“I have to take care of my family!” is cheap and unworthy button-pushing; a greedy person trying to deflect criticism by leaning on the only thing they still have in common with the Average Joe.
If we value Small Businesses, as we all SAY we do in all our drippy Lip Service to Small Business Saturday, then that Saturday really HAS TO be every day.
It is categorically NOT impossible for an American brewery to flourish, expand, and PAY PEOPLE, including the owners, and not sell out to some mega-corp or brewing conglomerate. It is NOT the inevitable end-game of being a successful business.
You are 38, now. None of us wanted to say it but this changes the dynamic: you’re not what you once were…And legacies are a function of Time. They are not established in one or two years and how many do you have left?
This future is something not that we have to create, it is something we get to create; a wonderful, limitless challenge and can be enormous fun and a good living, IF we have the guts and don’t let the knee-jerk naysayers drag us off the path, into their weeds.
It would be nice if today’s beer fans could bother to explore some of the styles of ale that sidle up to Lager Territory (Cold IPA, Brut, and Extra Pale come to mind) and quit reflexively running back to the comfortable haven of Less Flavor.
I sold my first article in 1967, to an old Chicago underground newspaper called The Chicago Eye. It was about student activism on high school campuses around Chicago. And I got my first angry letter a week later. As I recall, it started with, “You suck!”
Seems like the sheer size of that Big Check obscures the sun and lets them think that cowering in the shadow of that will hide their dismissive actions from view of the patrons they’re leaving behind.
The Pour Fool 