or grain chemical composition that you'd have to take into account to make a better beer to understand the process. So speak on that.

So speaking to my flow chart, as Allison points out, that's my way into craft beer. Yeah, I, I, I did. So you could have come from a big brewery and then made your way to craft. But for me, and as so many crappers, we went to brewing school having clean kegs prior to that and ran canning lines and help make beer and so forth, but not really understanding enough to take it to the next level to open their own spot. You could continue down that path though. You could, I could have stayed with coop brewing company and open my own brewery eventually. But I wanted to get out there. I wanted to network with the larger beer world and it meant I had to move away from home for the second time. the first time being with, with NASA, working with NASA, this was another time I had to move away from Allison and I just wanted to network, you know, that was for me, me. As big of a draw to this program is anything else. These people came from everywhere. They came from Miller, Sierra, Nevada, surly, new Belgium. You just couldn't, I was going to ask,

this seems like a very, this is a professional program, right? So this is all, this isn't, you know, Oh, how to make a batch of beer on your stove. This is the business of beer.

It actually isn't the business of beer. I was going to say, yeah,

I should say when you're talking about bottling or canning or things like that. You're talking about someone that's making beer as a business.

Exactly. Yeah. So this is the professional side of brewing. but I will say that day one, my instructor, Michael Lewis said that he, he said, first of all, welcome to the brethren of the brotherhood of brewing. And it was kind of a teary eyed moment. This guy had done it for 40 I don't know, forever. He said, well, I'm not teaching you guys to open how to open a brewery or run one. You're not going to learn any of that here today. He says, I'm teaching you how to make beer and, and that'll never leave me. And so I'm still, I'm still educating myself on what he said I won't be educated on. I'm, I'm again, meandering, but I'm trying to describe how that experience led to where I am today to opening this brewery.

And yeah, we were extremely naive when you were both starting and finishing a beer school and actually how to open and run a brewery.

Yeah. So, but let's just take it for what it was at face value. It was a, it was my education in professional brewing. And like I said, I said previously, I was learning, biology and chemistry on a level. That I had never learned as an undergraduate and I didn't do it in graduate school. And I was expected to know it on a level that was somewhere between undergraduate and graduate. And I had to do it on a timescale of six months. So I, I was really diving in deep to learn about metabolic processes, raw ingredients, fermentation. There's so many things I had to learn. There were 10 times more involved than anything I would have been exposed to in the world of homebrewing or honestly, apprenticeships. Most apprenticeships never could have touched on some of the things I would have learned. My, educators came from a different time when everybody was a big brewer. So big brewers are really good brewers. And as much as we want to say bad things about your millers and your quarters about how they're not awesome to drink, they're not interesting. I should say they are really good at brewing. They make the same thing every time. And that's the definition of quality. And so these guys came from that school, not a school of thought. And so they were teaching us how to make the same thing every time. And guys

and gals

And gals, actually, we probably were outnumbered in that class. I think in the end, those that succeeded might've been more women than men. He said, yeah, it was a, it was a big, it was a big, change in the brewing industry 11 years ago, 12 years ago.

So I'm guessing most of the people in this program, because you're getting a certification and nowadays the whole point of education is basically, you know, some sort of certification you get to please someone else that most of these people are going to work for. Some other brewery. And this is what they show to show their credentials. You didn't do that, right? So you're getting a credential that isn't necessarily going to be used to get you a job somewhere.

Yeah, I think I was using it as an, as education and as networking. And if the credential came into play all the better, and that goes for my PhD. I don't ever put that post nominal to my signature, but if it ever becomes relevant, then it's there. And there is a post nominal for my brewing degree as well that I could apply. What is it?

Just it's,

it's a diploma brewer. It's too many letters. It's like D I P a brewer. It's too many.

It doesn't even was IBD.

No, no. Cause there's several degrees.

I would put that on your business card just cause

yeah,

Sorry, Gary, I lost your, I lost my train of thought trying to think of my post nominal

you get this credential, right? So you go to the program. Yeah. Yeah.

Then what do you do? Well, so actually, so I call you up. So you're in beer school and I call you up and I'm like, Hey, guess what? He's picking

our next spot. Yeah. So the

goal was I'm going to go, he'll follow me wherever I go. It's up to me to find the job somewhere. Cause I was going to do the professor gig and Lawrence called. So I interviewed at Appleton. Can we

pause for a minute? She just described being a tenured professor at university. As the professor gigs professor. As if it's a weekend. It's

a verb. anyway, and so so we, I get the job, which is fantastic. And then I call him up and I was like, Hey, guess what? We're moving to Wisconsin. And the the physics department at Lawrence was needing a physicist. And they said, Oh, well, our new chemist is. Married to a physicist. Maybe he can take this job. So they interviewed you and they offered you the job for a one year visiting assistant professor job, but then also Hinterland Brewing Company up in Green Bay also wanted to interview because there was a person who had the IBD diploma coming to town and so the brewery industry knows that that, I mean, that is the credential. If you can have someone that has IBD on your team, it's amazing. At the time, I think the only other IBD in the state was. Well, at least in the craft brewing industry was Dan Carey out of New Pairs, Dan

Carey. And then soon after Brad, still mink.

Cool. Yeah. it was a, a rare credential to have 'cause it's so hard to get. And so we went up to Hinterland and you interviewed there, and they offered you the job as a brewer there the same day that Lawrence offered you the job. of the physics professorship for a year and so it was a fun,

it was a fork and it was a fun day. What

do we do? So we went to Stone Arch to enjoy some beer there and you decided, I think.

Yeah, I wanted to immerse myself in the academic community here. I, cause I knew I, I didn't want to, I don't want to talk down to the options, but I knew that the brewing jobs would always be there, but I don't think I was always going to have an opportunity to teach. And it made, it made an, it made a lot of sense actually from a money standpoint to cover our moving expenses.

Yeah, that's true. And just to I mean, we had just come out of grad school, so we had not really many dimes to our name. But also I was terrified of Green Bay because it was far away. I didn't know how far it was, 30 minute drive, but we had no idea what winter was. And in Oklahoma, I would have been on the,

I would have been on the graveyard shift. I was

terrified of you driving back and forth in winter. And so I was, I was very hopeful that you didn't take the job for that reason.

So your position at Lawrence, was it a, like a postdoc type

thing? Essentially. Yeah. I was, I was taking over a visit, a rotating visitor position. And your position was more of a tenure track one?

Yes.

That's a whole story. She didn't even know she was interviewing for a tenured position. Yeah.

It was a, it was a visiting position that they switched over to a tenure line. And,

and just so everybody knows, like, that's the holy grail for like most academics, right? Hence the, you go through all this garbage for years and the hope is you get a tenure track position. You get set up, you get a nice job for life.

Yup. Yeah. I'm hired for life.

What are the options?

Oh, you're hired for life or you're fired.

Yeah. So as you're until you're 10 years, what a colleague of mine described

tenure to be. But the idea is, is you have this academic freedom and you can explore your research in ways and the even more holy grail is working at Lawrence. Cause it's a very small college. So I don't have to do like, and it's undergraduates only. So it's not the graduate students and I don't have to go after big grants. I can really focus on teaching and working with students, which is fantastic. And the other fun thing about Lawrence was even on my interview, They're not allowed to ask any questions about like, do you have a spouse and what do they do there? anything about Appleton that we can tell you about for any reason at all? And I was like, well, is, can y'all, is it okay if we go around to some of the breweries? And they're like, Oh, okay. And so one of my. My colleagues took me up to Green Bay and we went brewery hopping, and he was like, yeah, I don't know why she wants to. I was like, it's fine. I just really like beer. What they didn't know is of course is I was really wanting to look at the comp, not competition, I mean all of these breweries. The landscape. Yeah. Look at the landscape and is there a spot in like is Appleton in need of another brewery? Especially one that with the vision of what we were kind of building.

So your decision to come here was obviously based on the job offer. Yep. Did you have any idea at the time, the history of beer? In this area.

Oh yeah. That, that's the part she asked me over the phone. She did have options at the time and of where we would land. And it was between Boston and Australia, which would have been cool. I, if I remember, right. Oh no,

that didn't. Well,

the point though being, she did ask, would it be a good spot to open a brewery? In Wisconsin beer. And I laughed on the other end of that line. And I was going to school with some people that were from Michigan and Minnesota. And they also laughed at that.

In all fairness, I wasn't at, you know,

it will, it,

I can just make it funny.

But, but what did work out is we moved at a time when there was more. One brewery in Appleton stone arch, the, the, our neighbors, the Appleton beer factory had not yet open open. And there was a brewery in grand shoot Fox river brewing company, but that really is based out of Oshkosh. So we moved into a really ripe moment in the, in the history of beer for this, for this particular city. So the reason I ask

is because at least in like growing up in the seventies, Probably earlier, when it was the era of big beer. Wisconsin really was the world's, the nation's largest beer manufacturer, most of that coming out of Milwaukee, Miller, Pabst, Schlitz, Hams, you know, every German name that a lot of Germans settled in this area, they created breweries and this was sort of the beer center of the world for a while. We tell like the craft brewing, you know, wave started.

Yeah. We knew about, we knew about New Glarus. And a friend of ours in graduate school was from Milwaukee. And so he would come back and forth over the holidays and he would bring us back a big box of spotted cow. And we were like, Oh my gosh, spotted cow. This is amazing. And so we knew that there was a really good beer scene here. I don't think, at least I didn't appreciate the rich history that was here.

I did. I, I knew about the logger scene. I was definitely keyed in on that. It's why that we launched with loggers. We knew we were going to make a lot of loggers. I think four of our top five sellers are loggers today. There's a German heritage here that we wanted to respect.

And that was actually something that we figured out when you were writing the business plan for what the brewery would be like really what our kind of goal beer styles would be when you did some digging to find the German and Irish heritage.

So, all right, so let's go to that point. You're both teaching at a university. When does the point come where you pull the trigger or you make the decision like We're gonna open a brewery. Oh god.

Well, that

decision was made Like I said when I was cleaning those kegs 20 years prior, but I mean that's like yeah. Yeah Aspirational

that's true, right? It's not like Honey, we're going to a bank and you know, we're, something's on the line and you got to, you know, it becomes real.

I think that is when we talked to our parents about getting investing going. That's when I think it really started to become the goal.

Yeah. Or it

became real, I should say. Yeah,

because, right, if, to be honest, if we don't have investment, then I'm still at another brewery. I'm just as happy. It's just a different path. we had to have investors.

So we talked to my mother and then Bobby's parents. And so both families bought in Bobby's parents were much more active than my mother, but it was that point that it became an actual, like,

now the groundwork was, was, was laid, not just, we're talking about the networking and the experience that I got in brewing school, but the net, the groundwork was laid here in town. I worked on and off for two years at Stone Arch Brewing Company, overlapping honestly with what I was doing at Lawrence University. So I, I was, I was getting to know this local brewing scene. And something very specific about, about beer here and the business of a beer here. I was helping these guys across the alley at the beer factory, with any number of technical and artistic, if you like to say it that way, decisions. And yeah, so it wasn't as though we, we were just some ghost and then we just, fabricated. We were the first people we met in town outside of Lawrence University were the owners of the Appleton beer factory.

That was fun. We were religious about every Sunday going to ABF for about 2 p. m. and just every Sunday we were sit there 2 p. m. And which is the perfect time. If you want to go to a brewery, go when, you know, not many people are there and you can really start to talk to people. And we started to talk to the bar manager, his name is Larry. He has since moved on, but, actually he's still an owner. But then he was like telling Jeff Fogle, Hey, you got to meet this guy. And so Jeff made a point to come by on one Sunday when we would come by. And the friendship was born.

And just to summarize our relationship with these guys, we're, we're not business partners, but we are spiritual partners. And we, we, we do share a lot of equipment. because it only makes sense, but we just are spiritually aligned and, and that's why we chose to, to move in next door to them.

When we'd already seen this model too, and Fort Collins, you, you know, there's breweries right next door on entire blocks that are just five or six breweries right in a row. And so they're really not competitors with each other. They really do help each, you know, the business helps each other. I'm sure

we'll talk about this in a future episode, but you are literally, you're literally 10 paces. Yeah. And that we'll get into that later. And we actually

bought this building because we are 10 paces from them.

One of the things I find interesting about your story is that of all the academics I know, let's just say they're rather risk adverse people.

That's funny.

You get a tenure track job. It's safe. And. Obviously there are a lot of them aren't politically conservative, but they're kind of personally, you know, rather conservative. They're not risk takers. So this seems like a very, you know, you can, you can have your story about, you know, you studied and learn physics and everything, but then that jump from, you know, student to entrepreneur seems like a real big one for an academic. That it's something that a lot of, you know, maybe some Silicon Valley people do it, but you don't see it a whole lot in other disciplines.

Well, Bobby had actually jumped off that cliff before.

I was going to say that this is where my parents, even if they didn't introduce, introduce me to beer, they introduced me to entrepreneurship. They, they had a real estate company. And then they, my, my father works in the oil and gas industry. And Oklahoma, which is the second biggest industry in Oklahoma. In fact, Allison's father did too. Those are businesses they created my parents and then they started to build homes. And my dad was a general contractor. My first job was building homes. I think I learned how to open businesses and jump off the cliff without even thinking about it. I

was about to say, let's say a little bit more about that. Like your, your dad was doing like the land brokerage, your mom was a real estate agent. she's actually the president of the real estate company of like the state, but then you didn't just build how, like you didn't just like work as a carpenter. You truly built the houses like from start to finish.

I didn't go to college essentially until I was 25 years old. Yeah, I was building homes until that point.

And so his company was rather successful and you were about to really invest and make it even bigger because you were building homes right around, I mean, and Elk City was growing where you were, out in Western Oklahoma, but then someone gave you a book. And so instead of being an entrepreneur and being inspired by your dad who could help you, you know, build this company, you decided to do something else and jump off a different cliff.

but to Gary's point and, and.

Oh, come on. I let it talk to the book about the book.

So, okay. We're going to jump off to that. Thank you. So I learned entrepreneurship from my parents, but here we go. The, the book that was handed to me was on quantum physics. And if anyone's listening, wants to know in summary what that means. Is that the world is very much more strange than, than what you deal with on the daily. The smaller you look you, you find odd behaviors,

whatever, quantum mechanics, light is a particle

part of what I read this book and it's called in search of Schrodinger's

cap. If you're interested by John Gibbon,

John Gribbon, sorry. So I shut the book and I just said, I don't understand the world that I live in and coincident to this. This is my. this person must know me really well to hand me that book. They knew it would, they knew I would not be able to just close the book and move on. I don't know is if that's a good thing or a curse. My sister had actually been going to college at the time. She was also a physicist. She actually ended up being a, business major at the end of it all. But that got my, I got the contacts that I needed through her department and I showed up at the age of 24 years old. And he said, come this summer, I'll, we'll throw you in this program. I said, I want to be a physicist. And at this time I'm thinking, I'm going to just learn physics and then, and then see where this goes. And this is when I thought that there is just like a book that you just learn physics from, even at 24 years old, four years old, I was still that naive. So anyway, he says, all right, do all of these math problems and come back and And we'll talk.

It was an entire book of college algebra. So you're starting at the very beginning.

Yeah, literally every single problem in the book.

I find this interesting because most academics go from kindergarten to PhD and they never leave school.

Yep. That was my route.

Yeah, there I have a very nonlinear path. Yes.

But in that nonlinearity you you You're comfortable with jumping off the cliff and it almost became a joke when it

explains the

what careers Bobby going to have next. but it, I mean, we love you though, but the skills that you developed made opening a brewery, building it ourselves, the entrepreneur idea, like it was already there and he'd actually practiced it a couple of times. Whereas most academics like myself don't do that. We stick to that narrow path.

Being a PhD is. Is that you have done it?

Well, I know, but it, it, in terms of the, what seems like an abrupt change, or actually it's jumping off that cliff without a safety net because it, you know, it's, a tenure track job. I mean, unless the university closes is pretty nice gig. Cause you know, you're going to have a job. It's ultimate job security. Whereas entrepreneurship is like, not

without sounding self indulgent. It's something that you don't know about yourself until you press yourself. And you, you either have that character trait that allows you to climb out on the wing or you don't. And I don't think that it's, I don't think that it is related to your history. It's just something about whoever you are. If you happen to be an academic or not, it just It's just something that's in me and I, maybe I inherited it or observed it from my parents, but jumping out of the plane was always something I was willing to do.

And you, your, your family had a lot of their own businesses. So your grandfather ran a dental lab, he made dentures and actually, Oh, this is a fun story. Can I go a little sidetrack? Let's go

way back. So

Bobby has so many skills. He learned to weld in high school, so he welded a lot of the stuff here. He, Carpenter. So most of the wood stuff that you see, he helped build with with your brother in law. And so there's all these different skills that he has. He can be really crazy. He's also made his own gold tooth. So this is a party trick, right? So he has a gold tooth. Show it around. I know it's a podcast, but still, okay. Gold tooth. But when you was, when you were what?

12 years old. So his

first, your first job really was working at your grandfather's dental lab. He made dentures. And so you would sweep up the gold dust. A quarter an hour.

I'm some kid walking around sweeping.

Anyway. And so he learned how to

Because there's gold in that dirt. Melted it down.

But you, you were skilled enough. Then he taught you how to make teeth. And so you got to make your own gold tooth. That's still in, which is just hysterical. I

think it's insane, but it's still in.

Your family, many members of your family have run successful businesses. So whereas my family was very much, the academic track and my father was an engineer. He was very like, okay, we're going to focus and support you that way. Your parents taught you, you know, yes, they valued education, but also you were part of those businesses.

Hearing it said that way makes me understand or say that Gary could have asked. What made me do academia? Because that I'm the first generation to get a degree. So that, that was more my jumping out of a plane.

There are a lot of parallels in our lives.

Yeah.

Oh yeah.

Okay.

Cause I've like reinvented myself umpteen times. I started a business. Everyone's like, why are you going to do that? And that was successful. And then I went back to school, studied science. But I realized I don't want to get a PhD after having seen so many people do it. I was thinking of going into planetary science, right? I was looking at like Brown, Arizona state and Caltech. And, someone was at the university of Minnesota. They explained to me like, well, here's how it's going to happen. You, you know, work on some program at NASA, and then you spend 10 years on it. And then the rocket blows up on the pad or it crashes. And you've wasted, you know, a decade of your life. And I was just like, yeah, I'm going to go travel around the world.

Oh my gosh, this is so similar. But

What you said about this being a personality trait. I absolutely believe that. And I've told that to a lot of people there. I get people that ask me all the time. It's like, Oh, I want to be a podcast and do this. And like, either you have it or you don't, and it's not a bad thing. There are some people out there that, you know, I've, I've never had a real job in my life. I've always done my own thing and there have been very highs and lows and in between. But I, I wouldn't do it any other way. Did the fact that you were married to someone On a tenure track offer a little bit of stability. Like that's sort of like the, oh, that's the only

way we can do this

Oh hell yeah. That there's, there's no way this happens without a stable

Yeah. I breadwinner. I am the he, he's the bread maker. I'm the breadwinner And I we're hoping

this is our retirement. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And this is

when it's been, I will say. Building a brewery can put a lot of strain on a marriage and you're good at putting strain on a marriage. but I remember that we were going to wait until after I got tenure to start the brewery. That was my hope because worst case scenario, now granted I'm really good, so it's fine. and I was going to get tenure, but I, you know, you never know and you know, you do the best you can. But I really wanted to wait. But then the building opportunity. Came to buy it and It's like we're gonna jump off the cliff and he just went ahead and he was like, nope, we're gonna do it We're not gonna wait. So what year did this

happen?

This was in 2016 and I would have gotten tenure in 2019 And I would have known about it a little earlier But I really wanted to make sure that I was gonna get it. So I And it

was at least a couple of years of finishing that process and me breaking ground here and going through the loan process.

And so we started, we jumped off a little faster than I wanted, but it,

but I, but it's the timescale that I work on. You can't

stop Bobby. That's one thing I've learned is like, are you, What something my father used to say was like, lead, follow or get out of the way. And you definitely get out of the way with Bobby. He is gonna do stuff and you just don't stand in his way. And if you can, you know, support him so you can go farther. I believe in you, sweetie.

Well, hopefully it doesn't sound like I'm walking on people to get there. Oh,

no, no, no, not, I don't, oh, that sounds bad, no. You're crushing

all of your enemies. No,

sorry, he's just, Which is brewing supremacy. I mean, he's getting up at 4 a. m. when he still has to finish his dissertation to go clean kegs for, like, nothing.

So, you, But it was clear that it was for something in the long run.

Extreme work ethic.

All right. Well, let's pause the conversation here and in the next episode, I want to really start with the the origins of McFleshman's and, and how that started and how you went from nothing to a brewery year of your own. Perfect.

Go team.