It looks like we’re going to start a brewery.’” You need to get back to Cincinnati immediately. When I got out, I had about 40 missed calls from Scotty who said, ‘Hey, this guy is for real. “I went back into the woods for four days. “A friend of a friend saw that post and reached out,” says Baker, who tasked Hunter with getting in touch. He was pulling out.”ĭuly freaking out, Hand got a two-week extension on the loan and fired off a Facebook post asking if any experienced brewers just might want to partner with him on a new Cincinnati brewery. But his partner-who was going to handle the brewing side-two days before they were going to close on the loan had to come and tell Scott he made a couple of bad investments with the money that was supposed to be for the down payment of the loan. “He had another partner at the time, and they found a property that they were going to be closing on. “Originally, Scott Hand got approved for a loan for a brewery,” Baker recalls. Which is about the point in the story when Baker, 45 days into hiking the Appalachian Trail, got a call that soon after led him and Hunter to cross paths with the third Urban Artifact founder, Scott Hand, Urban Artifact’s chief brand officer. They decided to brew sour fruit beers, a less-known class of libations that, they figured (correctly), would allow them to carve their own niche. With a clear desire to make their careers in brewing, the two set to work on a business plan over the next three-plus years. Hunter went on to pursue an MBA, while Baker also returned to school for a second degree in brewing science. They refined their passion for fermentation by starting the university’s first homebrew club.
We threw a big party and had a lot of fun.”Ī few years later, in college at Ohio State, Baker and his friend, Scotty Hunter (head of sales and chief financial officer at Urban Artifact), were both chemical engineering majors. A couple of weeks later we had this alcoholic apple drink. We picked a bunch of apples, pressed some juice, put in a bunch of sugar and cinnamon sticks, and we tossed in some bread yeast. “We read this thing where, if you add yeast to apple juice and some extra sugar, you can make alcoholic apple wine. “I worked on a buddy’s farm in Wooster, and on this farm, he had some apple trees that were just for personal consumption,” explains Baker. But he did have a bunch of apples at his disposal. Growing up in rural Ohio, Bret Kollmann Baker, chief operating officer at Urban Artifact, had a desire to party and very limited access to illicit libations.
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