The Way I Work: Ken Grossman, Sierra Nevada
Ken Grossman has built Sierra Nevada into one of the largest craft brewers in the country. But he still makes time to take a few of his 650 employees to lunch every week.
Photograph by Drew Kelly
Science Tastes Good: Ken Grossman spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on research equipment to improve his beer.
Photograph by Drew Kelly
Hopped Up:
Each day, Sierra Nevada goes through about 2,000 pounds of hops.
Ken Grossman, 58, started out as many brewers do: making beer at home. He liked the taste of hoppy, aromatic handcrafted beer and thought others might, too. In 1980, he jury-rigged his first real brewery using recycled dairy equipment and launched Sierra Nevada, one of the first craft brewers in the country. Among Grossman's early brews was Sierra Nevada's Pale Ale, which is still its bestseller. Today, the Chico, California-based company is one of America's largest craft brewers, producing close to a million barrels of beer each year. To keep up with growing demand, Grossman is building a second brewery, set to open this fall on the East Coast. Because he can't be in both places at once, it was a tough decision for Grossman, who likes to walk the brewery daily, chatting with employees and testing new ways to make his beer taste even better. --as told to Liz Welch
I'm constantly thinking about beer. Trying to figure out how to improve our product has driven me from Day One. Beer starts to degrade the moment it leaves the brewery. Heat, light, and oxygen can all damage the flavor. I'm always trying to think of ways we can better control that.
I usually wake up around 6 a.m. I try not to look at my email until I get to the office, but I inevitably end up checking it to see if I've got any fires to put out. We're building a new brewery in North Carolina, and they're three hours ahead of us. So when I wake up, there's often a lot of back-and-forth in my inbox.
I live 30 minutes outside of Chico, on more than 1,000 acres of untamed land. I've always preferred wild nature to city life. My wife, Katie, and I have a garden and eight laying chickens. We used to have goats, too. My three kids are grown, but they were raised on goat's milk. We like living off the land.
I usually have a couple shots of espresso and sit and chat with Katie for a while before heading to the brewery. The first four miles are dirt road, so I drive slowly. That's good thinking time.
I'm in the office by around 7 a.m. I usually start my day with a videoconference with my team in North Carolina. For the last two years, I've dedicated at least 20 hours per week to this expansion. At first, I was resistant to the idea of opening a second brewery on the East Coast, because I like to walk around the place every day to see what's going on. But, as our business has grown out east, expanding has become necessary from both a business and an ecological standpoint. Beer is heavy and expensive to truck, and I care deeply about our company's environmental impact. Plus, we have been growing so fast that we're about to reach maximum capacity in Chico.
We settled on Mills River, North Carolina, after analyzing our current distribution and projected growth in different markets. We whittled the search down to a dozen potential communities, all of which I visited in 2011. We looked at shipping, energy, and infrastructure costs, as well as water quality and local taxes. But the final choice came down to lifestyle: We wanted a place with plenty of outdoor activities--mountain biking, climbing, river rafting--like we have around Chico. I've always been active, and most of my employees enjoy the outdoors as well. Work is important, but so is a life outside of work.
