My son read Beowulf at age 11 and never left. I took a Norse myths and legends course at the University of Michigan and almost flunked it — it was the hardest course I ever took — but I learned a great appreciation of Viking lore and Norwegian myths and legends of men of yore. While in Michigan, I started brewing beer in my dorm using 55-gallon buckets and a garbage can. When the hydrometer sank, we bottled the beer. A sinking hydrometer means the beer is 15% alcohol, so we were drinking very high-gravity beer before anybody really knew what that term meant.

In the summer of 2015, we were going to invest in a brewery in Florida, but they’d raised all the money they needed before we had a chance to get in. My son is quite a beer enthusiast. He’s a cicerone in training. He claims that he’s tasted 2,000-plus beers, and I can prove it with my credit card. We decided, “Well, we’ll do it ourselves.” Since then, we’ve brought on two other staff that have equally high skill sets in a wide variety of beer.

Number one, we have a core series of beers that we’re doing under contract right now. Contracting is great because you don’t have the overhead cost of investing in equipment up front. Some people call it gypsy brewing. Unfortunately, it limits you on varieties and uniqueness. You can’t make it too difficult for the contractor, and it’s sometimes more expensive to try to come up with the primary resources for them. But we started that process and we have several beers that are number-one sellers every single day and they haven’t been off our list since we opened.

At the same time, we have 35 guest taps. They rotate four or five new beers every week. What drives a lot of people to our place is not only the quality of our beer, but this tremendous amount of variety for the Millennials who have an attention span of two seconds and want something new every day. We satisfy that attention deficit, if you will, with virtually a new beer every day.

The other thing that makes us unique is that we’re in Tennessee. Tennessee hasn’t been known to have the top brewers in the world. They have some good beers, but not the greatest beers in the world. We wanted to measure ourselves against the best, so we've imported some of the best, most unattainable, and rarest beers on the planet and served them to our clients, and then said, “If you like that, what do you think of this?” There appears to be no price sensitivity to buying that beer in our establishment. You can come to Asgard and try the best beers from all over the country and the world.

Another unique draw to Asgard is that we have rotating food trucks. We don’t have a restaurant, and as long as I’m alive, we never will. We have 28 food trucks that rotate seven days a week. We have a new truck every day. Three-quarters of them drive in from Nashville, which is 50 miles away, and many of them are literally running out of food when they spend a day with us.

My sine qua non for running a brewery is to be near a river or water, to be near a community college or university, to be able to make a local reference to the city, to be associated with a gentrifying town center that’s up and coming, and to be 30 to 40 miles away from the nearest competition. That’s exactly where we are. I developed that thematic sitting in a taproom in Frankenmuth, Michigan, which is next to a bridge, on a body of water, across from a park, close to a university. Frankenmuth brand been there since 1862 and are the oldest name in the state of Michigan. I wanted to transplant that concept down here.

The bridge is important to the Viking theme because in lore you have a Bifrost bridge, which is a gateway to the nine realms, where Heimdall guards transport you to the other nine worlds of the Vikings. We sit on a river, at the apex of a bridge. We have two buildings. One is a gas station from 1912 next to a garage from the 1920s or 1930s. Our second building, across the street, opened in 1938 as a Hudson car dealership.

The road we’re on was the old national highway, when the only way to get from Michigan to Florida through the middle of Tennessee. There were two gas stations and six car dealerships on the block, so this was the motor city capital of Tennessee. You stopped at that gas station with outdoor lifts to replace the tires and grease the bearings because you had to drive all day long to Nashville, which was 50 miles away on a dirt road. Finally, we’re about 12 minutes from the expressway. We wanted many, many people to pass our place while coming and going in the morning. People from the western suburbs have to drive past our place on a daily basis.

We carry the Viking branding throughout the space and will through all our taprooms. In the space we’re building across the street, we’re going to have a taproom and a big open-pit fire area and a porch. Then we’re going to put in the brewhouse. The third stage is to put a full deck on it, which we’ll call Valhalla. In Viking lore, Valhalla is where warriors who died a noble death went. They were hand-picked by Valkyries riding winged horses and taken there. Odin was the master of Valhalla and allowed you to fight and drink all day, every day. Basically, it’s a great place to be. In my Valhalla, you could die a noble death and we’d give you an honorary place. You could buy your way there as a VIP, or you could drink your way up there. We’re also going to have a loyalty card program for getting into the VIP porch of Asgard.

To follow the theme, our subsidiary site in Pulaski, Tennessee has already been incorporated. It’s called Jotunheimr, which in Viking lore is the land of the giants. Evidently, there were a few families of giants that lived in Pulaski at the turn of the century — we have evidence of them in newspaper articles and their grave sites.

We sell about $4-6,000 in distribution every month. That’s has been limited because I have to go through Lipman Brothers, our out of county distributor. They take 25% of our profits. I sell to Lipman for $112, they sell it to retail outlets for $155 or $175, and the retailer  makes $7-900 per barrel selling it.

That’s why we have a taproom. We do $40-60,000 per month in our 400-square-foot space. That has grown from $20,000 in our first month, October 2016.

We plan to have two breweries in Columbia. The 104 brewery, which will be located next to our current taproom, is a small 10-barrel system with all the equipment on site. They’re getting plumbing, trenching, and all that stuff together right now. It’s going to be a brewpub, with the food supplied by food trucks. It will be what I would call experimental, seasonal, small-batch funkatorium, sour beer. If you know how to make a sour beer, you know that you basically infect the beer with Brettanomyces  and lactobacillus pedis to make it taste better. You don’t want those bugs to get into your lager or your Pilsner. I’m not a big fan of sour beers, but it turns out kids love this stuff.

The second site, across the street from our current taproom, is going to be a 20-barrel system with a larger taproom. Instead of 35 taps, it’ll have 100 taps. We’ll still have guest taps. We’ll have a large porch over the river that will be able to hold 85 to 100 people instead of the 20 we can cramed into the current space. The larger brewhouse will help with broader distribution and statewide service. And in general, our flavors are going to focus on florals and things the Vikings did, which was to use juniper berries, sage, hemp, pine boughs, all that kind of stuff in their mead making processing. We’re making Biere de Garde, braggots, saisons, and other things with very interesting historic profiles.

The next plan, which is accelerating faster than I imagined, is to open a taproom and a small brewhouse with five to seven barrels in Pulaski, a city in Giles County. That would allow ASGARD to distribute Asgard beer in Giles County. 

Pulaski is 30 miles south of us. The building we’ve selected at 700 1st Street is 4,500 square feet and is the oldest mercantile building in the town. It’s got a much bigger parking lot, much bigger space for food trucks, and will have a small brewhouse. Most importantly, we’ll be able to transport our beer wholesale to that outlet, which can retail it or wholesale it in Giles County.

There are two other opportunities that have arisen in the last month: One in Fayetteville , which is in Lincoln  County, and one on a 1,400-acre farm. The opportunity  would be to put a brewery on a farm and it would be totally self-sustained. That would bring us up to five brewing spaces.

Due to Tennessee law, I can’t personally distribute outside the county — I have to go through a distributor. We work with Lipman. Four to six years ago, you might have been able to get placements in two or three counties and several in Chattanooga by working with a distributor like Lipman. But most restaurants have 30 taps. Once you’re done, you may not get that spot back for six months. They’ve got so many other options, and most of it’s corporate, and the corporate guys will only allow one or two guest taps. It’s a monopoly on access, so a distributor is necessary.

We do not sell in grocery stores. We have a can line, but we’re selling them at bottle shops, high-end filling stations, and liquor stores.

Our logo won an International Gold Medal a year ago. The graphics blow minds. When they look at Odin, anybody who’s a comic book fan or knows the history of the Vikings knows exactly who that is. They go nuts when they see it going down the road on our one-ton Mercedes van that has eight tap handles on the side of it. We use that for beer festivals. We can show up at beer festivals and sell $1,000 worth of merch. Also, we were first in the state to do a mobile tap truck delivery wagon that's fully cooled and can deliver a cold beer.

A lot of people find us on Google because of beer tourism. There are people that crisscross this country, east and west and north and south, and they hit a brewery every single day. That's what's going on in Nashville. We're on the beer tourism trail because we’re close to I-65.

A lot of convention-goers come into Nashville and head our way. One of the more successful programs we’ve run was a Groupon advertisement, where we gave two tasting flights and a growler fill for $30, a 60% reduction in our profits. That drove 6,000 people to our building, 75% from outside of our county.

Then, once people get here, they see the food trucks. We’ve had Cousins Maine Lobster, which was on Shark Tank. They sell a pound of lobster on a Connecticut roll, with a half-pound of butter, for $15. He’s completely sold out his truck, on our porch three times. Nobody has the variety of food trucks that we do. Many brewerieshave food trucks, but a lot of them have gone the restaurant direction, and one guy put a food truck inside his taproom. But the Millennials have the patience of a gnat. They come in and go, "What do you have that's new? I already had that last week." 

We have Asian, Middle Eastern, Southern soul food, Prince's Hot Chicken, Maine Cousins Lobster, hamburgers Movie Catering tuck. I've got Coney Island hot dogs from Detroit, the 313 area code. We have 40,000 current and retired GM employees in this region. I had a woman call me in tears and say, "Oh, I haven't had a Coney from 313 since 40 years ago. I was in high school." They try everything, and they spread the word.

Then there’s a night crowd, We're basically are an Irish-Scottish brewpub family event in the early evenings, but when all the restaurants shut down at 10 p.m., the raging hormone crowd comes and texts everybody to come on down and get an Asgard beer. We stay open until midnight, which frequently means 2 a.m. We’re pretty much the only nightlife in town, except for a few country music venues.

Tennessee has the highest tax per gallon of beer in the country which is  $39 per barrel of beer. The price we'd pay in Wyoming or Montana is $1.20. Three years ago, Tennessee had 68 breweries, and today it has 76. For comparison, two years ago, Asheville, N.C. by itself had 28 breweries, and now they have 69. The state of Michigan grew from 150 breweries to 325. How do I compete in that market?

I can either go along with a distributor and go down the toilet with everybody else, or I can endgame the whole deal and break what they call the three-tier system, which prevents manufacturers from being retailers and distributors. The way to do that is to build eight more breweries in eight more counties and distribute directly. Most of our revenue comes from sales in the taproom or brewpub. Why should I be depreciating the upside margin from the retail standpoint?

My margin right now, because we're  not making the beer in-house and we're selling other people’s beer, is 60.5%. When we're making my own beer, it’ll be 85% in our own taproom.

I’m the only original brewery in the history of the county. We are the only taproom in town, although we’re expecting another to open up late this summer. What are we going to do about the competition? Well, we’ll sell more beer. When more breweries and taprooms open up in Columbia, it’s going to make my life a lot easier, and I’ll tell you why. One, it validates the model. We can only run 30 beers a week in the current facility. We’re working on 50 with the new taproom and porch. The other Taproom in town could run run "White Devil" this week, we could  run it next week. It’s cooperative. We’re helping our soon-to-be competitor design their experiences.

The new place coming to town in a few months will be a taproom, not a brewery. I'm not worried about competition in what we currently are doing. Any new player basically validates our model. Any new player gives me a bunch of access to new blood — anybody that doesn't work out with my competition, I'll offer them a job. I worked many, many years in the pharmaceutical research field, and I learned that it is really hard to retain good people. You need to have a steady flow of trained, talented people in the business. Having local competitors just gives you a broader pool of talent.

There have been a lot of breweries that have sold out, as you may know — Goose Island, Lagunitas, and recently, Wicked Weed from Asheville. The big boys have been losing market share every single year for the last 20 years. They've done everything they can to slow it down, and it's not slowing down. The social dynamics with this next generation — they would rather walk than drive, they'd rather support local than national, they'd rather support small than big — means the big guys are desperate. The behavior of the big guys has been extremely unethical, if not illegal. For example, two years ago, they were going to pay distributors $2.5 million not to carry craft beer. That lasted a year and was shut down. The second thing is that, when AmBev bought Wicked Weed out of Asheville, they shut off the shipment of South African hops to all U.S. breweries except theirs. Seven businesses got screwed. That's what I call the non-competitive behavior. I am a capitalist, and I'm in business is to make money, but that's not a good way to do business, from my perspective. It's clearly not ethical.

That's why I'm doing so much local business. I can't tell you the number of farmers that are gunning up to grow barley in my area. Another example is, Michigan Great Lakes Hops, which was nothing 10 years ago, and is now a huge company in the Midwest because they're servicing 300 breweries.

The big guys continue to dominate the retail marketing side. They buy their way into the end cap, the thing at the end of the row at the supermarket. Then they cut their prices so that you have to sell your stuff at $9.99 a six-pack, which means you're making 5% margins. They can keep on going down, and they don't care, because they don't want to lose market share. Market share is a huge part of their valuation. I'm not trying to be in those grocery stores. I really don't see that as a future growth pattern for us. We’re not going to beat the big guys there.

Remember the webmasters back in the '90s? These guys were making $200,000 and they hardly knew what they were doing, but no one knew how to design a website so they could demand massive salaries. They moved on to the next job after two years. Think of the brewery growth in this country right now. We’re adding a brewery a week and there just aren’t that many trained brewers. So my concern is simply a personnel issue — how do I get people to show up, how do I get people who want to work, how do I get people who know how to work, and how do I get people who don't steal you blind? Those are always the issues.

That said, in retail restaurants, margins are 7%. My margins are high enough that I can weather some speed bumps.

Our average tip on a bar tab is 20% to 30%. My employees can make $90,000 per year if they work 40 hours per week. By opening up the two porches on the river and having two taprooms, particularly the larger one across the street, I'll be hiring 30 people. They’ll be able to afford a house, a car, maybe start a family. My whole goal is wealth generation for these kids.

Also, all my employees get stock options. I learned this the second time I went to the Ypsilanti Beer Festival in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The first time I went in 1997, there were four breweries and 500 total visitors. Last year, there were 12,000 people a day, with 4,500 beers and 150 breweries. In talking to all the brew masters and staff, I learned that one of the big issues with the breweries in that state is that the brewery staff and the brewers were being abused. They were being paid low wages and leveraged against their passion to make beer, but none of them had insurance, they didn't have profit sharing plans, and nobody was getting stock. We’re fixing that. From the inception here, every year, we're granting stock options to every employee. They’re owners, not staff.

I built this business for my son because of his passion, and my passion, for Norwegian myths and legends. My ancestry is Scots-Irish, so I wear a kilt for all the Scottish and Irish events at the taproom. This is a family deal. There is no exit strategy planned. None of the investors are asking for that at this point in time. I plan to build a sustainable business that can last a very long time.

My name is Stephen Porter. I'm the CEO and founder of Asgard Craft Brewery. I’ve traveled all over the world, have been to six continents, and I’ve also been running my own pharmaceutical company since 2000. I’m shutting it down this year, though. I sold my last asset to a Chinese investor in May. I like to tell people, "I'm getting out of drugs into a more noble profession, beer making."

Our first employee is my son, who’s got the nose of a bloodhound. He smells and tastes things I can't even imagine. He's got a passion for beer. He likes exotic, expensive beers, and he has a real passion for how beer is made and what's in it. He loves the lambics and the traditional-style beers that are made over there in open, wooden casks with lots of spiders and flies. They've been doing that for 800 years.

Our manager and primary bottle sales handler is Mike Peters, who spent years in Southeast Asia and Germany and acquired a great love for beer, then took a year internship virtually unpaid to learn how to make beer. He has an exhausting list of rare bottles of beer that he buys and puts in coolers in our place.

We also have Ryan, who started out as a home brewer, became a whiskey distiller at age 20, took a year’s internship in brewing, went back to whiskey, and then we hired him back into brewing. He’s the magic man. Most of these guys — and I say this in kindness — these brewers are essentially trolls. They have poor interpersonal skills and personal hygiene, but they love beer. It's their passion. They wake up in the morning and then figure out how to make better beer. Those guys are rare, so you’ve got to treat them right. We have not had a bad beer. He's upset sometimes because they're not the kind of beers he really wants to make, which are these exotic, rare, unusual beers, but I keep telling him, "It's paying the light bill, my friend. People love what you're making."

About three-quarters of our existing investors are folks in their 70s or 80s who want to provide a future for their grandkids. We have young retirees dipping into their retirement funds to get a better upside. I’m currently offering a convertible promissory note at 8% per year simple interest and a conversion at five years to stock at today’s price. I raised about $600,000 from that with a $25,000 minimum investment. It’s been successful, but I’m in a small town.

I want to expand internationally. I’d love to get some international investors, particularly from Northern Europe and Asia. I’ve been traveling to China since 1982 and their craft beer industry is awesome. The problem with China is that you can’t scale big enough. You’ve got to be at, like, 1 million barrels in two years, or people walk away. There are some challenging nuances between government support and private support, and their distribution model is really funky. There’s a lot of gray-market stuff. A number of U.S. brewers have their products being offered over there, which the government hasn’t allowed to happen, but because demand is so great, there’s a whole gray channel