Craft beer is getting awfully serious for what was supposed to be the irreverent, dressed-down younger sibling of industrial macro beer.

Just last week, San Diego-based brewer and distiller Ballast Point sold to Corona brewer and distributor Constellation Brands STZ, -1.02% for $1 billion. That’s roughly $8,300 for each of the 123,000 barrels of Sculpin IPA, Grunion Pale Ale and Victory at Sea Imperial Porter in the roughly 26 states in Ballast Point’s distribution radius.

Not bad for a brewery that produced just 11,293 barrels as recently as 2009, but recent growth into a 107,000-square-foot brewery had Ballast Point expanding its reach and mulling a public share offering. It went public, all right, but with a partner that would have been out of the beer business after Anheuser-Busch InBev’s BUD, -3.33% $20.1 billion purchase of Grupo Modelo in 2013 if the Department of Justice hadn’t stepped in. Constellation says it will keep Ballast Point running as an independent entity.

We’ve been hearing that quite a bit lately. Anheuser-Busch InBev had similar plans when it bought Chicago’s Goose Island in 2011, but has used a somewhat freer hand since purchasing Patchogue, N.Y.-based Blue Point; Bend, Ore.-based 10 Barrel; Seattle’s Elysian and Los Angeles’ Golden Road within the past two years. All are now functioning as autonomous entities of A-B’s craft portfolio. Belgian brewer Duvel Moortgat made similar claims when it purchased Kansas City’s Boulevard Brewing in 2013 and Paso Robles, Calif.-based Firestone Walker this year and has been adamant about maintaining their autonomy under its Duvel USA umbrella as well.

But is there any way to preserve your independence and get an influx of cash without turning to another, larger brewer? For Oskar Blues, the answer involved finding a private-equity firm that wouldn’t be overly controlling and using their money to acquire other breweries and avoid being the brewery acquired.

Founded by Dale Katechis out of a little brewpub in Lyons, Colo., in 1997, Oskar Blues became one of the first craft brewers to can beer when it did so in 2002 just to bring customers into the pub. The operation has since grown to include a brewery in Longmont, Colo., another in Brevard, N.C., a chain of hamburger restaurants, a bicycle-fabrication company, a coffee roaster, a manufacturer of aluminum can “growler” containers, a NASCAR sponsorship and, next year, a third brewing facility in Austin, Texas. It’s watched production climb from roughly 86,000 barrels just before the Brevard brewery opened in 2012 to more than 140,000 barrels last year.

However, all that growth comes at a cost. Earlier this year, Katechis sold a controlling stake in Oskar Blues to Fireman Capital in Boston just before buying Perrin Brewing in Comstock Park, Mich., just outside of Grand Rapids. Fireman also owns a $35 million stake in Utah Brewing Partners and their Wasatch and Squatters beers and has been, by all accounts, an ideal partner. However, the purchase of stakes in, or control of, Southern Tier in Lakewood, N.Y., SweetWater in Atlanta, Uinta in Salt Lake City and Full Sail in Hood River, Ore., to private-equity firms underscores the fact that private-equity money doesn’t always constitute independence. Sure, your brewery isn’t under some larger brewer’s flag, but it requires just the right partner to invest in your brewery that doesn’t want to immediately rip the labels off, redo the logo, trim the beer selection, flood the market, trim all other costs and get out of the market.

Speaking with Katechis, it seems as if he’s not only found that partner, but a viable alternative to the recent spate of brewery buyouts. We’ve been sitting on this interview with Katechis for a while, but his thoughts on expansion, private-equity partnerships and the culture of craft beer got only more relevant in the wake of recent craft beer acquisitions.

So how did Austin come about? There are elements of the city that make complete sense for Oskar Blues, but that can be said of many cities. What made you decide to set up shop there?

Katechis: We were throwing out ideas in some of our meetings, like we did with Brevard.

Initially, the idea of traveling and building a brewery on the other side of the country didn’t seem exciting at all. That’s why we chose a place that I was willing to travel to, and I wanted it to add to my quality of life. We really didn’t shop anywhere. We just chose a place that I was willing to travel to and that the rest of our team ended up falling in love with due to its proximity to Pisgah National Forest and some of the best mountain biking on the East Coast.

It kind of set the precedent in the way that, if we’re looking at other locations for a brewery in order to capitalize on all of the synergies that we realized with Brevard — from shipping savings to the alignment and the relationship we built with the local community — Austin was certainly on top of the list for different reasons than Brevard. From a cultural standpoint, what I believe Oskar Blues is made up of is beer, bikes, food and music, in no particular order. Just things that I find fulfilling about this world. I think we’ve built a pretty interesting culture around here and I think people feel the same.

Austin certainly had an irreverent vibe to it and uniqueness about it that we were attracted to. Obviously the local music scene, but it’s a foodie town. So we all sat around and said: “Would we be able to travel there and spend our lives in this town?” And the unanimous answer was “yes.” That’s really how those decisions get made.

I think Austin may benefit from being a little bit of a bigger town than Brevard is from an infrastructure standpoint in terms of waste water and whatnot from building a brewery. But once we got past that, we started looking for a spot and went to town. Two of our guys went down there to meet with civil engineers and we hope to be up and running by April.

What does this do for Oskar Blues in terms of shipping and availability? What does this open up that didn’t exist before?

Katechis: What we’ve learned is that the beer we ship from Colorado — and we do about 100,000 barrels in a 200-mile radius, and in Colorado that’s really just Colorado — is 21% of the beer we sell, in just that radius. What we noticed when we went to North Carolina was that the cost of that brewery is already equal to the savings on shipping to date.

You basically, on a napkin, build these three breweries. That allows us to invest in our people and the communities that we sell beer — all of the fulfilling parts of working 16-hour days. In North Carolina, from the day that we opened — Dec. 12, 2012 — that first year we brewed 40,000 barrels. We tripled our sales within that 200-mile radius around that brewery, and we’re seeing growth because of the investment we’ve made in that community. Three years later, North Carolina sales are up 45%, South Carolina is up 85% and Florida is still up 45%.

The beer is getting to these places quicker, which means it’s fresher, and the way that the consumer is educating their palate these days, they know the difference. Our brewers love it, and we love it because it’s fresh beer and it’s like you’re having a beer at the brewery. What we’re hoping is that, in a market like Texas, which has a significant population base within a 200-mile radius of the Austin brewery, that we might see similar growth trends.

With variables of family and your future endeavors on the table, is that why you brought Fireman Capital into the equation?

Katechis: I think that whole relationship started with kind of that thought: “Hey, I’m not getting any younger.” I might have even read somewhere “Hey, do you have a succession plan?”

To be honest with you, it started with a life insurance policy and then talking to my accountant about “Hey, you have to start worrying about these things” and I’m, like, “I’ve been too busy to worry about these things and they really haven’t been a thought.” Then you start thinking about these things. Are my kids going to take over my business? We built something that we want to live on forever because we’re proud of it and we think it’s great, but how do you plan for that? That was a whole new experience for me.

I hadn’t even thought about it and, looking at my kids, two of them are at the age where they’re too young to even think about it and the other ones look like they’re going to choose different paths. I started looking at the options out there for how to prepare this business for life after me. That’s how we came to meet Fireman and we just fell in love with those guys. I’d had partnerships in business before and I knew the quality that I was looking for in a partner and I knew what I wasn’t looking for.

We started entertaining the idea and they saw the beer world the same way as we did. It wasn’t just for the money; they were branding experts. And Dan Fireman’s just a great f***ing guy. I was like “I can do business with this guy, you know? We can go out to his farm and blow up cars with 50-caliber machine guns, I wanna hang out with that guy.”

The whole idea was to shed a little risk and breathe a little, and what we’re seeing is that everyone is engaged now. We’re more irreverent, and we’re probably having more fun than we ever have.

It kind of shows in the business. Your REEB bicycle fabrication business is up and running, your restaurant presence is expanding, your Crowler can growlers are in the market and your Hotbox Coffee Roasters just launched this year. How difficult is it to find a partner who’s willing to say “OK” to all of these peripheral ideas coming out of what is, ostensibly, a beer company?

Katechis: I will tell you that we met with some folks who were just a nonstarter in the first five minutes, so we did kind of have to look and find the right partner.

Credit to Dan Fireman. He really searched us out and he wanted to make sure that I didn’t consider him just another one of those guys. I considered the PE guys the ones with the evil horns who come in and break your business all for the sake of profit. It was refreshing to meet someone who understood the heart and the soul of this business was and knew how important the heart and the soul is to it. Sometimes, it isn’t the best business decisions that are the heart and the soul.

If you focus on the things that matter and the things that matter to your customer, then your customer is going to reward you by paying you for what that thing is worth.

Of the more than 4,000 brewers in the U.S., yours is one of the few that’s still trying new things and taking chances as if it’s 1995. Will it look the same from this point on and what do you have planned down the line?

Katechis: What we’ve learned is that we’ve built this business by creating bottlenecks for ourselves. Once we break through those bottlenecks where there’s a learning curve, we’ve learned a few things about production and sales and marketing. What that does is it allows you to focus on other things, whether it’s branding or marketing efforts or new companies that attach to the side of this Oskar Blues dynamic.

It’s encouraging and fulfilling for us. It’s kind of like when you walk into a restaurant and see the staff having a good time. It makes you want to have a good time, you know? I come from a restaurant background and that’s how I perceive my business. If we can have a great time doing what we’re doing and make some money doing it, then our customer is going to see and feel that.

Moving forward, all of those things that lie ahead of us will stem from me or one of my staff who has a great idea and we say “Hey, let’s do this.”

This year, that approach has enabled you to do some pretty special things for a brewery your size, including your takeover of Perrin Brewing in Michigan. There have been a lot of acquisitions since then, but that one seemed relatively smooth and benign in hindsight. How did you reach that deal and how do you view it months later?

Katechis: Ah, it’s a f***in’ grand slam.

The way that came about was Keith Klopcic, our distributor in Michigan, took us there after a meeting and said: “I’m getting out of the distribution business, my brother’s buying me out, I’m ready for a new challenge. What do you think of this place?” I said: “I love this place.” He said: “Why don’t you and I buy it?”

The partnership was falling apart, one of the brothers wanted out and we were like “That sounds like a great idea.” Within a couple of weeks, we got that contract together and I had already begun the process with Fireman. They had built this brewery that wasn’t into packaging but had done 14,000 barrels in two years, which is just unheard of. They weren’t in package yet, but had built a network of distributors around Michigan and the mission was and is still today to just own Michigan.

We thought that, we can our beer and we know how to do it, so we got a can line over there pronto and we believed we could double cash flow and business within 12 months. The day we closed, we turned the can line on and we already doubled cash flow in the first three months. On a trailing 12 months, it looks like we can triple cash flow on a business that’s growing exponentially and is operating as its own thing. It doesn’t feel like Oskar Blues; it’s its own thing. Keith runs it, and he and I have a great partnership. It’s fulfilling to see that happen and be an arm of what we’re doing.

Where we really capitalize on it is that it all started with a collaboration with these guys [in December 2014]. Our whole idea was to take the collaboration to the next level. That’s what these acquisitions are all about. They’re fun, our brewers love them, it engages them, they’re a part of the process and we’re able to engage the local community at a higher level. It’s good for both brands, and if your staff is having fun, everyone else is too.

We’ll continue to take these collaborations to the next level and look for opportunities for acquisitions — the ones that feel right. It’ll certainly be part of our strategy moving forward.

You dove into this in one of the most established craft beer towns in the U.S. in Grand Rapids. What was the reaction like there and how does it make you feel about potential acquisitions in the future?

Katechis: I think it’s a great sign of how attached local communities are to their beer. Everybody has their guard up for the sellout.

We just had this meeting with our entire sales force about a sellout because there was a feeling among the local die-hard Perrin guys that Oskar Blues was going to come in and change our new local brewery. There was a little apprehension there, but we’re going to talk the talk and walk the walk. We have a plan, and it’s not to change the culture of any of the breweries.

It’s to the contrary: We want to help them solve the problems that we know they’re going to face, but that we’ve been through a thousand times. It’s a mentorship, in ways, and then there’s an element in which they help us. What I like about this business is the smallness of it. I don’t enjoy this large piece of business and how big it’s gotten. I’m reminded daily that it’s important to keep a lot of these ventures and activities small so you stay grounded and you stay authentic.

These breweries are helping all of us do that because that’s the fun stuff: Helping pick up a pallet of beer that got dumped over in an alleyway because a forklift tire fell off. Things that just remind you not to take yourselves too seriously, because we’re starting to see a lot of that in the marketplace. Everyone is positioning themselves because everybody’s getting bigger and the stakes are getting higher and it’s just ... like ... we’re making beer. We’re just a bunch of guys making beer.

There are things like that that we need to continue to inject into our culture to make sure that we stay real, keep it real and keep the authenticity of our brand alive and well.

You go broad with your audience, but you don’t dumb down the experience or your beer. How do you walk that fine line?

Katechis: At the end of the day, for us, it’s about experimentation. We have a lot of ideas that come down the pipe and we try to only execute the ones we sign off on and feel like us.

Of course we want to appeal to a larger audience. It speaks to us and how we see the craft segment growing, and we want to be at the forefront of that. In order to do that, you have to take risks and do things that people might deem as big beer or mainstream and not a local beer festival. We certainly do that and we like to walk the line. We’ve built a culture of people that will sniff out bulls*** really quick and that’s one of the benefits of coming in every day and grinding. You set the tone, you let people know what’s acceptable and people know that bulls*** and a**holes are not acceptable around here. It’s cultural and part of the fabric that’s made up Oskar Blues, and I don’t have to walk around and do that anymore. The pirates have taken over the ship.

Jason Notte is a freelance writer based in Portland, Ore. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post and Esquire. Notte received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University in 1998. Follow him on Twitter @Notteham.