We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Andrew Stewart. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Andrew below.
Andrew, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea
In 2014 we were introduced to quality craft beer from the Northeast and, since we couldn’t find anything like it where we lived, decided to brew and reproduce it ourselves. We knew very little about brewing but we read a lot and bought some equipment. So began 8 years of homebrewing 40 to 50 batches/year with the goal of fine tuning and perfecting the 10-16 recipes/styles we liked. At the peak we were brewing 4 barrels (about 120 gallons) per month and we counted on our friends, family and neighbors to help us drink and critically assess each style so we could iterate recipes and/or processes to improve the next batch. We had always considered opening a small brewery and once we felt like our recipes were dialed in we found a small building in our local downtown and designed and built a brewery and taproom for people to come enjoy our beers. We opened in December of 2021.
We still adjust all of our recipes and processes trying to perfect every beer we have but we’re proud of where each one of them is and don’t shy away from letting people know that it took us a while to learn, adjust and improve to get to this point.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
We are a craft brewery that is continuing to add to and iterate our recipes and processes with the goal of helping find the perfect beer for everyone that comes in our taproom. We pride ourselves on engaging our customers to identify each person’s preferences and serve them their perfect beer.
We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.
Ray and I have been friends for 13 years through our similar-aged kids and our mutual interest in mountain biking. The Northeast trip where we discovered craft beer was a guys’ trip to my brother-in-law’s lake house in Maine. We both love beer and we’ve been home brewers (and now brewery owners) together since.
What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?
For two years before we opened our business we were still home brewing but we rented a small, run down commercial space for very cheap to brew. This was, in large part, because our wives were sick of us brewing at our respective houses. It gave us a place to brew but also to host folks and show them what we were doing. They gave us a lot of feedback and helped us drink all the beer we were brewing. That small place became a testing ground for what we were doing and really introduced a lot of the core craft beer folks to our mission so when we finally opened we already had a small following and a good reputation.
Contact Info:
- Website: mgtbrewing.com
- Instagram: @manygoodthingsbrewing