Brent Schwoerer is the Owner and Founder of Engrained Brewing Company. Raised on a family dairy and grain farm, Brent earned his bachelor’s in mechanical engineering and a master’s in human resources from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. After a decade in the corporate world — including two years in Brazil focusing on new product development — Brent established Engrained Brewing Co., which has been in operation for over ten years.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- Brent Schwoerer reveals the four cornerstones upon which he built Engrained Brewing Company
- What vibe would a customer notice while visiting Brent’s brewpub?
- Brent discusses the corporate journey that led him to open Engrained Brewing Co.
- How Brent’s mechanical engineering degree has helped him as a restauranteur
- The three-year struggle Brent endured when launching Engrained Brewing Co.
- How Brent went from homebrewing to winning craft beer awards
In this episode…
Are you pursuing your passion? People are motivated by many different things and sometimes passion and motivation can lead them to working in the corporate world. Other times, the corporate world can make people realize they’re lacking something.
For Brent Shwoerer, who founded Engrained Brewing Company in 2012, working as a corporate employee for ten years led him to realize he needed to chase his passion — outside of corporate America — and he persevered through great difficulties to make it happen. Armed with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s in HR, he left his job at Caterpillar Inc. to launch a locally-owned micro-brewery and farm-to-table restaurant. After initially struggling for three years to get a bank to loan him money, Brent’s brewery has since celebrated being in business for a decade and he has gone from homebrewing to winning awards for his craft beer.
On this episode of the Top Business Leaders Show, Rise25’s Chad Franzen welcomes Brent Schwoerer, Founder and Owner of Engrained Brewing Co., for a conversation about doing whatever it takes to chase your passion. Brent shares how he realized he was missing out on his passions while grinding away as a corporate employee, so he decided to start his own local brewery. He discusses the difficulties he endured in getting a loan to get started, his award-winning craft beer, and the values his brand is built upon.
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Episode Transcript
Intro 0:04
Welcome to the Top Business Leaders Show. Powered by Rise25 Media, we featured top founders, executives and business leaders from all over the world
Chad Franzen 0:20
Chad Franzen here co host for the show where we feature top restaurant tours, investors and business leaders. This is part of our SpotOn series. SpotOn has the best in class payment platform for retail and they have a flagship solution called SpotOn restaurant, where they combined marketing software and payments all in one. They’ve saved everyone from larger chains like Dairy Queen and subway to small mom and pop restaurants. To learn more, go to spoton.com This episode is brought to you by Rise25. We help b2b businesses to get ROI clients referrals and strategic partnerships through done for you podcast. If you have a b2b business and want to build great relationships with clients, referral partners and thought leaders in your space. There’s no better way to do it than through podcasts and content marketing. To learn more, go to rise25.com or email us at support@rise25.com Brent Schwoerer grew up on his family’s dairy and grain farm and then obtained his bachelor’s in mechanical engineering and a master’s in human resources from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. After spending over 10 years in corporate America doing new product development across the globe, including living in Brazil for two years, Brent was missing two things: passion and beer. With a focus on culture and the notion of leave it better than you find it, he opened Engrained Brewing, which is in it 10th year of operation. Hey, Brent, thanks so much for joining me today. How are you?
Brent Schwoerer 1:38
Great, Chad. Thanks for having me on the show. Yeah, great
Chad Franzen 1:41
to have you. Hey, yeah. So tell me a little bit more about engrained brewing. And, you know, what a customer might expect when going there?
Brent Schwoerer 1:49
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, when I tell people about Engrained, I like to talk a little bit about the journey to open the restaurant. Yeah, what I founded the business on. And there are really four kind of core elements or cornerstones I like to say that I built the business on. And they’re all kind of related to, you know, that all the way back to growing up on the on the farm. So I had an odd maybe experience growing up on the farm and the fact that we, we actually pretty much raised and anything we wanted to eat. So like if we were going to have pork we had hogs out on the farm that we would you know, slaughter and have in the freezer kind of a year round. So everything that we ate we raised, which was very different, it wasn’t until I got to college, that I really got to experience the true joy of the grocery store, if you will, that I’ve wanted to bring to our guest is that true farm to table experience, like I grew up with, unfortunately, I did not enjoy milking cows every day, like some of the rest of my family. So I decided to pursue more of the, I guess, technical science, part of the of the farm experience on the engineering side. But over time found that maybe that wasn’t corporate wasn’t where I was finding passion. And so I wanted to get back to my roots at the farm, really, with the goal of bringing that that local kind of all natural products to our guest was was one goal. And so those that’s one of our cornerstones is local, we source roughly 50 to 60% by dollar of what we buy in the kitchen comes from an 85 mile radius of the restaurant. And so that’s our focus on local is working directly with farmers. Like literally I’m buying a whole cow, you know, a whole pig at a time it goes through a local butcher, it comes into the restaurant, which creates some interesting challenges for us because we have limited cuts. But that’s all part of the local picture. On another corner you’ve got but generally call natural which really is a nod to regenerative farming we really try and partner with farmers who believe in kind of less, it’s on the realm of organic you know, using less chemicals and artificial inputs in their farming operation. Investing in soil health, whether it’s the the grass that the livestock eat or the produce that we’re purchasing from the farmers real big, focused on that kind of sustainable regenerative farming aspect and partners to do that so that we can bring that product to our our guests, you know, really focused on the all natural, keep the junk out of food in that same natural focus were from scratch kitchen. And so we’re, we’re doing all of our sauces like everything’s from from scratch, not quite everything. We’re not a bakery, so we’re not baking our own bread products. But we do try and partner with regional or local bakeries that kind of follow that same mission of keeping the things in the ingredient label you can’t pronounce out of out of the food The third cornerstone that we’re very focused on is, again, more on that sustainability realm. So we do a lot to minimize our impact on the environment. So whether it’s our recycling program or composting program, there’s a number of ways that we try and stay green effectively. And then the last was probably the most critical to me. And that was our culture, we’re very focused on the employee experience, like creating a real positive environment for people to come and work because we know that translates to guests. So our number one stakeholder is definitely our employees, with the guests being our second most important stakeholder because I know if I take care of my staff, and they enjoy being here, believe in the mission and what we’re trying to do that that’ll translate directly to the guest experience. So in a long, roundabout way, that’s kind of what we’ve built the restaurant on, and some of what I think people can experience when they come in.
Chad Franzen 5:55
Right, so what kind of vibe would you say, the guests would experience as a result of all those things when they go in there?
Brent Schwoerer 6:02
Man, it’s tough. It’s tough to describe, I mean, we’re very much a Midwestern kind of restaurant here in the central Illinois prairie landscape. And so we’ve kind of created an environment we have a lot of behind the by see the most people can’t see this, but some old reclaimed barnwood we have it all over the restaurant, that was part of our sustainability focus, you know, reusing products, and so lot old barn wood, kind of exposed ceilings have kind of a blend of that, that wood and stainless steel, you have a lot of the the metal from, obviously, the brewing equipment, and some aspect of the brewery is visible to every seat in the restaurant, which is unique as well. So I guess to kind of a melding of those, those flavors, we have pictures of paintings of cows, and chickens, and miscellaneous assortment of stuff around. Hey,
Chad Franzen 6:57
I mentioned it a little bit in your introduction. But tell me a little bit more about what you had been doing kind of right up until the time you decided to start start the Brewing Company. Yeah,
Brent Schwoerer 7:08
out of college, I got a job with Caterpillar large equipment manufacturer, most probably no Cat, they’re a fortune 100 or 500 company best. And I was doing new product design. So we would work on a project that was going to release in four to five years out. And so that was always kind of exciting to be working on the next greatest thing on the construction equipment side. And Cat is very much a global company. And one of our largest manufacturing facilities for the product I worked on was down in Brazil. And we also went down there and developed a, an emerging market products that needed to be tested in, in emerging markets. So out of South America. So I got to not only live down there but traveled pretty extensively to follow prototypes around we would put prototypes in the field to test and that was a big part of my role with the company. And so a little bit of all over I think I was able to travel to every continent, except for Africa and Antarctica when I was with with cat was a lot of traveling, which I’m glad to have that behind me to now that I’m happily married with a father of three boys. That travel part. I’m glad that’s behind me.
Chad Franzen 8:33
I’m sure it was a good experience at the time. How? So how did so you’re kind of doing that you’re plugging away traveling all that stuff? How did the idea for engrained come about then? I fell
Brent Schwoerer 8:47
in love with craft beer along the way. It was kind of the classic. My wife bought me a home brew kit. I’m an engineer. So I love that kind of the science of brewing as well as the artistic side of it really intrigued me. So I got into making beer at home and got into, you know, visiting breweries and drinking craft beer. 10 years ago, the industry was much smaller than it is now if you hadn’t even hit. I don’t think we were to 3000 breweries yet. And in the entire country, we were somewhere in like the under 2500 now are almost over 10,000 breweries in the country. So it looks a lot different at that point. But I just fell in love with it and decided I wanted to start a brewery that was the first angle I want. I wanted to do a brewery and then you have to make the decision. Do you wanna do a production brewery focus solely on you know that that production and shipping component or do you want to do the brewpub model and have the restaurant. I had worked at restaurants in college to help pay my way through school. That’s actually how I met my wife. We were we were both like we’re bartending at restaurants in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. And so it was an industry that I enjoyed the high energy And so we decided to go that route. Because the longer I was with cat is a great company, I had really good experiences, I wouldn’t have had the kind of the business acumen and discipline without my experience a cat to be able to start my own business. So that was a tremendous advantage for me to have that corporate time and have that corporate experience and learn how to, you know, run a business and how to sell things to the board of the company, effectively, we’d go and ask for the biggest project that I worked on a cat was $180 million project. And so we were regularly having to go through these checkpoints, and, you know, continue to to continue to push the project forward. And so that was a really good experience, for me to be able to how to write a business plan, for example. And so that that helped me out immensely. But at some point, I just realized that fire the higher I climbed, the less I really loved what I was doing. There’s always the kind of political maneuvering of a larger company that you have to, you know, work through. And that wasn’t I wasn’t loving that.
Chad Franzen 11:06
Yeah, but yeah, so, you know, your background, you know, I talk to a lot of guys that, like, I started when I was 16, washing dishes, and then I just, you know, grew from there, blah, blah, blah, years is a lot different. You have a degree in mechanical engineering, a master’s degree in Human Resources, how would you say, those things kind of helped you? A lot of people I talked to her engineers say, you know, I just have an ability to problem solve. So even if I’m not doing engineering, yeah, I think in a in a problem solving type way.
Brent Schwoerer 11:41
That’s absolutely true. The other avenue and honestly, I don’t know if I could have done a restaurant without the brewery. So brewing is very technical, really to do it right to maintain manage and manage quality control and all the elements of the the equipment, it really is a manufacturing process we distribute to So all through Central Illinois, we distribute beer, so you have a canning line. And we’ve all those components of modern day, you know, production, which is what I was used to corporate and with my engineering degree set me up for so that I definitely have that science geek in me and that math geek needs an outlet. And so the brewery is, is definitely my outlet for the engineer, but it applies in the kitchen to like I use it all the time in the kitchen. Our our, you know, line that we cook food on is very much like a production line. And there’s a mathematical equation you can put to it, which which I have for various things when we’re doing training, we talked about restaurant flow and actually modeled that people think I’m weird to look at things that way. But that’s how I work. Yeah, we made our own french fries for the majority of us up until COVID. And the science of French fries is ridiculous. It’s a It’s pretty intense. I like to get the french fries. Right. Very technical kind of thing to which is weird. But the science of food that it’s all you can apply it in any any industry any any fronts. So
Chad Franzen 13:09
Wow, very interesting. So tell me about the launching process. You know, you’ve got this idea. How did you kind of, at first put it into into practice?
Brent Schwoerer 13:20
Yeah, so I actually took, paid unpaid leave. When my first son was born, I qualified for family medical leave. So I took all my paid vacation, and I took another two weeks, I ended up having a month off to be home with my, my wife and I first born, this is back in 2010. And that’s when I started really writing the business plan. So I devoted a lot of my time to doing the research and going out to benchmark and do all kinds of things. And it was maybe I can’t remember when I started talking to banks, we didn’t open till 2013. So it took a while for me to but the first bank I met with was basically like hell no. You don’t have any restaurant experience. This is a really big jump. It was a big project, it was a $5 million project that’s not money for a guy that had never been, you know, on his own and entrepreneur before. And so I think it was the 12 or 13 bank that finally said, Oh, maybe we’re interested in this, that process took along then you gotta go raise money, right? So like they, they give you a certain amount, you gotta raise the rest. And so then then I gotta go raise money. And so like three years later, we finally started construction. That was a very lengthy project and very eye opening for me. And a good experience. You know, I really learned how to not only write a business plan, but be able to truly understand and sell the what’s in it. It’s easy to come up with the expenses, the sales were the part that everybody really questioned like, how are you going to generate these sales?
Chad Franzen 14:56
What made you so you know, I’m guessing you’re probably making a decent living at your prior job. What made you so determined to, you know, keep at it, you know, for a three year process getting rejected and rejected and rejected?
Brent Schwoerer 15:09
Yeah. Ignorance, maybe not. I, I just decided that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to go out on my own. And this is what I was gonna do. And I’m not the kind of guy that takes no for an answer. I just keep pushing and pushing. And I think that’s been that’s been key, because that was just the start of the journey when you open the restaurant. Yeah, that’s when it really got hard, right? Like, when we the first couple years of being in business, we’re definitely the hardest of my journey. But yeah, I was I was just I was determined. And so I listened to what people said, and I’d go get, if I couldn’t answer the question and go figure out the answers or do another analysis or market studies or whatever, I started dissecting the large restaurants who are publicly traded and have to, you know, put all their stuff in their annual and quarterly reports. And so I just started to pull all those numbers and do the analysis. So I could bring them the stats and say, Well, look at all these groups can do this, you know, number, I think my sales forecast is reasonable, given these assumptions, and so just kind of talking them through that. This guy. How’s he figure these things out if he doesn’t have any experience in the in, you know, running his own restaurant? Sure.
Chad Franzen 16:24
So tell me about the I was actually just gonna ask you about that. Tell me about the early days what you know, kind of once you guys got opened over those days, like,
Brent Schwoerer 16:34
yeah, they were there were long hours for sure. I remember, the first two weeks, we were open seven days a week lunch and dinner. And I was at the restaurant for the physically the entire time open to close every day for two weeks. I didn’t know you could work that many hours in one week. Pain in the neck, that was fun at the time, I would never do it again. I was 10 years younger. So that was a whole nother part of it as well. Yeah, it was a lot of figuring things out. I didn’t have all the answers. I didn’t know everything, we made some mistakes. I had a big working capital kind of allocation, set aside some people smarter than me and told me like you’re going to need, you’re going to need a sizable working capital and pretty much blew through almost all of that, before I started, really figured out how to turn the business around which metrics matter. There’s some great resources online, you know, some other groups that you can go out and get educated from effectively. And so I utilized what everybody else already knew, and I didn’t to get smarter about the financials. I mean, just we were so focused on day to day operations, I wasn’t paying much attention to the financials until that working capital number got really small is like, oh, boy, I gotta figuring out where this money is going. But it was a, that was my tuition, if you will, in your restaurant, that were being capitalized set aside, I made quite a bit of money in that education.
Chad Franzen 18:08
So you’ll listen, a lot of important values, things that are important to you. Maybe Maybe you guys take a step beyond other other places that might have similar products. Were those things always important from day one? Or did I kind of developed over time? No, they were
Brent Schwoerer 18:27
I didn’t have as big of a network, though. So it was harder, like our percentage of products that we buy locally was lower, just because I didn’t know who all the players were yet. And that’s changing every year. But once you become a more established brand, some of the farmers out. Well, yeah, we still that was always the focus from day one. Day one, we were buying whole animals. I remember my chef was just like, you’re insane. How are you? How’s this going to work? And I’m like, Just trust me, we’ll figure it out. And we were actually doing poultry. Straight like source directly as well as you have to buy whole chickens and we fought that battle for almost two years before I felt we finally decided that the price premium we have to charge guests, they didn’t want to pay it. And the operational hassles behind the scenes were just too surmountable. insurmountable. So we ended up cutting the local locally sourced poultry program and focused on pork and pork and beef, which we continue to sustain. So that was one area that we were doing, you know, for the first year and a half that we ended up dropping Other than that, we’ve increased the amount of local sourcing since since that point, but yeah, we were doing it from day
Chad Franzen 19:42
one. You You have a lot of I’m looking at your your beer menu. You have some seasonal beers, and then some year round brews you. You said you mentioned that you had been brewing your own beer before you got into this. Are these all your creations are well, yeah, all these beers.
Brent Schwoerer 20:03
They are. That was one of my goals as a home brewer. So I had started, it was before 2010 That I had started home brewing. And that was kind of part of the goal was to establish some recipes. The oldest one, it’s still on the menu is the oatmeal stout. That was, that’s the oldest recipe that on the Homebrew side. Otherwise, they’ve all kind of just evolved over the years. And as a brewer, you know, I think it’s important that we, we all stand on the shoulders of those that came before us because the brewing industry is very open. People are like, you know, there can be a beer that you think’s awesome. And you email the brewery, I really love this beer. And they’ll be like, Oh, here’s the recipe, you know, and unlike most other industries, and that’s what really sold me to is, and I think it was in 2011, I went to the first my first craft brewers conference in San Francisco. And everybody was so stinking, friendly. And, you know, telling me the biggest secret you have, and they’ll tell it to you, I was very open and transparent, honest and collaborative. And that’s what really sold me at that point that, you know, the this is definitely as I was starting to, you know, man, is this worth it? I’ve been fighting with the banks, I don’t know if it’s gonna work out, I went to that conference. I was like, wow, yeah, this is definitely the industry for me. And so I came up with a lot of my own recipes, because of the transparency of the industry, you go out and kind of see like this, now this guy does it. That’s how that guy does it and get a feel for not a dot. And it’s kind of like over time, like chefs can, you know, come up with recipes kind of on their skills or the experience they’ve had, you get to that point in the brewery as well or you can throw together might not be exactly what you thought it was going to be. But people will enjoy it. And then you can tweak it the next round. So there’s definitely been iterations of most of the beers over the years as well. But and a few surprises on there, like the Irish Red, that was I just threw that together you need like in the brewpub world you need like the color portfolio, you gotta have light and red, brown and dark and you know, all the different colors to look cool on the beer, paddle and red ale and I just whipped this Irish Red up on day one, I thought I would do one of those and then figure something else out. Everybody loves the damn thing so much. It’s still on the menu. I’ve made a few tweaks to the recipes over the year over recipe over the years. But that’s one that kind of was surprising to me that in the blackberry lager, our blackberry lager was just like, an experiment with our base lager. And people love that stinking thing so much too. And I enjoy it. It’s good beer. They love that so much to like, those would become two of our flagships. And I had no intention of those being.
Chad Franzen 22:50
Wow, that’s, that’s interesting. Yeah, you wouldn’t like a blackberry lager to be kind of like your one of your primary selections.
Brent Schwoerer 22:57
Yeah, people just love it. That’s our flagship and distribution too. So it might not always be the best seller at the brew pub. It’s consistently a good seller. But on distribution, that’s one of our more unique beers that you don’t see in the marketplace. So
Chad Franzen 23:12
and a couple of your beers have won silver medals from the best of craft beer awards. That’s got to be pretty satisfying.
Brent Schwoerer 23:20
Yep, yep. Yeah, that was on the pro side. We haven’t submitted. I’ve gotten kind of COVID got me out of the sending beers off. So we haven’t sent beers off for competitions. Since pre 2020. I need to get back into that. But yeah, those were so few years old, but definitely nice to nice to have a few metals to at least confirmed and that’s not like the probably premier competition. I still need to send some beers off to the bigger competition. That’s a big one, though. I mean, I think there were over 300 breweries close to 2000. Beers entered. It was a big compound competition out in Oregon.
Chad Franzen 23:59
That’s awesome. Hey, you mentioned COVID. Did COVID Change your operations much? Or how did it impact you guys?
Brent Schwoerer 24:06
Yeah, immensely. In Illinois, like many other parts of the country, we had mandatory shutdowns, we ended up having, I think, four different periods where we were forced to, we could only do take out, get up No, no on premise, which devastates you. And that came right out the gate. So like, right in March, that was like, boom, instantly restaurants are closed. That’s when everybody got hit the hardest. And so we had to, you know, I hate the word but we had to pivot just like everybody else. We had an advantage though. And the fact that all of a sudden, the supply chain kind of shut down, and my farmers were still growing, raising their cattle and growing their produce, and my butcher was still operating. And so we had this access to a freezer full of beef and pork. And you couldn’t get hamburger at the grocery store and you couldn’t get toilet paper and we had you know, stock the toilet paper. So we were doing, we start, we set up an online grocery, basically. And we were selling our meat and produce and dairy, a number of items that I sourced directly from the local farmers that helped them to because you know, they were having issues with supply chain. And so that’s where we pivoted to. And we also did the the, like taking bake kind of meals, that’s just to have staff here. I wanted my people to have a job. And when the government announced the payroll protection program, I was like, Hi, everybody, because we had to initially like layoff people I was like, Well, I have no revenue, I can’t afford to pay payroll, everybody. And so when that came in, I was like, let’s find some keep you guys busy with me, in retrospect, looking back and running the numbers, I probably would have been better off to just close the restaurant and sit back and wait for COVID to end but we would have lost our core staff I were to not maintain the relationships we made maintain with our guests and, and so we did a bunch of stuff that honestly sucked in the interim, like figuring out how to do take and bake meals. And we did like Christmas we were closed for for Christmas, December was another time that they hit us we did this big Christmas Eve. Day like brunch. I remember my chef at the time was here, he made had to make like 300 cinnamon rolls by from scratch. And he totally underestimated the time that was going to take so we had a late night. Think of the 23rd of December making cinnamon rolls that kinds of stuff we’re just not used to doing at that scale, and then trying to coordinate 200 orders or whatever it was of, of meals that people have to pick up we use the entire restaurant to stage stuff just so we could find you know, whoever’s order it was it was something I hope to never have to do again. But yeah.
Chad Franzen 26:56
Do you do as you look back on it now? I know you said you might have been better off just to close do you feel like any of that stuff? You know, going to an online grocery service or? Or you know, prepare you know, somewhat pre prepared meals do you feel like that elevated your standing in the community at all or something that you
Brent Schwoerer 27:15
know it did it did it all of the above and so like I’m glad we we did it like the definitely made a difference to our loyal base. And they really we were surprised how many people came out to support us to you know, the people didn’t have to buy that kind of stuff. The grocery store was still operating, you could go get after the first like three or four months, the supply chain started to dwindle back in and things weren’t as dire as they were. People continue to support us through the we had three more shutdowns after that into 2021. Where we have basically two months or more of just having to be closed and your revenue changes we did delivery to were like that we got the state gave a pass on our ability to deliver beers or like taking four packs to people’s doorsteps. I’ve got my servers serving staff or delivery drivers. They’re driving and doing deliveries like it was it was chaos, but we made it work. We came through I think on top we were in a better position because we did what we did. And there were community initiatives that we tried to support as well.
Chad Franzen 28:25
That helped make a difference. So do you ever miss working in corporate America? Yeah,
Brent Schwoerer 28:32
I’ll be honest, the hours weren’t too bad. And that steady paycheck was nice too. I joke that it’s a lot better now. But I joked when I started I went to work four times harder for a quarter of the pay. So
Chad Franzen 28:48
I pass I bet. Hey, I have one more question for you. But first, how can people find out more about Engrained Brewing Company?
Brent Schwoerer 28:54
Well, you can definitely check out our website, engrainedbrewing.com would be the best place to go to learn about us you can see where our beers at you know learn more about the brand and the company there.
Chad Franzen 29:06
Sounds good. Hey, if you were to go to Engrained as a customer what would be kind of your food slash drink combination of choice
Brent Schwoerer 29:15
are our most popular item on the menu and one of my favorites is our cheese curd. So I actually a neighboring dairy farmer that I grew up with. He turned his dairy operation into a creamery and 100% of their milk production goes into making cheese and we get their fresh cheese curds. So they’re never more than, you know, a week or two old it’s definitely that like squeaky kind of cheese and they’re just amazing. We have a very light batter that we hand up them in. And so that’s, that’s a go to my beer that I love. I always have some at home is our IPA. It’s a local hop is what it’s called and 100% of the hops are Illinois source And I think there are some very awesome hops, newer varieties that you can only get from, you know, like, say Washington, Oregon, Idaho, but I think, you know, even locally raised hops to don’t have the crazy new variety, you can still showcase this classic American citrus characters. So that’s my my go to.
Chad Franzen 30:25
Beer. Sounds good. Hey, one more thing you. You said you kind of developed the beer. What about the food who developed all this pretty impressive food menu?
Brent Schwoerer 30:34
Yeah, a lot of it came from my opening Chef. Chef Brad, he is no longer with us. But he did an awesome job setting up the menu. And a lot of the things have just stuck because he did such a good job. I mean, the barbecue sauce was his recipe. A lot of it too is kind of dictated by our limited cuts. So we have to make certain cuts of meat of the animal like they have to be on the menu to flow all of the whole animal model. And so like we’ll always probably have pulled pork on the menu we’ll always have there’s a number of kind of angles that we take to make all of the cuts work but a lot of that was from him as well. We do we house care, our corned beef, we house smoke our pork. We have secure our hands. So there’s a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes to to do that stuff from scratch.
Chad Franzen 31:27
Yeah, sounds like hey, Grant. Brian’s it’s been great to talk to you. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much for your time. And it has been interesting to hear your story.
Brent Schwoerer 31:36
Thanks, Chad. Appreciate it.
Chad Franzen 31:38
Thank you. So long, everybody.
Outro 31:39
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