Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Sam Nicholson. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Sam, appreciate you joining us today. Folks often look at a successful business and imagine it was an overnight success, but from what we’ve seen this is often far from the truth. We’d love to hear your scaling up story – walk us through how you grew over time – what were some of the big things you had to do to grow and what was that scaling up journey like?

When my wife and I took over Old 121 Brewhouse in September of 2022, we had already been very familiar with the business going back to when the brewery first opened in 2019 — I helped brew and Katie helped work the bar and at beer festivals. The first anniversary of the business had been cancelled due to the COVID shutdown and patrons were just starting to regularly come out again to some sense of “normalcy.”

We both had extensive experience in marketing, sales, events, and customer relations and knew this would be important to scale and increase our business overall. So we focused on some key elements for that scale up that included: Taproom experience, production expansion, events, and community outreach. All of these elements have had a huge impact where we have seen our production increase over 30% from 2022 to 2023 and our overall sales increasing 40% over the same period of time.

There was a lot of sweat equity involved, like installing/fixing equipment ourselves or personally hosting new taproom events like Bingo, to make sure everything was done efficiently and to make sure it was going to help our business grow the way we intended. Not everything worked out like events that didn’t bring in enough revenue or outreach falling flat. An example was a seed-swap event for Earth Day that didn’t garner the interest that we would have hoped for — and we ended up with WAY too many seeds and soil for ourselves.

We are always learning and looking back on our efforts to see what is driving success. Whether that is through sales growth, brand equity, or overall customer engagement. We have learned that we can’t do everything all the time, but know that each opportunity to connect with a customer is an opportunity for our business to grow and create advocates for our brand long term.

Sam, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Ever since being founded in March of 2019, we have strived to be stewards of good beer and community in Lakewood, Colorado.

Owner Katie Nicholson and Co-Owner and Head Brewer Sam Nicholson celebrated purchasing a home in Lakewood at the soft opening of Old 121 Brewhouse, which would become their favorite local brewery. Fast forward to September of 2022 when Katie and Sam became owners of the brewery that we affectionally call, The Brewhouse.

We stand out among other breweries because of our wide range of offerings as well as commitment to our community through non-profit partnerships, events, and more. We like to consider our brewery as Lakewood’s Living Room for the environment we want customers to experience.

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

We were homebrewers for over 10 years before finally taking the leap into commercial brewing. When we decided it was something we were interested in continuing as a career we took small steps leading up to the ultimate purchase of a business.

We were always looking to learn and grow, even in the homebrewing years, and then starting taking additional steps like formal education (Sam took a certificate program at a local university on brewery business) and interning and volunteering at other breweries to learn the business. We wanted to make sure the passion would not fall off once we began having beer be more of a career and not just a hobby. Once we felt comfortable with this is when we moved forward and I’m happy to say we’re still very happy with the decision.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

Being purposeful with all of our decisions has been very effective in growing our clientele. We have set our overall business mission and purpose and utilize this in each of our decisions moving forward: Is attending this event aligning with our goals, is making this beer something that makes sense for our brand, and are these partnerships aligning with our company’s values.

It takes a little extra time up front to develop our strategy, but it really has helped guide all of our decision-making moving forward without all the guess work. We also make sure to stay flexible enough when the market inevitably changes, but the core strategy itself remains the same.

Contact Info:

• Website: old121brewhouse.com
• Instagram: @old121beer
• Facebook: facebook.com/old121beer