KIM JORDAN

The beermaking began a few years earlier, in their Fort Collins basement, but the empire formally started in 1991, when Jeff Lebesch and Kim Jordan, then married, started selling the stuff.

They called the company New Belgium. It is now the seventh-largest brewery in the U.S., according to the Brewers Association, and poised to get bigger: New Belgium is building a brewery in Asheville, N.C., a project that will get its Fat Tires, Snow Days and Biere de Gardes distributed along the East Coast.

Jordan, 54, the daughter of liberal activists who grew up in California and Washington, D.C., started her career in social work before turning to suds. She and Lebesch divorced, and she is New Belgium’s chief executive.

Her unique route toward corporate management — helping poor people and messing around with fermentation in a basement, instead of an MBA and decades of plotting and angling — informs the whole New Belgium culture. Year after year, the sprawling brewery is voted the best work environment in the United States. It donates a lot of money to charities while pursuing an aggressive green approach to beermaking. Just this month, the company announced that it now is 100 percent employee-owned.

NEW BELGIUM BREWING CO.

Normally, we ask People and Places candidates to select a favorite spot other than their workplaces, but New Belgium isn’t exactly a routine kind of office. The “lobby” is a tap-filled tasting room. Employees can take a slide to get from the second to first floors. Foosball? Of course (and Jordan is very good). It’s the proverbial second home for Jordan, whose Spartan, small office suggests a CEO who spends more time among colleagues than cooped up in some lavish approximation of the Batcave.

Question: You guys are huge. And you are getting bigger. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess you didn’t anticipate this when you started making beer.

Answer: I think entrepreneurialism does sneak up on you. It’s a step function, especially in brewing. You have a brewhouse of a particular size. And then you reach your capacity and you say, “OK, we will invest in another brewhouse.” And then you start doing things like growing. And all along you are hiring. So the process of growing is a sort of “Wow, here we are again” feeling.

Q: You guys are always selected as a “best place to work” in nationwide surveys. Why?

A: I’m really comfortable with the notion of getting out of the way and letting my co-workers run with it. They know what matters to us collectively. We are clear on that here. They get to express that in ways that are genuine and warm and fun and irreverent. I have my pop theory on that, which is a lot of people, rather than dreaming about what is possible, they sort of go with what is expected. And I think that’s sort of business as usual, tail-wags-the-business-culture-dog. And because we were not business people — I was a social worker and Jeff was an electrical engineer — we made it up as we went along. It’s my nature to not be afraid and say, “Let’s try that and see how it goes.” New Belgium has given us an opportunity — my kids, me, my co-workers — to step on out there and try to be pioneers.

Q: Did anything in your background inform your approach to running a business?

A: It’s a combination of a few things. For one, I was raised in a liberal family where the profit motive was suspect, and I went to a Quaker high school. So there is that George Fox, “let your light speak” thing. For me, that was profoundly important. This notion that you get this opportunity to choose who you want to be, and that is true of the corporate life, as well. The confluence of those things was pretty important for me in terms of my thinking about New Belgium. And then I started to attract people like me. It’s the virtuous circle, an upward spiral.

Q: Are you a Quaker?

A: I’m not a practicing anything. But I feel connected to the magic of the planet, the magic of spirituality.

Q: Tell me about your parents. They sound interesting.

A: My mom was a social worker. She is 82 and just retired from being a tour guide in D.C. They live in Southwest, D.C., near Arena Stage. My dad did a lot of things. When young, we lived in Sacramento (Calif.), and he was Pat Brown’s press secretary. And he worked for Common Cause with John Gardner, he worked for the National League of Cities. He did a lot of urban planning, liberal policymaking kinds of things. He was on the administrative side of government, which is how we got to D.C.

We marched with César Chávez in California; we were on the March on Washington; my parents would take us to go do political things. When I was in junior high school or maybe also elementary school, I did fundraising for Eugene McCarthy and Edmund Muskie. And it mattered to me.

Q: Beer used to be such a guy thing. But now lots of women are beer-drinkers, too. Why?

A: Speaking about beer is more like speaking about food now. “We did this special preparation, we used fresh hops, smoked malts, we put it in barrels from Leopold Bros.” There is a much richer story there, it’s less making beer into this stupid-people-drink-it kind of thing.

Q: It seems like people in the beer business are having a lot of fun. True?

A: There is a high degree of camaraderie. My boyfriend, Dick Cantwell, owns a brewery in Seattle (Elysian Brewing). And I think we like one another, for one reason, because we have this commonality. Not just beer, but a lifestyle commonality. One of the things craft beer drinkers like about us is we are friendly and fun. Nobody wants to be in an industry where people talk smack about each other all day long. Most of us recognize that is a precious and delicate thing and we need to be delicate with it.

Q: Do you drink anything other than beer?

A: I drink wine. I rarely drink spirits.

Q: Who is your fictional hero?

A: Pippi Longstocking. She could carry a horse and had a suitcase of gold coins and lived on her own and told outrageous lies.

Q: If you could come back as an object, what would it be?

A: I’d want to be a deciduous tree. A deciduous tree because you get to renew yourself. You get the periods of rest and periods in the spring when you go from budding to flowering to leafing out, you soak up all of that warm sunshine, and you get to change into this incredible showy display in the fall before you rest again.

Q: What is your most treasured possession?

A: I have this little rock that sits on the windowsill on my stairs, and it is unbelievably heart-shaped. I love that thing, and I see it every day. It gives me a lot of joy.

Q: What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

A: Balance. People talk about wanting to be in balance. But there are days when I don’t want to be in balance, I want to race to the end and then say, “OK, what’s next?” If you are overly focused on balance, you don’t get to have big experiences because you are going to bed at the right time to get enough rest.

Q: Where would you like to live?

A: I like my arrangement now. I live in Fort Collins, San Francisco and sometimes am in Seattle.

Q: What is the quality you most admire in a man?

A: Manliness combined with homemaker skills. So a manly guy who likes to cook, who can keep up with the basics of living.

Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395, djbrown@denverpost.com or twitter.com/douglasjbrown