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

Tom, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.

Our brewery opened in May of 2020, or as one of my partners likes to say… “the best time to open a brewery since Prohibition.” The business model for the brewery was based around selling beer out of our taproom and maybe a little bit of kegs to local bars and restaurants. Covid however had other plans and we weren’t even able to allow people into our taproom, nor were bars and restaurants doing much draft business.

So we decided to start putting beer in cans to bring in some sort of income to pay our team and keep the lights on. We bought a hand seamer from a company called Oktober and poured the beer out of our draft lines, assembly line style with a crew of six people. People liked the beer and wanted more so we started making more. The only problem was that our brewery tanks were in the basement of our taproom. This works pretty well when you’re only selling beer on draft out of your own location but we were brewing 600 gallons of beer at a time for sale all over the state.

Also, due to the volume, we couldn’t do it by hand anymore. To get it done, we would have the beer packaged at other breweries by mobile canners because we couldn’t fit a canner or even pallets of cans through our doors as they were too small to accommodate materials of that size. But that also meant we had to transport the beer. So each week we would fill up 40 half barrels of beer (165 lb each) and haul them up the stairs and onto a truck we would rent. Then we would drive them over to wherever the canning was happening. Then we’d pack everything up to store. Each week we would load up our delivery van and haul kegs and cases to accounts in Madison and Milwaukee.

For the first year of our existence every customer received product that was delivered by us and sold directly by us. We actually nicknamed Billy, our partner and person in charge of sales, Midnight Bill because he’d be out selling and making “one more stop” to try and get a full van for the next day’s deliveries. Sometimes he wouldn’t get home until 1 am.

Our business never imagined putting beer into cans so scaling up to do it at volume was only accomplished by sheer force of will. It was do that or close up shop. Thankfully people really responded to what we were doing but due to Covid, we had to shift gears midstream and change up our entire model. This included setting up systems to invoice customers and allow for orders. We also had to figure out how to run delivery routes. We had to design labels from the ground up and figure out what people wanted to see on shelves. All of this while dealing with the unknown of the years of 2020 and 2021. I like to tell people it was like changing a tire while going 100 mph on the freeway.

We’re very happy with how we ended up and are incredibly grateful that people enjoy what we do, but most of what people see as who we are as a business was never contemplated prior to March of 2020,

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’m the co-founder of a brewery called Young Blood Beer Company in Madison. I have two partners in the business, one who is in charge of sales and the other who is in charge of brewing and production. I (along with our awesome team) run all of the operations/accounting for the company as well as head up our marketing/branding so I like to tell people I am head cat wrangler.

Young Blood is an experimental microbrewery that specializes in sours, IPAs and lagers. We don’t remake the same beers over and over or have 4 core beers with 1 seasonal. Instead, we make stuff that we feel is seasonally appropriate and that we’re inspired by. We want to bring the vibe of going to your local taproom and always finding something new on draft to the bottle shop.

We have a lot of fun doing what we do while taking what we do very seriously. We just don’t take ourselves too seriously and are unafraid of failing or experimentation. We’ll put just about anything in beer and try different techniques out so that way we can keep pushing ourselves forward and keep innovating.

Our taproom is the heart of what we do and a gathering place to celebrate the ordinary and the strange. We started YB to create a space for community and sharing of each other’s company. We make beer but it isn’t what we sell. Beer is the medium for what we sell which is creating a space to give people the ability to connect with each other.

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

Billy and I had been friends for a while. I was a buyer at a local restaurant group and he was in beer sales so he sold us beer.

We were out having a drink and Billy was mildly despondent about his current career situation. He said, “man, I just don’t know how much longer I can sell other people’s products.” And since I am a smart ass who doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut, I said “so you want to start a brewery?”

We both found out that we wanted to do this and had similar ideas for what it could be. The next morning I remember texting Billy and saying so is this really a thing? And then I turned to my wife and said I think Billy and I are going to start a brewery. Which, in retrospect is not something you just say to your ever patient partner who graciously goes along with all your hairbrained plots.

A couple of months later we were introduced to Kyle our brewer and third partner by a friend of a friend. We all met up in Milwaukee and had sausages at Vanguard and beer at Burnhearts and have been moving along ever since.

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?

So at this point, we’re relatively well known for our fruited sours. It is a style that offers endless exploration and possibilities.

In late March of 2021 we’d made a couple of them but hadn’t really dialed them in yet. If you remember, at this time, people were starting to get vaccinated and were venturing out more after a long and really hard winter. We also had been operating with very few staff as we were just trying to get through to whatever the other side of the pandemic looked like.

Well in March it was like someone flipped on the light switch. All of a sudden business exploded (at least relative to what we were used to) and we were running out of beer.

Kyle our brewer was freaking out a bit. He didn’t know what he was going to do to get enough beer made. We had two half barrels of sour beer that had no fruit in them just a sour base. He knew he’d need to fruit them but didn’t have the tank space or the time to do anything with them.

He looked at me and was like what if we added fruit punch to the sour that we have. It will lighten it up and not make it so acidic. Think of it like a Radler (which is a lager cut with lemonade) or a Shandy. It will be light and refreshing plus I can go to the store right now and get a bunch of Hawaiian Punch and we can have the beer on draft in like two days.

I thought it was insane but I was like, well let’s give it a shot, we’re desperate. The beer turned out phenomenally and people absolutely loved it. We sold out of the beer in like 3 days. So we decided to lean into it and start doing it as a style. We don’t add Hawaiian Punch anymore but we’ve basically created our own fruiting schedule that mimics fruit punch and people go crazy for the beer. The line of beers is low ABV, super flavorful and something everyone can get into.

I love the story because people think it is fun and creative, which it is, but it also came out of a moment of sheer desperation. Taking the risk to try something off the wall led us to this really fun place.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.youngbloodbeerco.com
• Instagram: @youngbloodbeerco
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/youngbloodbeercompany/