(Courtesy Terrapin Beer)

“I’ve had some great hits. I’ve had some bad misses. But I turned my hobby into a career. Isn’t that everyone’s dream?” – Spike Buckowski, Terrapin Beer.

One of the nation’s first, second-generation craft breweries has turned 20 and to paraphrase the Grateful Dead, “what a long, strange trip it’s been.”

Athen’s Georgia-based Terrapin Beer started as an act of rebellion. Spike Buckowski and John Cochran were sick of the beers they were brewing at an Atlanta Brewery and in the mood to “stick it to the man.”

But getting busted for taking in a baseball game when they should have been brewing was the last straw. They decided ‘Screw this. We’ll open our own brewery,’”

So taking it name from Bukowski’s favorite jam band, The Grateful Dead, Terrapin Beer was born, at least conceptually.

Before it became one of the top breweries in Georgia – producing nearly 100,000 barrels in 2021 according to Beer & Beyond, it had to contract brew its first batch, at Dogwood Brewing in Atlanta, where it produced 238 barrels its first year.

But one beer changed that.

In 2002 Terrapin’s Rye Pale Ale took a gold at the Great American Beer Festival thrusting Terrapin into the national craft conversation and forcing the budding brewer to relocate its contract brewing operations to what is now Flying Dog Brewing in Frederick, Md.

Two years later, Terrapin had grown successful enough for its own brewery and they moved into a converted blue jeans warehouse in Athens, a college town home to the University of Georgia. And Buckowski lived in the back of the brewery with his cats, Hops and Lil P, for about a year.

“We were a cutting-edge brewery coming out of the South. People weren’t making beers like we were making,” says Dustin Watts, Terrapin’s second employee and now President.

“This is where big lager beer dominated, but we were pushing the envelope of doing big India brown ales and Big Hoppy Monster (an imperial red ale), and coffee, oatmeal and imperial stouts. People were like, ‘What are you doing?’”

But whatever they were doing, they were doing it right….

In 2011, a renegade group of Terrapin’s investors attempted a hostile takeover. Around that same time Anheuser-Busch purchased Chicago’s Goose Island in a deal that sent shockwaves through the industry.

In order to stave off its investors and maintain control of the brewery they created, Buckowski and Cochran struck a deal to sell 24.4% of the company to MillerCoors, a deal which would keep Terrapin within the Brewers’ Association’s definition of craft.

“Our credibility was very important,” Watts says. “(Ever since), we’ve been on a mission to prove we can work with Big Beer.”

In 2016 MillerCoors took a majority stake in Terrapin. John Cochran was ready for a change and left the company, but Spike Bukowski and Dustin Watts remained at the helm.

Twenty years is a chunk of time, MillerCoors is now Molson Coors Beverage Company, but Terrapin Beer, which is now distributed in 17 states and Puerto Rico, feels much the same.

“It hits home once in a while: Wow, a 20-year brand, man, that still has legitimacy,” says Buckowski…

 “I’ve had some great hits. I’ve had some bad misses. But I turned my hobby into a career. Isn’t that everyone’s dream?”

###

Want more from Terrapin[in Beer?

TERRAPIN BEER RELEASES IMPERIAL IPA IN GIANT 19.2 CANS

TERRAPIN BEER COMMITS TO 100% SUN-POWERED BREWING

(All image credits: Terrapin Beer)