Business

BIG FOREST: The courtship of Sierra Nevada

Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. in Mills River. [PHOTO BY PAULA ROBERTS]

By Bill Moss, Published: April 7, 2014

Based in Chico, Calif., Sierra Nevada had a good problem. It could not make enough beer to quench its growing legions of fans. A star in the burgeoning craft brewery branch of American beer, Sierra Nevada had the style, the name and the taste. It had a national distribution reach matched only by Boston Beer Co. and its flagship Samuel Adams brand. And it was growing fast.

Brian Grossman talks about Sierra Nevada's decision to choose Mills River."We got to the point where our sales, roughly five years out, were going to be out of capacity," Brian Grossman, the son of Sierra Nevada founder Ken Grossman, said in an interview at the brewery construction site. "What are our options? You could either sell the company, you could expand in Chico or you could build a brewery somewhere else. Obviously we weren't going to sell the company, and that's where it came to the family decision.
"If we expand in Chico, it's got some advantages for sure. Out here it complicates things immensely. A, one of us had to move out here, and B, now we've got a full other brewery to run, which is extraordinarily difficult," continued Brian, who became the one to move and signed on as co-manager of the new brewery. "That's where the family decision was, that the most sustainable (strategy) for the company is to have a secondary brewery out here. We sat down as a family — I remember I was in my sister Carrie's daughter's room, stuffed animals around us, we were all sitting around having this conversation about building a hundred-plus million dollar brewery with a teddy bear. That's when we made the decision of 'OK, we're going to do this.' That's when we came to the action team and said, 'All right, let's start this.' That's when Stan took the bull by the horns."
Stan was Stan Cooper, the do-everything company executive who is part of the three-member executive team, along with Ken and Brian Grossman, that would put the Sierra Nevada stamp somewhere east of the Mississippi.
"The strategic team developed criteria that included airport access, roads, schools, the look, tone and feel of the community," Brian said. "We wanted something sort of like Chico, we wanted a big farm-to-table farmers market that people like to be at, outdoor-centric. Our drinkers are outdoors drinkers. It was a year of just coming up with precursors that this is how we're going to select our cities. We got down to 20 and that's when Stan went out."
The company's site selection consultant had pinpointed the optimal geographic hub of a distribution wheel — Harrisburg, Pa. A prospective site near there looked good. Cooper flew out to visit. Checking into a motel, he asked a desk clerk where he might get a beer with dinner.
"And she said, 'You're not from here, are you?'" Cooper recalled. "She said, 'You can't get beer here. Closest place you can get a beer is about 5 miles down the road.'" Cooper took out his cell phone and called the boss. "Get out of there," Grossman said.