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Beejay Oslon: We came up with Pipeworks- essentially I was a homebrewer in college, just doing
it as a hobby, and fell in love with it right away. When I first started homebrewing, I
really didn't know too much about beer, honestly. I drank it, but I didn't really realize the
depth and scope of beer, and how many different varieties of styles and all the history of
it. It was like a perfect mesh of science and art to me.
We brew beer that we want to drink. We love what we do here. I think we've brewed over
forty different beers in about sixteen months. We definitely cannot keep up with demand,
which I think is the best problem in the world. I think- I like it because it ensures that
my beer's always getting drank fresh, because if it sells out in three days, there's a good
chance that it's probably within someone's belly within four days after that.
The growth within the team was pretty organic, people have always emailed us asking to come
volunteer, or to just come hang out during brew days. So the team kinda came about as
our needs expanded, you know, on little jobs like labeling bottles or something like that.
You know, some volunteers would come by and some of them would stick around. You know
we have five full-time employees, besides the three owners, and people have always been
moving up through the ranks. You might have started bottling beer, and then all of a sudden
you're brewing beer. So we've been able to put together a really close team in that way.
Everyone's family. We go out to breakfast together, we hang out on the weekends together,
and everyone really likes coming to work. Because it's basically like hanging out and
making beer. The beer community, unlike any other competitive,
capitalistic kinda venture- it's like we're a community. Even though our products are
sitting on a shelf competing with one another, if I have a problem with something, I can
call up Half Acre and say, "Hey guys, I'm out of bottle caps, can I borrow some?" And
they're like, "yeah, of course." I don't really know of any other industry like that.