Meet the woman who started Fat Tire in her basement

Beer was taking over the house. Bottles lined the living room and New Belgium T-shirts were sprawled across what would be the baby’s nursery. They had more square feet in beer than in furniture.

No, this wasn’t the basement of a frat house. This was Kim Jordan’s home at the beginning of New Belgium Brewing Company — the brewery famous for Fat Tire beer.

Jordan and then-husband Jeff Lebesch launched New Belgium in 1991 after taking out a $60,000 second mortgage on their home. They brewed the beer in the 12-by-22-foot basement while Jordan raised a baby and worked four days a week as a social worker.

On the fifth day of the week, Jordan would round up customers’ beer orders, pack up the family station wagon and drive around making deliveries. At night, she finished up the day by making posters to advertise New Belgium.

“I’m not really afraid of taking risks, so to me it seemed like we could always go back to our day jobs,” Jordan told me. “Entrepreneurship is a funny kind of thing. It sneaks up on you.”

Jordan had never brewed beer before, but Lebesch was a home brewer and traveled around Europe studying beer for a while. At the time, they thought they could make their business work if they made 90 cases of beer a week.

“Beer has always been my drink of choice,” Jordan said.

They brewed five beers in the early days: Fat Tire, Abbey, Trippel Belgian Style Ale, Old Cherry Ale and Sunshine Wheat. New Belgium was the first brewery in the U.S. to specialize in Belgian beer.

“We were really captivated by Belgium’s experimental brewing process,” Jordan said. “Belgians use candy, sugar, fruits, spices and herbs. That was really interesting to us.”

Once their business had taken over their entire house, the co-founders knew it was time to move into a larger location.

By October of 1992, Jordan and Lebesch moved the business to a location in Fort Collins, Colo. This was five days after Jordan had her second baby, so he came along too.

They stayed here for three years as their Belgian craft beer grew in popularity across the country.

At the time, the co-founders had one volunteer employee. After a year, they decided they really liked him and wanted to offer him some “sweat equity,” so they gave him a 10 percent stake in the company.

That was the beginning of New Belgium’s “we’re all in this together” culture. Since 2013, New Belgium employees own 100 percent of the company. Jordan is now the CEO.

If you work at New Belgium for one year, you get a custom cruiser bike (the company’s logo), and you become a partial owner of New Belgium. If you stick around for five years, they take you to Belgium. (This is in addition to the on-campus volleyball court and foosball tables).

Creating a distinct work culture and strong community was important to Jordan. So in 1995, New Belgium held its first annual retreat for all employees. And Outside Magazine has named New Belgium in the top 20 best places to work for the five years since it earned the No. 1 spot in 2008.

“We practice open-book management and high-involvement culture,” Jordan said. “We want [employees] to know what’s going on with the business. We thought the brewery would be more successful if we enlisted the brains and heart and muscle of our coworkers.”

In 1994, New Belgium surpassed the microbrewery mark and started producing more than 15,000 barrels of beer per year.

A year later, New Belgium outgrew its home for the second time. This time, when they moved into a larger brewery in Fort Collins, they were able to apply for traditional bank financing since the company was doing well at this point. Jordan said this was when they knew they were going to make it.

“We were really like, ‘OK, the market for beer is taking off,’” Jordan said. “We are committed to making very good beers and to making our brand’s story really vibrant for beer drinkers.”

At their new home in Fort Collins, New Belgium makes 12 beers year round along with a whole variety of seasonal brews.

New Belgium now has 580 employees and is sold in 37 states and two provinces in Canada. They’re at max capacity now (New Belgium sold 800,000 barrels of beer in 2012), so a new brewery is in the works and is scheduled to open in Asheville, N.C., in December 2015. There, they’ll add close to 140 people to their team.

This will allow New Belgium to sell beer to the East Coast without shipping it across the country. And Jordan says the goal is to be a national brewery.

“I still have regular pinch-me moments where I feel like this is kind of magical, that I work with people who are so passionate about what they do,” Jordan said.

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