Today we’d like to introduce you to Tim Emmert.
Hi Tim, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I started homebrewing almost 20 years ago but my love of beer, and the concept we have at Hugger Mugger Brewing, started in the 90s when I worked at a pub in London. The British have a way of making their public houses (“pubs”) the center of neighborhood life. For most the pub was where you caught up on local news, saw friends and family, and where you were guaranteed the comfort of an establishment that was home. It was a revelation to see mothers enjoying a pint with their pram & teachers holding office hours in a corner booth at the pub. Beer was important but community was the most important aspect of pub life.
Over the years I learned much about beer and beer styles. Brewing at home provided an impetus for much of that learning, nothing drove my desire to learn more than the need for brewing a great beer. Today I carry with me the most important lesson learned about beer and brewing – there is always something to be learned from ingredients to process to equipment to styles and beer chemistry & more. The history, politics and economics of beer and breweries, the lore and practices of breweries both still standing and long gone, the modern efforts to understand how to brew the best beer now alongside knowing how the earliest brewers of beer practiced their trade – all these and much more were on the table for lifelong learning.
These things served as the backdrop for my efforts to found Hugger Mugger Brewing.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
No small business has an easy road and breweries are notorious for being places where owners, staff and even investors can burn out quickly. I left my full time job in community development in January 2016 & by April 2017 we were fully funded and on our way. Our doors opened in January 2018. I mention this timeline because development work is stressful & all that work happens before the doors open.
And when the doors open you suddenly are doing everything for the first time. It’s an exhausting amount of work but by early 2020 we were hitting our stride. Then COVID hit and everything changed. It was a mixed blessing. We actually did well during COVID with reduced operations. I was able to take a deep breath and reassess some things we were doing. The negative is that a lot happened during the COVID months that would affect all alcohol establishments.
Post COVID we saw a slightly different world of customers – some of whom gladly traded a more social life for one spent in the comfort of their home. And, of course, some who used alcohol as a crutch during COVID realized they needed to take a break (always a reasonable approach) and reassess their relationship with alcohol. Then came published research suggesting that any amount of alcohol was bad for you, and while this news hit the liquor and wine industries the worst there was still an effect for beer drinkers.
Today we see some rebound from that, I think moderation is a buzz word I hear more often. I also see many people reducing their screen time and looking for ways to connect with other human beings. This, in particular, is where beer offers great promise as “social lubricant” for those looking to reclaim a life lived more publicly. So, tough times at times but so much to look forward to.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
Prior to operating a brewery I worked for many years in the field of community development. This is a broad field of practice that includes everything from housing to economic development to leadership development and more. It was always challenging and typically focused on righting some sort of market failure for low income folks. I built a successful home repair program for low income homeowners, an IDA program that helped new homeowners learn what they were getting into and provided funds toward the down payment on their first home, helped establish a cooperative that sourced produce from local farms for distribution to area consumers, worked on homelessness initiatives and more.
Of course by the time I transitioned into getting the brewery off the ground the field of community development was already in decline. Low income populations are not their own best advocates and the national political discourse had moved well past any idea of providing a hand up to persons in need. It’s a shame, community development practitioners are often the people best placed to advocate for those in poverty & to work with communities to create solutions for shared challenges at the local and regional levels. It wouldn’t surprise me if these sorts of efforts came back into popularity, maybe under a different name, because the need for them is obvious and greater than ever.
At the brewery I’ve carried over many of the same ideals and practices from my days in community development. Hugger Mugger Brewing is a center of community life for many. We open our doors to dozens of small businesses, artists, musicians, clubs and entrepreneurs and enthusiasts of all stripes. For our small community we are some manner of connective tissue and that happened quite quickly – I attribute at least a healthy portion of that to an approach informed by community development work.
What makes you happy?
Right now seeing people seek engagement with one another & looking for ways to come together in selfless acts makes me happy and hopeful. It can be as simple as seeing and responding to someone who needs you to listen to them.
The “me first” tendencies in our society are deeply ingrained, social media only enforces that way of thinking, and that is very much a poverty mindset. Demonstrating gratitude for what we have, and who we have, in our lives makes us all happy to practice it and just to see it in action.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.huggermuggerbrewing.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/huggermuggerbrewing
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/huggermuggerbrewing
