After working in the film production industry as an intern, Augie Carton did not want to ever have an intern at his brewery as “free labor.”
But he doesn’t want to coddle them either.
“You spend six months obsessively cleaning and moving heavy things — you know, doing the job of brewing,” he said. “If after you’ve done that you still want to chase the dream we’ve prepared you for entry at most the small breweries of America in exchange for some days helping with cleaning.”
Carton, who runs Carton Brewing, admitted that he understand that interns need something on their resume and that leg in the door is a huge deal.
“When we put an intern on we do it less than two days a week for a six-month period with the ambition to give them some ‘knowhow’ and “a foot in the door,” he said.
For Figueroa Mountain Brewing, the Buellton, California brewery has seen up to six marketing interns at a time, plus interns in the brewery’s lab and with the sustainability program.
“Our company has experienced rapid growth and there were times when the only way I could accomplish everything I wanted to was to hire an intern,” said Brand Director Kady Fleckenstein. “Having interns is time-consuming when it comes to training but it proved to be worth it for certain aspects of the business such as PR and online marketing.
In fact, the current Events Manager and Marketing Coordinator, Laura Moore, started out as an intern in the summer of 2015 and has quickly worked her way up to her current job title.
“She worked really hard at her internship, took on additional projects outside of what was asked of her and really became part of the team,” Fleckenstein said. “She was shy at first but always professional and now she’s an important part of our Fig Family.”
A former intern that Carton turned into a cellar guy is acting as head brewer for a neighbor of the brewery while their first intern brews for Lagunitas in Illinois now after a run through Boston Beer.
“Most our interns disappear after a few days or find something somewhere in the six-month window we try to work in, but we really keep the numbers of interns very low,” Carton said. “They can only start after we try very hard to talk them out of it.”
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