How to Start a Veteran-Owned Brewery
Veteran JD McBride discusses how and why he and his wife Stacy opened their microbrewery, Fire Base Brewing, located in Temple, Texas. As a veteran-owned brewery he talks about his time in the military and how it influenced his decisions in opening his small brewpub when he retired, and discusses his marketing approach, his beer brewing equipment selection and what motivated him to build his craft microbrewery taproom in the first place.
I'm JD McBride, I did four years in the Marine Corps, did 16 years in the Army and I was coming up for retirement. I was making home brew for about seven years before that and you know, everybody likes to think their home brew taste good, people like it, so let's move forward with it and do something with it. And so my wife Stacy and I opened Firebase Brewing Company in 2020 in Temple, Texas.
I fell in love with the craft beer community and just the way people kind of embrace each other and help each other out. I also like how they get into the community and do things for the community, it's not just about the beer, it's about doing more for the community that you're a part of. And being military, that's kind of a big thing you know. I served for 20 years for this country and I wanted to be able to be able to do something service related afterwards.
After retirement, I found our space here, knew that we wanted to use the BREWHA system because of the simplicity of it, and here we are. Downtown is the heart of a city and so we wanted to be that community space, that Community Brewery here in town. We wanted to build a space where it's like a home away from home that you can come with your family, your friends, but you feel safe to have a beer, relax a little bit, and still remember what it might be like being downrange if you've been down there at all.
We wanted it to look like a couple soldiers put it together and a couple of soldiers did put it together. And we honor the service branches, we have their big logos on the wall here. We have an American flag right above the bar so everybody sees it when they come in. We do have certain things—like our rough countertop this is something that you know, had we been downrange overseas fighting a battle and we needed a space to relax, soldiers would have built something like this. The cooler/hooch behind us, you know, the people would build around so they had some private space, that's what that reminds a lot of people of even though that stores our beer. The details in the wall that we have over here, people that have been in buildings in Iraq and Afghanistan it takes them back to those places and those times that they've experienced. It's a little reminiscent of you know, maybe some bad times but there are some hidden good times in there. I've seen what I'll say is the worst of humanity and I've also seen the best of humanity.
Craft beer kind of brings the best out in most people. They're just here to have a good time enjoy the camaraderie, enjoy the conversation, and hopefully enjoy a good beer or two, or three, if they're somewhere that they feel comfortable with. That's where all this concept came from. It's a big part of my life, I know it's a big part of a lot of people's lives. I want to be able to share that with as many people as I can, for those individuals that don't really have a place to go to unwind from some of the mental trauma that they might have they can come in here and bs with people and poke fun back and forth with different service members, different generations of service members. We've seen multiple groups of people become friends here that never would have met anywhere else and that's what we try to provide, and like I say, we've proven many times.
The running joke around here is that everywhere I served I was never anywhere long enough to be part of a Mug Club so I decided to build a brewery around one so I could finally be a part of one. The green ones here, those are our Founders members. Those are all the the hundred individuals that helped get this place up off the ground, keep it off the ground during the pandemic and everything else. We had such an interest in it after everything got sold out that we decided that we were going to open up another lifetime membership. We've made some very, very, very good friends through this whole process and I don't think that can ever be replaced.
I think the biggest thing I learned from being in the military that's transitioned into the business world and running Firebase is the resourcefulness of trying to figure out how to get something done when you don't necessarily have the funds to make it happen but you got to figure out a way to make it happen. So that's one of the aspects that's rolled over into being a business owner, that has allowed this wheel to keep moving forward. Cost was a significant factor for us; it was essentially our life savings that we were bringing into this project.
Obviously I researched brewing systems, we knew we wanted to go with BREWHA because I liked the simplicity of it. It doesn't take a whole lot of brain power to figure it out and produce good beer. I really like the fact that you sanitize the fermentation portion during the boil and so everything that's going into fermentation has been heat sanitized. I do enjoy how easy this system is to clean, I'm not cleaning five tanks after a brew day or after a brew cycle like you would at a normal brewery. I'm cleaning one tank and one colander, that's all I have to worry about.
I really enjoyed the level of information I could get off of the BREWHA website and now that I've been brewing on it for quite a while I can do a brew day on my own without stressing too much about forgetting something or not being able to handle something. The best thing about operating a brewpub is being creative and brewing the beer. I can proudly say that I've had my hand in every single batch of beer that's come through here. I may not have been through the whole process of it but I have had some piece of it.
Most of the recipes I've designed myself and so that's the fun part and the creative part of doing craft beer and being in this industry, is putting your own spin on something that has been around for you know, decades and centuries, and having that one individual come in and be like, 'this beer reminds me of Germany' you know, because they were deployed there, they visited there, or they're from there. Or 'this beer reminds me of this moment in my life' and that's one of the greatest feelings.
It's not just about the beers it's about finding new connections, and we love to be here on Friday nights talking to friends of ours that we've met through this whole process, meeting new friends that we know we're going to connect with. It's been two and a half years now since our start, that we're still kicking, still brewing beer, still running with my head cut off, but still having a good time.
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