We're all in this together and it makes Duluth a real destination for people who appreciate craft beer.
You have four production breweries and four brew pubs that are all very close, very accessible.
People are excited about beer and good beer.
When we opened in 1995, we had a lot of questions for macro-roof beer, things that we just chose not to sell.
In 1995 on, we wanted to be a craft beer house.
At that time, I was totally in an educational position.
It was one customer at a time teaching them about, especially in Duluth, Minnesota, craft brew beer.
Then when we added brewery, then we could really focus on what we were about and what our flavor profile was.
I was fortunate when I came to town because my brother Mike had done all the heavy lifting.
For two years, he'd been brewing as a pair of styles, IPs, paleos, bitters, and basically presented them to the public.
So when I moved to Duluth, I was making what I was entitled, West Coast style ales.
And in about two years, I decided, well, I'm not going to call them West Coast anymore.
They're mine, so I named them North Shore style.
My brother's a good man. He's my best and my worst critic, and he's my best publicist.
I simply was creating beer in the city that I called home, which was Duluth.
Through my various careers in law enforcement and outside sales and marketing, I always stopped wherever there was a new micro-brewery.
There were so few in part between 15, 20 years ago, but I saw it growing.
Our partner is Rick Booth. Rick was a real pioneer here in Duluth.
He was open to change and saw the patterns.
And being Irish, I just said to him, I said, let's do an Irish pump.
You know, bought this building, got it in, brought it to Cone, and ran it successfully as a tavern, as an Irish pump.
But I knew we had to make our own gear.
It's about independence. It's about why did my people come here to be on chain?
We wanted to do the same thing.
You know, we're sandwiched by our competitors.
Yet our business is growing because of it.
We have people all the time that are coming in here that turn around, they look at the big lake, get you going.
And they want to stay here in the Norwegian Riviera, and we give them a reason to do it.
We have the freshest water on the planet right outside our door.
And better water, better beer.
We're able to put these operations into unique historic buildings, bring people in,
and allow that to be the economic engine that revitalizes this area.
1994, when we were exploring this idea, the city was going to give us an old theater.
It was called the Strand Theater. The city wanted to have some development, and they were going to give it to us for a dollar.
We never were able to pull it up, but I was a guy in my middle 20s, and it was just too large of a project.
We ended up in Fitgers. It really ended up being a great thing for us, because it immediately defined us as a beer place.
Since then, it's become a passion, and Duluth history and buildings built in the 1880s have become part of what defines our company.
In San Francisco, they call me the one that got away.
I have a lot of friends there, and they pick on me a lot, and hermitizing and Duluth hiding with my head down over the kettle,
just making, you know, a world-class beer.
I'm a journeyman who gets to create art.
You go to little towns in Belgium, that's the only place you can get their beer to.
We're going to do the best we can, make the best beer that we could ever make,
and people have to come here and enjoy it, and it makes it actually a little more special experience when they do drink it.
It's true.
