 Water, barley, hops, yeast. The wind through the meadow, sun on my face. I look out, I look forth. I want you, beer. Refreshing, surprising, crisp, smooth, bubbly. You make me drunk. You make me smile. Flourish, beer. Sing the song of beer. Hear, hear. I love you, beer. I'm Alexis Ohanian, startup founder and Y Combinator partner. Over the last year, I went on a 200-event book tour and met people building small empires all across North America. Now I'm back with a new season, revisiting some of my favorite stops from the tour. Running a brewery is hard work, and at small scales, the margins can be pretty low. But if the beer is good, as the size of the brewery increases, efficiencies in the processes and technologies at play allow for larger margins. And, due to automation, a more consistent quality of product than at a smaller space. The problem is, not everybody who's great at brewing beer is great at running a brewery, or even wants to. And that keeps great beer out of your stomach. So some well-equipped breweries, like Two Roads, allow contract brewers, or gypsy brewers, to program their beer into the system. Two Roads is kind of like a platform where you can code beer. That way, gypsy brewers can get their beer out to the public without having to take on the capital investment required to open a whole brewery. Cheers! We're here in Stratford, Connecticut. Not exactly a tech hub. We're visiting a brewery, which might be a little surprising, until you realize that Two Roads Brewing Company is doing some amazing stuff. They're not just making great beer, they are, but they're also building a platform so that micro-brewers, craft brewers all over the region can make amazing, professional-quality beer without needing to build all of this. Done. Howdy. So this is it? This is it. This is Two Roads. We're currently brewing and bottling. Wow. Do I get goggles too? I should get you some goggles. Safety first. All right. I'll take a look. This is where it all starts and ends, really. This is the control room. Everything you see here controls or accesses everything you see out there. So hundreds of temperature sensors, pressure sensors, flow switches, pumps. It's all right here. And we can step through the whole process from start to finish. And it's a very visual system. So I should not just randomly mash the keyboard and click on things? I would love it if you didn't. Okay. All right. All right. Now this is a very interesting brewery because, I mean, you all are not brewing your own beer. You have other people's beer that you all brew for them. How does this whole contract brewery thing work? Well, let me explain. First and foremost, we do brew our own beer, and that is absolutely our focus here at Two Roads, our own brands. We launched our brands and opened the brewery in December of 2012. Started with our brands, and then as we got to know the equipment and got the bugs worked out, we brought on brewing partners or contract partners whose beer we produce for them under license here at Two Roads. This is my 25th year in craft brewing, and through a good part of my career, I was on the other side of that equation where I was out brewing our beers at other facilities. All right. Now how much of this is being controlled by robots right now? This particular process? This whole process is controlled from the computer. Yeah. Okay. We can trust them to make our beer. Here we actually have a beer in process. How you doing there, beer? I can't even describe it. It's like a whirlpool of beer, of hot beer. I think the best way to describe Two Roads Brewery is as the next generation of craft brewing. Rather than starting off really small, we're starting off fairly big for craft brewery, and the way that we get to do this is by brewing other people's brands as well as our own, and this gives us the luxury of starting off really fairly small and allowing our own brand to grow organically, kind of outwardly from Connecticut and outward. Interesting. And why don't more breweries use this method? I think most breweries have taken the kind of the most obvious path of, you know, we're going to start off small with equipment that we can afford and then have a good level of success and then kind of make the next step to the next level and then, you know, steps as they go, whereas we're kind of the new guy in craft brewing. We can start big because we know that the demand is there, and we'll eventually fill that capacity. Okay, so this is where it really spends most of its time. It's the work, gets down to this stage, we cool it down to make it the ideal temperature for the yeast and fermentation because yeast is a living thing. Different yeasts create different flavors at different temperatures, and they're all controlled again through the computer so we can do specific temperature curves on the fermentation. So if you needed to make precise adjustments or whatever, that's all happening from that main room we're in just at the computer, and it just happens. And we taste, of course, every day as well just to make sure everything is good. Tough, tough part of the job. Very tough job. Gotta keep tasting beer. Yeah, yeah. The folks over at Two Roads have a pretty awesome brewery, and they brew a pretty awesome beer. But we're here in exotic Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in order to meet with an actual gypsy brewer. His name is Jeppe, and he's known for brewing beers that were inspired by things like baby poop. And we're going to find out what his experience has been like with Two Roads. I am originally from Denmark, moved to Brooklyn two and a half years ago. I own Evil Twin Brewing, and I'm the brewer. And Evil Twin Brewing is not a physical brewery. It's a so-called, they call it a gypsy brewery or a contract brewery. So I rent space from other breweries. So what does being a gypsy brewer versus a traditional brewer mean for the kind of freedom and creativity you might have? I mean, it means that I don't have a big investment. I don't have a lot of money out for a brewery that I have to make back. The first year Evil Twin was really operating, we did about 40 different beers, which is a lot. But I came from a home brewing background, having done a lot of different beers. Then there was a lot of things I wanted to test out on a bigger scale. And some of them worked out really well, and we still do them now at Two Roads at like 300 barrel batches. But some of them just didn't work out, so we just never did them again. And that's definitely a freedom that I like because, again, I don't have to make a wheat beer because it sells good. I don't have to make certain pale ale because it sells good. I can do whatever I want. I can make crazy beers. We can always sell one batch, and if it sells slow, we just don't make it again. Given how much craft beer has boomed in the States in the last couple of decades, and how there are so many more craft brewers, what does it mean for an upstart craft brewer to know they can come to Two Roads? They don't have to build an entire facility. They can come to you all and get that kind of production. That's huge, and I think that's why we've got guys beating a path to our door. We thought that we'd be successful, but we really have exceeded our own expectations, and that's why we're growing at the rate that we are, at a sustainable rate, but a very fast-paced growth here. We've more than doubled production every year that I've been here. My staff went from Phil, our brewmaster, and myself to now we have eight guys, and we're looking to add more. It's been a whirlwind. Every day is an adventure in a good way. Once the fermentation is complete, we separate the beer in the separator, or the centrifuge here, which literally spins all the particulate out. This is really unique in that we have a haze meter on the input and the output, so we have the technology to pretty much dial in the level of clarity that we want. Wow. Is this like a slider somewhere for the amount of haze you want in the alcohol? More or less. What was it about Two Roads that made it so compelling? I just realized that for me to be able to build Evil Twin as a brand, we had to get bigger and cheaper production. When I met the Two Roads guys before we moved, we had a meeting with them even before I moved to the States. We heard about the setup and what they were going to do, and we gave them some recipes and they gave back the prices. We were like, holy shit, if we can get in at Two Roads and start production here, we can take Evil Twin to the next level. It's pretty simple. We needed Two Roads, and Two Roads needed people like us. They needed contract brewers that wanted to use the system, and it's working out really well. I think we are the biggest customer now for Two Roads. Phil McCowsky, the brewmaster, is one of my big heroes. He wrote the book about farmhouse sales in the early 2000s and has been doing a lot of beers in his early days that are just known for some of the best beers ever made. I knew they were going to do good, and I believed in it. We haven't looked back since. It's crazy how fast we've grown now and how good our relationship is. The initial thrust was brewing your own beer, and in the back of your head you thought there might be a market for this. When you first launched Two Roads, was the thinking that there would also be this kind of craft contracting as well? It was. From the get-go, we tailored Two Roads. We knew we were going to do our own brands and knew we were going to do other brands. What made us different from a lot of startup craft brewers is that we wanted to do it once. We wanted to build a big facility that we would never outgrow and rather grow into it, both with our volumes and our customers' volumes. Although we have a 100-year-old-plus facility that we're housed in, our equipment is absolutely state-of-the-art. What was the history of this building before you all moved in? It was called the U.S. Beard Corporation. It's a company that existed from the turn of the 19th century. It was a company that made machinery for bending and forming metals. At its heyday, it employed over 500 people around the clock. Just in this facility? In this facility. It was a big part of this community. It was a big employer, part of the town's identity. Walk me through the last few decades of history here in Stratford, all the way up to the present now with Two Roads. I'm no history buff, but I know what I know from growing up here. Stratford is a sleepy little town with lots of potential right on the water, close to major cities. In the last few years, with Two Roads now leading the way, we've seen a lot of growth in town, a lot of things coming back. It really amazes me every Friday night, Saturday night, or even weeknights for that matter, in our tasting room here, we get a really good crowd. Could that be an extra benefit of this craft brewing revolution now? We don't have a town square anymore. Are these becoming the new town squares? I sure would like to think so. It's a meeting place for people. We have our Oktoberfest and we get a couple thousand people out. We have our race on the Stratford beach and it's amazing the turnout that we get for these events. Everywhere I go in town, people are talking about what Two Roads is doing for the town. What does it mean to you to have this company based here in Stratford? Well, it means a lot. Three of the four founding partners here at Two Roads were from Connecticut. This is our home state. From my childhood, I grew up in a town that was an industrial factory town and it's no longer what it was when I was growing up. Being able to bring back some of the industrial glory that once was Connecticut, still is Connecticut, was very important to us. So to be back here, our home state, brewing beer is a dream come true for me. So I'm in a very special part of the Two Roads brewery right now. This is the vault. I'm surrounded by delicious, limited-run beer, which is brewed once a year just to honor Igor Sikorsky. His helicopter factory used to be the economic engine of Stratford, Connecticut. Although Two Roads isn't necessarily going to employ as many people as Sikorsky's factory once did, what it is doing, aside from creating jobs in a community hub here, is it's providing a way for brewers all over the region to get started without needing to build a brewery. All right, so when you chose Two Roads, obviously the price was good and presumably the beer was good too? Yeah, I mean, you never know that before you actually get the final product. But again, Phil Mikalski has a very good name in the brewing world, so I knew that the brewer was good. I knew the system. It's a Rolek German system, which is like the highest end system you can get. And we do 14 different styles now up there, and they are all as good as they can be. If they're not good enough, it's my fault that my recipe is not good enough. It definitely doesn't have to do with the system or the brewery. Now let's say I want to start my own beer, because I do. I'd love to. I don't know anything about brewing. Should I start with home brewing? What's the right approach? I mean, there's two ways to do it. Start with home brewing or go to brewing school or whatever. There's a brewing school? There's a lot of brewing schools in the States. I never needed it. I mean, a lot of the best chefs in the world have never been to a cooking school. We do stuff that on paper is not a good idea, like dumping a thousand donuts into a beer as a dry-hopping kind of thing. I mean, they would never teach you that at a brewing school. A thousand donuts? We have a beer where for every batch we make, we put, you know, it's dry hop with donuts, so we put a thousand donuts in, so it takes like liquid donuts when it comes out. And it's just a fun way to do things, and no one has told me I can't do it, so that's what I'm doing. Yeah. What I love is that there is a machine whose sole purpose in life is doing this specific task. Yes. And it's so perfectly suited for that job. And yeah, right there. It's almost hypnotic, though, to see. It's a real, it's a dance. It's a dance of technology. Technology and beer. Yes. What a great couple, together at last. Very famous Robert Frost quote up there on the wall. I think I know where you got your inspiration from for the name. Tell me, in your words, how did Frost inspire two words? From my point of view as the brewmaster, it is about how we craft our beers. We like to take a slight departure from a typical beer style and put our own spin on it. You know, for example, dry hopping a traditional German pilsner is something a German brewer would never, ever do, because it's not traditional to them. However, we're an American brewery and we're Two Roads and we do things our own way to make our products different. So that's how we apply the road less travel to our brewing philosophy. Every beer I make, I make for myself. And again, being a tipsy brewer, I have the freedom to do that. If I want to taste something in a beer and it's not made, I have to make it myself. And that's just, that's my approach to it. And that's why I keep doing it. That's why I can't stop. I get new ideas all the time and I'm like, hey, we need to make this. Would this success have been possible if you needed to start your own brewery from scratch? It's difficult to say. I mean, we would have had success no matter what, I think. But it just made it a lot easier that we didn't have to go out and hunt the own $10 million to build our own brewery. I mean, they could give us the capacity and the prices that we needed. So yeah, I will say it definitely helped a lot. So what's the future going to hold? Is it global domination? Global domination does not interest us. We want to be a regional craft brewery based in Connecticut. First and foremost, known in Connecticut. And from that point, our wildest ambitions have us selling beer throughout the Northeast and growing into a true regional beer. And a place that people can visit, see the brewery, can experience the brewery. We'll have beers on tap here in our tap room that you can only get here at the brewery. So there's always going to be a reason for people to visit. We just want to make good beer and make people happy. I'm here at Torst, which is Yeppe's Bar in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, trying variety beer, including the Evil Twin Cowboy. If Two Roads can keep making great beer and also empower brewers all over to be able to make great beer at scale without having to build a brewery and let a dude like Yeppe continue to make awesome beer that pushes the envelope for what brewing can do, cheers to that. Two Roads Brewery built a space that was bigger than they may have needed at first, but they knew it would allow them to continue growing without having to stop production to expand. When moving into a new space, even just going beyond your home office, thoughts like room for expansion are really important to consider. When looking for an office location, consider what kind of business you are and then find a location convenient for your customers. You should also be able to consider all costs, including insurance and trash pickup. Finally, to keep with customer demand, whether in the office or on the go, look for great mobility services that can grow with you and your business. For more business advice, be sure to visit AT&T's Business Circle. Just want to take a second to say, hi, editors. You're doing a great job. All right. Sorry. OK.