The Microbrewery Handbook

Chapter 2How to Use This Book

THESE PAGES AHEAD outline our learning experience opening Perfect Plain Brewing Company in Pensacola, Florida, a 10‐barrel taproom‐focused company that took more than two years of planning, coffee, learning, beer, anxiety, mentors, excitement, luck, and hard work to open our doors on November 21, 2017.

What I hope to provide in this book, oddly, reminds me so much of my own interesting experience when I was 15 and learning how to drive a car with a manual transmission. People younger than 30 may be unfamiliar with such a term.

In 2000 I had saved up $1,800 from summer restaurant jobs to buy my first car. I made the crucial first mistake of allowing resident master negotiator and my father, Jim Reeves, to actually do the vehicle purchasing.

Dad calls one afternoon and says he has my first car, and as the suspense builds and my enthusiasm overflows, around the corner comes a black 1991 Toyota Tercel hatchback. This is the precise vehicle you buy when you have absolutely no concern about whether high school girls will find you attractive. Torn seats. Busted shocks. The tires could probably be fitted to a riding lawnmower, and in case I ever expected to arrive at social gatherings with any semblance of suave, my muffler sputtered loudly for what felt like minutes after the car ignition was cut.

Today, I rationalize this to simple “character building.”

So Day 1 in the Tercel was a lesson from Jim on how to drive a stick shift. I had zero days' experience; ...