Amy & Craig
How did you meet?
Craig and I were next door neighbors in a duplex our Junior year of college at UGA in Athens. Craig made up a course about beer marketing, convinced a professor to sponsor it, and convinced his dad that buying beer was a “school expense.” He would invite me over to try a new beer every now and then.
What made you both decide to open a brewery together?
Craig had run operations at large regional breweries in Texas for almost 10 years. We had a few friends from Athens who were living in Atlanta and wanted us to move back to start a brewery here. After nearly a year of planning, we decided the time was right to move back to Georgia and get to work on Round Trip!
What are your roles in the business?
Craig manages everything in production and distribution, and Amy manages most other things required to run the business.
What makes you all a great team?
We both share the same vision for the brewery and are excited for where it’s headed. We work together on vision, big projects, and keeping our home life in order. We have a 9-year-old daughter and parenting through the early elementary years while opening a brewery is no joke. At work in general, we stay in our lanes- I don’t need to be overly involved in production decisions and he doesn’t need to spend his time dealing with business and taproom details. Except for the times when, as a small business owner, some things just fall out of anyone else’s scope, so they’re ours. Owning and running a business is always challenging and often lonely, so we try to support each other on the hard days.
What are your favorite beer styles? – Totally fine if you both have different tastes 🙂
Amy is a dark beer lover- I love our smoked doppelbock, Smoking’ Translator. Craig is a fan of our German, lighter lagers and is constantly in judging mode, making sure his beers are on point.
How do you balance business and home life? (It’s Ok if you don’t, lol- how do you make it work?)
Flexibility is key. There is always something to be done at the brewery, so we both pitch in for things like grocery shopping, school pickups & sports, and keeping the house in order. And we know that this season of life is just busy. We try to make time for a few family dinners each week. There are definitely times that don’t feel balanced at all and other times that it feels great.
What are your favorite memories (memory) of you all running your brewery together?
The week we got to open was fun! We started build out just before COVID shut downs and opened a full year later- it felt like a victory to get anything done during that time and took a ton of teamwork. And then people showed up! Times when things are a little more relaxed and we get to just hang out with our staff are also great memories. It’s fun to have created something that people enjoy. Getting to see people find their new favorite beer or have an epic celebration, like a birthday party or rehearsal dinner, are really some of the best parts.
Why is Atlanta the best home base for you all?
The support system we have built up around us including our staff, investors, old UGA friends we have reconnected with, new neighbors, our best customers, and neighboring breweries have created a great spot for Round Trip. Like we said before, starting and running a business can be a lonely endeavor. Without that community we couldn’t do it. We love our neighborhood.
What are you both looking forward to? (Goals, upcoming trip, new beer, expansion, etc) Talk about everything exciting you have coming up 🙂
We’re headed to Antigua, Guatemala later this month to make a collaboration beer with Cerveceria Antigua. We are going to make a version in Atlanta as well. It will be Kolsch and will be available at the taproom in March.
Sara & Sam
How did you meet?
Sara and I met in The Lion’s Fountain Pub in Florence, Italy in August 2013. The bar was a lovely combination of cozy and grungy and served as a regular watering hole for expats, students, and tourists. At the time, I was stationed with the U.S. Army in Vicenza, Italy and had just returned from a year-long deployment to Afghanistan. Sara was finishing up summer vacation with a 10-day trip through Italy before returning to college at Loyola in Chicago. As I was walking out of the Lion’s Fountain with my friends, I turned around briefly and saw Sara sitting with her friend. My friends and I walked back in and introduced ourselves; Sara and her friend said that they were heading to bed that we should join them the following day for a wine tour through Chianti. We joined them the following day and had a great time, but after that evening we went our separate ways, assuming that we’d probably never see each other again.
However, a few months later Sara “poked” me on Facebook and I replied asking how she was doing. Serendipitously, I was looking for a date for a military ball coming up in December in Vicenza and ended up seeing if Sara would be interested in flying across the world to spend a week in Italy with someone she barely knew…well, she said yes and we had an incredible week in Italy, exploring Vicenza, Venice, Verona, and the other small towns nearby where I lived. Once again, as luck would have it, I received a job offer while Sara was visiting to work with the Ranger Regiment out in Tacoma, WA which meant I’d be moving back to the United States. In February, I moved back to the United States, bought a truck down in Georgia where I grew up, drove up to Chicago to spend a week with Sara, drove out to Tacoma, and then immediately deployed to Afghanistan for four months. Sara and I talked and emailed as much as we could. By the end of the deployment Sara had decided to move out to Tacoma and move in with me after she graduated in the summer. By September 2014 we were living in Tacoma, WA together and the rest is history.
What made you both decide to open a brewery together?
While we were out in Tacoma we fell in love with craft beer and really got to know the industry out there pretty well. Sara had been working for a marketing/branding company in Seattle for about a year and was getting burned out on the commute and the “nine-to-five” lifestyle. Around the same time I was in a parachuting accident during a training exercise with the Ranger Regiment and basically couldn’t walk for a few months after breaking my pelvis, leg, and part of my lower back. Needless to say, this experience caused us to seriously think about what we wanted to do with our lives. While I was recovering and starting to walk again I started to homebrew to exercise and build my body back up. At the same time, Sara quit her marketing job and started managing and bartending at a new brewery in Tacoma that opened up across the street from our apartment. A few months after she started the job I started the process of getting medically discharged from the Army and started an internship at Narrows Brewing in Tacoma to learn more about the brewery business and operations. It was at this time that we thought to give opening our own brewery a try. We loved craft beer, the customers, and the professionals in the industry. The community just seemed cool, laid back, and unpretentious. I ended up getting medically discharged from the Army and we started developing our plan. We knew that we needed to do something unique and Sara’s background in marketing and branding helped her understand that the most important part of a good brand is a good story. She proposed that we put all of our possessions into a storage unit out in Tacoma and travel around the world to figure out what we wanted our brewery to be. We ended up visiting breweries and interviewing brewery owners in the U.S., Mexico, South America, and Europe for 1.5 years and eventually returned to Georgia to live in my parents’ basement while we developed our business plan.
What are your roles in the business?
I am the CEO and manage all the financial, legal, and other things no one else wants to do! Sara is the Director of Hospitality and Marketing, managing all the marketing and branding and also leads on the operational front in the tap room. We tackle new business and special projects together.
What makes you all a great team?
We’ve spent a lot of time together doing hard things. We traveled around the world on a very tight budget living out of a backpack for two years pretty much solving problems everyday. It definitely wasn’t a vacation. We spent those years unintentionally training for the struggles of entrepreneurship. Also, we’re very good at communicating with each other which is essential if you want to survive in business – not to mention marriage – together. We also have different skill sets which allows us to accomplish more tasks together while bringing different perspectives to every situation.
What are your favorite beer styles? – Totally fine if you both have different tastes 🙂
In general, we’re on the same page with beer. Both of us love lagers and Belgians. Sara’s favorite Belgian is probably a Belgian Pale Ale. Taras Bulba is probably our favorite one from Belgium. Elsewhere’s Belgian Pale Ale, Menagerie, was probably our favorite overall. I am also a huge fan of a classic American Pale Ale or IPA. You’ll never hear me complain about a Sierra Nevada Pale of Celebration when it’s that time of year. If I was stuck with one beer though I’d have to go with a good Euro Pils or Helles.
How do you balance business and home life? (It’s Ok if you don’t, lol- how do you make it work?)
We try to get into the outdoors and travel when we can. Having these moments of complete separation helps us recharge and realize that the world isn’t falling apart!
What are your favorite memories (memory) of you all running your brewery together?
It’s been a pretty rough experience so far! But I’d say when Josh finished the first round of beers back in 2020 and we tried them for the first time it was a pretty incredible moment. Managing to get the brewery open in 2020 when the City of Atlanta’s licensing department was completely closed from March to August of 2020 still amazes me as well.
Why is Atlanta the best home base for you all?
I was born and raised up in Lawrenceville and the Georgia beer scene is still one of the youngest and least developed in the country. I know Georgians think they have a lot of breweries in the state; however, we’re still among the bottom when it comes to breweries per capita. This is just the beginning and we wanted to be a part of a brewing scene that was still in its infancy.
What are you both looking forward to? (Goals, upcoming trip, new beer, expansion, etc) Talk about everything exciting you have coming up 🙂
We have two big things happening right now. We are opening our small second location in West Midtown at Westside Paper (new development across the street from King Plow and Terminal West) set to open in May 2023. Also, we are traveling to Argentine Patagonia in a few days to take 14 customers on a two week excursion to some of favorite places in and around Bariloche. A good friend of ours is going to be the guide. This is the first of many trips we plan to lead as we see this kind of service becoming a cornerstone of our business model.