We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sara Kazmer a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Sara, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

My connection to hospitality begins in high school: one of my first jobs was hosting and bussing tables at a small-town restaurant on the Chain of Lakes in Illinois. I worked different roles in the industry through high school and started bartending during college. Just before my last year of college in Chicago, I met my husband at a bar in Florence, Italy. Needless to say, my life started to accelerate in a new direction.

After graduating college with a degree in marketing, I moved out to Tacoma, WA to be with him and begin my career in marketing. After several months of struggling, I found a job in Seattle at a firm specializing in branding. I learned so much about the importance of a strong brand: the story, meaning behind the name, look and feel, and messaging. I started to think more about why I dined at certain restaurants and gravitated towards certain beer brands. The Pacific Northwest has an incredible craft beer scene, and I naturally fell in love with beer. That being said, I couldn’t help noticing how male dominated the industry was in its branding, beer styles, and taproom design.

It didn’t take long to realize that office life was not for me, and I was tired of spending four hours a day commuting by bus to Seattle from Tacoma. I noticed that a local brewery was opening a second location across the street from us. I told my husband, Sam, I was going to apply for a management job there, and that I was ready to get back into the industry. I had worked in almost every type of bar/restaurant but not a brewery. I wanted to see if the culture was any different.

One month later I was walking across the street to my new job – the best commute ever. I learned quickly just how different the beer industry was. It attracted down-to-earth people who connected over a product that was enjoyable to share at any time of the day. Unlike wine or whiskey, an average strength beer can be enjoyably consumed at lunch, dinner, or even breakfast: it’s just a more social beverage. The customers were all warm and friendly, and the brewery attracted similar people for its staff.

Meanwhile, my husband was recovering from a parachuting accident sustained while training with the 2nd Ranger Battalion. After that we were questioning what to do with our future together. My wanderlust was strong, and I felt confident that the craft beer industry could benefit from a female-driven brewery. I thought, ‘why not travel the world to learn about beer and come back to open a brewery!’

Starting in the Summer of 2017 we traveled through South America and Europe interviewing brewers and brewery owners, learning about new businesses and ones that have been open for centuries. I started to see what contributes to a pub’s cozy aesthetic and what food pairs well with beer without being too filling. We tasted some of the best beer in the world and discovered how it is that some breweries make beers that remain popular for centuries. We took notes every day and arrived in Atlanta at the end of 2018. Sam, my husband, grew up in Gwinnett County, and when we would visit his parents prior to 2017 we noticed that the Georgia craft beer scene was still in its infancy.

After spending eight months in Sam’s parents basement writing up a business plan and making several attempts at unsuccessful partnerships, we decided to just do it all ourselves! Spending about six months looking for prospective locations, we fell in love with the Grant Park neighborhood because it had a similar vibe to our favorite neighborhoods in Seattle, Portland, and Tacoma. Eventually the stars aligned: we received an SBA bank loan, found the perfect space in Grant Park in May 2019, and signed a lease!

Finding our core team of people to help create a business aligned with our vision was essential and is still a work-in-progress! It has been vital for us to share similar tastes and vision with the key members of our organization as we continue to grow and further develop our company’s story. For our beer, it was sharing the same love for great Belgian Ales and German/Czech lagers with our Director of Brewing Operations, Josh Watterson.

For our food we shared a passion with our executive chef, Tyler Edwards, for fresh, local produce to create light and interesting vegetable dishes that complement our heavier sandwiches and meat plates. For our taproom experience, we shared an uncompromising dedication to exceptional and friendly service with our General Manager, Sarah Darrow.

For our taproom’s look and feel, we combined beautiful materials and design from around the world in a cozy, homey space with help from our designers, Local Architects. Our branding was incredibly important. We wanted to be inclusive of all genders and backgrounds while maintaining a feminine artistic touch. The Office Brothers were able to translate our vision into a physical brand.

Most importantly, all together we created a positive company culture that prioritizes employee welfare and happiness. It was the slow and intentional combination of many different ideas and people that I believe has set us apart from all other places in the brewing industry.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

After the pandemic began, the food and beverage restaurant industry changed. People realized they could save a ton of money by cooking and drinking at home, and that the experience of going out had sort of become monotonous.

We were facing an uphill battle of pandemic limitations and lifestyle changes, and we needed to find a way to bring people out again once things started to settle down. It seemed like the people in our market wanted to spend their time and money at a place that not only had great food and drinks, but also provided a unique and meaningful experience. We started to hold events and workshops – mostly things that we weren’t seeing in the area that we knew people liked. We were having bands play that were different from the brewery norm, like Funk, Jazz, and Bluegrass. We began hosting monthly Drag Brunches, Bingo, and Comedy. Workshops have always been important to us so that we can collaborate with local vendors and businesses that we enjoy personally. We quickly became a place for experiences, not just a bite and a beer. Any place can serve you a tasty burger and beer, but does it create a lasting memory?

In addition to giving our customers a good experience, it was even more important for me to foster a healthy work environment for our team. From day one we outsourced a Human Resource team to ensure that our employees can get help if they feel uncomfortable in any way. As of this month, we are now offering health insurance to anyone who works 30 hours a week and has been with our team for a year. To offset gas prices, we offer a company public transportation card through MARTA. We try our best to always lend an ear or a hand and to solve problems as quickly as possible once an employee brings something to our attention. Fixing problems lets employees know that they are actually being heard and adding value to the company. The restaurant & beer industries have a long history of toxicity, and we are doing our best to prevent that from being an issue.

Josh & Chef Tyler do a fantastic job at keeping things environmentally friendly, yet financially feasible for a brand new small business like us. Tyler always looks to source produce and meat locally first, and purchases next to nothing processed so we have minimal waste resulting from packaging. Josh now purchases nearly 100% of our malt from Carolina Malthouse, so our carbon footprint has reduced significantly with shorter shipping distances. He also switched our packaging tops to compostable tops, which has greatly reduced our plastic use.

With our beer program, our “Cause Series” seeks to raise money for causes we are passionate about supporting. We release a beer quarterly, partnering with different non for-profit organizations: Landscape lager – purchasing carbon captures; Boobie Beer – Breast Cancer research; Save the Sacks – Testicular Cancer research. Brave Noise – funding to facilitate diversity in craft beer; Grant Park Menagerie – funding to support the work of the Grant Park Conservancy. We have some other fun ones ahead! As a small business coming out of the pandemic, we are not profiting yet, but it is important to us to contribute in the few ways we can afford to.

We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.

I met my husband Sam at the other end of an Irish Pub in Florence, Italy. He was stationed with the U.S. Army in Vicenza, and I was a bartender traveling on my college break. We shared similar dreams and both the same level of resilience and perseverance. Elsewhere Brewing is the result of those dreams. We learned quickly that if we wanted to do something truly meaningful, we would have to be the ones to make it happen. Our relationship has been a series of decisions based on gut instinct and curiosity. I cannot begin to explain the amount of times both of us were called crazy while explaining our future plans. You are your number one supporter, and if you don’t believe in yourself, nobody else will; and a lot of times you may be the only person left believing in yourself!

We have a lot of dreams and plans for ourselves and Elsewhere. I feel like it’s good to always have a 5-10 year plan in the back of your head. It’s what gets you through the grind, while maintaining growth in your personal and professional life.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I worked in restaurants for eight years and dreamed about the stability of a nine-to-five while in college. When I moved from Chicago to Seattle, the marketing job market was incredibly difficult to break into right out of college. I had two internships under my belt and a degree, yet I couldn’t get an interview at any of the five firms in Seattle. After five months of job searching in my new home I felt depleted. I began serving again – at a cocktail bar with very toxic management – and began to hate the serving industry even more. As this was happening my husband was deployed to Afghanistan. It was a very depressing period in my life.

Six months later I finally landed a job in the marketing industry, which became my breakthrough. I freelanced in branding at a firm and left soon for a salaried job at a branding firm with a team of very kind and passionate leaders. I became even more fascinated with branding and learning how much you can change a consumer’s perspective of your product with rebranding.

Unfortunately my commute was tiresome – four hours by bus every day – and a monotonous schedule behind a desk was not what I had been dreaming of. Sam was also in a military accident shortly after I began, which changed the trajectory of his own career path and plans. Throughout this time our interest in craft beer was growing, and we started to think that maybe we could have a place in the industry.

After about a year at my marketing job I saw a brewery was opening behind our apartment.. I came home that day with a wild idea: to get back into the hospitality industry and learn about working in craft beer. My husband was perplexed considering that it took so long to find the job in the first place! Despite this, I decided to quit my marketing job and get into the craft beer industry. Beer was looking like a great opportunity at the time and all the education and experience was at our fingertips.

Two months later I was walking into the taproom as the Assistant General Manager, feeling like I was in college again, learning so many new things in the familiar industry of hospitality. I made some phenomenal friends, learned a lot of great things that I’ll have with me forever, and also learned a lot of things I’ll never do! I left that job knowing I wanted to own and operate a brewery, and I want to do it differently, and I knew Sam and I were capable of doing it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://elsewherebrewing.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elsewherebrewing/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/elsewherebrewingco
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/authwall?trk=bf&trkInfo=AQGxbUXOwMJFjQAAAYA-IMZo5T7UdeRp8nsUGbB-QJHS4c67iNA7LyPZ2VgR_glL8OdUFV52F2Z7FkfXCkOoehCrybkBsLhOR7llpGTMEAbRUwc9fwFI2NYZe7-bIXd3BgTtFhg=&originalReferer=&sessionRedirect=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkedin.com%2Fin%2Fsara-kazmer-86b46b60
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/elsewhere-brewing-atlanta

Image Credits
Dessa Lohrey, Peter Murray