38 State Brewing Company

The roots of 38 State are simple really – four friends who decided to try their hand at something in which they had absolutely no experience dabbling in… making beer. We never started doing this to make a buck – we did it for ourselves. Our agenda wasn’t to make a brew good enough to sell, but rather one good enough to drink. So, knowing little about the industry and the process of brewing, we decided to roll the dice and see what kind of trouble we could get ourselves into. Too many hours to count were spent in the garage tinkering with recipes, learning about ingredients, and trying to master the creation of a beer that we could enjoy. We never intended to open a brewery. But then, as luck would have it, something changed all that.

In the midst of a sweltering hot summer day, a group of friends with a deck of cards and discerning palates began sampling a few of our creations. We thought our beers were really good – but what would our brutally honest guests think? After the taste tests, the reaction we got was insanely positive. We had no business creating craft beer, and yet… people really liked it. It wasn’t until someone inquired about purchasing a keg of our Double IPA that our garage experiment was flipped on its head and the way we looked at brewing was forever changed.

Shocked, and a little taken aback, we couldn’t believe our ears! Someone really liked our beer? And not just liked it, but liked it enough to pay for it? So that got us thinking, “Could we really sell this stuff?” Seeing that we couldn’t charge our guest for the beer, we gave it to him hoping for some honest feedback from his friends. They sampled it, word spread, and soon we were getting requests for samples from people that we had never met.

Since then, we’ve been tweaking recipes, creating new ones, retiring old ones, and coming to the realization that our little garage hobby had turned into a full blown passion for creating great craft beer. And that, my friends, brings us to the present. It’s taken a lot of time, patience, spilled batches, bad batches, flat batches, a little bit of luck, and a lot of hard work, but today 38 State has managed to create a stable of hand crafted beers that we think beer drinkers, just like us, will enjoy in our brewery and taproom.

As chance would have it, we’re still in a garage. Just a bit bigger! We plan to keep the same feel and atmosphere our friends have grown to know and love and hope that you feel just as welcome and at home.

Crazy? Probably.