Talk to just about any craft beer fan or homebrewer and they will likely tell you they fantasize about opening their own brewery some day. Well Dave Miller of Brewery 4 Two 4 in Holland, Michigan did just that. After years of working at successful 9 to 5 job, Dave and his wife Erin went “all in” with their personal finances and opened their own place. Only it wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Dave graciously sat down with me to tell me about living his dream and his trying path to getting there.

Sommbeer: Why start a brewery now, given Holland has boomed with breweries lately?

Dave: Sure. I’ve got a lot of industry friends I talk to and when we sit down and talk about where the industry is going and where things are at, there’s going to be areas of saturation here and there…not only throughout the state but nationally. We see that there’s probably still lots of growth for small places like us that are the small, little corner brewery that are taking the place of the old corner bar. Still think there’s plenty of room for growth. We’re at 6 or 7,000 breweries in the country, there are 20 or 30,000 coffee shops and nobody says there’s too many coffee shops? How many places do you go where there’s a Starbucks across the street from Starbucks, right? No one seems to think that’s too saturated. From day one I said…our goal is to do a little local distribution to get our name out to drive sales in the taproom. So distribution is more of a marketing expense than it is a revenue source. So if we never make a dime on “distro”, that’s ok. We are trying to get people here. I feel like in the business you can either stay small and do it that way, keep your overhead low, your revenue stays a little lower but your margin stays good. Or you really have to go hard at distribution because margin is so little because in Michigan we have the “three tiered system”. Distributor takes their chunk, the retailer takes their chunk, by the time you have all of your expenses paid you’re making almost nothing. There’s bigger breweries that can make a lot of money on “distro” because they do a ton of it. There’s small breweries like me that don’t and I think in the middle is where everything gets really, really hard. That’s where I think you start to see a little bit of the shake out in the industry with breweries closing.

Sommbeer: How did you end up in this location (strip mall) versus downtown?

Dave: This was the 13th different location we looked at; it was also the first location we looked at. We got into the process and pulled out for a number of reasons and decided to look elsewhere. Two years later, we ran into so many roadblocks here in Holland that it was an absolute nightmare getting through the process (local restrictions and finding the right space). We wanted to be north side, we didn’t want to go downtown, there’s enough down there. Here on the north side of Holland we don’t have those cool, hundred year old brick buildings…finding a cool spot is exceedingly hard. There was some checkmarks I was very strict about that I wasn’t going to bend on (based on Dave’s experience brewing elsewhere). At the end of the day, this is where we live. We’ve been in the area for a long time now, my wife and I have roots here. We felt like we had a built-in customer base. The name Brewery 4 Two 4 comes from the last three digits of the north side (zip code). We feel like the north side was an underserved area and this is where we wanted to be. We made some strategic alliances. Hops 84th East (downtown restaurant and taproom) has become a huge advocate for us having our beer on tap. You get the tourist crowd downtown, even the “southsiders” they come in there and have the beer, “oh this is really good, where is this place?…they’re just 2 miles over the bridge, go check them out”. We get the best of both worlds. Be true to our local, north side folks but we also get a fair amount of traffic from downtown by that exposure.

Sommbeer: Is 4 Two 4 about the business opportunity or something else?

Dave: It was about the beer. I grew up in a family hardware store, so I grew up in a small business, around that entrepreneurial spirit. Beer had always been a passion for Erin and I. We homebrewed, we drank craft beer and we hung out with craft beer people. You get some confidence in brewing and you feel like you can do this and maybe a little of that entrepreneurial spirit that’s buried somewhere inside me and its like, “well maybe I can do this”. I definitely feel like I have the genes for the business, maybe more than I thought I did. You have to have a fire for this. Its legit been 15 to 16 hours a day, 7 days a week for going on two years. I haven’t had a vacation in three years, I’ve had maybe 2 days off in two years….it never quits. I feel like if you get into this business just for business, you’re going to burn out real quick. You have to have a real passion for this stuff.

Sommbeer: You and Erin appear to have successful careers, why risk opening a brewery?

Dave: Early on, when we hit the road block*…initially we had funding. Then when we decided to go forward, it was all us. There’s only so much funding you can get on a leased space. The bank is not going to give you a loan for your build out. We cashed out some retirement stuff, we took some money from my folks and her folks, shook all the change out of the couch and took every ounce of savings we had and everything and threw it all in on this, and went all in. Despite having a successful career I always felt like…I was capable of something else.

*Dave’s original partner was unable to continue with the business.

Sommbeer: What do you wish you had thought more about or anticipated before you started this journey?

Dave: I’m far enough away from it now, that I wouldn’t change anything. It’s still 90-hour weeks. It’s still the stress; I ended up in the hospital a couple of times (with anxiety)…it was bad. I feel like if it hadn’t happen the way it happened, it wouldn’t have happened. It would have been different and I wouldn’t want it to be different.

Sommbeer: Did you start with business plan?

Dave: Initially when I was working with my original partner, he’s a business guy so we talked numbers. We never had a full-on working business plan because I was the vision guy and he was the numbers guy and we could just bounce it off each other and it made sense. Then when we went solo on it, then we had to back up a step and say, “ok now we gotta put pen to paper and make up a business plan”.

Sommbeer: So initially were you planning to have enough money to have an organization?

Dave: We did the math and said if I work my day job and basically work every other hour of the day, I can make enough beer to get the doors open (laughing). Then as long as people come we’ll have enough revenue to grow things as it goes. Then I’ll be able to leave my day job, make enough beer and it will all work. Then a couple of months before we get the doors open we find out that Erin is pregnant with our first child and you throw that into the mix. The plan was originally to leave the day job February of 2016, and I just left a month ago. There was a period of 8 or 9 months where I would get up go to work, immediately come here change clothes and start working on the build out or making beer. You just go 16 hours (a day) and both days on the weekend. This is just what had to be done.

Sommbeer: Easy to find the right people with the right skills?

Dave: Honestly it’s just me and Soren (working in the brewhouse). Soren came to me as an intern. He did the brewers program at GRCC (Grand Rapids Community College). The tricky part with getting somebody who’s fresh out of brewing school and doesn’t have a ton of experience…you can train them anyway you want but you also have to do all that training. Now that we are past that point, he can just do everything. The bar staff is pretty much people I knew from elsewhere. They are all awesome.

Sommbeer: Did it go as planned? Any surprises?

Dave: We did a really good job of picking the brain of every industry person we could meet and try to figure out what to expect. And while it was an awful and terrible process, I think we still expected much of what we got (laughing).

One of the bigger surprises is the niche we carved out with our beer is not what I thought it was going be. When I had planned the ideal tap list early on… I was always a style guy. I always like to brew balanced, styled beers. Not a lot of adjuncts just normal stuff, down the middle. But our niche we’ve kind of found is a lot of fruit beers, a lot of coffee beers, a lot of adjuncts, a lot of weird stuff. The reason for that is because we are brewing on such a small system, it’s easy for us to do that stuff. Where as if you are brewing on a 7-barrel (system) you’re not going to make a chai tea and cranberry blonde ale because oh god if this is awful that’s a lot of money you’re putting down the drain.

Sommbeer: How long a process from start to opening day?

Dave: If you want to go back to when we were looking at locations, you would have been back in 2013. Settled on location in April 2015. Special use permit in September 2015. Finally got all of our liquor control approval June of 2017. Then things really fell apart (financing) and things got ugly for about a year…then really until June of 2017. I would say from very initial talks to open was probably 4 years.

Sommbeer: Who’s your competition?

Dave: Its collaboration, not competition. Everybody in the area, they are all “my boys”. We all hang out together at beer festivals. Our Beer (Brewery) and Hopland (Brewery & Distiller) are probably our closest comps. Big Lake (Brewery) they’ve kind of gone bigger and grown. They are doing a little bit different model than we would want to do. We would aspire to someone like Mitten (The Mitten Brewing Company). Kind of start a taproom, only a lot smaller, then we’re expanding to a new location. That’s kind of how we’ve always seen where the industry is going with the saturation of distribution. That’s how we see the growth model. Grow it as big as we can get it here and IF we want to keep growing, then do it at another location.

Sommbeer: How do you feel you are different from those “comps”?

Dave: The biggest thing we’ve tried to do is just focus doing a couple of things and doing it really, really well. We focus on beer. What we try to do is just do beer, do it really well. Have this open space, have sports on TV, music…just do us. If I was hanging out with some friends and it was me and Erin and another couple…these are the kind of people we hang out with. There’s probably going to be a football game on, there’s probably going to be music playing over the top of it, and we are going to drink good beer and talk about it. Provide a good environment, provide a really high quality product and have good staff. Those are really only the three things we even think about.

Sommbeer: What’s your long term vision for the business?

Dave: We are probably several years away from getting to a point where we’re maxed out here. I didn’t expect that I would have people lining up to buy beer from me in distribution. I still thought I have to sell beer. If I could make enough beer, I could have 6 “distro” accounts now that are waiting on beer from me. So we’ll continue to add tanks, we are trying to do it without taking on more debt.

Sommbeer: How big do you want to be?

Dave: I don’t see us getting bigger in this location than 6 or 700 barrels a year. That’s probably where we would max out here. I feel like if we are doing that, I feel like the business model we have can be profitable enough for us that I can take some money. Things work and sometimes it doesn’t have to be more money, more problems. It doesn’t necessarily have to get bigger than that.

Sommbeer: Who’s your target audience?

Dave: I would say locals, that’s always going to be our focus. We’re not catering to a super touristy crowd here. Obviously being on the road on the way to the beach, for sure (they are customers). Having the canner, we can do the 16 oz cans “to go”…it’s been phenomenal.

Sommbeer: As a customer visiting 4 Two 4, what do you want me to say about this place?

Dave: Quality beer. That stands king above anything else. People ask, “on a small scale, the way we are doing things, how do you keep things under that tight of wraps with quality?” The answer is we just dump it if it’s not good. That’s the cool thing about a really small batch, if its not on point it goes down the drain.

Sommbeer: What question should have I asked you?

Dave: What’s my favorite beer that we brew? I think right now, our new west coast IPA (West Coast Will) is probably my favorite drink right now. Super dank, super dry, no malt character at all, just a face full of hops.

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