We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Stuart Keating. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Stuart below.

Stuart, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What do you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry? Any stories or anecdotes that illustrate why this matters?

I am the former head brewer and one of the owners of Earthbound Beer, a small brewery in Saint Louis, MO. Corporate America shouldn’t exist. The separation between the benefits of ownership (i.e. the ability to own shares of a company in order to seek returns on your investment) from the risks of ownership (i.e. the environmental and human liabilities present in any business operation) allow for unethical, rent-seeking behavior that, taken in the aggregate, make us all poorer, less healthy and more miserable.

What corporate america gets wrong is the commodification of cool and the dislocation from physical space. We are very rooted to our neighborhood in south Saint Louis and to our city generally. We are here because we want to be here and we make and sell beer because we want to be a part of the neighborhood. You can’t be a good neighbor if you’re shipping your profits out of the neighborhood (or distributing them to out of state owners). And cool is always a human-scale factor. You generate culture at the human, individual level and people can tell when “cool” is focus-grouped or decided via committee.

Human scale business matters. Businesses should be small enough they can be drowned in the bath, to misquote Grover Norquist.

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

I started as a homebrewer and environmental/civil rights attorney. My business partner Jeff wanted to start a business and I pitched him on opening Saint Louis’ tiniest microbrewery. We got up and running in 2014 on $20,000 in startup capital and made a name for ourselves making niche beers in a literal niche–a ten foot wide hallway on Cherokee Street, an artsy neighborhood that lots of white-flighters consider “dangerous.”

We have since rehabbed a 150 year old brewery building, including digging out millions of pounds of fill from vaulted lagering cellars located 25 feet underground, and continue to make weird beer and host insane events, all without outside capital.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

It’s not really a marketing story, but:

The former mayor of Saint Louis promised to take down the confederacy memorial in Forest Park, but then waffled on it after election, claiming there was no money. We had a lot of construction equipment laying around so we offered via tweet to tear the monument down for free. We ended up getting a late night news segment (filmed in front of the equipment), I went to sleep before it aired and got woken up because the Director of Public Works for the City of Saint Louis called my parents’ farm in Oklahoma looking for me.

Long story short there was a “social media uproar”, we got review-bombed by a lot of white nationalists and white-nationalist adjacent people, received a hundred or so death threats and….the city found the money to take the monument down. It was a good teaching moment for everyone that the internet doesn’t matter, negative reviews don’t matter and you should do what you know is right. Our core customers loved it and it gave us the confidence to stand up for our political positions because the people who say things like “you just alienated half the country” really only represent like 5% of the country and none of them dare venture in to Saint Louis proper or drink our beer.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

That anything matters.

This business isn’t me, it’s not my identity, I am proud of what we accomplished and we have achieved every goal I set (too bad we didn’t set “make lots of money” as a goal, but it turns out that one is largely incompatible with the combination of “treat our employees as we want to be treated” and “treat our customers as we want to be treated” ).

We started out undercapitalized and really didn’t hit our stride until 2019, when we were firing on all cylinders and digging ourselves out of the (literal) hole from our expansion. 2020 started out as a banner year for us and then the pandemic hit. It turns out you can do everything right and nearly get knocked out of business by conditions outside your control. On the flipside you can make lots of boneheaded mistakes and still cover your losses and stay in business.

Basically control is an illusion, everything is in constant flux, and our realities are largely governed by our unconscious perceptual judgements, which are changeable. So truly nothing matters! We go out of business? Fine, I declare bankruptcy and go get a desk job or whatever. It’s only an existential problem for me if I let my company and my identity reinforce each other.

Pretty much the worst thing that can happen to you on any given day is you die, and from what I understand about death everything pre-death ceases to matter to you one way or the other.

Contact Info:

• Website: earthboundbeer.com
• Instagram: earthboundbeer
• Facebook: earthboundbeer
• Twitter: earthboundbeer
• Other: Personal stuff: instagram.com/bigboyparty stuartkeating.com