From GE Engineering to Amorphic Beer: Ron Hockersmith on Running a Brewery Like an Engineering Organization
Manufacturing Happy Hour
This episode was recorded live at Amorphic Beer in Milwaukee as a crossover between two manufacturing podcasts: Manufacturing Happy Hour, hosted by Chris Luecke, and A BROADcast for Manufacturers, represented by Kris Harrington (CEO of GenAlpha Technologies) and Lori Highby (CEO and founder of Keystone Click). The guest was Ron Hockersmith, owner and brewmaster of Amorphic Beer. The central question was what a career in large-company engineering taught Hockersmith that he now applies to a small brewery, and how that approach has kept the business healthy after the craft beer boom ended. His answer draws on lean methods without the bureaucracy, financial modeling built into recipe decisions, and a management style based on trust and feedback. He also says openly that he is not trying to grow the business as large as possible.
A Quick Lesson in "Double Dry Hopped"
The conversation opened with the hosts naming what they were drinking. Harrington had a hazy IPA labeled "DDH," and Luecke had Amorphic's Sentient 6.0. Hockersmith said Sentient 6.0 is actually quadruple dry hopped, but the brewery doesn't print that on the can because it would feel like "patting yourself on the back too much."
When Luecke asked how to explain DDH to a newcomer, Hockersmith said the term has no set definition in the brewing industry. Some breweries use it to mean twice the amount of hops. Others use it to mean adding the same amount of hops in two separate additions. Amorphic uses the label mainly because customers read it as a promise of saturated hop flavor. By his account, the minimum on any Amorphic IPA has been triple dry hopping, and some have gone as high as six additions. The hosts joked that "sextuple dry hopped" would make a good beer name.
From Gas Turbines and Viruses to GE Healthcare
Highby read Hockersmith's background. He grew up in Arizona and studied mechanical engineering at Arizona State University and the California Institute of Technology. He worked in gas turbine engine design and did research on the mechanics of viruses, then moved to Milwaukee to join GE Healthcare. At GE he became a Lean Master Black Belt and spent 14 years leading new product introduction teams. After that he became VP of engineering at an international defense contractor. He retired early in 2020. Once he had fixed everything in his 1903 Victorian home, he got bored and started working part-time at a brewery. He then joined former colleagues to found Amorphic. He joked that the strangest part of the story is that someone from Arizona moved to Wisconsin and loved it. He was a hockey player even in Arizona, which made him "weird there," and in Wisconsin he is "just normal."
Lean and Six Sigma Without the Committee
Hockersmith explained that Amorphic began with a phone call from a former GE colleague. The two had shared a cubicle for years, with the colleague as program manager and Hockersmith as chief engineer on a range of projects. The colleague proposed starting a brewery.
Many of their GE habits came with them. Hockersmith credited GE with early and heavy adoption in North America of Toyota-style lean manufacturing, alongside Six Sigma and Design for Six Sigma. He added the joking aside that GE may not be as good since it split up, "but that's cuz I left." At Amorphic they keep the principles and drop the formality. At GE around 1999 or 2005, he said, an improvement idea meant a formal project, committee approval, and a series of documented steps. At the brewery, improvement conversations happen while they are brewing. They still move through phases like define, measure, analyze, improve, and control, but nobody writes a formal report. In his words, they use "a lot of the good things without maybe some of the bureaucracy."
Kaizen of the Week and the Copper CO2 Line
One lean practice survives partly as a joke. Amorphic has a "Kaizen of the week," but only two people have ever won it, because only Hockersmith and his business partner take part. Each week they compete to find an improvement that makes brewhouse work easier or more efficient.
Hockersmith described his entry for that week. The brewery uses a lot of carbon dioxide, both for carbonation and to push beer through the tap system. When they opened three years earlier, they had run braided vinyl hose throughout the building. The plastic expands and contracts with heat and cold, and leaks kept appearing, so they were constantly fixing them. That week they hard-plumbed the whole system in copper, as a much larger brewery would. He admitted the podcast and the taproom opening nearly didn't happen that day, because the new system didn't work when they first switched over. They fixed it quickly. He predicted his partner's competing entry would be something like shaving 30 seconds off keg washing.
Designing and Maintaining Their Own Equipment
Highby noted that the founders designed much of their own brewing equipment. According to Hockersmith, when vendors sent drawings, the Amorphic team would often send them back with a different design. Some vendors liked working that way, and some even offered them jobs. Others refused to change their standard approach. Amorphic also does all of its own maintenance. He joked that if something breaks, it may well be their fault, since they probably designed it. He described the combination this way: a couple of mechanical engineers who fix their own cars and change their own oil turn out to be well suited to running a brewery.
Predictive Models for Flavor
Luecke asked what Hockersmith does, thanks to his engineering background, that other small breweries don't. The first answer was technical modeling. He mentioned that a pattern on the bar is related to a solution of a partial differential equation, and said they try to apply similar methods to beer. For the IPA Luecke was drinking, they had predicted the behavior of terpenes before brewing it. He described terpenes as flavor-giving compounds found in both beer and marijuana. He said some breweries surely do this kind of modeling, but he believes it is rare at Amorphic's size. Many of their models are based on technical papers from Sapporo, written by graduate students in Japan, which he read with the help of Google Translate.
Running a Taproom Like an International Engineering Organization
The second difference is how they manage people. Hockersmith said GE was known for developing leaders who went on to lead other companies, and he manages the Amorphic team in the same way. Every candidate is told, whatever the role, that the brewery runs like an international engineering organization. That approach may or may not suit them. Staff get feedback when they are doing well and when they are not, and compensation depends on performance. He said this is uncommon in taproom work. He reported that the brewery has had no staff turnover in over two years, which he called almost unheard of in the service industry. His summary was that running a taproom like an international conglomerate "sounds bad but apparently it works."
Staying Profitable After the Craft Beer Boom
Luecke pointed out that Amorphic opened a little over three years earlier, near the end of the craft beer boom. From roughly 2010 to 2018, Luecke said, almost any craft brewery could succeed just by existing. Now Milwaukee and other markets are seeing consolidation and closures. Yet Amorphic appears to be doing fine. He asked what manufacturing leaders in industries past their peak could learn from that.
Hockersmith's first point was financial visibility at the recipe level. When they design a beer, they can see its contribution margin, operating margin, and other figures across every channel: four-packs, draft sales to bars and restaurants, and grocery distribution. If he decides to add a sixth hop addition instead of a fifth, he can immediately see how that affects the numbers, and the numbers shape the decision.
The same discipline applied to building the brewery. Before opening, they built a financial model to check whether the business would make money. The model did not assume they would become a large regional brewery like Lakefront or Third Space, two Milwaukee examples. He admitted this sounds obvious and generic. But judging by the questions other brewers ask him, he said, it is not common to have a plan with baseline assumptions backed by data, execute against it, and then track deviations.
He gave a specific deviation as an example. The original plan assumed half of Amorphic's beer would go to distribution. It also assumed that within a year they would need six more tanks, each twice the size of the existing ones. In practice, only about 15% of their beer went to distribution, yet profit was already above what the plan projected for the full-distribution scenario. Hockersmith said distribution margins are "trash" and that it is very hard to make money in distribution without producing tens of thousands of barrels per year. Because they tracked the numbers, they recognized this and changed course. They leaned into the taproom side and did not spend the money on the expansion their plan had called for.
Luecke found it surprising that more breweries don't work this way. Hockersmith added that they sometimes debate whether to buy a $36 item by modeling its effect on results, and conceded that this is "probably too far."
Trust, Empowerment, and Building Around the People You Have
His second point was trust. Hockersmith said no one has ever worked for him whom he didn't trust, whether in defense contracting, at GE, or at the brewery. The taproom has no dedicated manager. Everyone who works there acts as the manager and decides how to make things right when something goes wrong. He doubted this is common in the brewing industry. He guessed it is also uncommon in many manufacturing operations, even where companies claim it as a goal.
Highby connected this to Patrick Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which puts trust at the base of a functioning team. Harrington mentioned The Speed of Trust, which had stayed with her because it links trust to how quickly organizations can adapt to change.
Hockersmith passed along two pieces of advice from a GE mentor. The first was that networking over beers is one way to succeed, which he said fits these podcasts well. The second was not to design a perfect team and then try to hire into it, because you will never find perfect people for every slot. Instead, find out what your current people are very good at and build the organization around them. He is applying this now. He feels he is at the brewery too much, around 70 hours a week, and wants to cut that to about 20. Rather than hire a new person who is expected to be perfect and "probably isn't going to be perfect," they are trying to reorganize work around the people they already have and trust.
Choosing Not to Grow
Highby asked how working for himself differs from working for a large organization. Hockersmith called himself a "cusper" between Gen X and millennial. He said that during his corporate career he worked mainly to fund what he wanted to do outside of work, and that snowboarding comes up often in his conversations with Highby.
One practical difference is time off. Even as a vice president of engineering running an organization of 300 engineers, he still had to tell someone, sometimes in another country, that he would be away snowboarding for a week. Now he decides for himself.
The bigger difference is growth. He said he and Highby have discussed this over beers at least a dozen times, and his position is that Amorphic is not a growth business. The brewery has passed on several opportunities to make much more beer, because that would mean much more work, and they did not start the business to work even harder. At GE or the other Fortune 500 companies he worked for, he said, nobody would turn down opportunities like that. He remembered all-hands meetings where a company announced $2 billion in earnings alongside layoffs because it had missed a target such as 10% growth. He said he understands that public companies have a duty to shareholders. Amorphic has no such obligation. They can choose to skip six months of capital investment and construction, enjoy the success they have, and balance work with the rest of life. Harrington framed this as the question of "when is enough enough," and Hockersmith added that for large companies, continuing to grow may even be legally required.
The hosts noted that all four people on stage were business owners. Luecke said that may have been a first for Manufacturing Happy Hour.
"I Just Learned That"
The episode then moved to the regular closing segment of A BROADcast for Manufacturers, in which everyone shares something they recently learned.
Harrington said that in ancient Egypt, workers building structures like the pyramids were paid partly in beer, about three to four liters a day given in three servings. The beer was reportedly sweet, thick, and not very alcoholic, and was believed to give laborers strength. Hockersmith added that anthropologists use the start of beer production as one marker of civilization, because brewing requires people to stay in one place for about three weeks rather than move around.
Luecke offered two items. The first was that the band 311 was originally called the Fish Hippos and announced its name change on stage while opening for Fugazi. The second, which he considered more relevant, was the idea of a corporate venture studio. On a trip to Pittsburgh he interviewed Premier Automation, a systems integrator that started an in-house unit called Premier Labs. The unit develops new ideas that could become products or business lines. It works somewhat like an accelerator such as Y Combinator, but because it doesn't bring in outside cohorts of founders, it is called a corporate venture studio rather than an incubator. Luecke agreed with Highby that it resembles an intrapreneurship mindset, which he described as bringing entrepreneurship inside an established company.
Highby shared that holly leaves grow spiky as a defense against deer, insects, and other animals. According to what she learned, specific genes produce the pointy leaves, and the plant's leaves are otherwise rounder and more appealing to deer.
Tracing Tariffs Through a Beer Can
Hockersmith's first item was lighthearted: the place he was going snowboarding that weekend was getting eight or more inches of snow a day. His second was about tariffs. He had learned that about 60% of the aluminum used in beer cans comes from Canada, and he was trying to find out where in his supply chain the cans cross the border, so he could estimate how much four-pack prices might rise.
The details were still unclear. Amorphic orders cans from a facility in Chicago, where the design is printed directly on the can with no label, which he said makes them very recyclable. The supplier is based in Montreal, which he noted is why the cans in the brewery's can display carry French text. What he didn't yet know was whether finished cans are made in Canada and shipped to Chicago, or whether raw aluminum is shipped to a U.S. facility. If the second is true, the impact might be around 30 cents per four-pack. Depending on where the border crossing happens, though, it could "get kind of out of hand." He was still working through it with his supply chain. Luecke and Harrington said the question reflects what many manufacturers were likely to be dealing with throughout 2025 and beyond.
Closing
Asked how to reach him, Hockersmith said the best way is to visit the brewery. He is usually there when it opens and leaves about an hour later, since most of the work happens before opening. Otherwise, the contact email on the Amorphic website goes straight to him. The hosts shared their own contact details, and the episode ended with a toast. Hockersmith's tariff question remained open: how much the aluminum in his cans will add to the price of a four-pack depends on a supply chain detail he was still trying to find out.
And thanks so much everyone for coming to our live recording of our first Pints and Podcast. Maybe there's going to be more. Who knows? I think there will be more. Hey, this is a brewery. Let's get loud like it's a brewery real quick. All right. There we go. There we go. You're better at this. I just wanted to make sure people weren't mistaking this for like a funeral parlor or something else. We got to get some energy. Feel free to laugh. You know, we'll have some fun tonight. Good to have everyone out here. Thank you. But hey, let's start with a quick cheers everyone. Cheers. Thank you for coming out. Thank you for being here.
See, your show is called Manufacturing Happy Hour. So you're the professional at this type of recording. Yes, I've done a few of these before. The typical podcast is over drinks. I mean Kris, you're an alumni though of Manufacturing Happy Hour. Yes, I am. And it's been over four years since you and I did our podcast. It was still very... it was late in the pandemic days but you and I met up and we sat at opposite ends of this giant boardroom table kind of like you would in like a medieval environment, right, when you picture like a king and a queen having a meal together. You know, we were very far apart, but yeah, it's been good interacting with all of you over the years and I'm ready for some fun tonight.
I do remember that day very clearly. You were very cool. I was very nervous because I had never done a live podcast before and he brought beer. So, we were at the office. He had some Blue Moon for me and it was... Yeah, you made it very comfortable. If Amorphic had existed at that time, I would have brought some, you know, like a wheat beer from Amorphic probably. You're right. It was a twinkle in Ron's eye at that time.
But anyways, what are you drinking right now, Kris? I am drinking a hazy IPA. It's called DDH something. Fluffy. Yes. Logic. Do you know what DDH stands for? Double dipped hop. Close. Very close. Ron, what do you got? I'm drinking Beia Ooi. It's maybe the only Vietnamese rice lager made in the country. Interesting. All right. And Chris with a C. I am drinking one of Amorphic's many great IPAs, I believe. Is it a double dry hopped Sentient as well? Is that it? Sentient 6.0. Okay. But it's not double dry hopped. Correct. It's actually quadruple, but we think it's kind of... what's the right word? It's patting yourself on the back too much. Just put quadruple dry hopped on the can. So, we don't put it on the can. Yeah. You wanted to appear humble is what I'm hearing.
And one thing we do, like in the manufacturing industry, is we use a lot of acronyms. But if you were having a drink with someone and they were learning what DDH is for the first time, double dry hopping, how would you describe it for someone, Ron? Actually that term in the brewing industry is not defined and it means different things to different breweries. Some breweries will say double dry hop means use double the amount of hops. Others will say it means put the hops in double the amount of times but the same amount of hops. So, it's one of those two things or something between the two. We only use it because it's a marketing term that tells people it's going to have like a super saturated flavor of hops in it. But to be honest, almost every one of our IPAs, the minimum we've ever done is triple dry hopped and some are as high as sextuple dry hopped.
That would be really not humble to write sextuple dry hopped. Why have you not named a beer sextuple dry hop, double dry hop or sextuple dry hopped before? I feel like that would sell well amongst the beer nerd community and among people that don't know that sex is also a prefix for the number six. Well said. Well said.
All right. Okay. Let's get started here. I am Lori Highby. I am the co-host of A BROADcast for Manufacturers with Kris Harrington here, and our third co-host Aaron unfortunately is sick. And we've got Chris Lukey from Manufacturing Happy Hour. Chris, why don't you introduce yourself quickly? Yeah, happy to. So, I'm one of the two Chrises on stage tonight, the one that hosts Manufacturing Happy Hour. The way I describe it, the mission since it started in 2016 is this really campy YouTube channel. It's all about talking about the trends and technologies and issues impacting the manufacturing industry the same way you would discuss that type of stuff over a cold one with someone, right? Getting beyond the acronyms and the buzzwords and things like that and just getting real about the issues that impact our industry, and the most fun way to do it is literally over a beer with all of you at a spot like Amorphic Brewing here in Milwaukee. So, give it up for yourselves. Thanks for coming out tonight. Thanks for hanging out with us. Yeah. Yeah.
All right, Kris with a K. All right, if we can keep taking sips of beer, this is going to get very interesting as we go through. So, I am Kris Harrington, one of the three broads in A BROADcast for Manufacturers. And our show is really about challenging the status quo. We like to talk to different people in the manufacturing industry with all types of different backgrounds who are impacting the industry in different ways, most importantly taking it forward. So, pleasure to be here in this crossover event with you at Amorphic Beer. And how about a little bit about what you do when you're not recording podcasts? Oh, yeah, that side job with GenAlpha Technologies. Yes. So, I am the CEO of GenAlpha Technologies. We work with manufacturers and distributors and we help them sell their equipment and parts online.
All right. And again, I'm Lori Highby, CEO and founder of Keystone Click. We are a strategic digital marketing agency serving the manufacturing and construction industry. And today, not only do we have this amazing crossover event, but we are interviewing Ron Hockersmith, who is the owner and brew master of Amorphic Beer. We are at his brewery. Amazing, awesome experience here. So, a little bit about Ron. He grew up in Arizona and studied mechanical engineering at Arizona State University and the California Institute of Technology. After stints in gas turbine engine design and research on the mechanics of viruses, he ended up in Milwaukee at GE Healthcare. Ron became a lean master black belt and led teams in new product introductions at GE for 14 years before transitioning to a VP of engineering role for an international defense contractor. Ron retired early in 2020 and after fixing everything there was on his 1903 Victorian home, he got bored and started working part-time at a brewery before joining forces with former colleagues to start Amorphic Beer. Ron, welcome to the show.
Thank you. What a resume. I don't know if it's normal, but yeah. The weirdest part is that someone from Arizona moved to Wisconsin and loved it. So, yeah, that is crazy. Absolutely. But you're a hockey guy, so like that makes... I was even a hockey guy in Arizona. So I was considered weird there and now I'm just normal. Fair. Okay. Weird is good. I like weird. Weird is not a bad thing in my book.
Let's start with some questions here for you. So how did working in a large manufacturing environment impact what it is that you're doing today at Amorphic Beer? So there's another person from GE, we shared a cubicle together for a long time. He was a program manager. I was the chief engineer on a variety of projects. And we worked together well there and that's the person that called me and said, "Hey, we should start this brewery thing." And then we did. But a lot of the same approaches to things that we did there, we end up using here. Like GE kind of founded, I would say, modern leadership, although, you know, they split recently and it's maybe not as good as it used to be, but that's because I left, so it had nothing to do with me. The adoption, at least in the United States, North America, for like the Toyota, the lean manufacturing thing, was heavily embraced by GE early. It went along with the Six Sigma and Design for Six Sigma philosophy. And I would say we embrace all of those principles, but a lot of them we kind of leave the formality out. For example, if you were working at GE in 1999 or even 2005 and you wanted to improve something, you were going to form a formal project and there was a committee that was going to approve your project and you're going to go through all these steps. And we do it here. It's just, as we're making a beer, we are talking about what we could make better or make our lives easier while we're here, and we do go through the same phases of like define, measure, analyze, improve, control, things like that. But there's no formal report. So, I guess I would say we use a lot of the good things without maybe some of the bureaucracy that went along with it.
Another thing we do as a joke, but it's actually good, is Kaizen. So we have Kaizen of the week even here at Amorphic, but only two people have ever won Kaizen of the week because there's only two of us that participate. And basically every week we're competing with each other to see what improvement we could make in the brew house to make it easier and more efficient to get done. Can I tell my Kaizen of the week? Yes, please. I'll tell you my submission for this week. So we use a lot of carbon dioxide in the brewery. That's how it gets the bubbles. We use it for other things as well. It's how we push the beer out the tap system. When we first put that in 3 years ago when we opened, we used this braided vinyl hose and we ran it all throughout the brewery in this network. But it's not the best. You know, braided vinyl is plastic. If it gets hot and cold, it kind of expands. So we started to get these leaks popping up all the time everywhere. We're constantly fighting these leaks. So we decided to do like a real brewery would do that makes way more beer than we do. And this week we hard plumbed it with copper the whole way so you don't have all these pesky leaks and plastic growing. Although this podcast probably almost didn't happen and the tap room almost didn't open today because we flipped the switch to switch to the new system and it didn't work. But we fixed it quickly. So I'm submitting that tomorrow for the Kaizen of the week. And I think all my business partner is going to have is like he, you know, slightly improved the keg washing process by 30 seconds or something. Well, we're rooting for you here. Sounds like there might be a clear winner this week.
We don't have a tally of who's winning overall. Well, and you also designed a lot of your brewing equipment, too, right? Yeah. Some vendors that we started working with really liked that, you know, when they would send us, well, here's your drawings. We'd be like, well, no, we're not doing it like that. We're not doing it like that. We're doing it like this. Some of them really liked that. Some even offered us jobs. But other ones were just like, well, this is how we do it. We're not changing. We're not doing those types of things. But the good news about that is we also do all of our own maintenance. Anything breaks in here, we fix it. But if it breaks, it might also be our fault because we probably designed it too. So it turns out that a couple of mechanical engineers running a brewery that are also handy and fix their own cars and change their own oil, that kind of goes together. Cool.
I've got a bit of a two-part question for you, Ron. Are there other things that you do thanks to your background working as an engineer at a large company that other small craft breweries, other owners of breweries, other brew masters... are there things that you do that other spots just aren't even thinking about that you think help in your business, the way you make beer, etc.?
I'll try two of those things. So, I was on a very technical side. I mean, as I was explaining to Chris earlier, there's a pattern on the bar that's related to a solution to a partial differential equation. We try and apply some of those methods to beer as much as we can. So, for example, the beer that you're drinking, before we even made it, we had predicted how those terpenes... terpenes are these sulfur-containing hydrocarbons that are in beer and marijuana actually, that give it the flavor. But we have models that predict this type of stuff. I'm sure some breweries do this, but I would say it's pretty rare at our size. I'm sure like Miller, and well, I know Sapporo, because a lot of the models we have are based on technical papers written by Sapporo, by grad students in Japan. Luckily, Google Translate. So that's one example. The other one, and there's actually one of our team members in the audience, so this may either be a surprise or she'll say that I'm lying. We'll find out. I mentioned GE was great at leadership development and developing leaders, and a lot of leaders went and became leaders at a bunch of other companies from GE. The way that we manage the team here is the same way you do it at GE. Whenever we interview someone new, regardless of the position, we kind of explain that we run this like it's an international engineering organization, and this may be different for you and it may work or it may not. You'll get feedback if you're doing well. You'll get feedback if you're not doing well. Your compensation will depend upon how you're doing. All of these types of things, which I don't think are that common, especially working in a tap room environment. But I can proudly say, even in this environment, we have not had any change in staff in over two years in the service industry, which I think is unheard of. So apparently just run a tap room like an international conglomerate, which sounds bad, but apparently it works for that part of things.
Well, I've got the second part to this question then. I think one of the commonalities with this crossover that we're doing, the folks that listen to A BROADcast for Manufacturers as well as Manufacturing Happy Hour, it's all manufacturing leaders that listen to the shows. And one thing I think a lot of folks can learn from you is in the craft beer industry... It's interesting, you opened a little over three years ago, basically at the end of the craft beer boom. Like anyone could open a craft brewery between 2010 and like 2018 and kill it because... Launch it, I got a blonde and an amber and I'm launching right now. Yeah, exactly. Like you didn't need to know, because you were a craft brewery, people were going to show up. That's not the case anymore. You know, here in Milwaukee and in a lot of other spots we're seeing consolidation. We're seeing craft breweries shut their doors. But one thing that I really like and admire about Amorphic Brewing is you seem to have the business savvy and you seem to be doing just fine as a business, despite the fact that maybe your industry isn't having an upward, you know, moment right now. So what would your advice be to manufacturing leaders out there on how they lead their business even if their particular industry might not be at its peak? And feel free to answer this in the context of the things you do here specifically at Amorphic and then let them decide whether or not it applies.
Right. Yeah. Exactly. Well, going back to your other question about what we do differently, I don't know if this is the case, and I know it's not the case for most, but I'm sure there are others. When we're designing a beer, we can see the contribution margin, the operating margin, everything on every... if it's going in a four-pack, if it's going in distribution to bars and restaurants and grocery stores, how all of that happens. If I just decide I'm going to sextuple dry hop it instead of quintuple dry hop it, I can see immediately what the impact of that is
and that affects our decisions. That's not only true there. That was true when we built the place. We made sure that we had a financial model that would tell us are we going to make money or are we not going to make money, and our model did not assume that we would take over the world, or even the state, and try and be the next Lakefront or Third Space. That's a very Milwaukee example. Large regional breweries, if you're watching from somewhere else. And we basically just followed that.
So that sounds kind of obvious and generic. I can tell you in the brewing industry, based on questions I get asked from other brewers, that's not super common, essentially that you have a plan, you've sort of set a baseline for your assumptions, and you have some data to back those assumptions up, and then we execute. And then when we deviate, like for example, our plan for this said that we were going to sell 50% of our beer in distribution and within one year we were going to have to put in six more tanks that were twice as big as the ones that you see on that side of the wall. But I guess this is good news: our profit was exceeding what it was supposed to be if we did that, even though we hadn't done that, but we were only selling 15% of beer in distribution. Well, the margins of distribution are trash and it's very difficult to make money unless you make tens of thousands of barrels of beer per year in distribution. So we were able to recognize that, pivot, and I guess embrace that side of things and not go spend all that money that our plans said we were and hang out.
The other thing I would say that I don't see that often, and I think especially in small businesses, is trust, especially of the team. I'm trying to see if there's smirks coming from my team members in the back, of course, but no one's ever worked for me that I don't trust, and it doesn't matter if I'm working in defense contracting for GE or at the brewery. So you trust them. You empower them to do the right things. We don't really have a manager here in the taproom. Everyone who works here is the manager. They decide how to make the situation right as something goes awry. I don't think that's that common here in the industry, and I would guess that that empowerment and trust is not that common in a lot of even manufacturing operations, even if someone might say that it's their goal.
Yeah. I mean, I heard a few different things in that answer. I mean, you started by talking about real-time information in terms of the impact of your product. You talked about looking at, you know, just what the impacts are going to be to your business. It is a little shocking to hear that a lot of craft breweries aren't doing that, but we don't make any decision... I mean, we even sometimes debate, should we buy this $36 thing? I mean, that's probably too far. That's probably bad. That's a bad example, but we do debate that. I hear you. I hear you. We model it, like how is this going to affect our results, you know? But I also like how you ended with the people, and that's a common thing that I hear on my show, Lori. Kris, I'm sure you hear it on your show all the time, right? That you have that empowerment. You've created that culture that makes having all the technical know-how and all the business savvy, you know, work, because you've got the people here to help back it up as well. So, great answer. Thank you for sharing that.
Yeah, I love that. I want to add, I appreciate the conversation around trust. Patrick Lencioni, who is a fantastic author and motivational speaker, especially around leadership, his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, the number one first layer of having any sort of success in a business is trust amongst the team. So thank you for putting that out into the universe.
Something a mentor told me at GE, who also, his number one thing was actually... you might like this with your podcast in particular. He often said that one of the ways to succeed was to network over beers with people, which seems to be exactly aligned with beers. Another thing this person said was don't form your team. Don't try and hire for the perfect team, because you'll never find the perfect people to fit into the perfect cogs for the perfect team. Find what your people that you have or can get are very good at, and then build your organization around that. And even here, we do that. For example, I think I'm here too much and I don't want to be here 70 hours a week anymore. So I'm trying to find a way to only be here 20 hours a week, and we're trying to find a way to do that with the people that we already have and trust instead of hiring some new person that we'll have to figure out what happens, that we think is going to be perfect. Probably isn't going to be perfect.
Yeah. And I just have to also jump on the trust bandwagon here, because there was a book that I read, and I'm not going to remember the author, but Speed of Trust. I don't know if you guys have heard of that book, but it really resonated with me because it talked about how quickly organizations can adapt to change, which is one of the biggest challenges for organizations, when there is trust amongst the team. And in life and in business, we're always challenged to change and innovate and do things quickly, and trust is the key to all of that. So, you know, that resonates. I think it resonates with all of us just because we're also small organizations trying to do good things in the world. So, awesome.
So I'm curious to know, how is working for yourself different than the responsibilities you had in working for a large organization? Can you just tell us a little bit about that?
So I'm what's called a cusper in terms of generation. I think I'm technically Gen X, but I'm on the cusp of being millennial. And I've heard that millennials tend to... you work so you can live, right? And when I was in my corporate career, I only went to work so that I could do the things I wanted to do outside of work. I don't know if I just offended any... You act like a millennial. Yeah, I'll just throw that out there. Most of our conversations revolve around snowboarding and other ridiculous topics. So I'm giving you... I'm either a very old Gen X or an early millennial. Yes.
Oh, now you threw me off. Remind me again. Working for yourself. Working for yourself and the different responsibilities.
So, one of my nicest things is I never really liked sort of the vacation policies and things that occur. It doesn't matter if I was the vice president of engineering running an organization with 300 engineers. I still had someone, that sometimes wasn't even in the country, that I had to let know that I was going to go snowboarding for a week or something like that. Well, now I just kind of decide what I want to do. And that sounds kind of obvious, but I think how that also plays in is this particular business... Lori and I have argued about this over beers. Not argued, discussed this over beers at least a dozen times. Don't argue, Ron. I would not say that this is not a growth business. Like, we are not trying to take over the world. And we have passed on several opportunities to make a lot more beer because it's a lot of work, and we didn't do this to work even more than we're doing it now.
And I mean, when I was at GE or any of the three Fortune 500 companies I worked for, you would not pass on some of these things. So here we can decide, well, we're already satisfied with our performance, and we're going to say it's okay, and we're going to continue and enjoy the success we have. Whereas I remember sitting in all-hands meetings at various companies and they'd be like, we made $2 billion this year, but we're going to lay off a bunch of people because our goal was to have double-digit growth of 10% or whatever. And I understand why that is a duty to the shareholders and so forth. Here we don't have that. We can just decide, well, we could spend the next six months doing capital investments and doing construction, and instead we choose to enjoy the life we have and balance working with this. So that's the biggest difference that I would say.
A beautiful answer. Yeah, it's the question of when is enough enough, right? And sometimes when you work for those large organizations, there really never is enough. You have to keep going. But when you get to do it for yourself, you get to decide what that is. It may even be legally required that you keep going in the case of large companies. Exactly. Oh, I appreciate that answer. Excellent.
Yeah, great answer. And you commented on this pre-show that we're all entrepreneurs on the show right now, which is really fun and exciting. Four different business owners. Small business. Is it fair to say small business owners, Kris? Okay. I wasn't sure. Like, I just feel like... You're kicked out, please. You're too big. Like, enough isn't enough for me. Sure. Sure. Okay. Okay. So, regardless, four different business owners on this stage does not usually happen, at least on my podcast, right? I feel like, you know, someone's a leader at a large enterprise. There's usually someone in the mix that doesn't fit that. But to have four entrepreneurs on the stage at the same time might be a first for Manufacturing Happy Hour. I don't know about A BROADcast, though. Well, Erin is not a business owner. So that's true. She would be here, by the way. We love Erin. We miss her. We wish she was here with us.
This is a good point to transition to the next part of our show. So, the A BROADcast for Manufacturers show has kind of a two-part per episode, and the second half is called I Just Learned That, where every single guest and host that's on the show shares a random nugget. It doesn't have to be anything related to manufacturing. And we've had things from a third grade science fact all the way to AI, which tends to be one of my favorite topics. So, yeah. Kris, why don't you finish this sentence? I just learned that...
Okay, so I'm going to make sure I look at my notes here because I don't want to get this wrong. Since we are here at Amorphic and we're talking about beer, I just learned that in ancient Egypt, beer was used as payment for workers and was believed to give laborers the strength to build structures like the pyramids. So they would pay three to four liters of beer throughout the day for laborers that were working on the pyramids, and they would give it to them three times a day. It was apparently not as alcoholic. It was sweet and it was thick, but it was used as payment back in the day. So I just thought that was very interesting and perfect for the show.
It was that same time period. It's also defined by anthropologists. One of the metrics they use is once beer starts being produced, they define it as civilization. Really? Because it requires you to stay put for like three weeks instead of being nomadic. Yeah. Oh, interesting. Fascinating. I feel like you told me that at one point in random beer conversation.
Yeah. So, Chris, what did you just learn? I'm going to give two quick answers to this. The first one is something I was just reminded of, but I learned a long time ago. So I think it still counts as something I just learned. But the '90s rap, rock, hip-hop, reggae band 311, their original name... does anyone know this? Does anyone know this? 712. No. No. Clever answer, but no, it was not 712. 311's original name was the Fish Hippos, which is an incredible name for a band, but probably not one that you'd want to have as a beer name. I would take that all day long. I would love the credit for it. I would love it. Yes. As long as you give me credit, you can use it. I'm not the one that has any sort of trademark over this. So don't ask me, but yeah, go ahead. Make a beer called Fish Hippos. But yeah, 311's name used to be Fish Hippos, and they announced the name change on stage while they were opening for legendary band Fugazi. So, what a way to make that announcement.
That's the first thing I learned, but I want to do something that's a little more on brand, because I didn't really see any head nodding to that in the audience. So I'm probably really out there right now for most people. I learned what a corporate venture studio is recently. And tell us... I was on a trip to Pittsburgh... and it's like an incubator. I was doing an interview at a systems integrator that has grown considerably over the years. Their name is Premier Automation, and they recently started a segment of their business called Premier Labs, where in-house they basically run their own incubator for new ideas that could be productized, could be turned into a new business line. So very much as someone might think of an accelerator like Y Combinator, for example, they're doing this in-house to try to create new product lines around new ideas. But since they're not bringing in a cohort of founders or something to do it, it's not an incubator. It's referred to as a corporate venture studio. So that was something that I thought was really interesting recently that was relevant to this conversation. Certainly more relevant than 311 previously being the Fish Hippos. So those are my two answers.
Is that where the intrapreneur kind of mindset comes into play too a little bit? I would say so. Honestly, this is going to get really meta, but I think it's like an entrepreneurial founder of a company bringing entrepreneurship into the company. So it's like entrepreneurship in entrepreneurship is probably the simple way to describe it. Yes. Okay. Great.
All right. Well, I'll go now. So this is really interesting, what I learned about the holly plant, which is, you know, normally around the holiday season, very spiky, pointy leaf. What I learned is the spikiness of that leaf itself is actually a defense mechanism: whenever deer or bugs or critters are going to eat the plant, there's specific genes that create new leaves that are pointy and spiky. So the leaf itself is actually very round and attractive to deer, apparently. But I just thought that was interesting. Yeah, it's amazing how much nature is designed to do that for itself, right? That's cool. Very cool. Very cool.
Ron, anything you've just learned? I have one of those in my backyard. Oh. So is it spiky at all? It is spiky. Fascinating. I don't think we have deer. We have a fox, though. But squirrels. Lots of squirrels. Lots of squirrels, but mostly fox. And mostly squirrels and no fox.
I have two answers too, but I don't think either one is as deep as yours, maybe. The two things I've been thinking about this week and learning about are: I'm going snowboarding this weekend, and the place I'm going is getting eight-plus inches every day and has gotten several feet for the past couple days. So that's very exciting. So I just learned that I'm going to have a good time this weekend.
The answer, maybe a slightly more advanced thing, is some of you may have heard about this tariff thing. So I've been trying to learn more about that. I think that I've learned that 60% of aluminum that goes into cans for beer is from Canada. So we're trying to figure out where in the supply chain our cans cross the border, to guess how much this is going to mean that our four-packs are going to go up in price. But I haven't quite figured that out yet. I am still working with our supply chain. But I mean, we order our cans from a place in Chicago. They get printed there. I'm kind of wavering here, but they print directly on the can. There's no label and it's very recyclable. But I don't know if that aluminum can is made in Canada and then shipped to Chicago. The company that we buy them from is a Montreal-based company. So that's possible. That's why if you
notice the Palace of Cans, it says Messi on them in there because they're from Montreal. Kipqua. Or do they just ship the raw aluminum to a facility in the United States? If the latter is true, maybe it's only, you know, 30 cents per four-pack, but it could get kind of out of hand depending on when they cross. So, this is what I've been learning about this week. Kind of somber, I guess, but
What a wonderfully... Yeah. What a wonderfully specific... this is your second answer, not the first answer. What a wonderfully specific and relevant answer and topic for all of our audiences right now, because I have a feeling throughout all of 2025 and probably beyond, people are going to be constantly having the tariff conversation and trying to navigate their businesses in lieu of that.
Yeah, I think it's a perfect way to sum up what's on the mind of many manufacturers right now as they're thinking about the impact of tariffs. So, I've been at a couple conferences where this was very relevant. Right now it's part of the conversation for everyone. So, perfect. Yeah. Way to wrap it up.
All right. That being said, Ron, if any of our listeners and viewers were interested in getting in touch with you, what's the best way that they can reach you?
The best way...
Meet you in the brewery.
I was going to say show up to Amorphic Brewing and buy a beer. Especially, I'm almost always here when we open every day. I usually leave about an hour after we open because most of the work takes place before. Otherwise, if you actually just go to the website and click an email, that comes to me. So you know, it looks like it's fancy and it's hello@amorphicbeer.com, but that really just goes to me.
All right. And since this is a crossover show, I think it makes sense that we all share our contact details. So Chris, how can folks get in touch with you?
Yeah, look for Manufacturing Happy Hour wherever you get your podcasts. iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, plenty of other niche platforms beyond that. But that's the best way to find the podcast, whether it's video or audio, or connect with me on LinkedIn, Chris Luecke. My last name is six letters. It's L-U-E-C-K-E. That's a great way to connect, have a conversation as well. So, we'll keep it at that. But if you search Manufacturing Happy Hour, it's going to be like the first 10 hits on Google, whether it's my website, Spotify, etc. You're going to find me there.
All right. All right. And Kris with a K.
Yes. So, you can find me on LinkedIn at Kris Harrington. Or you can visit our website, genalpha.com.
And me, I'm very active on LinkedIn as well, Lori Highby. Visit the website keystoneclick.com. And you can follow A BROADcast for Manufacturers on all the standard podcasting syndication websites.
All right, that's all we have for today. Typically, I say this is three broads, but right now it's two broads and two bros with four beers. We're wrapping up. We want you all to go out there and make something awesome.
And I'll add my tagline as well. Stay innovative, stay thirsty, and thank you for coming out and joining us for this conversation tonight. Cheers, everyone. Thank you.
Thanks for coming. Cheers. Cheers. Thank you.
[Applause]
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