Steering A Business Through A Pandemic Setback With Aaron Uhl

Many businesses felt the shock of COVID19, and more of these couldn’t survive. So what does it take for a business to survive and thrive past a pandemic setback? Stephen Jaye answers these questions and more as he talks to Aaron Uhl, founder and owner of Uhl’s Brewing Company in Boulder, Colorado. Aaron walks us through how he got into brewing, what he learned, and how he helped pilot his business through the COVID19 crisis. Learn more about Aaron and his experiences by tuning in. --- Listen to the podcast here: Steering A Business Through A Pandemic Setback With Aaron Uhl Colorado has been my home for years. For anyone who knows what it's like here, it is longer than most people. There are a lot more new entries and a lot of people are moving here. The area of Colorado, especially the Front Range, Denver, Boulder, and Fort Collins, is known for the craft brewing scene. We have a pretty robust scene in that particular sense of one of 5 or 6 places where there is a lot of people doing a lot of experimenting with different types of beer and formulas. My guest is Aaron Uhl, who started his own brewery. He is the owner and head brewer along with 6 or 7 other roles. We talked a little bit about the idea of wearing many hats with Uhl’s Brewing, for anyone interested is located near the corner of Arapahoe and 55th on the East end of Boulder.--Aaron, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Tell me a little bit about Uhl's Brewing, your story, and what you are all about. It all started with a passion for homebrewing, competitions, and loving craft beer, in general. When I first started brewing, it was simply because I couldn't get a certain beer from beer trading because beer trading was a big thing back in early 2010 and on. With that, I whined a little bit. My girlfriend bought me the book that everyone gets, The Complete Joy of Homebrewing by Charlie Papazian. That nudged me along to do my first brew with a friend who had an all-grain system. He showed me the ropes on the first brew. After that, I was at home homebrewing. There was a tile in the kitchen that was available on my side of the table. There was going to be a fermenter there. By the end of the first year, I had the beer that I couldn't trade for a mimic of it, an Imperial stout aging in a five-gallon bourbon barrel in my basement. That was in 2012 or so. Fast forward to 2018, I won a lot of awards at different competitions across the state and region. I ended up winning regional gold medals for an Imperial stout and Imperial IPA with AHA competition that gets run annually. That's the best of the show for me of all things, also a trip to the Great American Beer Festival with Jeff Griffith from FATE Brewing at the time, who is now at Twisted Pine. The eventful night led me to sign a contract with another brewery to start the brand in 2018 of February at the Fresh Hop Competition. I ended up winning about 5 or 6 awards and then took best to show. The funny thing was people that I would assume to talk with dropped a tank into their system and started brewing. They showed up to the brewery where the competition was having its final rounds of judging and award ceremony. They were like, “What are you doing here? We are honestly not to ask you. You own a brewery.” They live in the area and wanted to check it out. I told them that I had about eight different beers in the competition and they should sit down at the pro-am table, hang out for the award ceremony, and try the brewery’s beers that they were at. They sat down and their eyes were raising every single time I won an award because when I talked to them, that's what I wanted to start doing, brewing one and done recipes and easy IPAs. They are like, “Everyone thinks they can do that, but can you brew anything else other than that?” It landed in their head that, “If this guy is winning medals across broad spectrums from lager to British bitters to smash American sours, maybe we got something here. Maybe he is not full of hot air.” I signed the contract and started brewing Uhl's Brewing company in 2018. The first batch was delivered the week of the Great American Beer Festival. It was called the Wayward Hop Volume One. It was 10.5% double Hazy IPA. During the Great American Beer Festival, a lot of folks from out of town come in, eat up all the liquor stores, and drop off little goodies here and there. By the end of the Great American Beer Festival week, I had about 35 to 40 accounts, all selling Uhl’s beer. My first one was Hazel's and the second one was Liquor Mart, but Liquor Mart is no longer, unfortunately. First of all, there was a certain type of beer that you wanted to have that you couldn't trade for, and your instinct was to go and do something about it. A lot of people, when they have problems like this, they get caught in the trap of ruminating, sitting, and whining about it. Did you fall into that trap at all? Did it ever cross your mind, or did you instantly go into action mode in a sense that, “I'm going to brew this beer myself?” Pandemic Setback: Nobody's going to want to spend $10 on a 10 ounce, four of a double IPA. You have to be a little bit more considerate about who's drinking and what price range they want to be in. The beer trading continued in 2011. In 2010, when Bourbon County Rare came out, it set the next level for everyone. That wasn't even the beer that I was after. I was after the normal Bourbon County, but they had a small return batch. When that Rare came out, it went from trading dollar for dollar or ounce for ounce, which was a respectful way to trade to, “This bottle is worth $200. I'll value your beer at what I believe it's valued at, even if it's below sticker price.” The pay to trade game, I couldn't get into it. I had my regular traders, but that fizzled off as I started homebrewing more and more. The training completely stopped. I had developed quite a seller and ended up having to give most of it away as I ended up moving out of a house that I lived in for years abruptly. I didn't have any place to put it. It was also a way for me to try everything I could get my hands on with different flavors, styles, and sought-after Rare bottles. It was like a chase and it was fun. It was a nice little hobby, but it almost doubles or triples the price of the beer because you end up playing the ship it back and forth game. The homebrewing did come out of me complaining about still not being able to get that bottle, but it came out of the sense of my girlfriend giving me a gentle nudge with, “Do you like to cook? Do you like beer? Do you like Hops? Try this.” I had never thought about the idea of brewing it all. I never bought one of those, “Let's go make a beer kit and bring it home.” I went straight to all-grain. I had three kettles, and I did all the math on a couple of different programs that are available to everyone online. I started designing beers. I would look at other folks’ recipes and delve into why we are only using certain percentages of these and those malts. Looking at other aspects as to where do the Hops go, what Hops are we using? How much is enough? It got pretty crazy. I pushed some of the batches beyond what normal people would do at a professional brewing level. The other thing I'm wondering about this part of the story is what made you believe that your beer was good enough to start marketing it to other people at all these places that you had mentioned? People that moved to Boulder, Colorado, at least was to get in the outdoors every single day I possibly could. I didn't realize I was moving to a beer mecca. I was moving out from Fairfax, Virginia, which is Northern Virginia. I like to call it DC because we were twenty minutes away. It's the same mentality that's going on at the Capitol. It was the hustle and bustle. That is the reason why I wanted to get out of the city into the mountains. I found Avery Brewing of all things. They had Hog Heaven, Reverend, high gravity beers, and all different styles. They were able to nail Belgian golden, Barley wines, Russian Imperial stouts, Imperial IPAs, you name it. Those guys were in it in 2015 or 2016. Once I started to expand, people lost a little love with them, but that's how it goes when you get bigger and you got to put out more beer to make market demands high. I would hang out with those guys a lot. They were a lot of fun. I ride bicycles. I used to do summer to race all the time professionally. These guys were avid road riders. They would go out on Saturday morning, brewer rides. I get invited along, tear the legs off after a day of riding, and they would drink under the table. I’m used to going with Adam Avery on training rides. We would go up to Lions over to Raymond, down through Ward and then back up over the hill to get into Boulder 72 miles or something like that. He would sit on my wheel and I would go as fast as I could to get him some good training rides. They kept creating and listening to their clients. A couple of the beers they made were based on their employees’ requests, which some of them are named after them. They were revolutionizing barrel-age and barrel-aged sour beers at the same time. A lot of companies are hitting it on every note. They had one beer that they had to recall. One beer out of those first 50 that I collected has had no infection. It's not bad for barrel aging, especially for the amount that those do. How often were they bottling, kegging, going between sour? Eventually, I ended up homebrewing. They were still in the alley, I bring them some of my recipes, and I get critiques from the brewers. I started to get serious. I would start making some ABV beers and double IPAs back in the day that was suitable for West Coast drinkers with the Colorado flare to them. When you have to sell something, you have to have a government warning and a UPC to make your stores happy.Share on X ...