Does anyone know what happened to Skip Madsen? I saw a blog post where American announced their new Brewer and it had a terse sentence about Skip no longer being with American. Compared with Chad's departure from Worthy, I inferred Skip's situation was less amicable, but am curious where he'll wind up.
Well, he left Boundary Bay (where he had been since before I first went there in 2000) to open his own place, Water Street, in Port Townsend. He got squeezed out by partners there (after 5+ years), did some gypsy brewing for a while, and helped get American up and running. American has been open over 4 years now, and there's a lot of work to be done before the place opens. So, it's not like he's changing jobs every year or anything. American went public a while back, so maybe answering to stock holders just wasn't to his taste.
American has been going in a strange direction lately with the IPO and the publicity behind Simon Majumdar becoming a member of their board.
Seems like it wouldn't affect him that much, but American recently purchased a kombucha brand. Maybe with the IPO too he saw the company taking a direction he didn't like. Or maybe everything is friendly and American just didn't go out of their way to promote his next job. The industry seems to have plenty of "So and so's leaving, and we wish him/her well! Our new Brewer will be..." announcements, so the absence of a positive sendoff was conspicuous. **As a side note, I think the right beer/kombucha blend could be interesting.
