As a homebrewer for 22 years and a beer enthusiast for much of his adult life, Bill Boor said it’s a bit surreal to be serving as the first CEO of Great Lakes Brewing Co., the beloved Cleveland-based microbrewery that has grown steadily since Pat and Dan Conway launched the brand about 30 years ago.

It’s also a welcome change for Boor, having worked in large public companies for the bulk of his career — including an almost decade-long stint with Cliffs Natural Resources. He wanted to stay in Cleveland, a city his family had come to love, and be closer to the operations of a company for which he worked. A career in microbrewing wasn’t necessarily on his radar until a mutual business contact introduced him to the Conways. “My first meeting with Pat and Dan, we sat at that table over there and drank for 2.5 hours,” said Boor, 50, during a recent interview at Great Lakes’ brewpub. “And we went from there.” Boor’s arrival last October is an intriguing development in Great Lakes’ evolution. Boor, who earned his MBA from Harvard University, said the Conways have used the term “succession planning,” but they have no plans to immediately step away from the business. Instead, they were looking for seasoned business executives to tackle some of the most pressing issues facing the company — namely those relating to capacity. Also last year, the Conways brought in Bridget Barrett, a longtime Starbucks marketing executive, to lead the company’s sales and marketing operations. “We felt that after three decades, it might be better for the overall growth of the company to look outside of our four walls and bring in expertise that we thought we could use,” said the 67-year-old Pat Conway. Dan Conway, 55, added, “It’s nice to have some folks like Bill and Bridget step into some roles that we were trying to fill. As you know, with any startup, you’re accustomed to wearing as many hats as you can possibly wear, it’s nice to have a dedicated management team to always have those hats on.” With annual production now at about 160,000 barrels a year, Great Lakes is the 21st-largest craft brewery in the United States, according to the latest rankings from The Brewers Association, a national trade group. The question on tap, however, is whether Great Lakes needs to get bigger. If it does — and Boor said the company is leaning in that direction — that would certainly necessitate a larger brewing operation beyond its current digs in Cleveland’s Ohio City neighborhood.

Great Lakes’ last major investment in its plant came in 2014, with a $7 million spend that added considerably to its fermentation capabilities. Today, the company’s growth is hampered by the size of its brewhouse. And with little room for additional brewing vessels, the company will likely set its sights beyond its current landlocked confines. Boor, using the analytical acumen for which he was hired, said the company is in the midst of several market studies to decide the long-term growth potential of the brewery. At the same time, the company has looked at potential sites and done preliminary engineering work to gauge what it would cost to build another brewing facility. Boor said the company also is interested in canning some of its beers, which would expand the types of places where Great Lakes beers can be enjoyed, but there’s simply no room for a canning line. “The big bet in the end is on the market side,” Boor said. “You can know how much it’ll cost to build a facility and know the operating costs, but the market has to be there for you. While we’re making this decision about the potential to expand, we’re doing so in a marketplace that’s very competitive with a lot of dynamics.” According to The Brewers Association, in 2015, craft brewers produced 24.5 million barrels and saw a 13% increase in volume and a 16% rise in retail dollar value. Also last year, the number of breweries in the U.S. grew 15% to 4,269 — the most at any time in the country’s history. Meanwhile, the total U.S. beer market was down 0.2% last year, meaning that the bulk of the growth opportunities have been in the craft beer segment. So given the growing popularity of craft beer and, more specifically, the Great Lakes brand, why so much research into whether additional brewing capabilities are needed? The world always needs more Christmas Ale or Dortmunder, right? “A lot of craft brewers have gone and built a whole new amount of capacity and assumed a certain level of sales will happen and that will be used up,” Dan Conway said. “Sometimes they build it and forget how to sell it.” All the while, megabrewers looking to capitalize on the growing microbrew craze have acquired several regional breweries around the country — something the Conways aren’t particularly interested in at the moment. “We’re getting calls also, but we’re wary of bringing someone in and losing the culture and what we’ve developed so nicely over these three decades,” Pat Conway said.