Drawn by Alpena's beauty, family moves from California to launch successful craft brewery - Crain's Detroit Business

That was one vacation with unintended consequences.

It was 2002 and the Austin family drove from their home in California to Florida to pick up a new mobile home. The father, Dana, was a captain in the San Bernardino County Fire Department and long hours meant building up time off, which allowed for long family vacations, often in the form of car trips around the country.

The plan was to get the mobile home, then to drive to Idaho to visit some relatives. But, hey, thought Dana's wife, Julie: We ought to take a detour to Michigan, see one of the Great Lakes we've heard so much about.

So they were heading up I-75 and son Blake was doing the navigating. He suggested getting off on M-23 and running that north, along Lake Huron, or, as locals call it, the Sunrise Side.

"We didn't plan it. We just stopped at Alpena because it got dark and we got a campground," Blake said. "The next day we saw a drawbridge going up and a boat going by. We were captivated and stayed a couple of days."

The next summer, they decided to drive back to Michigan, this time to head up the Lake Michigan side of the state and check out real estate. Blake said they were getting tired of California and rocketing real estate prices, and had been so taken with Michigan they thought they all might want to move there when Dana retired.

They made it up to Traverse City, got sticker shock at housing prices, "and we said, 'Let's shoot back to Alpena,'" Blake said. It was as beautiful as they'd remembered, and real estate prices were far lower.

They had no way of knowing, yet, but those trips would eventually radically change the family's lives.

In 2014, they would all move to Alpena, and now the sons, Blake and Brant, own and run a thriving, growing brewery and restaurant there, the Austin Brothers Brewing Co.

But that's getting ahead of the tale. From 2003-13, Blake was a golf pro at the Oak Valley Golf Club in Beaumont, Calif. In 2010, Blake and his wife bought a home in Alpena. It was during the recession and prices were cheap, and they bought it as an investment and summer house.

The same year, Brant, who had been going to nursing school, decided he wanted to become a brewer, instead. Their dad had got into home brewing in the 1990s and part of their vacation planning over the years was finding and visiting craft breweries.

Brant had taken up home brewing, too, and on weekends, he and Blake and their friends would hang out in the driveway enjoying a beer, or three.

"My dad was like, 'If you're going to do it, you're going to do it right. You're going to brew school,'" Blake said.

He also said: "'Go back to your memory bank. What's the favorite town you've seen? We all said Alpena,'" Blake recounted.

Brant enrolled at Seibel Institute of Technology in Chicago, a vocational school focused on brewing education. Part of the program included several months at Doemens Academy in Munich, Germany, where he earned his master brewer certificate.

That was followed by a three-year stint at Ballast Point Brewing Co. in San Diego, a legendary craft brewer that was sold for $1 billion to Constellation Brands in 2015. Before Ballast Point was sold, Brant had moved on to The Mother Earth Brewing Co., a small brewery in Vista, Calif., where he wanted to work on the lower-volume equipment they would have in the brewery they were planning for Alpena.

Blake and Brant found a large industrial building on the outskirts of town, the vacant former home of an excavating company, and the day after Christmas 2014 they began ripping things apart.

"We did a lot of the work ourselves," Blake said.

In September 2015, they began brewing, and in November, they opened the restaurant.

As they were working on the building to get it ready, word got out in the Alpena community that a brewery was coming to town, and Scott Bays, the sales director for Huron Distributors Inc., which has warehouses in Alpena and Indian River and distributes beer in 10 counties in the northern Lower Peninsula, looked up the Austins.

"I heard rumors someone was moving here to open a brewery. I was immediately interested because we had no breweries in that area," he said. "We had a number of discussions with them. It's kind of like a marriage. You want to make sure you are compatible."

Huron became the brothers' first distributor, delivering draft beer to its customers when brewing began. About a year later, the brothers began selling bottled beer, too.

The brewery got a big boost in the spring of 2017. Bays arranged for the beer buyer for the Meijer Inc. stores to meet with the brothers and sample their beer. "He immediately green-lit it for all the Meijers in Michigan," Bays said. "What they are producing is very excellent and the market has responded."

The Austins make six year-round beers, including top sellers Woody Wheat and 45er IPA, named for the 45th parallel that runs around the glove and goes just south of Alpena. They also regularly make the same four seasonal beers, but much of the fun comes from being creative.

Over the years, they've made more than 150 different beers, including an India pale ale called Key Lime Smoothie. At the light end of the scale is Northern Lights, an ale with just 95 calories; at the opposite end of the scale is the Murkman IPA, billed as a triple New England beer, which tops out at 10.3 percent alcohol by volume.

"We try to make a beer for everyone," Blake said.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March, the bottom temporarily fell out of the business. Bars and restaurants closed on March 16, stopping sales of the kegs Huron was distributing.

Luckily, last July the Austins installed a canning line and they ramped up that production.

"Canning saved our business," Blake said.

"The sales of cans exceeded all our expectations," Bays said.

The pandemic had other impacts. They had to shut down their dining room and have yet to reopen it. Luckily, they have a large outside space that accommodates plenty of distancing.

Employee head count was reduced from 36 to 16 and will remain reduced for the foreseeable future. They went to a paperless menu, with a QR code on each table that brings up the menu on your smartphone. Hours have been reduced to noon-8 p.m., and often there is a line for outside seating when they open.

The curbside to-go business for food and beer remains strong. "It has brought us new customers, people who don't want to wait half an hour for a table," Blake said.

Last year, the brothers set a production record with 3,233 barrels brewed, a barrel equal to 31 gallons. This year, they were up 30 percent year over year before the pandemic hit and hope to at least match last year's total by year's end. In 2018, they brewed 2,724 barrels, good for 28th of the state's 400 breweries.

The rankings and barrels brewed by state breweries for 2019 aren't posted yet on the Michigan Liquor Control Commission website.

Mike Mahler is economic development director of the Alpena Area Chamber of Commerce. He retired as CEO of Alpena-based First Federal of Northern Michigan Bancorp Inc. in June 2019. In January he joined the chamber.

When he was at the bank, Austin Brothers had become a customer. One Saturday morning, before the brewery officially opened, he pulled a little rank and stopped in to get a growler filled. He said what happened next was proof to him of the brothers' passion.

"Brant was telling me that the pilsner wave hadn't hit Michigan, yet, but would. He had just brewed a pilsner and filled a glass and held it up the light. 'Just look at that yellow!' he said. He was just so proud of his beer. That's when I told him: 'That's why you are going to be successful. You're so proud of your beer.'"

Mahler said the explosion of craft breweries in Michigan, and seemingly in every tourist town, will create an industry shakeout. "The pendulum is going to swing back," he said. "There's just too many in the market, and you know a lot of them aren't going to make it, but Austin Brothers will."

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