With family-friendly spaces and offerings like BaconFace, Java Mac, Dirty Helen, Railsplitter, and Rust Belt, a growing group of Wabash entrepreneurs are at the forefront of a craft-brewing boom that’s enriching the state’s quality of life and shoring up Central Indiana’s economic bottom line.
WHEN CLAY ROBINSON ’97 LAUNCHED Sun King Brewery in 2009, it wasn’t his intention to spark a beer boom unlike any in Central Indiana since before Prohibition. He really just wanted to earn a living making suds—and be his own boss while doing it.
Robinson had graduated from Wabash near the tail end of a smaller craft-beer renaissance in the 1990s, which saw brewpubs open around the state. Still in search of a calling, and needing a job, Clay signed on as a lowly brewer’s assistant at Rock Bottom Brewery in downtown Indianapolis. Before long he worked his way up to the post of brewmaster, and his interest in beer—which before Rock Bottom was mostly limited to drinking it—became a career.
But Robinson also inherited a strong independent streak from his father, Omar Robinson ’60. A self-described “serial entrepreneur,” Omar had dabbled in businesses ranging from machine shops to balloons to carwashes, including a food-production company he sold to a subsidiary of Anheuser-Busch in 1982.
“I was raised by an entrepreneur who’s also a Wabash man,” says Clay. “Pretty early on in my life a lot of the values inherent in someone who chooses to go to college at Wabash were instilled in me—a lot of positive thinking and ideas that you can do and accomplish great things.”
So Clay, along with his dad and a few other partners, decided to break out of the brewpub model that most area breweries followed, serving beer and food in a restaurant setting. Instead, Sun King stuck to beer exclusively, with a production-scale brewery and aggressive distribution to bars, restaurants, events, and retail outlets around the state. Demand for the beer was so high they were able to double output after just their second full year in business. The father-son venture quickly grew to be Indiana’s second-largest brewery and one of the state’s most visible homegrown brands.
The success of the Sun King model proved irresistible to other entrepreneurs. Central Indiana had maybe a dozen breweries when Sun King opened. Now there are close to three dozen. And alumni from Wabash—a school better known for shaping leaders in traditional professional fields like law, medicine, and government—have an outsized presence in this emerging industry, with six breweries around the Indianapolis metro area. Altogether they contribute to an economic impact in the state that is estimated to exceed $600 million annually. (Sun King alone employs more than 125 people.)
And that number doesn’t include the industry’s intangible impact. More than ever, a region’s quality-of-life amenities are regarded as a critical component in drawing tourists and attracting—and retaining—an educated and creative workforce. A thriving craft-beer scene, much like sports, dining, and the arts, creates a buzz in more ways than one.
“Cities compete daily for residents, for businesses to relocate,” says Chris Gahl, vice president of marketing at Visit Indy, the city’s official tourism and convention organization. “And visitors are no different. We compete with Chicago, Denver, Orlando, San Antonio, Nashville. When you’re in the business of marketing a city, being able to showcase the uniqueness, the culture, and the overall vibrancy is paramount. Having so many new craft breweries has enabled us to position Indianapolis as a vibrant city.”
The Wabash entrepreneurs helping to shape this movement bring a broad range of educational backgrounds, professional experience, and personal stories to their respective ventures. But they share common traits that were honed, at least in part, by the time they spent at their alma mater, including intellectual curiosity, independent thinking, a can-do attitude, and a strong work ethic.
Barley Island Brewing Company
Jeff Eaton ’85
Est. 1999, Noblesville, IN
CENTRAL INDIANA’S CURRENT craft-beer boom is the second Jeff Eaton has witnessed firsthand.
In the decade after he graduated from Wabash, brewpubs were popping up around the region. A home-brewer, Eaton had taken a course on entrepreneurship in 1989, drafting a hypothetical business plan for opening a brewpub. He visited breweries whenever he traveled for his corporate job.
By the late ’90s he and his wife Linda were ready to make a go of it, and they opened Barley Island, which quickly became a favorite destination on Noblesville’s charming courthouse square.
Initially, Eaton stayed at his job while Linda worked fulltime on the business. But five years in, he left his day job to focus on adding a bottling and distribution operation. The Dirty Helen brown ale has since become one of the most popular and recognizable beers produced in Indiana.
Although the region’s first beer boom created the conditions that brought Eaton and Barley Island into the marketplace, he’s poised to ride this latest wave as well, with a second, production-scale brewing site and tasting room called Deer Creek Brewery.
“We’re looking forward to rebranding, kind of being new again,” he says in Hoosier Brew, an upcoming documentary about the industry in Indiana.
“There’s really a good camaraderie amongst thebrewers. Some people feel like we’re all competing against each other. Sure, you could say we are, but in the bigger picture, if someone is doing well, they just help raise the waters for the rest of us.”
At Deer Creek, Eaton is leveraging his location near Mexican, Chinese, and sushi restaurants to provide an innovative way for patrons to add food to the all-beer tasting-room menu.
“We don’t have an onsite kitchen, but guests can order take-out for delivery to eat in the tasting room, and more variety than we could ever provide ourselves.”
Sun King Brewery
Clay Robinson ’97 and Omar Robinson ’60
Est. 2009, Indianapolis, IN
“SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS” IS A TECHNICALLY ACCURATE but grossly misleading way to describe Sun King. “Phenomenon” is more apt.
When Clay first starting kicking around the idea of opening a brewery with friend and fellow brewer Dave Colt, they imagined something already familiar in Indianapolis: a brewpub. But after they brought in Clay’s dad and other investors, the plan developed in starts and stops. Eventually they realized that a lot of their difficulties stemmed from having to figure out how to launch a restaurant, when what they were really interested in was making beer.
So instead of a brewpub, they opened a brewery—the first full-scale production brewery in the city since the Indianapolis Brewing Co. closed in 1948. Six years later, they make more beer at their downtown facility than any other brewery in Indiana save one (3 Floyds Brewing Co. in Munster, which had a significant head start and a market presence in Chicago).
In fact, it was outside-the-bottle thinking—figuratively and literally—that sealed Sun King’s fate. While glass dominated the Indiana craft-beer market, Clay and Colt decided to put theirs in cans, a trend that was starting to catch on in other markets but remained virtually unheard of in their home state. It was an idea whose time had come: Hoosier beer drinkers who like the convenience of aluminum (the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, for example, prohibits glass) but want better-than-Budweiser quality have taken to Sun King’s cans in a big way.
More than just being profitable, though, Sun King has already become a near-iconic brand around Indianapolis, a symbol of the area’s craft-beer awakening. And that is in large part due to the Robinsons’ gift of gab. While Colt has headed up the brewing operation, on the marketing side Clay has been a tireless cheerleader for Sun King and the local brewing community, ubiquitous at events around the city (including a new CANvitational beer festival, which Sun King founded). Clay honed that gift partly at Wabash, where he majored in rhetoric. “Why did I study rhetoric?” he says. “I figured no matter what I did, I was going to need to communicate.”
For his part, Omar has leaned on his experience in negotiating deals to lobby for changes in government policy that benefit the state’s craft-beer industry. “If you can’t communicate with the guys who can help you by writing bills, you’re screwed,” he says. He recently helped score a legislative victory that increased the state’s regulatory production limit for companies designated as “craft” breweries, and Sun King has plans to open a second brewery north of Indianapolis in Fishers to keep up with demand. And while Sun King might have interfered with Omar’s retirement plans, he doesn’t seem to mind. “Nothing is quite as fun as the beer business,” he says. “Call it a happening. Call it a cult.”
Black Swan Brewpub
D.J. McCallister ’97
Est. 2010, Plainfield, IN
D.J. MCCALLISTER HAS BEEN a brewer for a long time. But owning a brewery was a different matter altogether.
He started home brewing while he was a student at Wabash—and “not just because I loved drinking beer,” he explains. “It was more than that, an intensively artisan quality that appealed to me.” With a major in physics and minor in philosophy, McCallister had a range of intellectual interests that spanned left- and right-brained disciplines. Brewing, which can incorporate everything from chemistry to biology to history to world cultures, presented a satisfying challenge to someone steeped in the liberal arts.
After graduating, McCallister hooked up with Greg Emig of Lafayette Brewing Company (whose brother, Joe, attended Wabash) and worked there as an assistant brewer for two years. Although he wanted to start his own brewery, he ended up getting a “real” job as a high-level manager at Exelon Corporation, an energy provider where he worked for several years before the idea of being a brewer “crept back into his head.”
By the late 2000s, several years of saving and then a serendipitous layoff and severance made it possible. At Black Swan, an intimate suburban spot with a gastropub format, McCallister can satisfy not just his love of making good beer but also his interest in pairing it with fine food. (His first and now-former head chef, Nick Carter, was a Class of ’95 Wabash grad.)
But it’s not just the epicurean aspects of running a brewpub that he finds stimulating. “I think Wabash men are, in a unique way, trained for small-business management—the rigor and critical thinking it requires,” he says. Add to that the ability to overcome and learn from past mistakes. McCallister’s first entrepreneurial foray was not Black Swan, in fact, but rather a private-label water-bottling company he bought into before the job at Exelon—a venture he now describes as an “abject failure” that, for a long time, left a “deep and blistering” wound. Now, though, he’s grateful he got the experience of failure out of the way. “Thank God it wasn’t the brewery,” he says.
Triton Brewing Company
David Waldman ’93
Est. 2011, Lawrence, IN
DAVID WALDMAN IS THE RARE Wabash grad in the Central Indiana craft-brewing business who can say he’s doing what he set out to do even before he enrolled at the College. While Dave was still a teenager, friends of his parents opened Mishawaka Brewing Company near his hometown of Elkhart, IN.
“It was in an old Chuck E. Cheese’s, and these guys were brewing beer better than anyone in northern Indiana could have imagined in 1985,” Waldman says. “It was a revelation. I thought, Holy shit! This is what I want to do with my life! Owning a brewery became my life’s goal.”
He finally made it, but not without a few twists and turns along the way. After Wabash, he earned a master’s degree in Jewish studies and nonprofit management at Gratz College in Pennsylvania, as well as certification as a mixologist.
“I had two ideas: I either wanted to be a professor or do this,” he says. “The jobs that I took were not about the title or even the work, but who was the Yoda I could apprentice under—the lady or gentleman who had the gift to give if I was willing to apply myself to learn those things.”
He found such an opportunity when he was recruited to become associate director of the Jewish Community Center in Columbia, SC.
“We had a budget of $3 million, put together to grow a campaign and raised $8 million on a goal of $5.5 million. It was an exceptional capital campaign,” Waldman says, “but it burned out everybody.”
So Waldman went to work at Delaney’s Music Pub & Eatery, an Irish pub with an amazing tap list in Columbia, SC. While he was there, a brewpub closed, and Waldman and his partners put together a deal to acquire the equipment and location. But when the owners ultimately balked, Waldman decided it was time to move back to Indiana.
The dream of owning a brewery persisted, and Waldman teamed up with Jon Lang, who worked as a brewer at Barley Island, and the two of them drew up a plan and started pitching it to family and investors. Now, some five years later, Triton’s Rail Splitter India Pale Ale is the best-selling Indiana-made IPA in the state.
Waldman handles the operations side of the business—“I deal with the stuff that makes it run,” he says—and as is true for other Wabash-educated brewers, the complexities of the industry, from financing, production, distribution, marketing, and regulation, to the politics of lobbying for changes to state law, fulfill his need to meet intellectual challenges.
“There’s a new challenge every day,” he says. “I think that’s why you find so many Wabash guys in this business.”
Wabash Brewing
Damon Carl ’03 and Matt Kriech ’00
Est 2015, Indianapolis, IN
IF GOOD BREWING REQUIRES the measured, methodical approach of a scientist, then Damon Carl and Matt Kriech are uniquely qualified.
Indianapolis natives and chemistry majors with overlapping tenures at Wabash, the two didn’t even meet until after graduation, when they connected in Utah while pursuing graduate degrees in the field. And even then, they didn’t share an equal level of interest in beer, let alone brewing. Carl had flirted with home brewing at Wabash—in a chemistry lab, where he and friends concocted something they called Fat Man Brew. (“Two of us were fat,” Carl explains).
Kriech acquired his appreciation after moving out west, while visiting in the craft-beer hotbeds of Colorado and Oregon, where he was introduced to Fat Tire amber ale, the first beer he “fell in love with.” An avid cycler, he started dabbling in home-brewing as well, making one-off batches for charity cycling events.
They each completed PhDs, moved back to Indianapolis (in 2009 and 2011, respectively), and reconnected. Then one day over beers in Sun King’s downtown tasting room, Kriech looked at Carl and said, “I’ve got a crazy idea for a nanobrewery.”
Kriech found a receptive ear—and business partner—in Carl, who, like him, already enjoyed a successful career. (Carl is a clinical toxicologist at a small startup lab, and Kriech is a manager at Monument Chemicals.) Rounding out the ownership team is head brewer Nic Stauch and Kriech’s cousin, Dave Kriech.
“Having a strong team, good careers, and patient and loving families allowed us to take our time before launching Wabash Brewing,” says Carl.
After consulting with a few other brewery owners, including Black Swan’s McCallister, they decided patience was the best approach.
“The toughest thing to do was admit to ourselves that we weren’t ready,” says Kriech. So they set up a small 10-gallon system in Kriech’s garage and, every weekend for a year, they practiced.
Finally ready, they signed a lease in an office park in the Park 100 district on Indy’s northwest side. They did most of the build-out themselves. Now more than a year into the business, the brewery, with its scattered tools and comfy chairs, feels like an ultimate guys’ workshop and clubhouse, and the friendly tasting room has gained a devoted following of regulars from the offices and industries nearby.
For Carl and Kriech, both still happy in their careers, the brewing venture is, in Kriech’s words, “more of a passion than a job.”
“As an owner and brewer, the creativity is unlimited,” says Kriech. “We’re not so structured that you can’t come home one day and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this crazy idea. Let’s go pursue it.’ It’s thrilling and exciting.”
And on a deeper level, the art—and mystery—of the ancient craft appeals to the same curiosity that drove them to become scientists in the first place.
“Even if you gave me the recipe for Wee Mac, there’s no way I could remake it,”says Carl, referring to Sun King’s popular Scottish ale. “Brewing is the ultimate chemistry problem.”
Central State Brewing Co.
Chris Bly ’06 and Jake Koeneman ’06
Est. 2015, Indianapolis, IN
MANY A BEER-LOVING ENTREPRENEUR has asked himself, How do I start a brewery?
But as Chris Bly, Jake Koeneman, and their partner Josh Hambright began formulating their plans while Central Indiana’s craft-beer explosion was in full boom, they asked themselves a more loaded question: How do we start a brewery that’s different from all the other breweries?
Brett gave them the answer—“Brett” being not a fellow brewer or business consultant, but rather shorthand for brettanomyces, wild yeast commonly used in Belgian beers that can yield surprising flavors. It’s a trend that’s starting to pick up steam in the United States, but still has relatively few adherents, particularly in the Midwest.
“There are more than 100 brewery permits in the state of Indiana, and 99 percent of those places are creating takes on the same five beer styles,” says Bly.
“We wanted to do something different. Yeast was a way to differentiate ourselves.”
Central State’s first beers starting flowing from Indianapolis taps just this past summer, a milestone in what has been, at times, a difficult journey. Initial plans had the brewery opening in Indy’s redeveloped former Central State mental hospital (thus the name), and when those fell through, the entrepreneurs worked out a deal to lease brewing space in the city’s popular Black Acre Brewing Co.
Bly and Koeneman both work full-time jobs—Bly as a technical writer for a pharmaceuticals consulting company and Koeneman as a program manager with Salesforce Marketing Cloud. But it’s this sideline gig that inspires them.
“From a business standpoint, some of what goes into producing and selling beer is like making widgets,” says Koeneman. “Ours just happens to be pretty awesome.”