Mike Stevens of Founders Brewing

This month, the Founders Brewing Company celebrates its 10th anniversary. The company brews the kind of beers its brewers want to drink, and by gleefully smashing every convention it can get its hands on, the brewery has gained a rabid following. Mike Stevens, Founders’ president and co-founder, readily admits that the future didn’t always look so promising.

1. Have a passion for what you’re doing
Stevens started Founders with his college buddy and homebrewing partner, Dave Engbers. “Most of us, we all got into this to satisfy an insatiable hobby,” he says. “It should always be fun.” Fun or not, Founders took a number of lumps in those early years. “The hobby world versus the business world of the brewing world is a whole different ballgame,” Stevens acknowledges. Their love for brewing helped smooth those lumps over and set the stage for Founders’ meteoric rise.

2. Success takes sweat and imagination, too
Passion got Stevens and Engbers in the door, but it didn’t make the beer in their tanks all that great. “When we first got rolling, we were a pretty typical pretty standard microbrewery, and we got our ass kicked a bit,” he concedes. “We were young and passionate, but I honestly would say that we were making average beers. It was a learning curve for us.” After a few years of brewing average beers, that learning curve dumped Founders at the door of a bankruptcy attorney.

3. When things look bleak, go all in
“Things weren’t going so great,” Stevens recalls. “We were backed into a corner, and we thought, if this is the way it is, we’ve got to start making some beers like we were when we were homebrewing, and come out swinging. At least make some beers that we can be proud of, if we’re going down. I figured, if I’m gonna be a poor brewer, I’m gonna at least have some fun doing it.”

4. Step up and get noticed
“There comes a time in everybody’s business cycle that breweries have to define themselves,” Stevens says. So Founders stopped making the standard slate of microbrews—Pales, Ambers, Wheats and the like—and instead conjured up beers that stand out: Red’s Rye (an IPA brewed with rye), Devil Dancer (a Triple IPA brewed with more malts than most Stouts) and Breakfast Stout (made with coffee, oatmeal and chocolate). “What really formed Founders, I think, was separating ourselves from industry. We were making average beers, and now we’re making world-class beers, and I’m extremely proud of what we’re doing.”

5. Bigger isn’t necessarily better, but it can be
Founders’ most popular and most highly rated beers are monstrously big, but that has more to do with the brewers than any organizational mandate to brew big. “I don’t honestly don’t preach that our style of brewing—whether you want to call it extreme or experimental or envelope-pushing or whatever. I don’t argue that that’s the way it should be, that’s what everybody should do. I don’t like saying we just make big beer. It’s an expression of a brewery’s personality. And we’re going to remain doing what we do best. We’re explorers in beer industry, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

6. Your key focus group? Yourself
Stevens calls the Founders brewery staff “somewhat self-absorbed,” and means it as a compliment. “We have a great time now brewing beers that we think are really just self-pleasing,” he says. “We brew beer that we want to drink. We believe that if you do it well, others will respect that and come to you. And there really are a lot of people out there that are looking for a twist on traditional styles.”

7. Find excellence in uniqueness
Asked to pick the best beer he’s made, Stevens waffles a bit, then points to Red’s Rye—an IPA-ish brew that pits Amarillo hops against rye, so it starts with an oily, citric bitterness and ends with “a dry pepper finish.” Stevens’s love for this brew is telling—he demands that Founders beers be unique. “There’s a lot of IPAs that live in this world, and I can honestly say Red’s Rye definitely stands apart,” he boasts. “It definitely stands alone amongst a big crowd, and that’s something that we’re proud of, for sure.”

8. Stand out with Stouts
Founders’ biggest successes, critically, have been Stouts. Breakfast Stout is currently rated as the ninth-best beer in America by BeerAdvocate.com readers; Kentucky Breakfast Stout (Breakfast Stout aged for a year in oak bourbon barrels) is number two. Stevens believes that’s as much a testament to the style’s inherent malleability as it is to his own brewery’s craftsmanship. “You’ve got a certain inherent mobility,” he says. “There’s more adjuncts that can go into its flavor profile. You can really have a lot of fun with them.”

9. Get out of town
When Stevens is able to blow town, he doesn’t head for the country’s better-known beer meccas; he grabs a fly reel, heads to Big Sky Country, and makes sure he’s got a growler or a six-pack of something local with him. “My favorite place to sit down and drink beer is actually on the banks of the Madison, or the Gallatin, out in Montana,” he says. “We’ll hit the brewpubs in Bozeman. To me, nothing beats drinking beer in the mountains on the side of the river.” ■