From Theology School To CEO Of Reformation Brewery

 

When Spencer Nix attended the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, he made a promise to never drink alcohol on his way to becoming a non denominational pastor.

 

It’s a promise he never fully kept, and instead turned into a business, as he is the CEO and cofounder of Reformation Brewery in Woodstock.

 

In a nondescript office filled with tents, branded coolers and enough packaged beer to last a few months, Nix told me about the philosophy behind Reformation and how brewing beer is like pastoring a church.

INTERVIEW

Rickey Bevington: “What does the hashtag #setbeerfree mean?

Spencer Nix: Set beer free, for us, is setting it free from the noise, the fear and the neglect that our industry has really suffered under for far too many years. Setting it free from the narratives of ‘what’ and getting it into ‘why.’ Why do we enjoy drinking beer together? Well made, hand-crafted, local beer, together?

Bevington: Why has there been negativity that you are setting beer free?

Nix: There [are] a lot of stereotypes, [there are] archetypes that have existed in our country for, I think [since] post-prohibition, even pre-prohibition, and we are still fighting some of those narratives here in our context. We want to draw attention to the good things that a well-made product can bring and the community that it fosters and the conversations as well.

Bevington: Why is running a brewery like running a church?

Nix: So many ways that they overlap. People often ask me, ‘How did you go from pastoring a church to running a brewery?’ Well, it’s actually pretty natural. You are still dealing with humans and they are just as messy in the church as they are out in the world.

I actually prefer the messy humans. In the brewing industry, in some ways, it’s a little easier because most people know they are a mess. That’s a good place to start for a good conversation.

Bevington: And you are bringing people together into community.

Nix: Absolutely. It’s just a natural attraction for people to come around. We say, a lot of times, beer is the first social media. Sharing a beer together and getting to know each other apart from a screen carries incredible value for us.

Bevington: Is that what the ‘reformation’ means in the title?

Nix: Yeah, absolutely. It started kind of silly because the other co-founder and I, we were drinking beers he was bringing home from Europe. He and I share a common background and [we have both] been to seminary, so after a few beers you end up talking about God or politics. We were nerds, so we ended up talking about the protestant reformation and that time period in church history and what was going on the world.

When we started home brewing we were like, ‘Well what are we gonna call this? Let’s call it what we end up talking about anyway: The Reformation.’ But little did we know when we were home brewing what this would eventually become.

But people identified with that moment of, you know, there is a reformer in all of us. No matter what you are trying to change in the world, you are a reformer. We want to celebrate that and draw that out.

Bevington: While you were in school at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, did you drink alcohol?

Nix: Yes, in the closet. There [were] quite a few of us. We broke our oaths not to [drink], but again there is a rebellious reformer in everyone and we took the liberty to do it. We didn’t think it was necessarily a great thing we should be promising anyway. In your younger years, you test the boundaries, and we surely did. We enjoyed it.

Bevington: What kind of reactions have you had from within your faith community?

Nix: Surprisingly, they have been very positive. I had that fear growing up in this context that there would be a lot of backlash; that I would lose a lot of relationships and dear friends.

Some of that has happened, but for the most part I have gained people in my life that bring value and they encourage me and have not told me that you need to walk away from the faith or any of that. So I have taken their advice and I listen to them, but, overall, the reaction has been very positive.

Bevington: For those who haven’t grown up in a teetotalling background, what’s it like?

Nix: I think we as humans like to put social pressure, for a lot of different reasons, to use as leverage for a lot of agendas. And it’s just like pressure you might feel in your job, or in your parenting. You never feel like you are good enough or accepted enough, so you just fight those same insecurities that we all have as humans.

Growing up in it, it didn’t seem weird. It was just the way we treated it and the way it was viewed. But as I grew up and studied and saw the issue from a more historical context, it is a very, very small part of the narrative of how the church has viewed alcohol and how society has viewed alcohol.

at the end of the day it’s very hard to get things to stop fermenting. We have only been able to do that, relatively, in the modern era. So we have all this history where you couldn’t stop fermentation. And then, as culture developed, part of our [society] said, ‘No, we need to do everything we can to stop it. People are abusing it.’ And that’s always going to be the case. But the solution to that, I think, can be more nuanced and advanced than prohibition only.

Bevington: And you remain very active in your evangelical faith.

Nix: I do. It’s an important part of who I am. It’s part of my identity. I am not ashamed of it at all.  But saying that, we are not a christian brewery. And not because we are ashamed of it, but this brewery has a lot of different partners and we don’t all share the same moral view and perspective.

I think that’s what makes it more beautiful as well, being able to have those conversations and arguments and fight for our values and visions. It makes us better overall as a company.

Nix then led us inside Reformation Brewery to give us a better view of the production process. We first stopped by what Nix called the “Keeping Room.’

Nix: We call it a keeping room and not a tasting room because it’s about why we do what we do. The keeping room, historically, was the room beside the kitchen where you would have your conversations. It’s where community would happen. And that’s what we want to celebrate: not just the tasting of beer, but the community around beer.

From the Keeping Room, we ventured further inside the brewery, to the production area.

Nix: As you can hear, that’s the canning line, the canning machine that’s making all this loud noise. We are canning Cadence today. Cadence is one of our top-selling products in the market. We are distributed throughout the state of Georgia. And we are going to package, probably, about 900 cases of Cadence today.

Bevington: This looks like a lot of fun.

Nix: It is! [There’s] a lot of moving parts, so please be careful. But, you can see, this is our canning process. It’s a lot of heavy lifting. There's pallets of cans that go into a depalletizer, make their way down a nice slide and get filled. We do about 45 cans per minute, and that’s when everything is working optimally. Also, it takes three humans to work the machine, so it‘s three jobs we are supplying to our local community.

Bevington: Is this like walking into your church?

Nix: Yeah! In a lot of ways. Sometimes you have to stop and try to rise above it. Because in the day-to-day, it’s just hard work. But, when you sit back and you have these conversations, it makes you very proud of what you've created and what you are supplying for these people who are working as well as the community that gets to enjoy it.