Irene Firmat Oral History Interview, May 4, 2015

TIAH EDMUNSON-MORTON: Alright, go ahead.

IRENE FIRMAT: Okay. Irene Firmat. I was born October 30, 1957. Right now we're at Full Sail Brewing Company in Hood River, Oregon.

TEM: So, you were born in New York?

IF: No, I was born in Havana, Cuba.

TEM: Oh, you were?

IF: Yes, I'm Cuban.

TEM: Alright.

IF: Yes.

TEM: So how long did you live in Cuba?

IF: We left when I was about 3 ½ years old.

TEM: Do you have memories of living there?

IF: I don't think so. But obviously it was such a huge story for my family that it's hard to differentiate at what times it's your real memory or what time it's a story that's sifted in. But one of the ones that I do, I think it's mine, is we had to go to Spain because there was there no diplomatic relationships with the United States at the time. So we had to get all of our paperwork done in Spain. Then we took a ship from Spain to the United States. I remember my parents waking us up, my sister's two years older, and it was just early morning and the fog was breaking, to show us the Statue of Liberty. I do have that 00:01:00memory. I think part of it too must have been the intense emotions my parents were feeling at the time.

TEM: Why did they leave? Why did, what was--?

IF: Castro. They totally supported him in the beginning. Cuba has had a really unfortunate history of a lot of corrupt governments and politicians. My parents were really idealistic and they supported him. They both had really high-power jobs in the private sector and quit them to go work in the government. My father's was pretty high-profile, and the day that Castro took away the freedom of the press my father really publicly quit. They came in and ransacked our house. My mom got a call saying you need to come home there's militia men with guns searching our house. They were looking for evidence that we were leaving. They pulled my dad's visa. Until the very final minute we really didn't know if he was going to be able to come with us. It was pretty intense. You could only leave with one set of clothes. That's it. Nothing at all.

TEM: Wow.

IF: My parents had to start everything new. It was pretty remarkable.

TEM: Did you fly to Spain? Were you able to--?

IF: We flew to Spain in a propeller jet that I think took something like 36 hours, a propeller plane. My mom said it was awful. Then we stayed there. We had relatives in Spain so we stayed there for it must have been about 4 months or something like that until we got all the paperwork and then came to New York.

TEM: So what kinds of stories-you were saying that the kind of merger of your memories and your family stories. What are some of the stories that you grew up with about Cuba? What did you know about the place that it had been and where you had left?

IF: One of the things was that it was really paradise in a lot of ways. We came in October, and it was one of the coldest winters in New York in like a hundred 00:03:00years. My parents were so shocked. It was shocking. All the trees die in the northeast, you know, in the Midwest, too. You forget about living out here it stays green all the time. But everything just dies. I remember the conversation with my parents and we had family that had also joined us there and all the adults were saying, "All these trees will never come back to life?" It was so in line with I think where they were feeling, where they were grieving. I think one of the biggest of losses for them was the whole quality of life or the network of family and friends and of living in a place where they felt really comfortable. I think that's so much of the immigrant experience, that you're so much of an outsider on so many levels. But my parents really wanted to start a new future for us. They didn't have a sense that they would go back. They knew 00:04:00it was permanent. They were really focused on just making a new life.

TEM: Do you still have family in Cuba?

IF: Not anymore. Everybody's pretty much passed away, everybody who didn't leave. But I would love to go back. I would love to see it. I have cousins who have gone back, but I haven't gone. My mom just died about 2 years ago, and we had made her a promise that we wouldn't go back until the government changed. I don't want to give them money. I don't really. It's not okay what they did, so I would like to wait. But it's tempting. Really tempting. So we'll see.

TEM: Why did they choose New York?

IF: A lot of Cubans were going to Miami and southern Florida, and they didn't want to do that because it was really a sense of-there's a Spanish expression: "volveremos," which means, "We will go back." So there was a lot of living in the past there and really focused on... my parents didn't have illusions that 00:05:00this would work that way, so they wanted a cleaner break. In New York my uncle had already come, he had a job at the American Company and the American Company was in New York so that became the place where we all came, and I went to kindergarten I didn't speak a word of English. By the time I finished I was fluent, but it was easy for a kid. Really hard for the adults. You know.

TEM: So did they, what was that transition like for them? Obviously you were pretty young, so to reflect on-what were you parents doing when you were five?

IF: I think I didn't really realize just how hard it was until the first time I went to Europe, and I was in Germany in a place I didn't speak the language at all, didn't understand it at all, and I thought, "God, this is frightening." It strips you of your dignity. You don't feel confident at all. And I thought my parents had to navigate that, you know, how hard that was. Here I am as a tourist just trying to figure out where I get the beer. But here they were trying to figure out how do I get housing, how do I get a job, how do I get my 00:06:00kids in school with not having fluency in the language. It really is a huge thing.

TEM: What did they do? They were working in high-power jobs in Cuba. What did they do career-wise once they--

IF: One of the really tough things when you're an immigrant is that you have this degree of education-both my parents had MBAs, were both accountants at MBAs. That doesn't count for anything. My dad had several really good friends who were surgeons. You have to get totally recertified. You either make the decision to go back to school and get recertified, or you just take a lower-level job. And my parents both decided to take the lower-level jobs. Other people, so my uncles decided to do the-go back to medical school or go back to get their MBA again, but that's a hard road. So you just get a lower-level job.

TEM: What was it like? So you just have the one sister?

IF: Yes.

TEM: So did you feel like at a certain level your community, your family 00:07:00community, moved with you to New York? Was there a sense of, not recreating what it was like, but that you had a support base?

IF: For a child, yeah. But for the adults it was very, very much less of what we had in Cuba, because it really distilled down to my grandmother, my aunt, and uncle and his wife. That was it. Compared to we had lots of cousins. We came from a pretty big family that was all very close, so everybody was spread out all over the place. I think there was a huge sense of loss about that. Cuba's a really small country, right?

TEM: [Laughs] Right.

IF: So you compare this tiny little country that's 90 miles to the vastness of the Unites States, right, where people just get lost here?

TEM: Well, I would imagine in New York, too. New York is the, even geographically.

IF: Oh, yeah, New York is huge too.

TEM: So what was it like to grow up in New York? What are some of the things that you remember?

IF: We lived in the city in Queens. You got a lot of independence as a kid growing up. You could go see friends pretty easily. Then when I was in fifth grade we moved to Westchester County, which had no ability to do anything unless your parents drove you. I remember going this is so awful! Because you lost so much independence. Kids who live in cities I think end up being, you can just do more things by walking. Everything's closer and more accessible. That was an adjustment for sure. My parents wanted to get out of the city. It was right when New York was getting really challenging in the late '60s, early '70s. I look back on that now, and New York now feels like La La Land compared to anybody who lived there during the '70s when it was a really challenging place to be.

TEM: Were you able to-did you still go into the city?

IF: Oh yeah, yeah.

TEM: Was that a--?

IF: It was a train ride away. Once we got to be a certain age my parents let us do it. I think we were 16 when we could do it, and it was always the running back to get the last train because it was only one train. We would all be-but it was the way we grew up. It was sort of what we were talking about the helicopter parents versus... I think they were totally right. My friends and I were totally capable of managing that: getting on a train, going to New York, coming back. But you wonder how many people would think that was okay now, right? But it was fun. New York had so many things to offer, too. If you're into theater and the arts and all of that. It was a remarkable place. It still is.

TEM: What did you do when you went? What was your favorite thing to do?

IF: Well, when we were that young we'd go see a play or go to the museum or whatever. And then obviously when we were older we went to bars [laughs].

TEM: [Laughs].

IF: The drinking age was 18. So yes.

TEM: Then you could ride the train home.

IF: Then you could ride the train home. Yeah, yeah. It's an interesting thing being out on the East Coast. When I moved out here I thought I might not like it, but no big deal because I can always go back. Because I'm going to miss all these things: the theater, the museums, and all that. Then you realize there's a whole lot of different parts about quality of life and make your life worthwhile, and just out here I think it's so deep with that. There's just something about living in Oregon that...

TEM: Yeah, so how old were you when you moved to Oregon?

IF: I was 23, 24. I had been working for a couple years and I was working in retailing. I figured if you're in retail in New York you can get a job anywhere, because it's like the place to be. I came out here and I did, even though I look back on that it was like the depth of the recession in Oregon. What a crazy 00:11:00thing to do, just move out here with no job. I think my parents were a little freaked out [laughs]. I had a good friend who had come out here as a Vista volunteer, which was like the America Corps of the day. So we just decided, she wanted to say, I came out, and I never went back. Then I had a job where I was a buyer for Meier and Frank, which was a department store that doesn't exist anymore. It's all Macy's. I would go back every month for a week. If anything helps validate your decision it's that you'll get nostalgic about it, right, because you're going back. So I'd be there and then I'd be back on a plane on Friday and going, "I'm really glad I'm coming home."

TEM: What was the contrasting, so what year did you move here?

IF: I was born in '57, I moved... so '81.

TEM: So what was the biggest, I don't know--

IF: The biggest difference? Oh, I can tell you. I came out here and I thought, 00:12:00"Boy I must really look like somebody who lives here," because people would say hello, look you in the eye. And I'd go, "Oh I must really look like somebody." And then afterward you realize that's just the way it is. I would get on that plane on Sunday night or Monday morning and I'd be like all Oregonian loose, and by the time I got back on Friday you'd have that body language of you don't look anybody, you're down. And I'd go, "I don't want to be that person." There's something really incredible about being that much more relaxed. It isn't like Portland didn't have crime and didn't have issues or whatever. The first house I had was right in North Williams, which back then if you had a stereo in your car it was gone the next day. Nothing lasted. But still there was just a different feel to it out here. I don't know if it's a West Coast versus East Coast part or the fact that Oregon's a small state. So many people came out here too, which 00:13:00was really amazing. My first Thanksgiving I must have had 10 offers from different people asking me to join them. Which, growing up on the East Coast you never did, because you just assumed people knew layers and layers of people, right? But here I think there's a whole lot more empathy about, hey, a lot of people are new. A lot of people are moving here, or I've done it and I know what it feels like. So there's a friendliness to it that is really appealing.

TEM: So you lived in the city and you were working for Meier and Frank and what were the things that you liked to do, or what do you remember about living in Portland once you had settled in?

IF: Oh I was never home. My mom used to say the ceiling would crash in your house and you'd never know.

TEM: [Laughs].

IF: It was so much fun. And everything was so affordable. There were so many things to do. You think about all the concerts that are free or almost free, all the different things that you can go out and do every night. It just requires having some people to do it with, and it was wonderful. I really liked that and 00:14:00you can actually afford to do them all.

TEM: What was the point where you said, "I'm working at Meier and Frank, I'm doing this, and now I want to do something..."

IF: Else?

TEM: Yeah.

IF: I really liked a lot about that job, and they were a great company to work for, but there were things that were done because it was a public company. It was part of MAY Company, which was a fortune 500 company, so there's was a lot of scrambling over quarterly returns all the time when you had to tell what earnings were and things that you knew didn't make any sense but were just for the moment and afterward didn't really solve the problem. You're just layering it on. Then choices that were made about how people were treated or where the money went, where I didn't think made business sense but also didn't feel very good from a values point of view.

I got to the point where I thought I could continue doing this or I can make a decision at this point in my life, which is pretty low-risk. I wasn't married, I didn't own a house. I didn't have a lot of things to risk and really try and run my own business. I had a friend who was working for a beer distributor at the time, and we kept seeing all the things that were going on with craft beer, with Bridgeport and Widmer and Redhook and Sierra Nevada and thought, wow, that's a huge opportunity. How do we do something with that? I had gone to Europe after college and done the whole backpacking-six-month thing with a friend, and the quality of life there was just incredible. That whole thing of the quality of the food and the beer and the wine, and people seemed to enjoy things more. Seeing the beginning of craft beer was such a call about that, that we could do 00:16:00these things better, right? We could have better beer, better bread, better everything, right?

TEM: Mm-hmm.

IF: Just that had a lot of resonance to me. But not to a lot of other people because it took us 3 years to finally get the money. And we bootstrapped it. Completely, utterly bootstrapped it.

TEM: Did you feel-pausing just a second on the story of the company-did you feel... you know we can think of eating local farmer's markets, locavores being a recent invention.

IF: Yeah.

TEM: Did you feel, though, the seeds of that were strong? That you could see the connection in Oregon to ingredients and farms and did you feel that back in the '80s?

IF: Not really. I think things were so not like that, right? There was just such 00:17:00a sterile-ness for the most part in what was available to people. It didn't really have any kind of connection too much. I mean there weren't farmer's markets. I mean really. That whole idea wasn't there. And knowing where something came from, no. The kind of variety we take for granted now. I remember when Pasta Works opened. That was a huge thing. You would get all these-it wasn't just that they were making fresh pasta but that they have a cheese selection that was like nobody was doing things like that. The cheese selection was pretty homogenized. It was all part of what was bubbling up at the time from all different people and all... which is the exciting part of something like that, right?

TEM: Yeah.

IF: That you have all these different people coming from these different places in their life and different experiences and they're all coming toward the same piece of helping build this quality-of-life piece.

TEM: Did you feel-so, you know, New York has a lot more going on for a lot of 00:18:00different reasons, but that there are lots of different people from lots of different places. Did you feel like that experience of growing up, and I don't imagine New York being homogenous... did you feel like you brought some of that from New York?

IF: You know what, what's interesting is in some ways New York can be really homogenized depending on where you are. There's really clusters of people who stay together and don't necessarily blend. One thing that really blew me away coming out here was the social class structure was so different. There was none. There is such a social class structure in the East Coast about who your parents were, where you went to school, what your education is, what your profession is, and my friend who was out here she was going out with a carpenter. Which, out here, it doesn't mean anything, but, my god, in New York that just didn't happen. You didn't know blue collar if you were a white collar person. I mean 00:19:00that mobility just... and I love that. I just thought that was incredible compared to the rigidity of that whole social class thing. I had worked in a country club, a really exclusive country club all through high school and a lot of college and, ugh, that whole East Coast, it really was such a turn off. So that to me in some ways this was less homogenized because it was so much more fluid. That was a really appealing thing.

TEM: What about culturally? So bringing in, you know, being born in Cuba and growing up in a family obviously that continued to tell the stories and connect to that Cuban heritage. What was that like coming out here? Did you feel like there was a community of people that you could connect with culturally?

IF: Being Cuban? No. I mean I had been so Americanized at that point. I think in 00:20:00some ways I become more Cuban as I've gotten older, because there's-I think there's part of the immigrant experience too that makes you want to be one of them, right? I remember as a kid I just wanted to change my name and I wanted it to be Betty. Because Betty sounded very American. And it was like you just wanted to be American. I don't have an accent. I don't look like people think Cubans should look like. It's always been very easy for me just to be...people are surprised when I say I am. I was always very mainstream with that. Yeah. It's just... so no, I didn't miss that particularly because it wasn't part of who I really was.

TEM: Do you feel more now like that's something that you can connect with here? You said that as you get older you...

IF: Oh, as you get older and I married somebody who's very waspy, you know, from the Midwest. So when we first got married, he would go like, "You know you talk 00:21:00about Cuban coffee and you talk about Cuban sandwiches and you talk about Cuban cigars and Cuban rum." And I said, "Yeah." And I said, "You know what that means, right?" And he goes, "What?" I said, "It means it's the best." [Laughs]

TEM: [Laughs].

IF: So what do you say when you say "Cuban woman?" You know, it's like... It made me realize how rich in contrast to a more typical American upbringing my family life really was. It was a lot of conversations you have when you're first falling in love and you start really knowing that other person in a deeper way and just realizing how many things my family had in terms of more of a global perspective, more of a sense of history about the world, and not just a more narrow American point of view. That's I think one of the moments when I realized, god, this is a really rich way to have had that. You know?

TEM: Yeah. And I imagine too the strength that it takes to make a decision as a 00:22:00family to move is...

IF: Oh, incredible. Incredible, really.

TEM: Courage to--

IF: Courage, but if you see what was left behind, it would have been very, very hard to raise children without having control over what was going to happen to them. Kids got pulled away from their families. They were sent to school. You didn't have all the choices you would make as a parent to protect your kid or to nurture them. They got taken away. So I don't think my parents ever regretted leaving.

TEM: Did they live in New York?

IF: They did. And then when they retired they went out to Los Angeles, because my dad's brother was out there. So all the time they had lived with my mom's side of the family on the east coast and then they went to move out to my dad's side of the family, so.

TEM: It's sunnier.

IF: Yes, that too [laughs].

TEM: The trees continue to-[laughs].

IF: The trees continue... and there's palm trees and all of that.

TEM: I imagine that it was more similar to Cuba than New York City would be.

IF: Yes, you do get used to a lot, but, yes, I think that the weather was way better. Yeah, way better.

TEM: So back to the 1980s you are partnering up with the distributor and looking around. Did either of you brew? Were you...?

IF: No we got someone who was a brewer. We had met him. I can't even remember how we met Dave. He was the state champion for that year at the state fair. And he also had a business with his wife-Wy'East Labs, which does yeast for small breweries, well, small wineries. Then he was doing the home brew package that nobody else had anything like that. We ended up meeting him, so he was our original brewer.

TEM: What was partner's name? Your first partner's name?

IF: Jerome. He had been working at the distributor. So he was bringing the sales 00:24:00expertise and I was bringing the business expertise and I had a marketing degree, a business degree, and then we had Dave who was going to be the brew master. But not that far into it his wife-who was the microbiologist who was running the business with him, which is why he said he could do this no problem-she got pregnant with triplets and got a complete bed rest. So then Dave couldn't do it anymore. I mean, we were working 80, 90 hours a week, and they had been doing that on their end, too. I got a resume, I got a lot of resumes, none of which I really liked. They all were MBAs [Master of Business Administration] and wanted my job. I wanted somebody who really, deeply felt the passion for this. I saw a resume, and it was somebody who had an organic chem [chemistry] degree and was graduating with a Master of Brewing at Siebel, and his objective was to master the art and science of beer. I was like, oh this is 00:25:00great. This is so good. There weren't a lot of options back then. So I talked to him on the phone and I convinced him to come out. I thought, you know, he's in Indiana. You convince a 24-year-old guy to come out here. He's going to fall in love with Oregon. He'll never go back. So he did. But we also found love. So then we ended up deciding to get married.

TEM: So you were, but Full Sail, was it called Full Sail then?

IF: It was called Hood River Brewing Company.

TEM: So that answers my question. You have always been based in Hood River-Full Sail has always been in Hood River.

IF: Because by that point there had been two brewers in Portland, and the third just opened up. Portland Brewing was the third. And we thought, whoa, too many brewers in Portland, you can't [laughs].

TEM: [Laughs].

IF: So we were a little wrong about that one [laughs]. Then the part about out here, I mean, it's hard to imagine, but this was the most economically 00:26:00devastated community. It was just hit so hard with the whole timber piece, with all the limitations on the old growth and with this building we're in and about 10 buildings of this size were all abandoned because they had been part of the Diamond Fruit co-op for canning fruit. And when the canned fruit market just collapsed, these buildings were just left completely abandoned. It was a place that was being targeted by the SBA [Small Business Administration] as part of really helping distressed communities. So there were opportunities here. Plus we really liked the association with the gorge. It's just beautiful.

TEM: At that point had you moved to Hood River as well? Were you living here or were you still living in Portland?

IF: I was still living in Portland. And I would stay at my friend whose, Jerome, 00:27:00he had a house here. He and his wife had a house here. I would stay there and then once Jamie came, he was living here too. What we found over time is it's a really small community, and if the two of you are working in the same place you really don't get much distance from it. We actually decided when we decided to get married we're going to buy a house in Portland. And we did. And we've always been in Portland. It gives us a spread. It lets us talk about work on the way here and talk about work on the way back. And then hopefully--

TEM: Be done.

IF: Be done. You know, never that clean but more so. Then you don't know what's going on in people's personal life. Which we learned really early on you want to make decisions about people, about what they're doing at work but not necessarily what they're doing, like who they're sleeping with or what else is going on. I mean, don't want, not judging people here, we're just making sure 00:28:00that they're good employees and good people to work with. That in itself was a good thing of, okay I don't know. I don't know all that. Then afterward once we had kids we had this really interesting conversation with somebody who owned a company in a small town and said it was really challenging for them, it was a husband and wife too, because they made a really difficult personnel decision. And the person's son was a bully in the third grade. All of a sudden their kids were being subjected to that. Or the reverse of their kids thinking that they were so cool because their parents were this. Well, our kids were able to be pretty anonymous from all that, which I think was a really good thing. The decisions you make without thinking of all these variables, but then after the fact you go, yeah. So it was good.

TEM: I can imagine too that Hood River economically struggling. It's hard for us to look around now and it feels so different. But I can imagine that it would be 00:29:00hard to grow up as a child--

IF: --in a place like this?

TEM: Mm-hmm.

IF: Yeah, I mean I didn't even really think about that. It was mostly for us just having some distance, and I think it was great because since it wasn't all about us it really shaped the company's culture. People view Full Sail and it's not the Jaime and Irene show. It is about all the people who work here and everybody gets opportunities to really be front and forward about how they represent the company. So many people do. I think if we lived here that wouldn't be as easy to happen. I love that. I think it makes it for a really great space.

TEM: So what was it when you decided to open, you set up here? What do you remember about that time, at that point it was pretty much the Portland Brewing 00:30:00scene, you guys, then-?

IF: --draft only [laughing].

TEM: Oregon trails... so what was it like? What are the things that you remember from? I know it was challenging to get financing.

IF: Yeah, and then after we got financing I quit my job in May, and every dime that we had went to pay for this bottling line that we had brought over from Italy. Then the OLCC [Oregon Liquor Control Commission] wouldn't give us a liquor license. Until we had our license, the financing we had wouldn't get released. It was one of the components. It took us three months to finally get through and get the license. Part of it was nobody had done breweries for so long. Everybody was trying to figure all this out. But in the meantime we were living on credit cards. Back then people did not take credit cards the way they do now. There was only one grocery store in Portland that took a credit card, it was called Corno's. It was right underneath the bridge. We would go there and buy, and if eggplants were on sale we would buy eggplants to get us through the week. We were just squeaking by because we really didn't know when... I remember 00:31:00having a little spreadsheet trying to figure out how much longer we can last until... and then the financing came through. That was incredibly stressful because we had spent money and we're all out there, had quit our jobs. Then finally we got the money, and you just start with all the learning curve of starting out and all the things you don't know.

TEM: You and Jaime were married then?

IF: No Jaime didn't come on board until April. The company started in September, so...

TEM: Okay, okay.

IF: Which actually I'm really proud of because I think it's... most of the time you get women running breweries or being involved in breweries, it's because they came in with their partner. And that wasn't the case here. I hired him.

TEM: You hired him.

IF: Yes [laughs].

TEM: How long were you, and how long was Jerome involved too?

IF: He was involved until we did the ESOP [employee stock ownership plans] back in 1999, and that's when he sold his shares and he moved on and did other things.

TEM: Does he still live in Hood River?

IF: No he lives in Portland. He works for the distributor again, totally closed the circle. He works for Maletis Beverage.

TEM: Company culture wise, I'm curious about lots of people talk about your leadership style, praise your leadership style. It wasn't until the '90s that the employee ownership came in. What were those first 10-ish years like, and what were the things that were really important to you for building a company culture that was open even before employees were owning as well?

IF: Yeah.

TEM: Does that make sense? That was a long version of--

IF: Oh yeah, absolutely. And I think the employee ownership is one piece of that. But it isn't really what makes it special here. I think what's unique about what we've built here is it's really a culture of respect and empathy. 00:33:00It's approaching it from the sense that everybody's here not because they want to be-it's not like you're taking a vacation with friends or family-people have to work. So what can we do for each other to make this be a better experience? One of the things I really didn't like about working for corporate environment was that Monday morning quarterbacking where people take apart decisions after the fact. So we try to be very, very respectful of not doing that. Decisions are made in complicated environments sometimes. It's really easy after that complexity is over to say I think that really undercuts people. Makes them feel not really confident about making decisions moving forward. So we try not to do that. We really try to have a culture where nobody here, we're such a small company, and we stress that all the time. We're such a small company in this really incredibly competitive global environment. We're competing with some really humungous companies and always have been. Now we're competing with a lot 00:34:00of very small companies, but the reality of when we started was we're competing with some very, very big and powerful companies. We had to make sure the strength that we had was that we didn't do all of those things that big companies tend to do... of being more silo-ish, of saying that's not my job, of really compartmentalizing responsibility, that we really had a culture where everybody felt like I can count on that person, that person will have my back. To me that's what's really makes working here such a great thing. It's great for me. I think the other part of it is I really like to delegate, and delegation really empowers people to do more interesting things. If you don't delegate then you don't let people grow and you don't let them really thrive and see what they can do. Delegation comes in really handy when you are trying to raise children 00:35:00at the same time that you're trying to run a company, right?

It just... I think that's part of what the culture is. I think the ESOP for us was a solution to... we had early investor friends, the classic piece of you start a company with friends and you grow apart and you get different things that you want. And people wanted to cash out, and we didn't want to have the brewery sold and just shut down. So we did the ESOP as an alternative to that. In some ways it was just part of the continuum of saying we're a company that is really respectful of people's efforts, and that we want to acknowledge that.

TEM: I know you get asked this a lot, but it is unique, it was unique to have a female running a company, starting a company. What do you feel like both the 00:36:00biggest challenges were and the biggest benefits of being a woman starting a company in the 1980s?

IF: Well, it's a woman starting a company in a very, very male-dominated world. Sometimes to me it's still shocking how dominated it is. I will be in front of a distributor group of 300 people, and I'll have to search for women. Obviously we have a lot of women working here. Is that partly because I'm here? I don't know. I think it was interesting because I hadn't really dealt with any of that coming from the environment I had come in. I didn't expect to find it, and I think in some ways not expecting to find it makes the reality be true. That you're going to be treated with respect. It's a piece of advice I give to any woman who enters into the beer business. Don't come in expecting to be treated without 00:37:00respect. If you come in expecting respect, 99.9% of the time you're going to get it. Especially if you can deliver and you can add value and you can be a good partner to the people you're working with. But it is incredibly male dominated and I had gone from an incredibly female-dominated world. I think the thing it really taught me is all the stereotypes are total BS. Human beings are human beings. Men can be just as catty and petty as women can and women can be just as whatever. It's just human beings. The one thing I think women do bring, and I hate it in some ways because it's a stereotype but it's real, it's the testosterone piece we don't have. We don't go to elevate so quickly. It doesn't feel-we can treat it a little less personally and try to find a solution a bit more. I just really see that that's a huge value. Not everything is personal. 00:38:00Not everything is a call to combat. It's almost like, okay, let's really see how we do this without going there. I think women for whatever reason, just we as a group of people, tend to be more collaborative that way. I think that's a really, really healthy thing.

TEM: And you had children. So that was something that we talked about not staying at home being helicopter parents.

IF: Yeah?

TEM: What was that like? Did you talk about your early family life and that balance between running a company that was growing and soon to be growing in leaps and bounds? But still being a parent engaged with your family?

IF: I had some really good advice from somebody who was a bit older than me and 00:39:00had a career and had children and she said, there are three things, right? Your career, your family life, and then everything else: social life, whatever you want to put into that. It's really hard to do three out of three. You can do two really well, and I think I really lived that. I didn't volunteer for a lot of stuff outside. I didn't join boards, I didn't... I really focused on my family and the company. I didn't let... I said a lot of "no's" and I think the no's were really, really valuable. I got a 20 and a 23-year-old, and our relationship with our kids is wonderful. It's one of the joys of my life. I have so much pride in having raised two cool people. You don't try to do everything and I 00:40:00think that that was a great piece of advice which I would to give to any working woman.

I think it's challenging because the world expects you to-the thing that we were talking about, about you're supposed to still be able to participate in all these things. But you've got to prioritize. You got to say that's just not worth my time. I would rather spend 2 hours on the couch with my kid, you know, just doing nothing. Just spending time with them then going off and doing this volunteer thing. I'm grateful for the people who do the volunteer stuff, but I felt like my biggest responsibility I had was to raise my kids.

TEM: Do you feel at a certain level like working at the same company as your spouse made that easier? Was there, you were kind of speaking the same company language or was it harder?

IF: Oh, no, no, so much easier. People will tell you how can you work together? It's like, okay, what is the biggest, most stressful situation working parents always have? The child is sick, right? How do you negotiate who has to be at 00:41:00work that day? We knew. We knew exactly whose day was more important, and we were very supportive of that. We didn't have that push and pull of, okay, come on, this isn't fair. That part was huge for us. Then the fact that we were genuinely interested in each other's work. So when you're talking about it, you care. Christmas parties were fun because you're not the spouse hanging out there without... you know, oh god, I have to get through this. The other part of it is we spend so much time at work and if you love what you do it's such a good side of you, right? I can't imagine being partners with somebody in life and not seeing that side of him? Right? That's a lot of why I fell in love with him because of what he was like at work. How was so steady, stayed, and just so fair and brilliantly smart but never made anybody feel dumb or any of that. How he 00:42:00engaged with people and you see all of those character traits and it's such a big part of who we are. For me I think that that did make it much easier. I mean, yeah, we were the buck stops here totally, you know, so we had that responsibility all the time, but the ability to negotiate with each other and with all the issues that were going on... so much easier because we were in it together.

TEM: Did you have trouble, though, then separating from work? Did you... there was the hour drive, but-

IF: There was the hour drive. And there were kids when you got home, and that is completely and all-consuming when you get home and you both worked. I look back on that now and it's like, oh my god, how we'd do that? You know?

TEM: [Laughs].

IF: It's like, okay, you come home and you're geared in and you deal with everything that happened in their day that day and you try to create as much relaxed space. We were absolutely religious about the family dinner. You had 00:43:00even nights when you would be like, let's just not do this. We did that all the time, and it's really one of the memories our kids really have. We'd plan vacations and we would plan vacations ahead of time so they would not be moved, because if you don't plan vacations we learned something will always come up. We've taken so many vacations in moments of crisis for the company that it's just-you have to, otherwise you never, ever go. That was such a big family dynamic of planning the vacation and everybody deciding what they wanted to do. We would always have everybody gets to choose. You had four people and everybody got to choose a thing that they always wanted to do. So all of that-you just disconnect from work, right, because you're engaged in all of that, and it makes me feel pretty good because our kids talk about those two things: the family dinners and the family vacations as being huge parts of their memories of what made them feel really loved and really happy with being part of the family.

TEM: Do your kids want to be part of the company? Was there ever I want to be the heir to, or were they pretty separated?

IF: We never really gave them the option, you know [chuckles].

TEM: [Laughs].

IF: If you're in the beer business you see a whole lot of second and third and fourth generations. The distributors can be exceedingly painful. You realize that as a parent that your kids are their own people and I think bringing your kids into the business they're not the same. Our kids are so different. They're both incredibly good at what they're doing but they have very different skills and bring very different things. But in a business environment you can't treat people that differently. Then you have the dynamic of shutting down all the other opportunities that they could want to do.

TEM: Yeah.

IF: So, no, my son's graduating in June with a master's in public policy from Stanford and my daughter is studying industrial design at ASU [Arizona State 00:45:00University], and they're both really, really good at that, and I wouldn't want them to be doing this. And then they would be responsible for our financial security. That's the other part of passing the family dynamic. I remember talking to a distributor/owner who was third generation. Really nice guy and very, very wealthy family, and he said it's such a burden to be worrying about that you're the one that's going to screw up. Right? Because it's not yours. It's something that's been handed to you.

TEM: Yeah.

IF: So, yeah, we never wanted that for them. It's a really interesting conversation right now in craft beer because you have so many people like us who started in the-not so many actually-but people who started in the '80s.

TEM: A handful.

IF: A handful, a handful. And a lot of them are larger craft breweries and so what is that transition like? And it's really interesting because there are people who are doing the family passing on, and then there's people who are not and it'll be really interesting to see how that works.

TEM: Yeah. Well, it is, I think, interesting that you, you all, the first-I 00:46:00don't know, I sort of arbitrarily grouped the first 5 or 6 together as a nice number, but that you're all still active, obviously, but at a point where it becomes you have kids that are old enough to take over, you are thinking about, not exit strategies but what comes after.

IF: What comes after? I can only think of a handful of people who are doing that. Sierra Nevada is and Bell's is, but I can't think of anybody else. Maybe New Glarus, is. I think Dan Carey and his wife have their kids working in the business too. But it's not very many when you think about it. I think maybe other people have seen the same dynamic with distributors and have seen how painful that can be. You want the clarity of it, for people who have been here for a long time and have had responsibility for a long time, what do you exactly do when the owner's child comes in? Right?

TEM: [Laughs].

IF: [Laughs]. It's awkward on both sides.

TEM: Yeah.

IF: Yeah. So we never could see our way around that and we wanted our kids to dream their own thing and be who they wanted to be.

TEM: So what about, stepping back a little bit in time into that period in the mid to late '90s and a lot of people talk about the bubble that was happening then and characterize it as, yes, there was a lot of beer. No it wasn't necessarily all very good. Those companies weren't necessarily run...

IF: ...very well...

TEM: Run very well. So what was that like? Can you talk about that? I see that as one of those critical points in the story of craft brewing in Oregon. What was it like for you guys out here?

IF: It was pretty scary because you had been riding this wave of we're hot because the category is so hot. It was having a tiger by the tail. The growth 00:48:00was incredible for everybody. Everything was growing. Market share kept growing. Then all of a sudden it slows, but then the perception was even worse than the reality, right? It was like, it's dead. This wasn't really a viable category. We had to fight that so hard to get things started. That this wasn't a fad, it was a fundamental trend. I don't know how many times in my career I had made that statement to people. But you start to fail and the view is, well, it was frivolous. It wasn't meant to last. That perception was really damaging in a lot of ways because then the interest that we were getting was outsized relative to the volume we were all doing, which was really helping fuel future growth goes away for a few years. That was really scary. I think everybody broke through it, 00:49:00but it really created an environment that all of a sudden everybody had to do much better at what they were doing.

TEM: That's what I was wondering. Did you feel like the people who came through it and the new people who came after really had to step up their game? Was that? You know, not that there isn't bad beer now, but-

IF: Well, yeah.

TEM: Did you feel like the survivors out of the other end really brought the whole market up to a higher level?

IF: I think a lot of the bad stuff went away. I mean there was such crazy contract brewing back then. They were just jumping the shark. Every time you'd think a beer couldn't get worse as a concept, it got worse. That's when you knew it was being made into a joke or a gimmick.

TEM: Yeah. Can you give some examples? You don't have to give companies, but give some examples of the--

IF: Oh, like, yeah, our classic one, and it's a little risqué, so bear with me: Wanker's, and the label was a woman and you peeled it off, and her clothes came off.

TEM: Charming.

IF: And their tagline was, "You can have one hand free."

TEM: [Laughs and gasps].

IF: Is that horrible? Yeah. When Jaime saw that, he said, "This is it." This is, you know... there were so many really just people who rushed in, didn't invest really very much, it was just a contract brewing so they just, and they flooded the market. It was confusing and diminishing for what we were trying to do. Again, going back to our perspective of when we started it, for me this was really a statement about quality, about making, it was totally quality over quantity. We weren't going to spend the money on marketing. We weren't going to spend the money advertising. We were doing something so different. We were 00:51:00coming back to the roots and saying this is really about better beer. We're not cutting any corners ever on quality, that this is just about better beer. Not weird, not esoteric, but just better... more complex, more sophisticated, more elegant... all of those things, right? Then you go to Wanker's and you go, whoa, how far have we come from that, right?

TEM: Yeah.

IF: So that was very damaging. I think getting rid of all those-they did not survive, was all of a sudden that message went away, and we could go back to what we really wanted to talk about, which was about the quality of the beer and the richness of brewing and all the breath of choices that you could have about beer and all that. So getting rid of all that was a very, very good thing.

TEM: Did you start to feel in the, maybe not necessarily the late '90s, but going into the early 2000s, was that the point where you felt like people were 00:52:00starting to talk about where beer came from and talk about ingredients and talk about who was growing what, who was brewing what? The farmer's market locavore that we--

IF: You know, it took so long. I think about, we were one of the very first people to do the fresh hop beers, and we were one of the very first people to take people out to the hop harvest. When we were out there we have so many people who have been in the beer industry for 20, 25 years who have never done that, never seen it. I think that in itself tells you-we are so insiders here, but there's so much that it hasn't been spread, that story. For me, of all of the stories that we can tell about craft beer I'd much rather talk about that relationship with the farmer and our relationship with the maltster and the barley growers. I would much rather talk about that than some of the esoteric stuff that gets talked about all the time. That, to me, starts to feel very gimmicky. I think there's a bit of jumping the shark going on right now with 00:53:00some, god, what was it, the Rocky Mountain Oyster Beer and all that stuff. You just go, wow, you're making it back into a gimmick. You know?

TEM: Yeah.

IF: It's a gimmick. Being out with the hop farmers is far from that. To me that's where the resonance really is. That's where, as craft brewers, I think we need to focus on what's deep and real, and not just be chasing every trend about what's, you know, how can I get the most notice. But it's a challenge, you know. You have 30, 400 breweries is the new number right now. How do you get heard in that chaos of noise, right?

TEM: I obviously have an interest in the depth of history. So talk about what it's been like to connect to the growers and what some of your favorite bits 00:54:00about that are.

IF: You know when we were there last year and we saw the four generations on the farm. That was incredible. For me that whole connection with the fact that how critical the Oregon hop growers were and how far back they go, right? Some of those statistics about it was the number one growing hop region in the world for a period of time. We almost lost it, and I think we would have lost it if it hadn't been for craft beer. To me, that piece of the connection with history is such a huge thing. I'm a history buff too, and I think one of the things that for me gets lost sometimes with craft is everybody's just talking about what is new in the moment. It's become such a new shiny thing instead of really talking about we reconnected with something fundamental here in American life. You think about small towns had their own bank, their own department store, their own brewery. We're bringing some of that back, right? The department store will 00:55:00never come back and the banks won't. But, god, breweries are actually, have come back and been part of their community and part of the fabric of their town. That's a wonderful piece. That, to me, is the stuff that has roots and depth, not some of the other stuff.

TEM: Well and I wonder, do you feel that part of the specialness about Oregon is we have all the ingredients. We also have white yeast, which obviously played a pretty significant role in--

IF: We have water [laughs].

TEM: [Laugh].

IF: Think about that. Oh my god we have the most amazing water here. It's so soft and it's got-it's incredible. It's on a level of Pilsen and best brewery towns in the world, but we also as Oregonians have water. I think it's kind of a challenge if you're a California brewery right now what are you doing? That's 00:56:00really difficult. Without a doubt. I feel it is about we have a very unique story here in Oregon about craft beer. It is different than other places, and it has a level of depth to it that, to me, and a level of depth, which I tell people all the time-it's not about the number of breweries you have. It's about how many people are participating in it. The market share that we have here to me is the real story. The fact that so many people make craft beer as a choice and it's a part of their life and they identify so much with it. That is the remarkable accomplishment here. We all as brewers need to be really grateful for all the people who extended themselves and said, okay, I'm going to taste this, it's a lot more expensive, you know. And we're forgiving, because in the beginning none of us were all that good, and we got better and better all the 00:57:00time as we got to invest more and more money in our breweries and I think now we're making some really extraordinary beers but that was our consumer that stayed with us and helped build the category.

TEM: Well and I, like I said, I was at Fred Eckhardt's birthday celebration yesterday, and I think there was a lot of...obviously birthdays are a time to reminisce and revisit, and people were bringing his books to him to have him sign. You were in the scene, then. What was the small community of brewers like in the early '80s? What are some of the things that you remember about that time?

IF: We competed against each other. I think one of the funniest parts is this whole mystique of collaboration. We all competed against each other. I mean I remember one time we're sitting around and talking to Kurt Widmer, because we had asked for something and we would help each other out to some extent, but we 00:58:00were always very conscious that we were competitors. One of our biggest-we were very conscious of where we all ranked, what size we all were. When you leapfrogged over somebody else everybody would celebrate your company. It really was a lot of mutual respect borne out of awareness for one another. But awareness as competitors. We have a lot of respect for one another. We've known each other for a long time and I think that is, to me, what is real. Sometimes the stuff that they talk about right now with collaboration feels very fake. It's like-this was much more collaborative in a way, even though we were viewing each other as the competition, we knew we all are in this together and it's up to all of us to grow the category. That was the sense of responsibility that we really felt about how do we grow the category. How do we make the pie bigger? That's collaboration for me. I always want to win more than them, but I want us 00:59:00all to win, right? But you don't minimize the fact that you want to win more. But you only really can have the opportunity to win more if the whole category is healthy and grows, so.

TEM: Did you feel like...you all have such very different styles. Again, when I look at the first-I mean it's just really amazing. It's amazing to look at the first five or six, that you're all...it's very, very different now. I'm sure it was very different then too. So did you feel like the growing educated consumer base or growing interest in things that tasted different drove you all to specialize and individualize? How did you decide what to make?

IF: [Laughs].

TEM: How did you decide-you know, like what you're, not like you guys were all into branding and marketing, but you're obviously very different companies. So how did you decide?

IF: I think it's interesting. Because our original beer was amber and that's how we were going to start. Then our distributor told us it's too challenging a beer. You need to come up with something that's more accessible, and we came out with golden ale. I think if you take a look at Widmer, Widmer originally came out with alt and then they changed to Hefeweizen. I think just about everybody probably did something like that because we were trying to really figure out, pushing the boundaries of this market, but we can't push it so far out so that nobody's communicating with us. Pyramid's first beer was like a hop flower. I think it had bitterness units that were out of, just completely crazy. I remember ordering one with my friends at Meier and Frank and everybody was like you can't possibly drink that.

TEM: [Laughs].

IF: And it was hard to drink [laughs]. I remember I sipped this beer because it 01:01:00was so explosive and so dense and really not in a good way, but we were all really trying to figure out where's a niche. I think we also all came from a different philosophy about brewing or different experience. Obviously everybody has personal preferences, and I think that also influenced the directions that we went. And you know what your ownership structure was like, what your partners were like. There were people who had much more sophisticated investors than others, so that drove them in different directions than what we were doing. I think all of those things made a difference too. But we were mostly, I would think, absolutely consumed with work. We didn't really have a lot of time to socialize, which I think is one of the things that, we just all worked. Because something is always kind of going wrong. We didn't start up with a lot of money 01:02:00so you really were always kind of making sure that everything was okay by the time you left that night, and there was no leaving until everything was okay, which was really challenging, too, when people are used to saying okay I'm going to meet you for dinner at 7:00 and you're calling going I don't think I can make it until 8:00 or 9:00. Very hard. So after a while you just get really focused on the work and that's what you do. I think if you talk to more people who are starting out in the '80s and early '90s it was probably the same sort of thing. You just were working, a lot.

TEM: So I'm curious-I always love the comparing and contrasting-so what do you know about how things were developing in California? Or how things were developing in Colorado? What was it like there? Did you guys compare yourself to other states? I guess Washington, too, I shouldn't leave that out [laughs].

IF: Well, sure, Washington was a big deal. I remember we went to, we got invited to Red Hooks grand opening and it was a 15,000 barrel brewery. We went up there and we all were talking and saying he's crazy. He's just crazy. Who is going to sell 15,000 barrels of beer? [Laughs]. The sense of it. Sierra Nevada was 8,000 barrels when we started. They opened 15 years before we did, and it took them all that time to get to 8,000 barrels. So we were all aware of each other, but how big it actually ended up growing, I don't know of any of us ever started their brewery and said oh my god it's going to be 10 million barrels. That just-I think that was surprising for everybody. So we were very aware of one another. There was a respect. We would meet at certain events. Everybody was 01:04:00different. Everybody had different personalities. It didn't feel like-we were competing but nobody was crowding each other out. I think there was very much of a sense of this is still so new.

TEM: What about, so, you were on the Board of Directors of BAA, and that was in '96, so what was it like to be part of these larger brewers associations as a microbrewery? What was it like to be part of that conversation?

IF: It was painful at times. You really had a sense of we were all so young and 01:05:00new still and there were breweries that had been around for 100, 150 years but just barely hanging on, you know just barely hanging on. It was hard. We knew we were in a transition stage, and we were bringing fresh life to the organization and they desperately needed it and fresh resources and all that. But you still had this sense of humility about, my god we just started and these guys have been doing this for so long, you know? And they're not going to make it. You just could-it was almost like a sense of death in the air that. I mean, it was hard to watch. It's so different now but they were so small, those meetings. Maybe the BAA meetings had maybe 20 people, 25 people, and then at the same time you had the craft brewers, oh what was called at the time...Charlie Papazian and Pease... Jaime was on the board of the IBS [International Brewer's Symposium], right? So he was on the board of that, I was on the board of this one, and the 01:06:00trajectories were so different in the sense of how they felt. It was really interesting. Because they were bigger breweries that were involved in the BA [Brewers Association]. The IBS was a lot of smaller, more brew pubs and all of that. It really felt like we were being handed over this culture of beer in the U.S. by these people who had just been hanging on. It was pretty remarkable, really.

TEM: Was there a sense of you young upstarts...?

IF: Oh, they probably resented us. I mean we used to complain all the time: oh my god we grew 30%, we grew 40%, I can't keep up. We were pretty insensitive when I look back on that. That was our obsession then. We couldn't keep up, and these people were just dying. That was obnoxious of us, but we didn't mean it obnoxiously. That was our concern at the time, we just couldn't keep up. And you're saying that in front of somebody who is seeing a decline and a decline. 01:07:00They probably did view us like that. But they were really generous and really kind to us also. But it was definitely keenly aware that it was a moment in time when things were really changing.

TEM: Do you think that informs the way that you view new brewers now? What is it like, obviously Full Sail hasn't been around for 150 years, but what is it like to be one of the elder states people?

IF: I think that there's very little respect, actually. I don't like that. Not about me personally but we, man, we thought Fritz Maytag was incredible. We would go to these small little conferences that were the BA then and listen to him, and we were so aware that he was the first to start in this direction. 01:08:00There was really, I think, much more respect about the history. It doesn't really feel very much like that to me now. It's all what's of the moment. That's odd to me. It's almost like with women and feminism, and women who say they're not feminists, and I'm always like, how can you not have respect for what those women did to make it so much easier for you today? You may not-you have all these political beliefs lined up this way but you got to respect all the women who did all that really, really hard work to get the vote, to get property rights, to get all these things that we take for granted, to get education. Co-ed education didn't even exist in the Untied States until the '60s at major universities. If you don't know that, if you don't know how hard it was, how do you know how you're going to take care of it, and nurture it, and make 01:09:00sure-obviously beer is not the equivalent of women's right to vote and property rights, but there is that sense of if you don't respect history, how much can you be a good guardian for the future? I just don't see much of that, really. There's not much celebration of breweries turning 30, breweries turning 25... there's a whole lot of celebration about this new weird beer that came on yesterday, right? I think that's a loss. Granted, I have a bias point of view here, but I do think that stuff matters. Because I don't think if we're not careful about it, you then don't understand how tenuous some of it is. I think it's important to understand some of this is tenuous, that there's a lot here that could really affect this industry in not particularly good ways if people don't protect it.

TEM: There's always/often conversation talk about being in a bubble right now. Do you see, you know I don't necessarily think it's the number, that we have x number of breweries, but the way that you were talking reminded me of the way you were characterizing the mid to late '90s: that it's flashy; it's about peeling off a label; it's about the shock value. Do you feel like we're on the edge of that now? That there is a critical point where it's gone too far into the shock and the new?

IF: It's not just the shock. Part of it is the new breweries, and I think people don't think a lot about what it feels like to be running these breweries at this time right now. We actually have quite a few people who used to work for us who'd start breweries, and so we've had some really honest conversations with them, and they will come back and tell us it is so damn hard because growing 01:11:00right now is very hard and every decision people make to grow reduces their margin that much more, right? So you start off and you go, well, I'm just going to sell all my beer in my pub. Well, you can't, because all of a sudden there's 10 more people who decided to put a pub within 10 blocks of your brewery. So then you go, alright, well, I'm going to sell draft. Well, you know what? Other people are doing that too. So all of a sudden you're selling at lower margin and you have to hire staff to sell draft beer. That doesn't sell enough to pay for everything, and then you go well, I'm going to can; I'm going to bottle. Every one of those decisions makes your life more difficult, makes your margin more smaller. People right now are talking to us about working 80, 90 hours a week, not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. That story doesn't get told very much. I've been at that place. That's a very, very hard place to be. You can work 80, 90 hours a week for a while. You continue to do that year after year, 01:12:00it's miserable. You feel like you're just not-think people don't get that one craft beer for everything that we've accomplished per capita consumption beer in the United States in the last 25 years has gone down 25%. That's a really bad statistic. So we are growing all these breweries in a very compressed market share. People like to say, well, there were 1900 breweries in the turn of the century. Yeah, for 100% market share. There's 3400 breweries that are sharing, what is it, 15% market share? Very, very different economics. Very different dynamics, and I don't think any of that's healthy. I just-this more is better all the time? Is such an odd thing for me because I started this because it was quality over quantity and to celebrate quantity-I guess at the conference, at 01:13:00the craft brewers conference, somebody made a statement there were 1.3 breweries opening per day last year and now we're up to 1.7 [laughs]. And I had a couple people come to me and say, "Do you believe people applauded?"

TEM: [Laughs].

IF: That's not a good thing! That's not a sign of a healthy industry. More is not necessarily a sign of better, and I really do think we're in a weird space right now. One of the things I think is really sad: you're not just getting people with a lot of money investing in this. You're not just getting the lawyers who open wineries. There's some of that that there had never been before. But you're also getting people who are cashing in their 401ks, who are mortgaging their houses, who are thinking this is some path to riches that you just go... no, no. what are you bringing into a market with 3400 breweries, plus all the imports? And all the big, global domestic companies that's going to have 01:14:00your voice be heard? I don't see it, but you know, I thought 4 breweries in Portland was going to be too much, so maybe I'm just wrong, you know? I could just be wrong.

TEM: I think as you, so you guys are in a point of transition. Full Sail's in a point of transition now. How does Full Sail, when I say grow, I don't mean necessarily get bigger, evolve--

IF: ...evolve, mm-hmm.

TEM: Grow and evolve, what happens? What is the, I don't know, not that anybody has a crystal ball or that I'm asking you to give crystal ball statements, but what is the future then of solid companies like Full Sail?

IF: I think the crazy exponential growth, you have to be very careful about that 01:15:00because a lot of times it's being born out of things that you do-a lot of its pipeline fill. You're opening new markets, you're putting out new products, you're shipping overseas, doing things that are not necessarily sustainable. So you have to have the discipline to make sure the things that you're doing are sustainable. I think you also have to continue to spend more money in the market. That reality is there. I think that's not going to change for a while. Everybody's putting more money in sales and marketing than they did before. Because you have to have your voice heard. You have to have a relationship with your customers that has to be more intense than it could have been five years ago because there's fewer and fewer distributors, more and more consolidation at retail, so you got to make sure that you're part of the conversation when those choices are being made.

TEM: Do you feel the press to do something flashy? Have you guys had, again, not 01:16:00like I want the secret-

IF: Oh I think we act-

TEM: Do you feel like that pressure of like what's--?

IF: You know what I think we did the flashiest thing anybody's done in a very long time. Session 10 years ago was prescient about the market. It was incredibly bold in a moment where everybody was going how big can I make these beers? How odd can I make these beers? We went the exact opposite way. And now everybody's, obviously, Session is the thing now, right? That's bold to me. Bold isn't weird. Bold isn't esoteric. Bold isn't a beer that nobody can find and just the tip of the pyramid and gets 100 at ratebeer.com but only one beer will ever exist. Bold is really saying, hey, what is important about the beer culture? It's comradery. What makes comradery? It makes beers that you want to have more than one of? That you really want to enjoy? For us, Session is Helles 01:17:00One of my favorite beers in the world is Augustiner. It's impeccable, elegant. Everything that is great about beer, and it's Helles. We won against Augustiner in the world-that's incredible accomplishment for craft brewery, to win in a category like that. It hardly made any... because it wasn't flash. That to me is flash. That to me is real. What we've done with session as a category of saying let's bring people back in, let's not be pretentious, let's not say that we have to talk about all these ingredients, or what the [degrees] Plato was, or the original gravity, or all these esoteric things that intimidate people and make them thing craft beer is not for me, maybe. Let's really change how we talk, right? But we started that 10 years ago. We're obviously ahead of the curve. That to me is the core of what we should be doing as craft brewers is bringing people in and making them feel welcome. I think everybody hates that 01:18:00Anheuser-Bush commercial they ran during the Super Bowl or March Madness. I think as craft brewers we need to be a little wary of that. They do quite a lot of market research. They really understood that there was a feeling there among people that craft beer was pretentious and I don't want to participate in that.

TEM: It's funny, because the things that you're saying remind me of the things that I imagine you all were saying in 1985, that we want something that we want to drink and we want something that is real, and we don't want something that comes, in the 1985 sense, from the big companies--

IF: We wanted more flavor, more complexity, yeah.

TEM: So what you're saying reminds me of let's bring everybody under the tent of striving for good taste and inclusivity.

IF: Yeah. But think about how food has changed. When we first started the brewery there were 3 Starbucks. That has become such a mainstream expectation of quality, right? Do you know anybody who buys coffee in a can anymore? We don't even think about it that way, right? That to me is when you really made the profound change, when people are just looking at that and saying, how many people buy Wonder bread anymore? Just these things that people have really changed about the way they look at food. The restaurant scenes of just the diversity, and the choices, and the quality, and the execution expectations. All of that. Those are real, fundamental changes. And we just need to make sure that craft is part of that, right? And not just...

TEM: Weird.

IF: Yeah.

TEM: Yeah. What do you feel proud of? What is it, when you look back on the impact that you've had what is it that you feel your chest puff up? Like, "I did this."

IF: Oh, I think for me without a doubt, you start off and you're kind of young and no idea what you're getting into and you think you're risking everything and then all of a sudden you realize other people are risking along with you. The first time I validated a bank for somebody's mortgage, you go this was my dream and then all these other people are part of that dream. That's an extraordinary feeling. To feel like you started something that then people continue to grow with you and are a part of. That, for me, is just an extraordinary feeling. I get so much deep satisfaction out of that, that it's not just my dream but that 01:21:00it's become so many other people's dream and that in becoming their dream how they've shaped it and changed it and that we've gone in directions and created something out of all those contributions that's definitely what I'm the proudest of. I just get a thrill out of how much this company means to a lot of people.

TEM: What do you want people to remember you for? What is the thing that, what do you see your legacy as?

IF: Hopefully that I build a company where people, was filled with respect and that out of that respect we made some amazing beers. I take a lot of pride in what we make here. I think we've got some very passionate people who care so 01:22:00deeply and I hope that that's what people always associate Full Sail with, that level of passion, that level of commitment and that level of respect for each other and for our customers. We take that relationship very seriously.

TEM: Is there anything that when we set up this interview and you thought about what I might ask or what you might share, is there anything that I didn't ask or that you want to share that you would want to have on the historical record [laughs].

IF: [Laughs].

TEM: I was imagining myself like engraving on stone, like, this is your chance!

IF: Or kind of like an Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, just putting it in the warehouse.

TEM: Exactly, exactly. What do you...?

IF: Oh, I think that beer's fun. I've been so lucky to have been a part of this. 01:23:00It's been incredible. I've been part of the renaissance of beer, I've been part of the renaissance of Hood River. It's just an amazing gift to be able to be at a place in a time where all this stuff is happening and things are optimistic and moving forward, and it's fun. Life isn't always easy and you get a whole lot of challenges, but at the end of the day it's how you deal with those, and I'm very lucky.

TEM: Fun is good.

IF: Fun is good.

TEM: That sounds like a wonderful place to end, so I thank you, and I'm going to hit- [recording cuts off].