The Black Cloister Brewing Company opened its doors for business in downtown Toledo one year ago today. An anniversary, particularly a first one, provides an opportunity to reflect upon the past and think about the future. With this in mind I sat down with Black Cloister’s CEO and Founder Tom Schaeffer. I wanted to chat with him about the ups and downs of his first year in business and to  hear his thoughts on the next twelve months. In the end our conversation was more wide-ranging and we covered a variety of different topics.

Starting a business can be both challenging and stressful. There is no guarantee of success and many new small businesses fail. Data for the state of Ohio show that of the 14,906 small businesses that opened in the state in 2013 21.1% failed to survive through 2014. In my conversation with him Tom spoke quite candidly about the challenges of starting the Black Cloister and the tense conversations and long meetings that took place between him and his three business partners whose collective genius is responsible for the Black Cloister. It took them much longer to open the doors than originally anticipated and as with any start-up business there were and continue to be a seemingly infinite number of very long days filled with countless hours of very hard work. While he cannot categorically establish a direct cause and effect Tom is sure that the long hours took a toll on his body with the result that during a three to six month period he found himself under the weather with four distinct bouts of sickness. However, Tom (who is 53 years old) got through this initial start-up phase without encountering any serious health problems which is quite remarkable when you consider that he had suffered a heart attack at age 49 – not something you would expect when chatting with this energetic and healthy looking individual. Tom is not alone. Running a small business can be extremely stressful. Indeed a 2012 study by the Bank of America found that managing a small business was three times more stressful than raising children.

Once the doors were opened new challenges appeared, some of which could be considered part and parcel of the growing pains of a new and thriving business.  Others were unanticipated.  I asked Tom to give me an example of one such challenge. He immediately started to talk about distribution. Tom had expected that the Black Cloister would self-distribute its beer for the first couple of years at least. And in the beginning they did. Tom had two sales people who would load kegs of beer into their personal vehicles and deliver to bars and restaurants throughout Toledo and the immediate environs. The sales people worked on a commission basis and received reimbursement for mileage. Tom soon arrived at the conclusion that this system was not particularly profitable and that it would be much more cost effective to sign a contract with a distributor. This he duly did. Following a conversation with a fellow brewer in Columbus, OH Tom realized that the small size of the Toledo market that had made it difficult to profitably self-distribute. In the considerably larger Columbus market this brewer had three sales people whom he compensated very much along the same lines that Tom had compensated his sales people. There was a key difference, however – the Columbus brewer’s sales people each had a hundred or so accounts. Cavalier, the distributor who Tom now uses, only has somewhere in the neighborhood of eighty accounts – a clear indicator of the difference in market size between Toledo and Columbus. The Toledo market was simply too small for self-distribution.

One of the things that has always impressed me about the Black Cloister is the people that work there. The staff are pleasant, attentive, and knowledgeable about beer. So I was really not surprised when I read that the the Black Cloister staff had been voted best staff in the Toledo City Paper’s 2015 Dining Awards. Building his staff team is one of Tom’s most satisfying accomplishments and has contributed greatly in the success of the brewery during the first year. I asked Tom the process he uses in deciding who to hire. In interviewing potential staff members Tom asks them to talk for five minutes on a topic about which they are passionate. The topic can be anything – it need not be about beer. As Tom said he can teach them about beer. But he cannot teach them to be passionate. Tom reckons that if they cannot talk passionately about something about which they claim to be passionate then there is little chance that they will ever be able to talk to his customers passionately about beer. So, through the interview process, Tom has heard a lot of passionate monologues on a wide variety of topics ranging from dog parks to human genome sequencing. Writing for the Gallup Business Journal  about the importance of passion in the workplace Kenneth A. Tucker argues that “far too many companies lack employees who are passionate about their work, and they flounder, or just get by.”

I was also curious about Tom’s perspective on creativity. Craft brewers tend to be highly creative individuals who are capable of doing wonderful things with just four basic ingredients – water, hops, malted barley, and yeast. Of course they sometimes add a few extra ingredients to make their beers even more interesting. These added ingredients range from everything from cherries to bull testicles. When I asked Tom about the role that creativity plays in what happens at the Black Cloister he went off in a direction that I had not anticipated. However, as an economic geographer with an interest in local economic development it was a direction that resonated with me. Tom did not talk about hops and yeast and barley (or bull testicles). Rather he talked about creativity within the context of urban regeneration. Toledo, like many cities in the industrial Midwest, was hit hard by Great Recession of 2007-2009. Tom suggested that cities that seem to have been most successful in recovering from the recessionary period appear to be those that have been able to retain (and nurture) their most creative people – artists, fashion designers, architects, and yes, craft brewers – the people that the oft-cited urban theorist Richard Florida calls the “creative class”. As Tom was talking I was reminded about one of my favorite pieces of scholarship in which the urban economist Ed Glaeser of Harvard University documents and explains socio-economic changes in the city of Boston between the years 1630 and 2003. According to Glaeser (whom I just heard give a keynote talk at a conference in Hawaii) one of the keys to Boston’s success in the post-1980 period is the fact that when economic circumstances got tough (and they did in Boston, particularly during the 1950-1980 period) and people were fleeing the city for pastures new, there were enough creative and highly educated people who stayed behind and decided to make a go of it. This was essentially the same argument that Tom was making for Toledo – the creatives have a key role to play in the revitalization of Toledo. In a recent article in The Atlantic James Fallows identified eleven signs that a city will succeed. The eleventh sign, according to Fallows, is the existence of one or more craft breweries. In fact Fallows suggests that this is probably the “most reliable” marker that a city will succeed. Incidentally, the two interviewees who spoke so passionately and eloquently about dog parks and human genome sequencing were both hired by Tom and remain an integral part of the Black Cloister team today.

With respect to the next twelve months Tom is very optimistic. A few weeks prior the Black Cloister had won its first competitive beer medal – a Gold medal at the 2016 Best of Craft Beer Awards for its Helles Angel, a Munich Helles Lager. In June of this year the Black Cloister will be one of only just over seventy breweries that have been invited to participate in  Savor, a craft beer and food pairing event, that will take place in Washington, DC. Plans are also afoot to enter two beers into the biennial World Beer Cup that will take place in Philadelphia, PA this May. Expansion of the Black Cloister’s brewing capacity is also in the works. The addition of two fifteen-barrel fermenters will double the brewery’s production capacity with Tom anticipating that 2016 production volume will reach 1,000 barrels. There are also plans to expand into the Columbus, OH market which will be a significant step. Looking into his crystal ball Tom hopes that by 2018 Black Cloister beer will be available throughout the state of Ohio as well as parts of neighboring Michigan. Finally, I asked Tom as to how many craft breweries he thought that Toledo could support. He noted that Pre-Prohibition that the city had thirteen breweries and believes that we could once again support a similar number provided that all were producing a good quality product.

So I raise a glass and say Happy 1st Anniversary to the Black Cloister Brewing Company. From a customer’s perspective it has been a wonderful twelve months. I hope that this previous year was the first of many successful years of brewing great beer while, at the same time, contributing to the revival of downtown Toledo.