Adventure Brewing Company opened in Stafford County, VA in May of 2014. Since it’s only September of 2014, the memory of getting the brewery off the ground is still very fresh in the minds of its owners. Tim Bornholtz, John Viarella, and Stan Johnson started brewing together a few years ago. Eventually they were brewing good beer and had the thought that many brewers have, maybe we should open a brewery. As Stan put it, “most of them are smart enough to realize, eventually, that they shouldn't do that. And we just weren't smart enough to figure that out.”
On a muggy Virginia Labor day, I headed up to Stafford to talk with these guys about how they accomplished what John would call the “best mistake ever.” Tim and I pulled up a seat, John and Stan tended to the bar, I grabbed an Expedition IPA and here’s what went down.
Note: If you’re unfamiliar with some of the terms below, check out our glossary.
Stan: You’re a homebrewer, when you invite your friends over and they taste your beer and you can tell that they’re not just giving you lip, that they’re satisfied and enjoying your beer, that’s the best part. When I get to look at this room and people are sitting there, talking about the beer, enjoying the beer, telling each other to taste it.
Tim: I love it when people come back. People come in the first time and say they love the beer, like alright cool, do they really? But then they come back the next week, like oh they actually did like it. I love making beer too. It’s very cathartic for me, like meditation at this point.
Stan: Just yesterday was batch 47 for us on the full scale system.
Tim: In a 3 month period.
So your full scale system is how big?
Tim: 100 gallons, so 3 barrels. And we’re to the point now where we know what we’re doing; we've got the process down. Little noises here and there, we know that things are starting to go wrong, we can pick them up way earlier, you know, we’re not scrambling around.
Stan: Once again, taking it back to the homebrewing thing, when you finally finish your homebrew system and put it together, the first few times every time you make a big change, things screw up, things are a little bit different. But eventually you get on track with it, you start prepping things to avoid problems where you ran into them before. This number of batches, we’re starting to get there.
Has there been any big disaster? What’s the biggest thing that’s gone wrong so far?
Tim: Nothing... everything’s perfect... Hah, no, we’re using electric heating elements in the brew kettle and they got some build up on them, and ended up giving some of the batches a scorched flavor, which is not a good flavor. So we had to dump a couple batches there. That hurt.
Stan: It’s a terrible feeling.
Tim: It was. We agonized over the first one longer than we should have. Finally we just made the decision, it’s gotta go, it’s undrinkable. If it’s not right, we’re not going to serve it. So we dumped it, figured out what was wrong, fixed it, and luckily we had enough beer in reserve where it didn't shut us down or anything.
You guys opened in May? With the current pace, do you have an estimate of how many barrels per year you guys are rocking?
Tim: I think we’ll hit about 650 this year.
Do you have any plans in the works to do canning or bottling?
Collective laughter
John: There’s a plan... more like a rough outline.
Tim: Everything changes you know. As soon as we agree, okay here’s what we’re going to do, the world changes on us. So it’s constantly evolving, but the plan is to get like a mobile canning line or bottling line to come in here and can like 10 barrels of beer at once for us. In the short term we’re going to start hand bottling some beer, just to have here. We have growlers to go, but some people don’t really want a growler, they want a bottle of beer to take home. So hand bottling, one a time, you've done it, it’s labor intensive, but I think it’s worth it. We’ll probably start that in the next couple of weeks. Really the only thing stopping us right now is labels. Trying to get labels that we all like.
Is that an agreeing on the design thing, or is that finding someone to make them for you, or what?
Tim: It’s finding an artist that meshes with us. Coming up with labels that the three of us agree on is surprisingly difficult. We all have ideas about how things want to go, all three of us know enough about design to know what we like and don’t like, yet none of us are even remotely qualified to make a label from scratch ourselves. So finding an artist that can understand our babbling about, well I want this and that and bold, but you know bold colors but not too bold, you know very vague requirements for labels. I think we’re getting close on that one.
Stan: Fortunately we've got lots of volunteers, people that want to help us out and do it, it’s kind of a jazz for them, you know?
Yeah, I think I came your first or second weekend you were open and there was a ton of guys back here, like I recognized a couple of guys from Capital Ale in Fredericksburg, that’s really cool to see people from the community helping out.
Tim: Yeah, actually Dave is coming here every Friday and, are you familiar with the Randall? It’s a thing that Dogfish Head made and it’s an infuser. Dave has all kinds of crazy ideas about things and puts those through them and runs some random beer through. So last week was coconut habanero in the stout.
John: Oh, I wish I had gotten to try that!
Tim: I think next weekend, I’m excited, he’s doing coffee with the brown. Pretty much every Friday Dave will be here with some crazy thing. Pretty much giving him free reign to come up with weird ideas. Some will work, some might not.
In that vein of weirdness, is there anything that is kind of weird that you guys are thinking of trying to brew in the future as maybe a seasonal or a limited release?
Stan: I’m working on this one, and literally I swear it’s still in my head because it’s gotta be real subtle, but it is a chocolate, vanilla, bourbon wheat.
Wheat, huh?
Stan: You know, with a stout, those ones will mix well and I know they’ll be a great deal for a stout, but if I can pull them down enough so that they’re in there but they can’t kick the crap out of the wheat. It’s a certain flavor profile. And when you’re in that wheat and you’re playing with those fruits, there’s a group that really likes those smooth flavors.
Tim: It’s very interesting for us, as a business model, because there’s a big set of people that want to come here and drink the same beer every time they come here. They come in and they have a pale ale every single time. They don’t care about what’s in the Randall, they don’t care about seasonal stuff, they want the same beer, and they come in every week and they get it all, and that’s awesome. Then you've got another completely different group that only want new things. If we only had the same eight beers on tap, they’d come once then they’d see no reason to ever come back. So you know, balancing those two groups of people is kind of interesting. It’s pretty cool. And we’re small enough where we want to make a one off batch, we just make it and it might be fantastic and it might not, and you know, it’s not like I’m making 10000 gallons of the stuff that I've got to move. We only have 100 gallons and it’ll go. We’re doing a lot of small batches too, of 10 gallon stuff, so you know the homebrew scale, and literally on our old homebrew system.
So is that where you guys start, like with something like the wheat?
Tim: General rule of be able to make a batch consistently on the small system and be able to make it more than once. Stan: And that’s one thing that took forever to make happen on some of our regular recipes, but now I think even on the ad hoc ones, because we’re so careful about recording, we know those places where we can twist it, even the one offs, where we can repeat it fairly regularly.
So what’s the worst part of owning or running a brewery? Is there a worst part?
Stan: Depending on who you talk to, it could simply be the massive amount of work and time investment.
Tim: Yeah, there’s that right now, and we’re new enough at it to where, you know, we haven’t, well we've hit little burnouts, but we’re not burnt out. You talk to people who have been doing it every day for 10 years, and yeah, they get burnt out, you can almost see it in them.
Stan: And our objective there is to head that off at the pass.
Tim: Right, it’s not realistic for all three of us to work 60 hours a week here in addition to our day jobs, and actually stay in the relationships we’re in. Yeah, I don’t know, I mean it’s awesome at this point really. It’s a ton of physical work. You know, all three of our day jobs are mental. He’s a sys admin, I’m a web developer and John’s in HR. So we all sit at desks, we all work on computers all day long, and then come in here and it’s, you know, scooping out the mash tun with a big ol’ shovel. It’s just a different way of doing it, and it’s awesome.
This is a pretty cool space, how long did it take you to outfit it to what you need?
Tim: Well, there was a long time from—we made the decision to open the brewery in October of 2012, that’s basically when we decided we were serious, and it was May of 2012 before we finally opened. So a year and a half there, but a lot of that was working with the planning commission, and board supervisors, and getting the zoning laws changed, but once we finally got in here and got our building permits done, we got our building permit March 24 and we were open May 14, so a little over 6 weeks. We did the plumbing, the electrical, built the walls, built the bar. It was maybe a little more aggressive than what a sane person would do, building the whole thing in 6 weeks. Like the whole month of April, I have no recollection of anything that happened that whole month.
Stan: I couldn't multiply, I couldn't add. Literally I had to start buying calculators.
Tim: I mean, we were literally putting in 18 hours a day here some days.
So were you guys taking off of work to come down or what?
John: I took a week of vacation, just before we opened, to do whatever we needed to do, but still. Most nights it was work, come here, and work until...3 in the morning?
Stan: And we made up a dollar figure, and that’s the reality of it. There are a certain number of dollars that you have to spend and a certain time where we had projected and promised we’d be open—and where we were going to run out of money. Those lines were coming together real fast. John: Well, I mean, there comes a point where you’re spending money for so long without making any money and there comes a point where you just have to open, or you’re not gonna open, and we recognized that date on the calendar.
So if you guys were to give advice to a homebrewer that was looking to break on to the actual brewery scene, what would you say?
Tim: Do it.
Stan: Visit breweries, and then just do it.
Tim: Yeah, if you’re thinking about it, start running the numbers. You know, start to look, read, read, read, read, read. Everything you could ever want is out there for free.
Stan: And the business. Read the business stuff, not just the brewing stuff.
Tim: What we had heard was once you decide you’re serious, it’ll take you a year to open. We didn't listen to that, and it did, it took actually 14 months. Take your budget and triple it.
John: And that’s probably the first thing is just, figure out how much you think you need, double it, triple it, whatever, and then figure out, first of all, where you’re going to get your money from. If you don’t have that, then there’s no reason to even do anything else. It is a very, very expensive business to start.
Stan: At the same time, if you’re really going to do it, you’ll find the money.
Tim: There’s a lot of different ways to come up with money, a lot of inventive ways people have done it, crowd funded and stuff like that, but if you want to start with a 30 BBL system on day one? Yeah, you’re a million dollars into it at least, if not two or three. We started with a 3 BBL system—we all wanted a bigger system, we just got what we could afford. And every single thing in here is paid for, so we don’t owe anybody anything in the world. It’s really a lot of freedom for us, you know?
Do you guys have a long term plan to upgrade your system?
Tim: Absolutely, and it’s actually not that long of a term. We just ordered a 9 barrel fermentor yesterday, I think.
Stan: Check’s in the mail.
Tim: Some more 10 barrel fermentors are coming after that, probably within the next 60 days, and then I think the next big jump is to jump up to a much bigger system, either a 20 or 30 barrel system.
It looks like you guys have plenty of space to expand here.
Tim: Exactly, yeah, we could easily do 2000 barrels a year out of this base.
In the 95 corridor kind of between Richmond and DC, the craft brewery scene has really started to pop up. So you guys have a head start here in Stafford, and as the trend grows and more and more craft breweries pop up, what is your vision and plan to ensure that you guys stand out amongst whatever else comes along?
Tim: That’s a tough one. So the brewing industry, we’re all friends with each other, we all support each other.
Stan: You know, after this, we’ll send you to the one up the road.
Tim: We’re in competition, but it’s really not competition, you know. Ideally, I would love to have six really good breweries in Stafford and Fredericksburg. Or more. Because by having five or six breweries, all of the sudden it becomes a destination, so people from DC or Richmond will make it a point to come here for a weekend. Whereas right now, there are breweries here, but it’s a little tough. I fully encourage more breweries to open and I think it would be great. We all work really well together, we all talk constantly. I was talking with the guys down at Rusty Beaver in Ladysmith and we’re doing a collaboration brew with them. A little bit different of a collaboration, in that we both brew the same beer, once here and once there, mainly so we can learn how each other does things, you know. They can see the tricks that we've learned, we can see the tricks that they've learned, and we can both make better beer. What other industry really does that, where you go meet your competitor and watch how they do every single thing that they do. You know, that doesn't happen.
I had a great time sharing a couple of pints with these guys and listening to their story and perspective. It just highlights that camaraderie of the brewing community, which is one of my favorite things about the beer world. Whether you live in the area, or maybe just stuck in traffic on I-95, go check out Adventure Brewing Company, grab a pint, maybe something from the food truck, and experience Tim, John, and Stan’s dream become reality.
Visit: 33 Perchwood Dr, Stafford, VA 22405
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