Deb Carey started the New Glarus Brewing Company — maker of Spotted Cow — because she thought her husband Dan had a gift for brewing beer. He had been a brewmaster since she met him in Helena, Montana, in 1982.

A graphic artist who started her first business at age 16, Deb had finished her last year of high school and attended two years of college in Helena. She was looking for projects when she heard about a microbrewery that was starting up downtown. “Being an artist, I thought, well they must need something done,” she says.

And that’s when she met Dan, the brewmaster who was putting the brewpub together for its owners. The two started dating, and before long they became three when daughter Nicole, now 29, came along. A few years later, they became four with the birth of Katherine, now 26.

Dan continued working in the beer industry, landing in Portland, Oregon, where he designed and built breweries all over the country for a brewery equipment manufacturer. Deb got busy raising the kids and running another small business importing German furniture and representing local artists. In her role as “the engineer’s wife,” she also attended business dinners with Dan.

“Repeatedly, I’m hearing stories of brewery startups or the problems that people are having while they’re running them. And since I have my own small business I’m thinking to myself, ‘Oh, that was a really good idea, oh that really sucked, I would never do that, and what possessed them, and too bad they didn’t know that.’ So I’m just taking it all in, and at the same time I’m feeling really strongly that I do NOT want to run a brewery!”

But about 10 years later, living in Colorado where Dan was working for Anheuser-Busch, all that knowledge Deb had gained collided with her entrepreneurial spirit. She began thinking about starting a brewery.

Research Points Back Home
Much of the Portland discussions had been about demographics. The craft brewers wanted to know who was drinking their beer and why they were drinking it.

“They were trying different ideas, and you could see them clearly thinking, ‘Oh, it’s people who are rich,’ and then they’d try to put a brewery in a neighborhood of wealthy people. But I had my own ideas about demographics.”

Those ideas lay dormant until the early 1990s. Then, believing her husband had a gift for brewing beer, she decided to give him the gift of a brewery. She researched five or six areas of the United States before deciding her home state of Wisconsin would be a great place to start one. People in Colorado thought they were crazy. They wanted to know who would buy handcrafted beer in “unsophisticated” Wisconsin, where there’s snow and mosquitoes and not much else?

“But, I’m from here, and I know that people are parochial in their buying habits, that they’re very educated, and that they care very deeply about the environment and local issues, and that they pay attention. And I think those are the things that have to be together to make a small brewery successful.”

Apparently she was spot on. Spotted Cow is now the best-selling draft beer in Wisconsin, and both Dan and Deb — and their beers — have won numerous awards over the years. This year, the U.S. Small Business Administration named Deb the 2011 Wisconsin Small Business Person of the Year and first runner-up in its national contest. She also received Ernst & Young’s 2011 Regional Entrepreneur Of The Year Award in the Consumer Products division and was selected by The White House as a national Champion of Change.

Entrepreneurial Spirit Meets Providence
Deb and Dan made their decision to start the brewery in January 1993, and shortly thereafter Deb sent Dan to Wisconsin to investigate. She thought if the native Californian could handle Wisconsin in February, he’d be okay with it all the time. So she drew a 30-mile radius around Madison and told Dan, “Why don’t you just go look at some towns and see what you think?” And off he went.

After driving around looking at small towns, Dan liked what he saw but couldn’t decide which town he liked best. Then, while en route to Monroe for a meeting, he stopped for gas in New Glarus.

“You would like this town,” he told Deb over the phone. “It looks like Aying.”

The two had lived in Aying, Germany, for a time while Dan apprenticed at a small brewery there.

Coincidentally, there happened to be a warehouse for sale in New Glarus. It had the features and capacity they sought, and the owner was willing to trade stock for a year’s occupation. He became their first investor.

When Dan returned from Wisconsin, he started making calls to check malt and barley prices while Deb started working on a business plan. And that’s when Fate kicked in big time. “I always believe God speaks to me through garage sales and serendipitous happenings,” Deb quips.

Dan was on the phone with a woman from Briess Malt & Ingredients Co. in Chilton when Deb heard him say, “What equipment?”

There was a brewpub for sale in Appleton.

“I’m thinking to myself, this is too perfect, because equipment is hard to find. That was one of our problems, how are we going to find used equipment and then get it to Wisconsin? Then all of a sudden here is a used brewpub, a 20-barrel system. I’m like, I’m going to bid on that!” she says.

Dan objected, reminding her they had no money, but Deb retorted, saying she would sell the house. Then she and their young daughters traveled to New Glarus by train. They arrived in New Glarus in the middle of the night and the next morning Deb quickly negotiated a bank loan with no payments or interest for six months, then found a house to rent. When they went back home, she sold the house.

“I got back on Thursday and had another open house that weekend and had buyers that were successfully financed. I sold the house and told Dan to go put in his notice at Anheuser-Busch,” she says.

Then came one of the hardest parts: raising money.

If You Build It, They Will Come
“I didn’t know anything about how to put money together,” Deb explains. “There’s no family, there’s no rich uncle somewhere. But I had been given advice once, which was good advice, to call somebody who’s in your same industry but not a competitor and ask advice. So that’s what I did.”

She called a few people they knew in the industry and kept getting the same story: there are people out there with a lot of money who are looking for investments, and if you put together a good business plan, they will find you. Deb found this hard to believe but pursued the strategy anyway.

When the local newspaper found out, and one of the reporters wrote a story, investors sat up and took notice.

Some of the people she talked to wanted to invest and take control of the business. They were turned down. By the end, she had raised $200,000 — about $40,000 from the sale of past houses, the rest from 27 virtual strangers, most of whom are still with them. In one of the quickest brewery startups ever — having conceived the idea in January and moved to New Glarus in June — the brewery starting producing beer in October 1993.

This year, the New Glarus Brewing Company expects to brew more than 100,000 barrels, up from about 92,000 last year. Recent growth is estimated at 16 percent. Large national breweries have made offers, but she’s turned them down because she knows they wouldn’t treat her employees as well as she and Dan do.

More important than dollar figures, Deb says, is the creative process of running a brewery — what beers are doing well, how the production schedule is moving, what’s going in the minds of consumers and bar owners — and how her employees are feeling.

“I genuinely care about them,” she says. “What’s really important to me is to make the best beer that we can and take the very best care of the people, and then I think the rest of it follows.”

Photography by Chris Hynes

By Marcia Tillett-Zinzow

Marcia Tillett-Zinzow is a freelance writer who lives in the Lauderdale Lakes area north of Elkhorn.