When breweries are opening at the rate of more than one per day and selling at the rate of one every five days, a year can seem like a lifetime in craft beer.

Just imagine what the 20 years AleSmith Brewing Co. has spent in San Diego must have felt like. AleSmith’s founders, former Pacific Beach Brewhouse brewer Skip Virgilio and homebrewer Ted Newcomb, haven’t owned the brewery since 2002. AleSmith’s Horny Devil Belgian Strong Ale not only predates the brewery, but first won a gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival (GABF) for Virgilio’s former employer.

AleSmith’s original brewmaster, Peter Zien, has been running the brewery since 2002 and has watched it rack up 18 GABF medals for its Speedway Stout, Decadence Old Ale, Old Numbskull Barley Wine and Wee Heavy Scotch Ale, among others. Meanwhile, his brewery has expanded from a 15-barrel production brewery in Miramar cranking out just a few thousand barrels a year to the 80-barrel brewery just a few blocks away that will be able to produce 100,000 barrels when it’s operating at capacity.

Zien watched AleSmith take home trophies for Small Brewing Company of the Year and Brewer of the Year at the 2008 GABF while finishing up its 13th consecutive year without turning a profit. He saw Danish brewer Mikkeller agree to take over AleSmith’s old brewery after nearly a decade of bouncing from one brewer’s facility to another, but saw Saint Archer — a brewer that had opened in San Diego less than two years earlier — sell to MillerCoors and become the first San Diego brewer to sell to a brewer outside the city. (Alpine sold to San Diego’s own Green Flash last year.)

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Through all of this, Zien and AleSmith stayed the course and focused on the brewery’s core lineup of beer and its continued growth. Though the commitment to that beer and the team making it hasn’t wavered, Zien hasn’t been able to resist all the change that’s blown through San Diego’s beer community. Zien, founder of the Quality Ale and Fermentation Fraternity (QUAFF) homebrewers club, is now a bit more guarded with his recipes and advice. Though sales are up and banks are more willing to partner with him than they were a decade ago, Zien still bears a whole lot of financial responsibility for both AleSmith’s expansion and its staff. Lastly, his brewery that was built largely on reputation and word-of-mouth was forced to move outside of its comfort zone in the name of growth and actually do some marketing. That’s how they reached us, and that’s how we began our conversation with Zien about AleSmith’s changing reality:

Your public-relations firm contacted us about your beer lineup just before we scheduled this interview. We didn’t expect that from a brewery that’s subsisted for so long on its reputation.

Peter Zien: It’s new for us. We got away with no marketing or sales departments for 18 and a half years, so we’re playing a little catch-up right now.

How big of a role will your marketing and sales strategy play in increasing AleSmith’s profile over the next few years?

Zien: That’s a great question. I think about that subject a lot and, first, I really want AleSmith to be established as a classic brewery. We are going to introduce new beers, but the core of what I want to do is to push our main beers. The thinking behind it is that it’s fun to try all sorts of new stuff — and I’m a beer geek at heart and love this new era of bright, shiny and new stuff — but at the end of the day you really want a classic beer. We strive to put our West Coast spin on classic styles from around the world.

What makes me think about that is that I drink a lot of German beers and I read their labels and there are styles that have endured for centuries: traditional bocks, doppelbocks, hefeweizens, pilsners. These breweries, a lot of them will say “Since 1180,” “Since 1340.” It kind of says to me that people do want great beer that way.

But I do want to stay relevant and I do want to change. I think we got away with no marketing and got away with no sales because that’s a luxury afforded to a small brewery that’s in demand. But our barrelage is doubling every year now. We went from 4,000 to 8,000 to 15,000 and this year we’re looking at 25,000, next year 44,000 barrels and 60,000 in 2017. So there are a lot of choices out there: In San Diego, we’re up to 110 now. When we started back in 1995, the only other brewery that was around was Karl Strauss, and then we had Stone and Ballast Point right after us in 1996. It’s like a whole new ball game, and I feel like I’m relearning this game every couple of years or so.

AleSmith built a big part of its reputation on 750-milliliter bottles of imperial-strength beers. However, in the march from 4,000 barrels to 44,000, are there fundamental changes that have to occur in the portfolio between here and there?

Zien: I am proud of that part of our lineup, but less than half of it are those 750-milliliter large-format bottles. We are running hard with our Extra Pale Ale. Our .394 Pale Ale [in memory of famed San Diego Padres hitter and baseball Hall-of-Famer Tony Gwynn, who died of cancer last year] has turned out to be a juggernaut, lightning in a bottle. Our Nut Brown and our IPA are under 8% alcohol by volume.

We’re going to six-packs, so we’re going to some new formats that I think are going to help us grow. Six-packs are coming for our Little Devil, our Belgian pale ale 5.5% wit-style beer, our IPA and our Nut Brown. We already have .394 in six-packs and, down the road, we’re already thinking about future projects: Throwing the high-gravity beers like Speedway Stout, Wee Heavy, Old Numbskull and Decadence into smaller formats and mix six-packs or four-packs of those. We’ve got a lot of people thinking about this.

I do recall a couple of years back, about eight or nine years ago, Dr. Chris White of White Labs was doing a talk and he said that there were four breweries up in San Diego alone that he thought could sell 100,000 barrels of beer if they made it. We were lucky enough to be on that list and I’ve kind of always wanted to grow, and we’ve always been able to sell all the beer we make without even pushing, but now we’re pushing and our message is a big part of it. We’re a humble brewery and we want to be the best, but we’re only as good as our last beer. I tell everybody on the team, which is now 51 team members, that you have to park your ego at the door if you want to work at AleSmith. If you start believing your own press and thinking you’re god’s gift to brewing, that’s when the learning stops, that’s when the growing stops and, ultimately, you don’t succeed.

We’re pushing on all cylinders in all departments. We really want our customer service to be at the highest level. We know people have their choice of tasting rooms now, so we train our staff at five-star resorts like The Lodge at Torrey Pines. Their management runs classes for our beertenders, so we’re trying to identify every aspect of what customer service demands and keep the quality of the beer high.

That focus on quality seemed instrumental in your new partnership with Danish brewer Mikkel Borg Bjergsø and his Mikkeller brand. How did that partnership come about and where do you envision it going from here?

Zien: We’re in the final stages of getting all that paperwork done and we’re jumping through the hoops of his country’s government and our government, so it’s been a complex deal that’s in its final stages. We’re looking for an October 2015 turnover of the brewery to the Mikkeller project.

Going back to how it started, Mikkel used to write to me as a homebrewer. He was working on his Beer Geek series and he was having trouble with the coffee aspect. He would write to me hoping I would tell him something about Speedway Stout, and I did.

I come from homebrewing roots and I like sharing, but I’m a little more tight-lipped these days. Every other person is opening a brewery now. My stock answer now is: “You seem like a creative guy or gal, you’ll figure it out.” But, back in the day, I kind of told Mikkel that we’d gone through a similar process and tried the coffee several ways, so he gives me credit for his Beer Geek series and it started a friendship.

In 2008, when he had only been brewing around professionally for a couple of years, he wanted to do a collaboration, and we were his first choice. At the time, I was just putting in our 30-barrel system, which was the first expansion AleSmith had done since its inception in ’95, and I didn’t really have a brewery. It was being torn apart and Stone agreed to bring us into the picture, so we did a three-way collaboration with Stone. And it was fun: We made a Trippel and it’s still drinking really nice, and we stayed in touch over the years.

He invites me to his Copenhagen beer celebration every year and I’ve always had to give him an excuse about why I can’t make it. He sent an invitation at the end of 2014 and I was writing him and saying “I’m knee-deep in an expansion and I can’t go” and while I’m typing, I start thinking about what I’m going to do with my old brewery. Do I want to keep it? Do I want to sell it? Do I want to partner with somebody? I basically had everything on the table and I started typing out free thought while I was writing to him. “Hey, how would you like to own your own brewery. You’re a gypsy brewer ... how about it — do you want a tasting room and a stateside presence?”

He wrote back enthusiastically about the prospect, but I wanted to stay on. It’s hard to walk away from a brewery that has your blood, sweat and tears in the concrete there. I suggested that I stay on, if only as a minority owner, and he wrote back that it was kind of a requirement since he’s out of the country and when they do foreign deals, they always require someone in that country to be a partner. It just seemed like everything was lining up just perfectly for this.

He flew out immediately, we started talking, I sent one of my guys out to his celebration and we’ve been working on it. His art guy is a Pennsylvania guy and he’s been out a few times. They’re redesigning the tasting room and everything’s going really fast now that we have the paperwork signed.

As far as going forward, I think he wants to do his core brands and have the Beer Geek series brewed for U.S. distribution. We’ve talked about brewing together and about inviting third parties in from all over the world to brew collaborations there. We’re going to call it Mikkeller San Diego and we’ll have Mikkeller beers, collaboration beers and some one-off AleSmith beers. So far, San Diego’s been really receptive to the idea. Having a world-class foreign brewer identify a local brewer and our city as a place he wants to set up shop has been a big boost.

Some cities are more provincial than others when it comes to their local breweries, but the near beer commune you’re talking about setting up here is welcoming even by the loosest standards. What makes San Diego’s brewing culture special in that regard?

Zien: We treat each other as compatriots and not competitors, and I think that gives San Diego its edge.

I think we’ve all learned this lesson that, perhaps, it goes a little bit against human nature to be so cooperative and to treat each other as compatriots when human instinct sometimes demands you to step on someone else to get yourself ahead. It doesn’t work in San Diego. I’ve never done it and I learned in the homebrewing community — I was very supportive of all the homebrewers and all the different clubs and we hoist the craft beer flag together. We don’t fight.

But we have a lot of new players, and the old guard is trying to teach the new guys how to play. You don’t have to guard your tap handles; you play nice, sometimes you’re on at a certain bar and sometimes your friend is. I look at it as building my karma bank. I do favors, I don’t ever show that I’m real hypercompetitive with my allies here. All good things just seem to keep coming.

When a brewery opens near you, your first instinct might be to be nervous. What I’ve noticed is that our business just keeps going up: It brings more craft drinkers to the area. Craft beer drinkers like you and me like variety and like going to different places. So they’re going to stop at Green Flash, they’re going to stop at Ballast Point: I just want to be on the route. I want them to stop at AleSmith too, and they usually do.

Even with San Diego amassing so many brewers over the years, it’s clear through your paperwork and initial experience with Mikkeller that there are still some hurdles to opening a brewery. Has AleSmith been forced to become more active in both San Diego’s business and political communities?

Zien: I could count on my hands the number of times I had to speak to a lawyer in the last 12 to 15 years. Now I have a standing call going twice a week with my attorney.

We’re now members of the California Craft Brewers’ Association, which has a group that petitions in Sacramento on our behalf. I go to meetings, I lend my experience to craft beer attorneys in town, I’ve been in books where we’re trying to help make things better. It’s a little bit of a different situation with this Mikkeller deal because we have two countries involved. We’re trying to position it so we both get the most favorable tax treatment. He gets really nailed in his country if certain things aren’t done, and I get really nailed if I sell too much of my company, so we have multiple lawyers and accountants working on our deal.

The federal license from the [Treasury Department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau] to start brewing has a turnaround time on an application of 128 days. Breweries are opening at a pace of 1.5 per day nationally, so I think they’re just swamped. To do things involving alcohol in the U.S. is still not easy. There are so many agencies that are on us, and I suppose it’s good, but you have to jump through their hoops.

The Brewers Association has put the number of breweries in the U.S. at 4,000, which makes it look as if breweries are the easiest businesses to open. Given how much effort is going into getting your project with Mikkeller off the ground, what warning would you give someone who’s considering switching careers and opening a brewery?

Zien: I teach a class at the local college and I joke with them that I’m here to scare the crap out of them about opening a brewery, but in the end I turn it all around. I want breweries to keep opening and I want this high tide to keep rising.

I’ll never lose sleep about breweries opening, but I might lose sleep about breweries starting to close. I’m bullish on this whole thing, but I tell them I’ve experienced every emotion in my brewhouse. I’ve been on my knees — a 45-year-old man, on my knees — crying like a baby in front of a fermenter wondering: “When is this going to change? When are we going to break into the black? Why do I have to work from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m.” You just have these moments.

But then, on a whole other spectrum, you’re on the world’s biggest stage collecting a medal for a beer you made, in front of all your peers, and you’re crying for another reason. I’m very honest about that. Don’t think brewing is a license to steal, because it isn’t. If you make good beer, you bring your “A” game and you’re capitalized properly — and you’ll even need a little bit of luck — you might make it.

But look at the history of beer: It goes up and down like the stock market and we have washouts and years where breweries close and no one wants to open. We had a period of time from 1998 to 2002 when not a single brewery opened in San Diego, so it happens. We’re at the high of about a 14-year run right now. We’re all watching this and blowing a lot of air into this balloon, but I think we’re going to be fine.

If you’re not making good beer, I think the customer is getting savvy enough that they’re not going to keep you in business anymore. I’m betting the whole farm on that. I need educated beer drinkers, and that’s when AleSmith shines. We might have a little washout here, but I’m on record as saying we might have 200 breweries here in San Diego before anything happens.

Considering there were only four states (California, Colorado, Oregon and Washington) with more than 200 breweries at the end of 2014, that would be impressive. However, does that regional success necessarily translate to beer sales? For example, were there times when you were winning awards for Speedway Stout and Old Knucklehead while the brewery was struggling to exist?

Zien: That’s something that I don’t hear enough of, but that’s the reality of it. I lived it and I share these stories when asked, but when we were at the height of our game and collecting the Small Brewery of the Year trophy at the Great American Beer Festival in 2008 and had more medals than anybody, I was signing these little two-year leases because when we ran out of money, I was going to close the door.

We were in the red for 13 years. From 1995 to 2008, we did not make a single penny. I personally injected upwards of $900,000 into the company to keep it going. Since then, I’ve been paid back, we have a nice profit margin and we have a bank that’s willing to work with us now. But even like four years ago I couldn’t get a $25,000 line of credit from a bank. It wasn’t a game any of them were willing to bet on, but I think they’ve seen the success of Stone and Ballast Point and the banks are now fighting for the premier breweries to grow. We had a number of banks throwing money at me to help with this project, and I needed every penny of it. We’re about $12 million into a $15 million expansion project, so we’re almost to the finish line, but we need the rest of the year to get this done.

When you’re leveraged out that far into your brewery, what does that mean for you personally? What kind of impact does that have on your finances and your personal goals?

Zien: I’m holding a lot on my shoulders right now and I describe the history of AleSmith as a series of ups and downs. I go into debt and I’m at the bottom of the swimming pool and we work our way up and I get to breathe some air. Then I get to breathe a lot of air and I’m on a mountain top. Then I dive from that mountaintop to the bottom of the ocean again. It’s just this cycle.

If we didn’t expand, we could have been a 15,000-barrel brewery bringing in about $6 million a year, and my wife and I could probably ride off into the sunset on that. But ... I wanted more. I looked at the team members and I looked at the people who made this happen and I kind of want us all to get there together with success.

I want to share more. I want them to be the highest-paid in the industry. I want to have profit sharing, or maybe even an ESOP [Employee Stock Ownership Plan] is the way I get out of this one day when I’m a little older and they’re owners. I want them to have benefits. It comes from a real place and it goes back to that “no ego” thing: We’re a team. When we won that Small Brewery of the Year trophy, they wanted to put my name on it and I refused. I wanted it to say “AleSmith Brewing Team,” so that’s the trophy you’ll see if you come to our AleSmith tasting room.

I thought about them and I thought about the fact that we’re making, really, a drop of beer in that 10,000-15,000-barrel range. You can’t really get it out very far and a lot of people want to try it. I hear of breweries like New Belgium selling $1 million barrels and our great friends at Stone in San Diego reaching 600,000 and I think: “Is it really a crime to get to 50,000 to 60,000 barrels?” I think we can do this and I think I can deliver on my promises to my team members. I want AleSmith to be their vehicle in their life to do what they want, so these are all the decisions I made before going into debt like this.

But when I do the pro forma and I calculate it out against the per-barrel price that we dictate — for every 31 gallons that leaves your brewery, you figure out the price and divide it by your gross and you divide the barrelage into your gross and get a per-barrel price — we averaged over $400 in 2013. If you start multiplying that against our projected barrelage, you can get an idea of the kind of money that could be coming in. I don’t see us being in debt past the six-year mark [of AleSmith’s latest expansion].

All companies are leveraged — it’s the smart use of your money on the total equation — but, yeah, it takes its toll.

That’s a whole lot of advance and succession planning accounted for, which seems to leave little room for a merger or acquisition in that equation. Is all that in place to ward off inquiries from large brewers, private-equity firms and others?

Zien: They’ve already come a-knockin’ and I’ve had those meetings. I don’t turn down meetings, really: I like to learn and, at the very least, you learn something or walk away with an idea.

I’ve been approached by a number of groups from venture-capital groups to other large breweries. I would take a meeting with some of the big boys, but I would tell you there is absolutely zero chance because that is not the AleSmith story that I want to unwind.

I think it’s going to happen: I think a San Diego brewery will sell [and Saint Archer did just a few weeks after this interview]. Going back to what we were talking about, the suffering and the pain and the work: Imagine you started a brewery on 70 grand and somebody’s throwing numbers at you that are 10 or 15 times your profit. If you make $2 million on your bottom line and they’re giving you a 15 times multiplier on your valuation and that’s $30 million, your knees tremble and you start to think about it.

And then you hear numbers like Boulevard’s, which sold to Duvel Mortgaat for $120 million. That lets you open four other breweries if you wanted to and start a nonprofit while you’re at it. But that’s not the way I want to go out. I have other options. I have a law degree and a finance background, so I think I know my way around this area a little bit better than just a brewer would. There are viable options for me where I could put ownership in my team members’ hands and still do some of the things we want and pull a little bit of equity out of this company. But that’s years off, I believe, though I do talk about it openly at our monthly meetings. My wife and I tell them this every month and it’s just words right now, but I’m comfortable with that arrangement and I’m going to prove myself. Everything I’ve promised or said, I’ve delivered on, so they have no reason to doubt me.

I do want to stick around for this ride, and hopefully AleSmith continues to keep its reputation as high as it’s ever been and allow me to deliver to my crew and my drinkers.

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.