Oral history interview with Ellen Joyner, 2018

Erin Lawrimore: To start, can we have you say and spell your name?

Ellen Joyner: Sure. Ellen Joyner, E-L-L-E-N J-O-Y-N-E-R.

Erin Lawrimore: Wonderful. Today is Thursday, July 26, and we are at Bombshell in Holly Springs, North Carolina with an interview for the Well Crafted NC project.

Erin Lawrimore: Ellen, to start with, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself, where are you from, and how did you get here?

Ellen Joyner: Yeah, so I'm from Cary. Well, not initially, but basically grew up there since I was in elementary school, and went on to college in East Carolina and got an undergraduate, and then got a master's in business from Meredith here in Raleigh. Then kind of moved around in the area, and then ended up in Holly Springs about 13 or 14 years ago.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. I know that you kind of started home brewing.

Ellen Joyner: Yes.

Erin Lawrimore: That's where you got your going. Can you talk a little bit about how you got involved in home brewing?

Ellen Joyner: Sure, sure.

Erin Lawrimore: What was the initial interest?

Ellen Joyner: I discovered craft beer, and believe it or not, it was like Carolina Brewing's craft beer, drinking it at the Devils Ridge Country Club, or the club that we played golf at. So I really was starting to hone in and say, "Oh my god. This is so much better beer than the stuff that you traditionally were thinking of or that you drank in college because that's what you could afford." My brother bought me a home brew kit for Christmas back in 2005, I believe. The very first batch of beer I brewed turned out really, really well, and I was hooked at that point.

Erin Lawrimore: Do you remember what that first batch of beer, what it was?

Ellen Joyner: It was just a pale ale, so it was done with liquid malt extract on the stove, top it off with distilled water, and pray. I can remember the 00:02:00instruction sheet was like Xerox pages that was about three pages long. It was missing a lot of steps. I remember saying, "Oh my God! Is this going to turn out because there's so much I think I'm missing?" Then after you do one, and then you discover some of the pains that you have in your first home brew, such as adding the corn sugar to the individual bottles, you start to build on it and very quickly it becomes a very expensive hobby.

Erin Lawrimore: Going from that, what resources have you kind of drawn on over time to grow as a brewer?

Ellen Joyner: A lot of reading. Thank God for the internet. You don't have to go and look at encyclopedias or go look up card catalog stuff at the library anymore. With the internet, you can pretty much find everything that you need to know on there. Anything I could put my hands on and read is what I did, and then I would go and try it. One of the things that I did as a home brewer is I was 00:03:00more trying to understand what was going on. So I kept brewing the same recipe over and over, just tweaking it and trying to get the perfect recipe, whereas a lot of home brewers will go out and brew a whole lot of different styles and every time they're brewing a different style. I just took a different approach because I wanted, I guess, more of the science behind it and understanding what was going on. That was kind of how I would brew is pick one recipe and then just keep trying it until I've loved it, and then move on and do something different.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about how you went through the process of maybe even developing or perfecting recipes?

Ellen Joyner: Recipes? Sure. It would be tasting it and saying, "What did I like or what did I not like? Did it have too much toasted or roasted or biscuity, and was the hops too overpowering? Did they linger? Was it a stringent?" Then I'd go read and find out why. I can remember doing different things, such as stabilizing my mash pH, not understanding when you first start to brew what pH 00:04:00really does in brewing. Doing things like that to filtering my water and running it through a chlorine filter, sending my water off for analysis so that I could start making adjustments.

Ellen Joyner: It really was just ... It builds upon itself. It just came back to taste. Then I'd give it to all our friends. "What do you like about it?" They would say what they liked or didn't like, and that's how I go about fine tuning it. I kind of have this little motto, "Is it as good as it can be?" Sometimes we use that here. When we do a beer and it sells really well, then we say, "Is it as good as it can be? No, we might can add another pound of orange peel to it and it'll be better." So we kind of take the same approach here.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. Do you have something that you would consider to be like your favorite thing? What was the thing that hooked you from that home brew kit to not just going, Well, I did it once. It was fine"? Was there a favorite thing 00:05:00that was really the hook for you?

Ellen Joyner: I think it was that I made it. I like to make things. Even growing up as a kid, I was a very crafty person. The gratification came fairly quickly. It's not like doing your lawn where it's instant gratification for the work you put in. You still have to wait a couple weeks. It was the science behind it. It was, "let's change the yeast up on it and see how it changes."

Ellen Joyner: As we grew, and as I brought Michelle into the fold in brewing, we bought bigger and bigger systems, bigger and bigger pots. We should have just gone for the gonzo at the very beginning. We would have spent far less money. Being able to say, "Here's one batch. Let's put three different yeast strains. Let's use five gallons with this yeast strain", and then see how it worked. I think that was just ... It was the experimental portion of it.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. You mentioned Michelle. Let's talk a little bit about kind of the path from the home brew kit to here at Bombshell and how-

Ellen Joyner: How that happened?

Erin Lawrimore: ... how you guys came together and how we got to this point.

Ellen Joyner: We were avid golfers. Were being were. I don't play anymore. Anytime it would rain, we would go brewery tour hopping. Back in 2006, 2007, 08, there was only a couple breweries in the area. So we pretty much stuck to Carolina Brewing and Aviator.

Ellen Joyner: One day, Michelle was saying, she was like, "We hate corporate America. Why don't we do this?" So I was like, "Are you serious?" She said, "Sure." So I taught her how to home brew. We spent a year kind of writing the business plan, teaching her how to home brew, seeing if it was something we really wanted to do. Then from there, it was like, "Okay, let's just take this risk. Let's take this leap, because if it fails, we still have time to recover 00:07:00at our age." That's how it started.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. You mentioned the corporate culture and the corporate background. Do you feel that having that experience before diving in to the brewery has helped?

Ellen Joyner: Absolutely, absolutely. I probably wouldn't have done it had I not had my corporate background. The thing that corporations do is they instill process. You get skills, you get the managerial skills, you get the financial skills. I probably wouldn't have had ... One, I wouldn't have had the financial means to have done it. Two, it gave me the confidence to do it. I think having business partners do it with you just made it a little bit easier of a step than to have done it all by myself.

Erin Lawrimore: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Do you remember what was the ... Do you remember when the light changed, when the switch flipped to just go from 00:08:00continuing with home brewing to opening? What were the processes? What steps did you take?

Ellen Joyner: For a long time, it just seemed like we were talking it, we were talking it. Finally, it was like, "Okay. For a year and a half, we've been home brewing constantly. We're either going to do this or we need to stop talking about it and just saying it's going to be a hobby."

Ellen Joyner: I believe it was summer of 2012. We were at a July 4th pool party. We had taken some of our home brew, and we're serving it. We just happened to walk up to one of the city councilmen and saying, "We're serious. We do want to ... Do you know of any buildings?" He happened to know of a building that had been sitting vacant for a while. He says, "I'll introduce you to the landlord, and let's go talk." So we showed up at this particular building and we were like, "It's perfect. It's close to our houses." We went back and forth. We 00:09:00didn't initially jump on it, but after about three or four months, we finally were like, "Okay, let's do it." It structured our business, got it all legal, and signed the lease.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about some of the challenges that you faced in starting up from scratch?

Ellen Joyner: Sure. One, understanding what equipment we really needed to have. Not having been commercial brewers, not having worked in the commercial brewing industry, we didn't really know what equipment we needed. So we found somebody to consult with us to kind of go over equipment and what we needed. We knew what our financing was and what we had the money to spend on. Then you're building out something, and I don't have a construction background. None of us did. We're suddenly running a project that needs to happen. What we did know is it needs to happen fast because every day that it's not happening and that we're not open, 00:10:00we're paying rent.

Ellen Joyner: We went through the venture of hiring the contractor. There was a lot of days nothing was going on here. Us just not having run a construction project, sometimes keeping people on site to do the work because they wanted to come for a full day's worth of work ... If it was just a tidily thing to put a bar top in, you didn't see them until they had enough to do to occupy a day, and they were running between jobs. That was frustrating.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. What was it that led you to choose the site? Was it just availability, or did you did you pick the first site you looked up?

Ellen Joyner: It was availability. There's not a lot of availability that is in existing building in Holly Springs. We looked at a couple of other sites, but once we found out what the price was we were like, "Ooh, a little too much money." This one was close to our houses because I live less than two miles from 00:11:00here, so we love the location. We just wanted to stay in Holly Springs. There just wasn't a lot opportunity.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. How would you define the main mission of Bombshell?

Ellen Joyner: The main mission? When we started out, we wanted to ... It's funny how the business plan has changed, but we wanted to make really good solid beers that people enjoyed. Then we wanted to be a part of the community. We wanted a place for people to go, not necessarily the Cheers bar, but something where people felt comfortable, and we wanted females to feel comfortable being able to walk into a bar by themselves. Making great beer and making a community environment was, in my opinion, our mission. I believe the other girls will say something similar as well.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. Let's talk about the name. How did you decide on the name Bombshell?

Ellen Joyner: Yeah. Bombshell. The name found us. When Michelle and I were brewing and leaving it out to our friends on the golf course, they ... We were much younger. We were blondes, and they referred to us as the bombshells. I don't know why. I never considered myself that. They would always be like, "Oh, the girls, the blonde bombshells, have beer on hole number six or hole number 18. Be sure to get some." So when it came time to naming it, we started going through what are names, and we were trying to think of names associated with the town. Everybody kept calling us Bombshell. It was finally like, "Let's just call ourselves Bombshell." That's really how it came about.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. Are there particular resources or people who, during the process of going from home brewing to opening the doors, were particularly influential or helpful?

Ellen Joyner: You know what? The community is helpful. The craft brew community 00:13:00is very helpful. The first year, we weren't open, but we went to our first craft brewers conference. It was fabulous because I come from corporate where you stood and you were the vendor. I actually got to be the participant. When you were going to pack, you're packing blue jeans and tennis shoes and T shirts, and you're headed off to this craft brewers conference. You check in, and they give you a bag. I'm like, "Oh my god! This thing weighs forever." It was filled with beer. They have brew stations, so in between all of the segments, you get to go and try different samples of different beer. I was like, "I'm hooked. I'm in the right place." I can remember texting and sending all my friends back in corporate America what I was going through, and they were like so jealous because we'd come from bigger trade shows where they were just awful.

Ellen Joyner: We would do that, and we met a lot of people. They would give us their cards. They were like, "Call us at any time." There was some people that were more local that had director of brewery operations at Natty Greene's. We'd 00:14:00call up and we'd ask questions. They would say, "Oh yeah. Go here. Do this." So we had several people.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about the size of the brewery when you first open, like your production size and equipment?

Ellen Joyner: We're a 15 barrel brewhouse. We started out with three fermenters. We were going to do four. The day that the people showed up to ... We were originally looking at a 10 barrel system, and the day that the scoping out and the vendor was coming, they gave us kind of another quote that said, "Look, for a few dollars more, you can get a 15 barrel brewhouse." Typical up selling, right? We looked at it, and we were like, "Oh wow." We had to make a couple sacrifices, and one was cutting out a fermenter, but in the end, so glad we went with the 15 barrel.

Ellen Joyner: We started out with three fermenters. Basically, we had 60 barrels worth of fermentation space. Today with our latest purchase, we are up to 225 barrels of fermentation space, which in a perfect world, if everything turned in two, two and a half weeks, roughly 5500 barrels would be our capacity right now. Of course, we make lagers, which slows things down.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah.

Ellen Joyner: Yeah. We've grown ... Between year one and year two, not a ton of growth, but then we really started to grow after that.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. In terms of staff, how has the staff and staff responsibilities changed and grown over time?

Ellen Joyner: Greatly. One, adding more sales people to cover more geography. Drivers because we're a self distributing brewery. We have basically two drivers. We've had to buy vehicles to go on the road. We started out with Bessie, our 1989 Isuzu box truck. We bought her because she had a lift gate. Now 00:16:00she's parked across the street in the field. She's out in the pasture. Then we bought vans. A little more economical.

Ellen Joyner: Sales people, staff, brewery staff. When we first opened the taproom, it was us working it and our friends. Very quickly, we were getting worn out because for the first six months that we were open, I was still working my corporate job. So I'd leave the corporate job and come here and work until midnight and weekends. It took its toll, so we quickly realized we're legit, we need professional bartenders and people that are going to be in here. Then found it was time to take on and get a general manager for the taproom, and had the right candidate and have never looked back. He's just been fabulous working for us.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. Did you carry over any of your home brew recipes-

Ellen Joyner: No.

Erin Lawrimore: ... when you went into commercial?

Ellen Joyner: No.

Erin Lawrimore: You ditched all of them?

Ellen Joyner: Ditched all of them.

Erin Lawrimore: Are any of the beers that you guys are producing now legacy beers from when you opened, or have you-

Ellen Joyner: No.

Erin Lawrimore: ... kind of changed a lot?

Ellen Joyner: Everything has changed. Everything has changed. One of the things that I see that people do is you open, and your first six months of brewing, your beer hopefully is good, but it gets better. The brewer's trying to learn the system. It's like getting a brand new gas grill, and the first time you go to use it, that steak is going to probably be a little overcooked or undercooked because you're just not used to how it works. The brewers that have worked for us have gotten progressively better as time has gone by. We've learned the system, and then we've had to adapt to the market changing and the taste of what people are wanting. Five years ago, there wasn't a lot of fruit in beer, and now everywhere you look, there's fruit in beer. There's different styles of IPAs. 00:18:00Yeah, nothing has carried over.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. As somebody who used to home brew, you mentioned a couple of kind of trendy or style pieces. Are there particular beer trends today that you're a big fan of, or even that you aren't a big fan of?

Ellen Joyner: I love a sour. We don't do any here for they need to be in a separate facility. The fruit beers, some of them I love and some of them are too sweet for me. Then I love an IPA, and pretty much all IPAs I love. I prefer my IPA not to be totally in your face with hops. Some people really want that. I like mine to be a little bit rounder, a little bit more balanced with the malt, so I like a better mouth feel with my IPAs, and then really getting your IPA 00:19:00from the late addition hops in the dry hopping to get the aromas and flavors-

Erin Lawrimore: Right.

Ellen Joyner: ... more so than the bitterness.

Erin Lawrimore: Right. I guess also thinking back on outside of Bombshell, but in the region, can you talk a little bit about how the triangle beer scene has changed since you guys opened?

Ellen Joyner: Yeah. A new brewery opens about every day. There's one opening while we talk, I'm sure. The consumer ... I think that the age group of people drinking craft beer is a lot lower, younger than when I was coming through because when I graduated from college, I just didn't have money and we were still drinking, "What can I buy a case for $10 for?" Now you're finding college kids that are drinking craft beer, so that has changed.

Ellen Joyner: Obviously, there is a lot more breweries, so the competition has 00:20:00gotten harder. The consumer is always about what's new. You don't find them going for their staple. Everybody used to always say, "This is what I drink every weekend. I might venture a little bit and try something, but for the most part, I always keep the same thing in the refrigerator." The craft brewer doesn't do that, or the craft drinker doesn't do that. I think that you can see that for the fact that you can buy singles now and mix and make your own six packs and 12 packs as you will.

Erin Lawrimore: Right. Here at Bombshell, do you have a beer that you consider to be the flagship beer?

Ellen Joyner: Our Head Over Hops IPA is our flagship. It is our biggest seller. H Town lager is probably our second biggest seller. It's two different drinkers, right? You've got your lager, "I don't want any hops", and then you've got your hoppier beer. Those are our two biggest sellers that we have here all year.

Ellen Joyner: We make such a variety of beers now. We make lot of one-offs. We 00:21:00make them one time, and then if they catch on, we keep them in the portfolio or we'll bring them back periodically. Then if they don't, then, they go on and the next one comes about.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. I'm sure there isn't one, but can you talk a little bit about maybe a typical week here in the brewery for you, from your perspective?

Ellen Joyner: Yeah. Typically, because I do most of the bookkeeping, I was doing all of it, and we've just recently hired somebody to take some of that off, so it's usually doing the bookkeeping, checking with orders, production orders. Monday mornings start out with a production meeting. That's the very first thing that happens every Monday morning is a production meeting so that sales knows what's going on and when beers are going to come out and then everybody's on the same page. Then we discuss what new beers we need to make or what needs to get back in tank because it's selling really well.

Ellen Joyner: Then it's problem solving. "Oh, we're out of CO2 gas, or it's getting low. Make a phone call." CO2 People are supposed to always be here, but they don't. Or it's, "This is broke. Get this done." It's keeping up with your daily receipts, all of your bookkeeping, your orders, answering the phone calls, people wanting product. It's answering to the employees that need help with something, making sure that we have all of our supplies, ordering of brewing materials. Most of the brewing materials, the brewer orders his own grain. We don't have to do that, but if he needs hops, then I'm trying to locate hops for him. Just kind of laying out the production schedule to make sure that we have all of the supplies when we need them without bringing too much in at a time.

Erin Lawrimore: Right. Can you talk about some of the biggest challenges that 00:23:00you feel like you faced in opening the brewery-

Ellen Joyner: The biggest challenges.

Erin Lawrimore: ... and growing the brewery too?

Ellen Joyner: One is knowing when you need another human because it's that cart before the horse type thing, where you really need the help, but the revenue isn't quite there to support it. So you end up asking a little bit more of your current employees to generate that little bit of extra dollars so then you can afford to go and hire somebody. Then you gotta wait for that to kind of pay off and turn off. I think that every entrepreneur will tell you that is a huge struggle of when to put the next person on staff.

Ellen Joyner: The other thing is affordability of certain things. We want to be able to offer our staff so many things like 401Ks and various things, but it's expensive. Trying to get to that point that we can provide those, those are big challenges.

Ellen Joyner: Making sure that every customer that comes in here has a good experience, and addressing customers when they do have complaints, which isn't very often, but occasionally you do. You need to jump on it right away and not let it fester and solve for that.

Ellen Joyner: And things breaking. I always joke with my brewer that I need to start writing a blog about the day in the life of a brewery owner because there's always something that's unexpected, that goes wrong that you weren't counting on. Some days you just feel like, "Oh my god! It's been three weeks of nothing but a gray cloud over top of our heads." Then you'll go weeks and everything is wonderful, and you're like, "Oh yes! We're finally cruising." Then the van breaks down and it's a $2,000 expense, and, "Oh boy. We need the van. How are we going to make our deliveries? Well, who has a vehicle?" It's those challenges all the time.

Ellen Joyner: You start to laugh sometimes. You have to because something breaks. I've learned how to fix boilers, repair site glasses, how to restart my chiller because the breaker trips. There's certain things you just learn, "Oh I know what's gone wrong." You get in there and you do it. Our keg washer broke. I got a phone call from my brewer and he said, "The keg washer's not drawing up sanitizer. What do I do?" I said, "Check valve." I come in here and replace the check valve. Yeah, I've had to learn to do a lot of mechanical things that I never thought I would have done.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. So looking back at your hopes and dreams when you guys first opened to today, are there things that kind of really surprise you now, things that you never would have anticipated five, 10 years ago, even when you were first home brewing?

Ellen Joyner: Yeah. There's definitely things that surprise me. One, how many 00:26:00people know who I am, but I don't remember their names always. I think just the amount ... I never thought we would have as many employees as we have. When we were writing out the business plan or I was home brewing, when we knew we were going to open this, I think we always thought we could do it with three or four people, and you can't. I think that aspect surprised me at how much labor it actually takes to make things work.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. One of the trends that we often see with breweries, and you kind of mentioned this earlier, is a focus on the community and giving back to the community. Can you talk a little bit about some of the work that you guys do here?

Ellen Joyner: Sure, sure. We do a lot of fundraisers. There's so many people 00:27:00that need help these days, and so many charities that are looking for avenues to generate and raise money for their charities. We have a venue here, and so we offer it up. We've always done periodic different charity events that were maybe once every quarter or once every other month, but now we have established first Fridays and third Fridays, where we're raising money for charity. We still do a Saturday here or something else for another charity. We just want to be part of the community. It drives also new people here that come out to support that charity who might not have known about us, so it opens doors for more customers and people to enjoy our product and feel like they're also supporting the charity, so that's ... We really feel very compelled to help out in the 00:28:00community and be one of those avenues.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. Thinking forward, where would you like to see Bombshell go in the next five to 10 years? What are your goals for the business?

Ellen Joyner: One is to expand ... One, we're outgrowing our location, so we know we have to do something different as far as the location goes. We're in the process now of figuring out what that's going to be. We have a few months to make that decision. We definitely want to be able to provide a bigger venue for people, and as well as expand further geography wise with our beer in the state. When we first started out, we wanted to be a regional brewery. That was our goal to be a regional brewery, and regional breweries now are actually falling in sales. Everything has become so hyper local that you can actually do really well 00:29:00just staying local, so I don't think our dream anymore is to necessarily cross state lines. It may happen in five or six years, but I would say in five years we'd want to have pretty much statewide coverage of the beer.

Ellen Joyner: Then start you know to build a place for either relatives to take over and us retire. Not retire in five years, we're far from that, but ultimately, I don't want to have to return to corporate America.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. Following up on one thing you mentioned just now, you were talking about statewide distribution, can you talk a little bit about your distribution path now and kind of how you got to the point of where we are today?

Ellen Joyner: Sure. We originally obviously start as center and close to your brewery, and you just start expanding out. What we did is we looked at the triangle first. Then we ventured to Durham and Chapel Hill. Then we needed to 00:30:00expand further, so you start looking at how easy access and where the people are. We naturally went west first towards Greensboro and Winston-Salem. That way, we could stick on the 40/85 corridor, and there is just so much opportunity there.

Ellen Joyner: It's definitely more challenging to sell the further away you get from the brewery because it's just the notoriety, and there's so many more breweries in those areas as well. If there wasn't any breweries in Greensboro and Winston-Salem, then they probably wouldn't be so difficult.

Ellen Joyner: The next step that we're looking at is to go to the beach. We're slightly doing Greenville. We've done we've done bits and pieces in Greenville, but not enough business there to justify a full time sales person or running of a vehicle down there. We are looking at the extreme parts of the states, and 00:31:00with that, whether or not we're going to self-distribute or whether we're going to pick up a distributor. That's kind of on the table right now as far as where we're expanding.

Ellen Joyner: Yeah. You start central. That's where you can get to the fastest. For the first ... We were delivering off of Bessie ... We didn't even have her for five months, so we were delivering in our personal cars for the first five months, and then Bessie would come. Then we were still delivering with our personal cars, and even to this day, every once in a while if a vehicle's in the shop, we do that.

Ellen Joyner: We're doing a little bit in Fayetteville, but there's a lot of opportunity down there, and that's not but an hour away. Really, that's how we're kind of expanding. Where can we get to the easiest and that there's enough business to justify sending a driver down there with enough orders to cover your cost?

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. Right now kind of in terms of, I guess, percentage of sales, taproom versus canning versus other distribution, how would you say that 00:32:00balances out?

Ellen Joyner: We definitely do more wholesale business than taproom business. It's about a 65/35 split, 35% taproom right now.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. One of the things that Michelle mentioned earlier when we were talking to her was an interest in self-canning, that you guys were going to start looking at that. Can you talk a little bit about the decision to do that?

Ellen Joyner: We've been using a mobile canner. The great thing about the mobile canners is that when you're first starting to try and get store placements, you don't get them all. They're not just there the day you say, "I have cans." You have to work to get store placements, and then you have to prove that you can sell the beer through their stores in order to get more and more shelf space.

Ellen Joyner: You can't afford a canning line, you can't you just can't justify it until you reach a certain point. It's much cheaper to have a mobile canner. 00:33:00We finally reached the volume where the mobile canner was starting to be not cost effective, not timely for us because beer was having to sit longer than it needed to in order to schedule a date with a mobile canner. Mobile canners, because for them to show up, you had to do a certain amount of volume or the price was prohibitive. So a lot of the one-off beers, we just couldn't justify, "I'm only going to can nine barrels" because the mobile canner didn't want to show up for nine barrels. We would have to get two or three beers in process and then can them all at the same time in order to justify the cost.

Ellen Joyner: We finally hit that volume level where it said we were hurting ourselves. The mobile canner is expensive. Beer is sitting around longer than it needs to. It needs to keep moving, and we're getting bottlenecks because of the mobile canner. We just recently purchased a canning line, and we're just waiting 00:34:00for it to show up.

Erin Lawrimore: Yay. One of the things that we haven't mentioned in this interview yet, but Bombshell is a 100% woman-owned business, which is not commonly found-

Ellen Joyner: Nope.

Erin Lawrimore: ... in the beer industry. Can you talk a little bit about being a woman-owned business and the importance of that to you?

Ellen Joyner: Sure. Yeah, you're right. I think when we first started, when that very first craft brewers conference that we went to, they said like 2% of the brewing industry was females. It's higher than that now, and women definitely have become more of a craft drinker as well, and so they're wanting to be in the craft beer industry.

Ellen Joyner: There's goods and bads of it. I think there's certain things that women are just more apt to do. When we were building the taproom, we had the woman touch on it. We wanted it to not just be in the corner of a warehouse with a bunch of picnic tables and slap some stuff on the walls. We actually took some 00:35:00real thought into putting a design to it, making it a nice space that people wanted to hang out into because it's about length of stay.Then I think there's certain levels of details that we as women, our brains are a little bit more programmed into, perhaps a little bit more customer insight about building that customer experience. Plus our corporate backgrounds being on customer service side of things built that.

Ellen Joyner: Then there's been challenges. Physically, it's hard for me to lift the 50 pound grain bag, or the 55 pounds. They're almost all 55 pounds. There's certain things that ... I can't lift half a barrel keg. I can't do it without help. A guy can certainly do that.

Ellen Joyner: From an aspect of getting along and other people helping, we've just had wonderful help when we've needed it with other breweries that have been 00:36:00over in a heartbeat. We had ... Last fall, we heard this big bang, actually my brewer's wife. They were eating lunch in the back on a Saturday, because he's not normally here on Saturdays, and they heard this big thunder and realized it was coming from the cooler. A big ice block had built up in the fan unit and fallen and water was gushing out everywhere.

Ellen Joyner: Immediately, it was like, "Oh my god! What do we do?" I texted one of the guys at Carolina Brewing, and within five minutes, he was walking in the door. This was on a Saturday. He happened to be right around here at the Food Lion, and so he came over. Everybody jumped in, trying to solve the problem. We ended up finding out what was going on. We got it fixed. Then on Monday, the repairman showed up and added a little device so that the unit would cut off one hour every night. Those are little things that you don't think about, that if 00:37:00it's not properly draining, it's going to build up ice.

Ellen Joyner: So I think there's goods and bads of being the female. You have to look at it as the positives. As Michelle used to say, "Not everybody has to have a beard to brew beer."

Erin Lawrimore: So if a woman walked through the door right now and said she wanted to open a brewery, what would you tell her? What advice or cautions would you give her?

Ellen Joyner: I hate to discourage anybody. It's a lot more work than you ever will dream that it's going to be, a lot more work, and a lot of sleepless nights. It takes way more money than you thought it was going to take. But if that's really your passion, you'll be successful.

Ellen Joyner: Be very critical of yourself as well. I think we're our worst 00:38:00critics. "This beer is good, but it ain't the best. Let's improve on the recipe." I think you have to be able to take that approach and listen to feedback. Most people won't tell you to your face that something's not good. They just don't return.

Ellen Joyner: So yeah, to the female, if it's your passion, then go for it. But find the right location, find the right team of people to work for you, and have fun.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. So we talked a little bit about where you wanted to see Bombshell go over the next five years, but thinking kind of broader, like the North Carolina or even the beer industry as a whole, where do you see the industry going over the next five or 10 years?

Ellen Joyner: I think for a while it's going to stay even more and more local. It's going to become more crucial for people to stay local as far as the 00:39:00breweries go, because what I'm seeing is the big guys are buying up some of the craft brewers. They're putting the squeeze on the corporate accounts, because we're feeling it, because they're losing shelf space.

Ellen Joyner: The other thing that I see is going to happen is just the cost of things are going up. I think this is going to be a real challenge because the big guys, the big dogs have the resources to drive prices down and can afford to take lower margins than the smaller brewers. It wouldn't surprise me in the next couple years if everything on the shelf from a local craft brewer goes up by $1. Where you're used to paying a $9.99 price point, that it's going to become a $10.99 price point. Ingredients are going up, and the more brewers that come in, the demand for hops and grain is growing, and so those prices are going up.

Ellen Joyner: I think it's it's gonna be a challenge. If you don't try and 00:40:00capitalize on your local market and your taproom sales, distribution is just going to get harder because the grocery stores are catering to the big guys because they're offering better pricing, they're offering deals, and kind of trying to squeeze the little guy out. You really have to look at your model and how do you become a destination within your own community to where you're just like the restaurant that they go to every week. You need to become that craft brewer that they go to every week.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. Now we hit on kind of the fun questions at the end. What's your favorite beer from Bombshell?

Ellen Joyner: It varies by week. It really does because your tastes change on a weekly basis, so some weeks ... I love Lady in Red. We're getting ready to come out with our Oktoberfest, and I love, love our Oktoberfest. I drink our Head 00:41:00Over Hops a lot. It's off tap right now due to one of those unfortunate incidences. I love our IPA of the month program. We've really produced some really, really tasty IPAs. Some days I love to drink H Town lager. I can't say that I have a favorite.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. To follow up on the one thing you just said there, can you talk a bit about the IPA of the month project?

Ellen Joyner: Sure, sure. The IPA of the month program, when we were sitting down first of the year, we were like, "We got to come up with something to hook people and get them to be a repeat buyer every month." IPAs just sell well in North Carolina. Devin was wanting to try some different things with some experimental hops or some lesser known hops. Citra's huge, but at one point, citra was not a big hop until it got discovered. We wanted to play with, "What 00:42:00can we do with some different hops that people aren't familiar with and see what they turn out like?"

Ellen Joyner: So we created this IPA of the month, where we would use a unique or a different hop and do a different style IPA. Sometimes we do New England styles. Sometimes we do a fruitier IPA. Sometimes we do just a regular IPA, or a white IPA, or a red IPA. Every month, it's different. It's pre sold out for the entire year. We're trying to figure out what we're going to do next year, but that's what the IPA the month program is, is getting people to try a different IPA every month.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. Well this question's probably going to be even more difficult than that, than the one about your favorite beer here. Do you have a favorite beer from a North Carolina brewery other than Bombshell?

Ellen Joyner: Oh, boy. God, I never get out to drink anymore. My go-to staple has always been Sierra Pale Ale. That was what I called my Bud Light, meaning 00:43:00that's what I would always have in my refrigerator. I'd always pick that up, and I still every once in a while will go back and just say, "I don't want a Bombshell. Give me a Sierra Pale Ale."

Ellen Joyner: I try different things. I'm kind of like that same consumer that says, "What's new?" If it sounds interesting, then I'm going to try it, but I can't say that there's anything that I always have in my refrigerator or that I'm always going out and seeking that's from North Carolina. There's so many great breweries here. There's some really, really good local breweries, and I will always pick them when I go someplace over anybody else. Yeah.

Erin Lawrimore: Yeah. You probably don't have a ton of free time.

Ellen Joyner: No.

Erin Lawrimore: But when you're not here, when you're not working, what are some of your favorite things to do? How do you like to spend your free time?

Ellen Joyner: Sleep. I used to golf, and I still every once in a while get out and play golf. I hope to one day get back to playing on a regular basis. I like 00:44:00to do some photography things. I haven't done a ton of that as I used to. You'd always find me with the camera everywhere. I made a calendar for all of our friends every Christmas of the previous year and what was going on. I do a little bit of gardening and that's ... Play with my dog, and spend time with my niece and nephew.

Erin Lawrimore: Yep. So that's pretty much the end of the prepared questions that I have. Is there anything we didn't talk about that you would want to have as part of the bigger overall story?

Ellen Joyner: No. I think we're good.

Erin Lawrimore: Okay. Awesome.

Ellen Joyner: Thank you very much.

Erin Lawrimore: Sure.

Ellen Joyner: Thank you.