CU grad hops onto a satisfying craft-brewing career

By Clint Talbott

Freddy Bensch’s first brush with the brewing industry was less than glamorous. In the early 1990s, he and a fellow student at the University of Colorado Boulder landed jobs washing kegs on the loading docks of Boulder Beer, Colorado’s first microbrewery.

Bensch and roommate Kevin McNerney “fell in love with the industry.” It was an affair to remember.

Today, California native Bensch runs Atlanta’s SweetWater Brewing Company, which has the capacity to brew 420,000 barrels of beer annually. Last year, SweetWater was ranked as the nation’s 24^th largest craft-brewing company—tied with Oregon’s Full Sail—as measured by sales. This year they will brew more than 145,000 barrels of beer.

The link is the outdoors. I’m a huge outdoorsman. Most of the classes I took had to do with the woods or rivers."This year, Bensch says, SweetWater will probably be ranked in the mid-teens. “We’re growing quickly,” he notes.

Not bad, given that Bensch graduated from CU-Boulder in 1995 and founded Sweetwater in 1997.

The path from an environmental-studies degree to craft-brewing magnate might not seem obvious. Bensch connects the dots:

“The link is the outdoors. I’m a huge outdoorsman,” Bensch says. “Most of the classes I took had to do with the woods or rivers.” When he wasn’t going to school, he was typically outside, kayaking, for instance, perhaps enjoying a beer.

After graduation, he and McNerney decided it was time to find a “real job” or “get serious” in the brewing business.

The duo learned more about “fermentation sciences” at the American Brewers Guild in California. For a time, worked on the West Coast honing their skills and tapping other breweries’ knowledge.

Bensch and McNerney hoped to open their own brewery one day, and attending the 1996 Olympics highlighted an opportunity. While craft brewing proliferated elsewhere at that time, the Southeast brewing industry lagged behind, “about 20 percent of what it is today,” Bensch says.

With funding from friends, family and the U.S. Small Business Administration, one of Atlanta’s first craft breweries opened in 1997 and was christened “SweetWater,” after a creek that flows into the Chattahoochee River, in Sweetwater Creek State Park. The company’s motto flows from its name: “Don’t Float the Mainstream.”

SweetWater sold 17 kegs in its first month. “The beer thing we knew,” McNerney told Atlanta Magazine last year. “The business thing and all those other technicalities—that is what we were green.”

McNerney has gone on to be brewmaster at Atlanta’s 5 Seasons Brewing, which boasts that McNerney “helped to build SweetWater Brewing Company.”

In the beginning, Bensch and his partners advertised via shoe leather. “We’d load up our company car, which was an old Honda station wagon, with kegs,” he told Atlanta Magazine. They’d pop into local bars, and, “With a growler of beer, we’d go in and say, ‘Hey, we just made this down the street. We’re starting this new brewery; would you like to try this?’”

Atlanta’s beer drinkers, used to mass-produced beers, were generally sold with the first taste, Bensch recalls.

Today, SweetWater is the second-largest craft brewery in the American Southeast. Other brewers have noticed the booming market. Colorado’s New Belgium Brewing (No. 3 among U.S. craft brewers) and California’s Sierra Nevada (ranked No. 2) are building breweries in the Southeast.

Meanwhile, Bensch retains his love for the outdoors. With parties and cleanups, Bensch and SweetWater have raised money and awareness for the Chattahoochee River. “That’s where we get the water for our beer,” he says. “We kayak, paddle board, and brush our teeth with the Hooch’s water.”

The Chattahoochee is the southern-most trout stream in the country and runs to the Gulf of Mexico. “It’s gorgeous.”

The philanthropy, which has generated more than $700,000, comes “straight out of our experience in Colorado, doing things good for the community and good for the environment,” Bensch adds.

And his career, which involves making beer, tasting beer and talking about beer, is satisfying. “It’s a dream job.”

If a college student asked for career advice, Bensch would say something like this: “Don’t be afraid to take a chance. You’re not here for a long time. You’re here for a good time … Your life will turn out a lot happier when you live by that philosophy.”

He continues: “Don’t be afraid to fail. Find something you’re passionate about. If you’re doing something you love, it’s not work.”

And one final thought: “Support your local breweries.”

Learn more about Bensch’s venture here. 

December 2013