The Microbrewery Handbook

Chapter 28Love Your Community, and It Will Love You Back

Community is part of our fabric. It's part of our company mission statement: “To create incredible experiences that make our beer, our brewery, and our hometown, Pensacola, unforgettable.”

Before you roll your eyes and mumble to yourself that “we love our community!” is part of the small business cliché starter kit, we go out of our way to make our charitable work impactful and widespread in an area of Florida that can use it in so many ways.

My two favorite compliments we get at Perfect Plain are:

1. “This taproom reminds me of a place in Denver/Portland/San Diego/Asheville.” I love that because it's exactly what we hoped to accomplish with our taproom.
2. When someone I don't know e‐mails and says, “Since you guys are so big in helping the community …” The fact that the word is out in our city among strangers that we're here to build our city up is both intentional on our part and one of the most rewarding parts of owning this company.

It's not just a tagline on our business card. We live it each day. It's part of our fabric.

At Perfect Plain, we have one condition to our charitable giving: All dollars must stay local. If a national organization is doing a local fundraiser but they plan to send those dollars to Orlando or Tampa, we won't do it. Our charity is solely focused on building up our community. I strongly suggest ...