Stab Magazine | A Craft Brewery Named Desire

Live Now: Chapter 11 Mini-Documentary With Dane Reynolds

688 Views

A Craft Brewery Named Desire

How Saint Archer turned hops into gold.

style // Jun 13, 2016
Words by Jake Howard
Reading Time: 4 minutes

Nearly three years since its inception, Saint Archer is one of the fastest growing breweries in America. Founded by one-time surf documentarian Josh Landan and an amalgamation of action sports heroes, including Paul Rodriguez, Mikey Taylor, Erik Koston, Taylor Knox, Jack Freestone, Laura Enever and more, the brewery is based in San Diego and currently produces 37,000 barrels of beer a year. In September 2015 the sale of the brewery to MillerCoors was announced. The final price tag was not disclosed, but the Wall Street Journal estimates Saint Archer’s value to be somewhere in the $35 million range. Rumours abound that it was twice that. Shortly after the foam settled and the cheques were kicked out to overwhelmed investors, Stab sat down with Landan to discover just how surfing’s official brew gamed the big-beer establishment. Success, with Josh Landan:

I’d be lying to you if I said it wasn’t nice to change the lives of my closest friends. That’s what they signed up for, man. You have your friends and family invest in your dream business, and at the end of the day they hope it works out so they make money off their investment. Taylor Knox doesn’t have millions of dollars floating around to lose. When I had the opportunity to make the decision to change their lives, dude, I’m going to do that every time.

There’s always the people that are going to have something to say and call you a sellout, but people who have those opinions don’t have the responsibility of their friends and families looking at them to make the right decision to protect their investments. You have to do what’s best for your company, your employees, and your investors, and as president and CEO that’s what I did. Some of the best times of my life – besides my wife having our kids – was handing out some of these cheques to my friends and seeing their reactions. Their wives were crying, hugging me. It doesn’t get any better than that. It was really a fun time to be able to make good on the promises I’d made.

People have the misconception that because a lot of these guys are pro surfers and skateboarders and snowboarders they’re flush with money. I had one guy go, “Yeah, I’m down, I totally want to be a part of Saint Archer. Come with me to the bank.” So we walked up to the bank teller, and he goes, “How much do I have in my account?” And the bank teller tells him he has $21,000. So my boy says, “Make a cashier’s cheque out to Josh, empty and close the account.” That’s how down people were. People are emptying their savings accounts? I don’t care if it’s two grand, 500 bucks or a million dollars, when you hand over everything you’ve got, that’s gnarly.

When you’re in a hyper growth business, you’ve got no financial history, which you need to have your business financed by the banks. We’d only been in business for a year, and needed multiple millions of dollars – because that’s what’s required in the craft brewing business, you can’t just spend a couple hundred grand, brew beer and ship it to Northern California – so for us the only way to go was private capital. And when you do private capital raises you lose equity. It’s just that simple. Almost every bank in California turned us down. Then we got a call from MillerCoors.

People only see the end result and are like, “Oh, you guys killed it and you’re all millionaires now.” But they didn’t see what it took to do this. I was making films and walked away from it overnight. Mikey, Paul and I had been thinking about doing Saint Archer for about a year and it just came down to the point where Mikey Taylor’s not going to quit being the face of DC, and Paul Rodriguez isn’t going to quit being the face of Nike. So it was really up to me, or it was just another great idea that we didn’t follow through with. So one night in downtown L.A we made the call. I drove home and told my wife. We had two kids at the time, five and two, and I told her we’re moving to San Diego and we’re going to build Saint Archer from the ground up. I’m going to quit everything else.

When you quit everything and you’re in the middle of trying to raise money, you don’t have access to the money because it goes into an escrow account (an untouchable investment account). So for the first six to eight months of trying to build this business, Mikey and Paul were paying my utility bills. I was working 60 to 80 hours a week trying to raise $3m to build a brewery from scratch. It was a crazy time, we definitely pushed all the chips into the middle of the table. We had this we’re-gonna-die-before-this-fails” mentality, and I think that’s the part that a lot of people didn’t see. They just saw the product hit the market and we had success. But dude, it was hard. It’s not as glamorous as everyone thinks.

I figured out a long time ago that money’s not what makes me happy. It’s the competition of trying to prove the doubters wrong that excites me. People in the action sports world laughed at us. I had one person who didn’t invest, say, “I went to Whole Foods last night and stared at the beer section. There’s no way in hell you guys are going to pull this off.” So that’s a good one to think about now.

Comments

Comments are a Stab Premium feature. Gotta join to talk shop.

Already a member? Sign In

Want to join? Sign Up

Advertisement

Most Recent

Watch: What Happens When A Brand Takes Its Youth Team To A CT Event?

A: Good things, typically.

Mar 29, 2024

Full Frame: Scandinavia Is Surfing’s Next Frontier

A 30-hour drive, bathymetric maps, and 10 years of searching yield surfing's newest discovery.

Mar 29, 2024

Watch: João Chianca Had A Remarkable Hawaii Season Before His Injury

Plus an update on his condition.

Mar 28, 2024

Pittar’d And Feathered

Do the WSL judges deserve the internet's wrath? We asked the man of the hour.

Mar 28, 2024

Robbo, Pickles, And Tyler Wright Become The Underdogs Breakfast At Uninspiring Winkipop

The foreboding blade sharpens and inconsistent judging prevails on Day Two in Torquay.

Mar 27, 2024

“I Don’t Always Win Heats, But When I Do, I Try To Beat John John”

Slater shines and the axe begins its descent on Day 01 at Bells.

Mar 26, 2024

Back Against The Wall: The Ramzi Boukhiam Redemption

Morocco's first CT surfer on speaking six languages, having no coach, and snatching Fil Toledo's…

Mar 25, 2024

Will Kirra, Babies or JJF Stop a GOAT Winning at Bells?

Bluesky BOAG advice from a Superman specialist and former Trials winner.

Mar 25, 2024

Bells Preview: The WSL’s Victorian Sword Dancing Equinox Ritual

Will a Brazilian crack the Top 10 at Bells?

Mar 25, 2024

69 Shin Bones Later + the Anticlimactic State of Big Wave Record-Breaking

Lucas Chumbo might have surfed the biggest wave ever this year. But how will we…

Mar 23, 2024

Watch: ‘Fresh and Fried’ Ft the Quik Kids

How taxing is it to tackle the Gold Coast’s Triple Crown in a single day,…

Mar 23, 2024

The Popular Vote: The People’s Stab In The Dark With Kolohe Andino Champion

Which board looked best — to you —under Kolohe's talons?

Mar 22, 2024

Six Key Learnings From Portugal

Three CT events in, what do we know? 

Mar 21, 2024

‘Zipper’ Is Going On Tour, Here’s Where You Can Watch It  

Dates, times + locations for the Venice, Encinitas, Sydney + Byron premieres.  

Mar 20, 2024

Dane Reynolds On His Future, His Past, And Chapter 11’s Raison D’être

Our 9-minute plunge into the collective psyche of Ventura's pillar(s).

Mar 20, 2024

From ‘Blue Ribbon Cross Country Runner’ to Vogue – How Steph Again Is Back With A Rip Curl Remix

Everything we know about the she-GOATs sponsorship boomerang.

Mar 18, 2024

Stab Interview: Darren Handley Explains Why You Can’t Buy The Winning Stab In The Dark Model

And his decades-long standoff with Slater.

Mar 17, 2024

Griff Embraces Portugal’s Eternal Time Loop To Vanquish Medina + Ewing, Defay Delays The Inevitable

A redeeming closing act at Supertubos.

Mar 16, 2024
Advertisement