Book Review
It’s August and back to school time is on everybody’s minds. For food & beverage entrepreneurs, I recommend they brush up on their business know-how with a trip to Beer School. Beer School is the story of the Brooklyn Brewery as told by co-founders Steve Hindy & Tom Potter. It’s not just for beer entrepreneurs and the insight it provides into the twin challenges of production and distribution is priceless. If you hurry, you can still fit it into your summer reading list.
The Brooklyn Brewery is certainly well-known in the Northeast. Their excellent craft beers are fairly well distributed in the Northeast and they stand out as one of the early successes in the re-emergence of American Craft Beer. What people may not know is that the brewery’s success is at least in part attributable to their role as an early distributor of other people’s craft beer. Faced with the inability to find a reliable distributor for craft beer in New York City, they built their own and started selling other people’s beer as well.
If you produce a craft product of any sort, you should read this book. It helps to really clarify the roles of the producer and the distributor and better understand the distinct issues and business models of the two. And it does it while telling a compelling story, complete with theft, the mob, dot.com madness, and bet-the-company negotiations. Hindy is a former journalist and knows how to tell a tale.
The other reason all entrepreneurs should read this book is the perspective and insights it provides about building a team and working with a key partner like a co-founder. How do people really manage to work with each other, especially in the context of a high-pressure startup? As the book makes clear, it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Tensions and differences arose and had to be worked through.
As always, it’s great to be able to learn from other people’s mistakes. It is particularly nice when those mistakes (and ultimate successes) are documented in an eminently readable book. You can Beer School on Amazon right now and go back to school early.
I also recommend that all craft food & beverage entrepreneurs check out Brewing Up a Business about Dogfish Head Brewery for many of the same reasons. I reviewed that one last year. And if you are serious about starting a brewery, check out my 4 part review of The Brewers Associations’s Guide to Starting Your Own Brewery.
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