Tips for Keeping Your Brew Team Motivated

As a leader, there are many keys to helping keep your team motivated. Employing your brewery’s ideals while also giving your employees room to be creative and experimental can be paramount to the health of a brew team.

“In the craft brewing industry, creativity is important,” said Aaron Inkrott, the Brewing Operations Manager for Saint Arnold. “Most of the brewers left previous professional careers to be apart of something they believed in.

“We have an environment where all brewers are encouraged to test brew so that something that they developed will reach full scale production.

Augie Carton likened his brew team at Carton Brewing as a “loose jam band” situation where if someone starts adding to the sound, they get invited to stick around. That has meant adding someone to the team about every 12-18 months over the last four years to bring the group to six total.

“We are all about creativity and you wouldn’t have landed at Carton if the creative side of brewing didn’t motivate you,” Carton said. “Whenever we are re-inventing a beer, or process, the whole team is involved in the discussion.”Inkrott noted that quality, consistency and community are three tenants to a healthy workplace for his brewing team in Houston.

“We believe our beers are of the highest quality, and consistency is what we expect from ourselves and what the public loves when they purchase Saint Arnold,” he said. “Getting a beer approved for full scale production goes through quite a bit of R&D. Typically severally months, sometimes up to a year.”

That means being open minded to new ideas, and having the wherewithal to adjust and be open to criticism is key. Being honest from the beginning with the realities of the job and not being upset when someone doesn’t fit like you’d hoped has also been learned Carton said.

With a new beer he will usually reach out to everyone for their hopes and dreams and look for feedback. With a new process Carton says he tends to start with his head brewer and then reach out for feedback on the concept.