Oral history interview with Nicole Preyer, 2018

EL: Can we start by having you say and spell your name?

NP: Yes I'm Nicole Preyer. N-I-C-O-L-E P-R-E-Y-E-R.

EL: Wonderful. Today is August the 28th and we are at Preyer Brewing Company in Greensboro, North Carolina talking to Nicole Preyer for the Well Crafted NC Project. Nicole, can you start by just telling us a little bit about yourself. Your background, where you're from, and what path led you here.

NP: Yeah. I was born and raised in Greensboro. I never imagined that I'd be getting into the beer industry. I had intended to be an archaeologist. I got a history degree for my undergraduate, started dating a guy who just really had a fancy for craft beer and said "I want to open a craft brewery." I thought 00:01:00"That's great buddy. We'll see where this goes." Well, it went somewhere really cool. It kept going and we kept working on it for about a decade. I finished up a master's, he finished up a degree in brewing and we thought "Let's do this!" And so, we got together with some other members in the family who were interested and we opened a brewery here.

EL: We were talking before we started filming about your educational background and how it ties into what you do here. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

NP: I knew getting into opening your own business, that that can be really risky. Looking at us planing out our family and our future, we knew that we needed a back up plan as well. So, I completed a masters in public administration, which is kind of like business school for bureaucrats. It teaches you a lot about how to run large organizations; management, leadership, accounting, all of those different things that you need.

NP: But, it teaches you how to do that from a perspective of profit is not 00:02:00necessarily the first motive. That's my business school for bureaucrats joke. It's actually turned out to be a really handy degree, not only because it means that I have a lot of job opportunities if I need to move on from the brewing industry, but brewing is a really highly regulated industry. We're regulated and a federal, state and local level.

NP: It's industrial manufacturing, but often in a downtown location, so you're dealing with zoning, you're dealing with taxes, you're dealing with North Carolina ABC, so my degree helping me learn about how bureaucracy works and how to achieve things within that framework has been really helpful to running our business to.

EL: Let's talk about the decision to open the brewery. You talked about your husband getting a brewing degree, but I would assume that it even backs up further than that. Where did the spark first come from?

NP: The spark definitely started with him. He did some travel abroad and was really intrigued by the local beer scene in the Czech Republic. Beer was really 00:03:00fresh, it was really different from what he was used to experiencing in the United States. The craft beer revolution was really just starting its second wave. I don't think he had much experience with a local craft brewery.

NP: So, he came back to the US, got really into local and craft beer in general and wanted to start learning how to make his own beer so he did. He started home brewing and then figured that, "Hey, I'd love to open a brewery one day, but even if I don't run my own place, I'd really like to be in this industry." That's what led him to seek out a degree from the Siebel Institute, and then from there evaluated whether or not it would be possible for us and we figured we would give it a good college try.

EL: You talked a little bit about your previous degree and some of the benefits that came from that. Can you talk a little bit more about how you specifically 00:04:00see that degree applying to opening the brewery. You touched on it, but let talk a little bit more about it.

NP: Opening a brewery is pretty grueling. You have a lot of regulations on the manufacture of alcohol. You have to get approved by the federal government, you get your brewers notice from the TTB, which is a federal agency that oversees alcohol production in the US. In order to get that, you have to submit your floor plans, your location, your diagrams. You have to have certain things locked up at all times.

NP: If your alcohol is ever stolen, you're considered guilty before innocent. You have to prove your innocence. If someone broke into our walk-in, we'd have to prove that it was a break-in, you're no innocent until proven guilty. So, you have to jump through those federal loopholes which require your space essentially being built and having plans for it already. Then you can get your 00:05:00ABC permit.

NP: North Carolina relies on the federal government having already approved you to make alcohol, and then that ABC permit is required for a few local permits. It's kind of like this really insane, orchestrated dance of, I have to have this done with construction first and then I can do this on a federal level, then I can come back and do this locally, then I can go back to the state. You're just constantly trying to figure out what's next on the path of trying to get open.

EL: During that process of opening, and even since you have, are there particular resources that you guys have leaned on to help along the way?

NP: Yeah. Other brewers in your state and in your city are really helpful because they know the specific state or city regulations and they know how those will interact with the local level. Sorry, with the federal level. Some places I imagine that you could go ahead and get your state permit before you maybe got 00:06:00your federal permit, I don't know. Some states are really relaxed on their alcohol laws. North Carolina is fairly high regulated.

NP: We also used the North Carolina Brewers Guild. It had some information out and since we opened, they have just continued to expand what they offer. I always recommend to people who are interested to get to the North Carolina Brewers Guild, become a member. They have a lot of information and can help you through that, or can help you with an alcohol consultant. We did not use one, but alcohol-specific attorneys and alcohol business consultants can really help you get through those loop holes.

NP: I think it was easier for us because it was our job to open. We were not working also a full-time job at the same time. We had our part-time jobs and that was able to help us live and cover our expenses, but if I had a full-time nine to five, it would not have been possible for me to figure out how to navigate on my own.

EL: Let's talk a little bit more about that opening. When did you first start 00:07:00the process of opening, versus when were you actually able to open?

NP: I think it was the fall; summer, fall of 2014. The real estate search took about a year. I'm not even including when that was not really formal. We started nailing down our location and started working with architects on coming up with the plans, which would allow us to start some of your permitting processes for the alcohol production. And then, actually getting together with a contractor and starting to open was probably like early fall 2014, and then May 2015 is when we opened.

EL: Were there any issues that you guys encountered or; we'll say challenges instead of issues that you guys encountered in those early years? You know, the Greensboro beer scene, that's about how old it is with the exception of Natty's as a brew pub.

NP: Yes and know. It's a really difficult process to open a brewery. We have a 00:08:00lot of people that are like, "Oh, I'd love to open a brewery one day. Let me do this." You meet two groups of people in that category. You meet people who are like, yeah, you've got this, you've thought deeply about it, you know how hard this might be. And then the people who are just like, "I'm going to open a brewery one day," and I'm like, "That's great. That's not really going to happen."

NP: Because, its like running a marathon before you start your next marathon because when you open your doors, it gets even harder. I think opening a brewery even though it's difficult is a good test of how well you're going to do in the future. It's not an easy type of business to run.

NP: But specifically locally, we did not really have any problems with our zoning board, with inspection, with anything like that. The city of Greensboro was really nice to work with, I think because they saw it as something that they wanted the city to allow to have growth. They knew that it was going to become a 00:09:00bigger thing here. WE're a great tournament town. You have to offer things to people to do.

NP: If you want tourists to come to your place and stay engaged in Greensboro, if you want young people to stay here and try and find jobs here instead of leaving for Raleigh, Charlotte or other big cities, you've got to have interesting night life for them and I think they were really on board with that.

EL: The space where you guys ended up, it's kind of on the edge of downtown. Can you talk a little bit more about where we are, but also how you found the space and the process of getting it to where it is today?

NP: Yes. We looked allover. We did not look in just downtown Greensboro, but we looked all over here in Greensboro. Myself, I was born and raised here. My husband and his two brothers were born and raised here. We're definitely a Greensboro family so there was never any question that we would open somewhere else other than here. But, we did look all over and weigh the pros and cons of opening up in a more industrial setting, like maybe out by the airport. You're 00:10:00going to rely a lot heavier on wholesale to make your money.

NP: Opening up downtown, you're going to run much more of a tap room and we thought that was really intriguing. We really liked the idea of having a really nice, inviting space that was full and popular. So, we sort of through our real estate search narrowed being in the downtown area and we looked at a lot of properties. Honestly, it was just the one that fit our needs.

NP: You're looking to open downtown, but you can't use any old space. You need high ceilings, you need weight-bearing floors, you need floors that can be renovated. Our brewery floor is covered in coatings that can handle straight acid poured on them. You can't really do that ... Not every owner of a space was interested in leasing to someone who needed significant renovations that are fairly specific.

NP: We have a lot of specific plumbing installed, specific drain types, specific things on the roof that have penetrations through a flat roof and if you move from being a brewery to someone else, all of that work that you did is lost and you have to pay to have that fixed up for the next tenant. This space we thought 00:11:00had a good mix of being downtown, our landlord was really open to the idea of it being a brewery and it fit the bill as far as ceiling height.

NP: We have a big warehouse out back. We kind of knew when we got here that it was just going to be a perfect location for us. I can't say that being on the edge of downtown was really a factor for us. We would've been fine with this building in downtown, downtown if it was there, but it was more that this seemed great and we landed here.

EL: Since you guys opened, very specific that this area has changed a lot.

NP: Yeah, and I think it will be even more. We've heard rumblings of a few of the buildings around here may be going up for dale or may be going up for lease for a different tenant. I think that this is pretty prime to become the next zone downtown. If you think about South End, it's really coming to its own and it's and awesome place to be. It's a great place to be at night, it's a fun place and I think that we're next for that.

EL: Let's talk a little bit about, I guess that Greensboro beer scene as a whole. Having grown up here, you've seen lots of changes. But even since you guys have opened, there's been a massive explosion all around. Can you talk a little bit about the changes that you've seen?

NP: Yeah. I think that people, it a lot for them to think of a tap room as a place to go, or a brewery as a thing to go see or a thing to go try and do. Once that culture starts to take hold, I think people are really into it. That scene is huge in Raleigh and Charlotte. It's huge in Asheville and I think that we were on the cusp of that starting in Greensboro.

NP: Gibb's had just opened about a year before us, then we opened, then I believe Joymongers, then Little Brother, then Leveneleven. We know of a few others that are in planning, I think some more seriously than others. I would say that we're probably due for at least another handful of new breweries. So, 00:13:00it gets easier and harder as a brewery to see that scene grow. It's great because it's very much an industry where rising water floats all boats.

NP: We will become more of a place where if someone's driving from Winston-Salem to go to the beach, they might stop in Greensboro and try a few of the different breweries, pick up a 6-pack and take it to the beach with them. People who come here for tournaments or conferences will know that that's just an additional thing that they can do and they can come and try a few of the breweries, so that's great. You need more than just a handful to have it be a thing that people do in your area.

NP: But, it does become more competition with your regular Greensboro locals. They have more and more options and you really have to step up your game in terms of quality, thinking about what people are looking for, thinking about what kind of programming you might want to have in your tap room because you're not just making beer, you're making an experience for people. You've really got to be on your A-game the more and more breweries that open.

EL: Talking about community, you guys do an awful lot of community events. Can 00:14:00you talk a little bit about what you do, but also the importance of doing it?

NP: Yeah, I'll start with the importance. We think that it's really important to engage the community not only because that makes really good businesses, but because beer is one of the ways that humanity started. Coming back to my interest in archaeology, archaeologists love to fight about whether people settled down to make fields of grain for bread of for beer. I think the answer is pretty obvious there, that it was obvious for beer.

NP: There's this idea that humanity and that cities and civilization really started to make beer. Whether it was beer or bread, beers were made a really central part of a lot of different communities throughout time. I think that tap rooms today operate as what we like to think of as a third space, and I don't know if I'm getting that term quite right. But, they're a place that's not your home and it's not your office.

NP: It's a place where you can go and make new friends or hang our with new 00:15:00friends or old friends, but you're not having to clean you're house, you're not having to have someone over who you might not be ready to take that step yet. It's a safe but familiar and comforting place where you can see and hang out with people and bee in the public eye without feeling like you're a a baseball game or there's a ton of people around you. You're kind of in your home away from home, and that's really important to us.

NP: People identify third spaces as stoops, front stoops, inexpensive coffee shops, bars, things like that and we really like to embrace that role here and think of our tap room as that. We do a lot of charitable giving, and that's just to engage our community and make it a better place.

NP: But here, in the tap room specifically, we like to offer ... We do live music frequently, we do a lot of different classes. I like to offer art classes. I do terrariums on tap from time to time where we build a terrarium. We do painting nights, things like that, but we also do a lot of giving back in our 00:16:00tap room. We have an event coming up at the end of September I'm really excited about with the Greensboro Symphony.

NP: They are going to start a concerts series here in our tap room. I'm really excited. We're going to move some of the furniture, they're going to have seats set up, it's the real deal. We're selling tickets to it and I'm really excited to work with the symphony. It's not only a really great night for us as a business, but the symphony gets to engage in younger clientele and let people realize that classical music is not just for old people or musicians, it's for everyone and it's really interesting and engaging.

NP: So, they get to engage in younger clientele that we bring to the table and they bring to the table the awesomeness that it music in that community and they bring new people to our doors. We're just really excited about that. We love working with other community partners to create things like that.

EL: Honestly I will say, I think one of my favorite events that you guys do is the bake-off.

NP: I completely forgot about that, oh my God.

EL: I think it's become a go-to event. Can you talk a little bit about where 00:17:00that event came from and how it's grown?

NP: Yeah, the great part of bake-off ... I can't believe I forgot that. It's one of my favorite things that we do, and that was the idea of our previous tap room manager Jess, who was just awesome. A light in the darkness. An amazing persona and an amazing soul. Shortly before she left, she came up with this idea of, "Hey, you really like The Great British Baking Show. People love to eat baked goods, especially when they've had a few beers. What if we did something like a contest, we then sold the baked goods but all of that money went to a local charity?"

NP: We started with a Christmas cookie swap or a holiday cookie swap. We try to be pretty secular here in the tap room, and had bakers just knock our socks off. It was amazing the quality of things that people brought to the table. We were expecting your grandma's Christmas cookies and oh my gosh, people went above and beyond. They looked amazing and they taste amazing and I get to sit there and judge. I get to eat like 30 cookies in a day and judge them.

NP: We have professional judges come as well. Our last round was hand pies, and we had Brittany McGee of The Humble Bee Shoppe in Winston. It's an amazing bakery. We had Nikki Miller-Ka who is a local food blogger and food critic. We had Lydia, her last name escapes me. She was the previous pastry chef at LaRue. They came and offered really awesome feedback to the bakers. They all get to take their score sheets home, learn and do better next time.

NP: Then we sell the pies, or the cookies, or we have candy coming up in October to the public. They get to take those home and all of that money goes to a local charity. We've done Urban Ministries and we've done BackPack Beginnings. It's just really awesome. It's a different crowd of people that come out. People love buying those things and feeling like they can give away those cookies to a friend or neighbor. It's become this really awesome thing.

EL: This may tie into what you were just talking about but for you, how would you personally define the mission of Preyer Brewing?

NP: That's really hard. We've talked a lot internally about how you have these ideas, you're opening this business, you've got these goals for it, but if you're really engaging your customers in the community, you're not entirely in charge of that goal. It becomes something where you get feedback and if you're a shrewd community builder, if you're a shrewd business person, you realize that you've also got to provide what the people want.

NP: We did a few really weird beers that we didn't think would be very popular, but we really liked that stuff because we get to try so many crap beers and thought, there's like 6,000 breweries in America, what can you do that's new or different? We played around with a few of those with test badges and it was insane, people loved it. Then we hit our fist October open.

NP: We love Halloween, I love candy. I mean, I love eating, I love candy. Our tap room manager at the time said, "What if we did some candy-infused beers?" We 00:20:00did, I made up some rims for a sour patch beer, for a mixed citric acid, Jello-O powder and coarse sugar. Played around with that and made ... It looks pastel, but when you use lime just on the glass rim and then dip it into it, it turns into this bright Jell-O bright color. It just looks really appealing and it tastes like a Sour Patch Kid.

NP: People went insane for it and that really made us realize that people are in the craft beer industry. Your consumers are looking something new, especially in the tap room. Your wholesale in a grocery store is really different than what you're providing in the tap room, but I oversee the tap room and enjoy that direction. We realized that people want beer to be fun.

NP: They want to feel a little reminded of their childhood, but adult at the same time so you're having some candy and beer and that's awesome. People like new things, they like to be impressed so we have just run with that. I think our mission now is that beer should be fun. There's no right way to beer. We get a 00:21:00lot of feedback on some of these stranger things that we do to of people just really hating on it.

NP: I'll point to our tap list and go, "Here's half of our tap list which is just a plain, basic crisp lager. Here's our amber ale, here's put West Coast style IPA with nothing in it. Why don't you try some of those, but we've also git just a few things that are really unique and fun." We really like to have fun with it. Our employees especially started to run with that and come to us with the best ideas.

NP: What's really fun is the business. We've got an internal chatter and sometimes late at night, people have had a few too many and they're like, "what if we did this?" Sometimes it's a no and sometimes it's yeah, definitely we're going to do that.

EL: You were talking a minimum ago about some of the candy flavored beers. I know you guys have done a ton of things with flavored rims and things like that for the glasses, but one of the beers that I think really stands out as unique 00:22:00is the Thai Shrimp Gose. Was it last year or two years ago?

NP: We released it commercially this year. The previous summer, so summer of 2017, we entered the first Triad Brewers Alliance contest competition with that beer. We were told to just enter a beer. It had to include cucumber. That was the mystery ingredient. Every brewer in the Triad Brewers Alliance competed and entered a blind submission. They all had cucumber and people were able to buy tickets to sample them all and then they voted.

NP: This raised money for the Triad Brewers Alliance. I have a really healthy or unhealthy sense of competition and was really into that. I really like our Goses and the variants that we make on them. They include seas salt in the beer and I am really intrigued by the different fermented foods from around the world that are salt-cured. I cook a lot of Chinese food, authentic from scratch Chinese food and I use salted dry shrimp in that sometimes.

NP: You chop it really fine and it's a seasoning on things. It's not like you're eating a whole salted dry shrimp and I said to Calder, "What if we did that as the salt replacement in a beer?" He was not convinced for a few months, and then this contest came along and I said, "You know what would be really good with cucumber? Salted dry shrimp," and he was like, "Fine," just thinking it was a throw away contest.

NP: So, we made a test batch with the salted dry shrimp. When we opened up our package and dumped it into the boil kettle, it kind of reconstituted the shrimp and we all were like, "Oh my God. What did we do? This is going to be terrible. It smells awful. We're going to have to trash this and fins something else to do." We let it ferment anyway, we may as well to see where it goes and we added some grapefruit to it. We pureed some grapefruit and it turned out really good.

NP: You get a really shrimpy, disgusting smell when you're boiling it. It is bad. It's really bad. No one wants to be in the brewery that day. But, it ferments out to a really lightly sweet, umami taste. So, you get that meat, 00:24:00umami sensation and flavor without adding tomato or beef or anything else to your beer. I think that that's a really interesting new flavor that brewers are going to seek to develop.

NP: We've done another beer, [inaudible 00:24:19], [inaudible 00:24:20] being another traditionally fermented food with salt that also added that umami and it's amazing. Gose is a really great base to play around with because it's a lightly tart version of a Saltine Cracker in beer form. Anything you can put on top of a saltine you can really try in a Gose. This year with the popularity of the Thai Shrimp last year ... It won.

NP: It won the inaugural contest for the Triad Brewers Alliance. We brought back a full production batch of it this summer. We canned it and we sold out really fast. We've definitely gotten some feedback on it was not awesome. Most of those people did not even try the beer. Pretty much everyone who came into the tap room and said, "shrimp beer, that's weird," when they tried it they were like, 00:25:00"Wow, that is really good."

NP: Some people couldn't taste the shrimp, some people pick it up at the end where you get that light, sweet shrimpiness, but yeah, that's been one of my favorite weird beers and weird beer stories.

EL: Let's talk about your role here at the brewery for a bit. This is probably going to be a really difficult question, but what is a typical day or week, whichever is easier, like for you around the brewery?

NP: It really depends. That is one of the things that it's hard for me. I'm a creature of routine and I do really well with planning and habit. And so, I'll come up with my to-do list for the day, then I'll get here and then something else will require my attention. Or, one of my team members that I needed to collaborate with to get something done wasn't ready that day, or they spring something on me and now I've suddenly got an extra hours worth of work that I wasn't expecting.

NP: But in a typical day, I wake up in the morning and right away check any of our sales numbers. I get reports sent to me about how the tap room did. I'm 00:26:00checking our numbers, our product mix, what sold well that night, what didn't, why? Our trivia night has a different product mix that I would expect on a Saturday, something like that. So, just checking in on that. I check my emails for anything that's an emergency email that might need to be gotten to right away.

NP: I wake up, move on with my morning. I have to get two kids out the door to preschool, which is always really fun. But it is nice in that that I don't have to be somewhere right at eight. I don't have to be at court at nine o'clock. I'm not an attorney, I'm not a doctor that's got to be there for my appointment. As long as I now have a meeting, I can be a little more lax. I get to work, sometimes I had meetings with either internal meetings or external meetings, filmings like this. Meeting with reporters, meeting with people who we're maybe setting up nonprofit events with, offsite concerts, things like that.

NP: I don't really enjoy meeting, so I hope to not have many. I try and schedule them all on the same day. I answer emails, try and get to a deeper triage of my 00:27:00inbox, and then I get to my to-do list, which might include coming down here to check the tap room and see how it's looking. I'm kind of the ... Our bartenders do a massive amount of cleaning at night and then I come in in the morning and make sure, like a hospitality manager for a hotel might come in and say, "This thing is to be straightened. This needs to be dusted. Let me refresh these flowers." Little things like that.

NP: Then I really get on with my real meat of the day. I do all of our legal compliance. Anything that we're working on within that realm, I might be working on that. That's usually email work. I do our social media, so I'm often taking pictures especially when the light is good or once the product is ready for releasing a can that day. It's a new can release and we're canning at that day, I have to wait for a can to be ready and then go take a picture of it. So, taking pictures, editing pictures, planning out our social media schedule and getting those posts either up or scheduled to go up later in the day.

NP: Then just a lot of random things, which is where I really struggle, things that I didn't know I was going to have to be doing that day. Fixing a foosball table, finding out, "Hey, we think this beer might be infected. Let's get a team down to the tap room and really do some formalized sampling of it. Someone tasted it last night and thought it was weird. Let's go down there and figure out what's wrong with it." It really depends.

EL: One of the things you mentioned just now was canning. You talked about the importance of the tap room, but you guys do a lot of distribution to. Can you talk a little bit about the decision to do both and the way you've grown that side of the business?

NP: We knew that we did not want to open a tap room only location. That would be a brewery that produces be on a much smaller scale for consumption almost exclusively in your tap room. We knew that we wanted to wholesale because we 00:29:00wanted to grow a business that would hopefully provide for our next generation. I have two kids, my brother-in-law has two children as well, two daughters.

NP: We have a long history, at least my husband's family of family businesses. On my side to, my family has businesses. We knew that we wanted to create something to pass down, and we just weren't sure if the tap room only model would really do that. It's become a stronger and stronger model since we opened, but that was what we were interested in. We wanted to spread at least over the state of North Carolina.

NP: As we've grown, we've been trying to grow our wholesale markets. We've really been growing them in Raleigh and Charlotte. We've got a few things under our cap, trying to grow it here in Greensboro. We actually just signed on with Caffey, which is a local distributor. We're really hoping to increase our reach in the Piedmont area, be much more available in grocery stores, much more available in bars and restaurants than we are now.

NP: It can be really difficult balancing those two though. We find in the tap 00:30:00room that people want really strange, unique beers. That's not going to sell in a grocery store. Harris Teeter does not want to pick up your Thai Shrimp Gose cans, but that bottle shop in Raleigh does. We really have found over the years that maintaining your beer portfolio, the variety of beers that you offer, and the timing of those releases is incredibly important. And, juggling having a busy tap room and also trying to have a great wholesale list can be really difficult sometimes. I'm looking forward to a few things we have in planning to help ease some of that tension sometimes.

EL: You guys, do you do your own canning? You do your own canning care on site?

NP: Yes. We used a mobile canner for a long time, Tap Hopper Tours opened up a Tap Hopper Canning. Mobile canning is incredibly popular, especially in North Carolina with the amount of breweries that we have. That's where someone owns a very, very nice professional, amazing level canner. They can run anywhere from half a million to a million dollars.

NP: They go super fast. They come, they set up their equipment, they can your 00:31:00beer and they're done. But we with our model, that doesn't work really well for us. When you're using a mobile canner, you've got to have a lot of beer all ready to go at once. We like to do really weird beers and we like to do small amounts of those. That didn't really work well with mobile canning.

NP: Our mobile canners were great at what they did, but that didn't work with our kind of portfolio model. We knew that we always wanted to have our own canning line to see those savings as far as canning, more expensive to pay someone to come do it for you, and to have more control over our kind of product. And also to be able to say, we're going to make this batch and we're only going to can three barrels of it whereas when you're canning with a mobile canner, you might be looking at can 10, 20, 30 barrels for a brewery of our scale of the same beer. That allowed us to do things like put Thai Shrimp Gose in a can.

EL: This is something that you've touched on a few times already, but I think it's actually a key piece of the prior story as a family business. Can you talk 00:32:00a little bit about the importance of the family to your business and vice versa?

NP: That's a hard question for us to answer because I can't really think of it any other way. It's not like we started as a family business, but have since grown to where we have a ton of employees who are not family members, or that we started as just a business and the family bought it and took it over. It's just sort of one in the same and I'd say it's the same for us having jobs here. This is my life and it feels like my life.

NP: I don't necessarily have a time when I clock in and clock out. I'm always working and I'm always representing our business. So, that's a tough question to answer. I think that one of the things that has been a real benefit to us as a family business is that you argue a lot, which sounds silly. Sierra in Nevada is a family owned and operated business and I think they've recently added to their marketing; family owned and operated and argued over.

NP: But, the really wonderful thing that comes out of that is that conflict is 00:33:00not bad if it comes to a good resolution and if it's not about feelings. If the conflict is about what beer to put in your portfolio next or what step to take as a business next, it can be really great to feel comfortable really, really advocating for your position and not wondering, "Am I going to get fired over this? Am I going to get judged over this? Are these people not going to talk to me in the future?"

NP: It adds a layer of really being able to go to bat for your ideas without having to worry about the fallout of that relationship. Again, as long as it's not about feelings and fighting about that. If it's really just, we're sticking to business and I've got this perspective on issue A and I've got an opposite perspective, as long as you can really keep it to the objective facts and argue about that, you can really go much deeper in exploring where you should move than I think a lot of businesses can where the people don't know each other as 00:34:00well, where they are concerned about how people are going to, you know, "How is this meeting going to end? How are we going to all walk away from this meeting and come back together."

NP: But when you've got a Thanksgiving dinner together the next week, there's no choice but to really fight for what you think is right, but also keep it nice and realize that at the end of the day, that family is more important and that if your business fails or if something terrible happens there, you've got to value the people that you're with.

NP: I think that also helps us value our tap room employees. I think it's cliche for someone who runs or owns a business to say that your employees are like family. We really try and be very labor-oriented in that we pay people a living wage. We try and really treat our employees very well. I've worked a lot of minimum wage throwaway jobs and you can really feel like you're just a throwaway employee. I think that being a family business has helped us realize that that security that I feel in my job, I don't want my employees to not feel that.

NP: I don't want them to feel like they can't come to me with an idea that maybe really upsets me or is just absolutely opposite of what I was thinking and not feel comfortable the voice that. I think that's where we get these really crazy beer ideas at two o'clock in the morning, or that's where we get a tap room manager who comes to us and says, "You guys, you really need to change the beer portfolio in this direction." That was a hard thing to hear, but then we end up moving in a really good direction. I think being a family business, that helps you realize that as a family, you need to value everyone's feelings and opinions and that that needs to extend to your employees as well.

EL: Looking back to four years ago versus today are there ... Thinking about your initial hopes and expectations when you first opened, are there big surprises that stand out for you or things that you just really didn't expect or anticipate?

NP: Yeah, it feels like a lifetime ago. When you're running a brewery on the model that we are, you run an industrial manufacturing plant, you run a business to consumer tap room, you run a business to business wholesale side. And then if you're self distributing, you're also running a distribution and logistics company. People like to think of craft beers as just this really fun thing to do, or beers and fun and it's got to be, it seems hard, but they don't really think very deeply about it.

NP: It's really difficult type of business to run. That's what I mean when I say it feels like our hopes and dreams to open a brewery feels like it's just difficult to even think about. I think in the same way that before someone has kids, they have this idea of what it's going to be like and then you have children and then it's just nothing. It's everything that you expected and it's nothing that you expected. It's the most amazing thing and also the hardest thing you've ever done. It's really similar to that. I think opening a business any business, but especially one that's really difficult to run.

NP: One of my hopes was to be available for my children, to have a job that let me also raise a family in the way that I wanted, and this has let me do that. I am able to pick them up from school and then work from home, or go work from home and my husband finishes up his day like we did last night. He came home, fed them dinner and got them to sleep while I came back to the tap room worked a private event.

NP: It's hard, you're working all the time. I'm never off work. But by the same token, I get to be at work more flexibly and more available to my kids. That was probably my biggest hope and dream and I would say that for the most part, I've been able to recognize and realize that.

EL: Well, thinking forward, what are your hopes and dreams for the future of Preyer?

NP: I would really like to see our business grow and our local wholesale, which 00:38:00we're pretty well positioned to do that at this point. I'm really excited that we're moving forward with Caffey as a local distributor. I would like to be able to find my beer out at places. My husband and I don't get to eat out very often with two young kids, so when we do it's kind of a production and we're working hard to get there right at 4:30 so that we're not disturbing other people.

NP: Are the kids upset today? Are we going to be able to make it happen today? Okay yeah, the stars have aligned, let's go out to eat. We get to Sticks and Stones and our beer just went off tap. We're always chasing our beer. It's a big joke. We can't find it at any restaurants. We know that we're selling a ton of restaurants and the ones that we're going to, it's just not there when we finally get there because craft beer in particular goes on and off.

NP: It used to be that you'd have a tap and it would always be that one beer and they'd put a new keg of that same beer on when that can blew. Nowadays people want something new and different and so it's always, beer A from brewery A went off tap. Now we've got beer B from brewery B. We're always like, "Oh, I see our 00:39:00beer was on tap at Sticks and Stones." I finally get my kids there two days later and it's gone.

NP: So, I'm really excited I think to hopefully be able to see my brand grow locally, and some sponsorships and partnerships with local organizations as well as just being really, really available in our local area.

EL: Well, I guess the good side of that is folks are drinking it when it's out and about pretty quickly.

NP: Yeah, they are. It's a great problem to have. We joke about it. It's an awesome thing. I'm glad to hear that beer sold out in two days for them in the middle of a week, that's great. I would really like to see us following a model of going very deep in our home market. Some breweries race to expand across the United States, some race to expand across the state and they've got shallow distribution, but it's available and a lot of places.

NP: That's awesome because you get people who are really into say, that unique barrel aged sour and you can get that across the United States. You just have to know where to look in your different cities. Some breweries adopt the model of going very deep in their home markets, and so maybe you're not available in 00:40:00Virginia or South Carolina, but you're available everywhere in North Carolina or everywhere in the Piedmont Triad. I think that that's definitely what we're looking to do wholesale and I'm really excited to see that around here.

EL: Well, let's shift gears a little bit. One of the purposes of the research we've been doing this summer is talking with women brewery owners and brewers. One of the questions we ask is your experience being a woman in an industry that's so stereotypically ... Although, as we are learning and have learned, there are a lot more women in North Carolina beer than people notice.

NP: No, it's still very stereotypically male. Even with more and more women in the brewing industry, it's still very stereotypically male.

EL: Can you talk a little bit about that experience though?

NP: One thing that I've learned is that women's experiences are all very different. I learned that by getting to know some of the other women in beer and that it's easy to say like, "oh, women in beer," and then to think that a woman speaks for all other women in beer. Getting to know these other women who are 00:41:00maybe younger, they don't have kids, or women who maybe opened a brewery with family or a partner in they're passed their career, they retired and decided to open this business, and I'm kind of in the middle.

NP: I have a young family and that makes it really hard for me to get out to Pink Boots Society networking events that are at seven o'clock at night, the next town over. That's really difficult for me to achieve as a parent with two young kids. That would be the first thing, is the all women's experiences are really different and it really depends a lot on what you're looking to get out of the industry and what you're able to put into the industry. That has a lot to do with your life, where you are in your life.

NP: Also, my experience being I think a female owner is maybe a little different than being maybe a female employee. That female employee's experience as a brewer will be really different than a female tap room employee. They're all 00:42:00really different, and I think I can speak a little bit to what I've observed about other women and about myself. But, that's the biggest takeaway for me is that it's all different and I can't say "Women in brewing experience."

EL: We've definitely seen that. Age makes a difference, position in life, position in brewery, and even the size of the brewery makes a difference.

NP: Yeah, and there's a lot professional support for women in brewing. I've run into this with a local organization for female brewers, or female female tap room employees, or female wholesale sales representatives. But, there's nothing out there for the female legal consultant or the female on social media manager, or the female owner who does anything that needs to get done.

NP: I don't really have the job description because I have my areas of expertise and then whatever else needs to get done that doesn't fall to someone else, I kind of pick up that slack. I guess you'd probably call me an operations officer, a COO at another company. There's not a lot out there for women that 00:43:00fall into that role and I don't think that there are many women that fall into the role of a COO at other companies to. It's very much a scheduling, following up on operations, making sure that all of those gears are turning correctly and in the right order, at the right time.

EL: If we had a woman who walks through the door right now and said, "You know what I want to do? I want to open a brewery." What advice would you give her?

NP: Is say run, don't do it? Actually, we get that. We get couples or groups of people that are interested in opening a brewery. Circling back, I know I said it earlier, there's really two groups. You can get there pretty quickly in sussing out how serious they are about it. I usually start with, where do you want to open? If they have no idea, I kind really politely just engage them in maybe beer and their love of beer.

NP: If you don't know where you want to open a brewery, it's such a regulated industry that it really depends on the specifics of where you're going to open 00:44:00with what you're allowed to do. Some states really only allow you to adopt a wholesale model. Some states, you could really go full in on the tap room and there's very little alcohol regulation. Opening a brewery in North Carolina is going to be really different than opening one in New Orleans versus opening one in rural Louisiana.

NP: We usually start with that and if someone has a pretty good idea of a location, I might talk to them. I'd also as a woman specifically, once I got past the, okay, are you ready to talk nuts and bolts about this or do you just want to go oh, I love craft beer? Talk about what kind of role they see and assess, how do they see themselves fitting into craft beer? There are definitely women that work in the industry that are very into keeping the men in the industry really happy.

NP: They'll say, "I've never been sexually harassed working as a bartender 00:45:00behind the bar." There's just no way that's true, there's no way that's true. Maybe you've not noticed it, maybe it doesn't bother you and you can define for yourself as like, "I've never felt harassed behind the bar." But, there are a lot of women who extrapolate that to, "Well, I've never been bothered by this attention," so it's not a problem for women. You kind of figure out where that woman falls on her understanding of what she might experience in the industry.

NP: From there I might get a little maybe more explicit with them about some of the things that you might expect. But overall, I think especially because I'm an owner and because it's a family business, I have not personally encountered on an ownership level a lot of discrimination. I might have some times when I've said something three times, then my husband pipes up and says it and that idea is suddenly taken seriously.

NP: But, I'm also in an environment where I can say, "Record scratch? I've been suggesting this for three months now and now that the man has said it, it's an 00:46:00okay idea?" And everyone's like, "Oh, I'm so sorry. Let's move forward with that." But overall, I think our business feels like a really awesome bubble. We have a number of female staff that work behind our bar. One of our to brew assistance is female.

NP: I think as a business, we're pretty oriented towards not putting up with any kind of crap for a woman in the beer industry. It's when you move outside of that you know the places where you can speak freely about things that bother you, like label design being really sexist, beer names being the way sexist, which bottle shops in town care about that and which ones don't care and which ones actively say screw you to the women that say, "Hey, this really kind of offends me." That's a long rambling answer, but it's a really weird and complex thing, especially now that women are starting to get one more into the industry.

EL: Yeah, and I think women are becoming more and more a larger part of the 00:47:00audience to, the drinking audience.

NP: That is what I think started getting women into craft beer. They have to like it and think of craft beer as something for them before they wanted to get into the industry itself. You always have women here, there that get into it just because they loved craft beer 30 years ago and that was a strange thing back then. Society perceived it as strange. It was not strange for a woman to like craft beer.

NP: But yeah, I think it had to be a thing. especially looking on our maybe brew side and tap room side, for someone to want to get into it as an industry that they really love, they needed to like the beer in the first place. We're really conscious of the fact that women make up a huge part of our consumer base. They make up a huge part of your wholesale consumer base because while your bars and restaurants might be pretty evenly mixed, when you're looking at grocery store sales, it's usually the women of the house that are doing that grocery store shopping.

NP: I have personal feelings about how fair that is. But regardless when you 00:48:00look at the data, they're the ones making that choice there and they're the ones recognizing your brand as something that they enjoy. They're the ones recognizing your brand is the one when they came to the bar and we're breastfeeding their baby, they didn't get told to cover up or there was a changing table and it wasn't in the women's bathroom, it was just out so dad could use it to.

NP: Just these little things that I think make a woman feel included here, be it because she has kids and we make it a kid-friendly environment or because we have female staff behind the bar that are not dressed in skimpy ... They're not there and dress for male gaze. They're there because they like beer and they like to talk to you about beer and if they want to dress in skimpy tank top we say, "Great, that's fine. You look great." If they want to dress in a four piece suit, "Great, that's great. You look great."

NP: Can you perform your job? Awesome. I don't care what you look like. I think that having a variety of people as your public facing face is what helps women to feel really comfortable here.

EL: Thinking about kind of the North Carolina brew scene at large, can you talk 00:49:00a little bit about maybe your, I guess your favorite part? What do you enjoy about the North Carolina brew scene?

NP: I don't know. I think it's really hard to put something on that because I don't travel to a lot of other states and try their beer scene. But then when I'll hear things about it it's like, "Oh, we've got 50 breweries." It's just mind boggling to me because North Carolina has such a variety of breweries.

NP: I've been talking about these different models they breweries can adopt to kind of survive in their market, and we have so many different models. We've got ones that have tap rooms but they're in maybe a sleepy town so while that tap room is a really awesome visit, it's not a busy bar on Friday at 10 o'clock at night. But, they make these amazing, unique bottles that are going to age for years on your shelf. It's like you're holding this little gem of a bottle.

NP: We've got breweries that you know exist in Raleigh and Charlotte that maybe don't put out a bottle that you're going to put on your shelf and open on a special occasion but man, it's the coolest place to go and hang out and just have a few with a friend. I think that I like the variety that we have, especially when I go visit another town. Here locally, Raleigh, I go to Raleigh a lot, Charlotte sometimes. Hillsborough, Chapel Hill area. It's really fun to see the different ways to make sausage in the same industry.

NP: That's weird. It's weird being in a brewery and seeing how they do different things and understanding some of the logic behind their choices of their tap list or the food that they offer or don't offer and things like that. that variety is probably my favorite.

EL: We have a few questions that we like to end the interview with that are always honestly the most challenging questions for people to answer. So, what I your favorite been here at Preyer? You have to pick a baby.

NP: I saw this. I saw this on the list and it's really hard for me to answer. It's going to be the same answer to the next question that I know which is coming, which is your favorite North Carolina beer, which is it for me, I'm not much of a bulk drinker. I really dislike the sensation of being drunk and having two kids under four, my tolerance is really low because I've had years at a time when I either couldn't drink or could really only mildly drink mom nursing a child.

NP: So, I'm really limited in what I can drink and so for me, it's so event-specific. So, am I having that beer on the beach? I'm maybe going to want probably our Mango-zuh, which is the mango, ginger, lemongrass Gose. It's really light, it's low in alcohol. It's got a little bit of salt in it so it tastes really refreshing at the beach. Is it a Valentine's Day dinner? I'm going to want that high ABV Russian Imperial Stout.

NP: I think if I had to pick and always go-to, also heart speaks to me seasonal. This is so hard, it's so hard. I should've known this answer ahead of time.

EL: Honestly, this is one of the challenges that a lot of people have, especially when you factor your seasonals into the mix, or one-offs.

NP: Yeah, when you're in the industry you et to ... It's not like ... If one of the perks is that this beer is just freely available to you, and so you really get to be picky and choosy with what you pick. So many of the people, I know someone's going to be a good fit for our tap room when we asked them the same question interviewing for tap room staff and they go, "God, it just really depends on where my head space is, who I'm with and what event is happening." That's when you know you found a winner.

NP: Probably though if I had to pick one, it would be a lot of your Vladibeer Russian Imperial Stout. I like it because it's good on its own, it's amazing. I can drink a half poured, feel a little tipsy, which is good for me. And, it's 00:53:00really fun to play with. When I come back to our fun rims and infusions, it's great infused with coffee, it's great infused with peanuts with Reese's Cup rimmed around the top. There's a million things you can do to it. It's just beautiful on its own and it's beautiful with 1,000 other things. That's probably my favorite.

EL: It is a good one.

NP: Our tap room staff knew I was having a really hard day. it was about a year ago when Calder put in our employee's chatter that, "Nicole is taking our crawler of Vlad to the face," and that's 32 ounces. They knew. They know it was serious then.

EL: Even more difficult is, can you pick a favorite beer, or even a favorite brewery other that Preyer?

NP: I can't. I can't pick a favorite beer or brewery. I don't really drink enough to have a go-to that I come back to, especially because being on a brewery owners budget, people think that you just roll in the dough and that is so not true. A lot of these breweries are big operations and when you look at 00:54:00opening a business on the financial scale that most breweries are, you're looking at years before an owner or operator is really pulling a salary at all or salary of any kind of notes.

NP: My beer budget is is really small and it's usually my beers because that's free to me, but I can pinpoint a really great experience I had lately with beer. I was visiting a friend in Raleigh. We'd gone brewery hopping and we were at Trophy eating dinner. They have great pizza. Stopped by, and I don't drink a ton of sours, but I saw that they had a coffee and vanilla Gose on the menu.

NP: I really like to try a beer that's going to challenge me because I thought, "There's no way in hell that's going to be good. I'll put shrimp in a beer but come on, a coffee Gose?" I tried it and it was so cool. Someone they are clearly got to be in their bonnet about this idea and was like, "You got to let me try 00:55:00this." They did and they nailed it. Paired with a [inaudible 00:55:03] for breakfast, oh my god, it was so good.

NP: You got the bitter and acidity from the coffee, so it really tasted like a cold brew, like an alcoholic cold brew coffee and then just with the barest tend to vanilla at the end to round out that bitterness and kind of take it from being maybe a little too much to just wrapping it up in a bow. That vanilla lingered on your palate with the coffee and it was so good. I would, definitely drink that again and again with some breakfast beer.

NP: I doubt that that'll be one that they offer very regularly because that's one of those fun things that someone who works there goes, "you know, we're going to try this really weird thing today," and someone goes, "All right, let's do it."

EL: Oftentimes those work out pretty well.

NP: They do. Sometimes it's terrible and you can't be afraid to dump it, or just be honest with your consumers and say, "Hey, we've got this one small keg that's releasing in the tap room and we're not really pleased with it. Try it, it's 00:56:00cheap. Here's a sheet, give us some feedback on what we could do better." A lot of your core consumers in the craft market are really into that. They want to feel engaged not just with the brand, but with the beers. They want to give you feedback and they want to feel like that feedback is heard.

NP: When you're honest about the fact that you're not perfect, you make mistakes, and sometimes your beers get infected ... Just come clean and be honest about it. People are really receptive to that.

EL: In some ways I think that feeds in with a lot of what we've heard about the tap room in general which is, it's a place for education.

NP: It is, yeah. It's a place for education and community engagement. Part of that community engagement is we do beer. Come engage with beer beyond just drinking it. Learn more about it, learn about the ingredients that we use. We use 100% North Carolina malt. Talk to us about why. Talk to us about what you do or don't like about this beer. Don't just leave an untapped review. Really chat with us about it.

NP: When someone offers us feedback in the tap room, our staff quickly let's Calder know or they can ask him a question and say, "Why did you choose to pair 00:57:00these two hops together? Someone at the bar is asking me." He'll get back to them right away and say, "This is why," then that person and gets that feedback straight from the president and brewer.

EL: The last question that I ask is one that I can't imagine you even have an answer to which is, what do you do ... What are some of your hobbies and interests when you're not here at the brewery?

NP: No, I do. I can answer that question because hobbies and other interests have always been really important to me. I'd rather be learning something or doing something then just wasting my time. I love to knit. I have a knitting night that we do once a month here because I wanted to meet some other knitters that were maybe younger, or younger at heart. I don't care what age you are, but I don't want you showing up and complaining about how your daughter-in-law didn't like this really outdated sweater that knit for your new grandchild. I don't want to hear about that.

NP: We have knitters of all ages that show up, but they're young at heart. I 00:58:00really enjoy knitting. I get to create things for my daughters. Unlike my job where I show up and I don't always know what I'm going to be doing that day, or I don't know that that that beer's going to turn out, if you follow the instructions with knitting, you will very incrementally make perfect progress. I really like feeling like there's something that I'm in control world, I know exactly what I've done, I know exactly where I'm going, you've just got to follow the rules.

NP: Am I the only one here that cares about the rules? Sometimes I feel like saying that here, and so I like knitting. I like baking for the same reason. I love to eat sugar, love sugar, love the Great Preyer Bake Off. I really enjoy baking, especially with my daughters now that they're a little bit older and can do that.

NP: And, I garden. We have a few chickens at home. I live pretty far out in the country, which I think really helps. It's a hard drive, especially if you have to come in late one night, there's an emergency or something or if some piece of equipment broke and Calder's got to drive in at 11 pm and come try and fix it all night. But, I really like living outside of the city. That gives me a little 00:59:00bit of some breathing room for my job.

NP: We have a big garden. We grow a lot of produce. I can, I can a lot of our produce, put up salsa, tomato soup, stews, things like that for the winter. Sounds really strange, but it it comes back I think to Calder. My husband and I, Calder and I are very into making things and seeing those results of your time. I don't think I could do a job where I sat at a desk all day and the only product I had to show for it was numbers. I couldn't do that. Power to the people who can, but I've got to see or taste or smell a physical result of something that I've done so knitting, baking, gardening, raising children.

EL: Yeah, and beer.

NP: And beer, yeah.

EL: And they all tie together.

NP: Yeah, yeah.

EL: Well, that's the rest of my prepared questions. Is there anything we didn't touch on that you think would be important to the whole story?

NP: No, I thin that was a lot.

EL: That was great though.

NP: Yeah.

EL: Thank you very much.