I Know A Place: Creature Comforts & Adam Beauchamp
Season 2: Episode 7
Athens, the city of conquerors, host of the Olympics, and the beginnings of higher education. No, not Athens, Greece. Athens, Georgia. The city of Athens is home to the Georgia Bulldogs, held events for the Olympic games in '96, and was the first public university in the United States. One space downtown also represents much of its predecessor in the pursuit of arts and philosophy, even though they may describe it more as “craft and curiosity.” Creature Comforts is a local brewery born in Athens, Georgia, out of the philosophy that hard work deserves to be celebrated with a few “creature comforts.” Adam Beauchamp, Co-Founder of CCBCo, had a curious nature about himself and a passion for beer. With his study in genetics and biology, he and his friends came together to start their own project right in the heart of Athens. I had a chance to sit down with Adam, and he shared with me his story and the story of Creature Comforts.
The Place: Creature Comforts
1. What’s the story?
2. Atmosphere?
3. What brews are unique to the taproom?
4. How’d you get from Athens to LA?
5. How does CCBCo live out its values?
What’s the story of Creature Comforts?
It began as an idea that our founders had, that would allow us to follow our passions, foster human connection, and make our community better. We discovered that we're all exceptionally curious about the world, and we wanted a platform to be able to explore art, science, and business. As for the name specifically, it was inspired by some artwork that one of our founders was aware of. He had a college friend who was creating these woodblock prints of creatures that were really crazy. You can see them on a lot of our early labels. We started using other artwork as well, but the name still means to us the products that the brewery makes, and the brewery itself as well for us.
We believe if you work hard in life to achieve the things that you're seeking, you should be able to enjoy the creature comforts of life from time to time. For me, connecting with people over a beer is my number one top creature comforts.
So the brewery is built for us to be able to do that. We're creating experiences, we're creating products that hopefully don't get in the way of connection, that maybe provoke thought and curiosity, and inspire people to be curious, follow their curiosity, and maybe uncover their passions in life. We feel like we've personally been able to do that and our passion has become this whole brewery and the company.
What’s the atmosphere like here?
So the taproom is a warm and inviting place. I like to think that it's filled with the creativity of all the many people who work here. We have a “best idea wins” kind of culture. So if you've got a good idea, we have the kind of culture where that idea can be put into action. The taproom is filled with a big amalgamation of a lot of different people who have influenced it over the years. We're centered on hospitality. So, we should be exceeding your expectations in terms of being warm, inviting, and above and beyond what you would normally expect from a brewery taproom staff.
The things that we offer on draft and in cans should really stoke your curiosity and just delight your senses. We're going for really delicious beer, not extreme beer. So we're not gonna have the most bitter, we're not gonna have the most sour. It's meant to be just really good, and usually, that means balanced. So it's sweet and sour balanced or bitter and sour, etc. There are lots of different ways you can achieve balance in a beer. The beers are meant to deliver that. We also feature a lot of local art and music. We have all different kinds of events that happen here.
So if you come to the taproom, it's likely that something different will be going on that day. We've had everything from professional female wrestling to reptile petting zoos to being the official tap room of UGA Athletics. We try to make it an evolving bar with a lot of variety both in terms of what's going on and what's on tap just to keep people interested. So if you come to town once a month, you should be able to experience something new here each time.
What brews are unique to the taproom?
Well, specifically at the taproom, nowhere else has the Curiosity Bar. This is a bar that we have set up where you can add customizations to your beer. We have a michelada, we can add cold brew coffee to your beer, we can add lime to lager, and things like that. These are just ways that people can customize or make something unique. Typically, it's done with Athena, which is our base Berliner Weiss, because traditionally, people would add syrups to that beer, so we've got a range of different flavorings that can go into that, but we also customize other beers.
We have a line of products called the Curiosity Collection, and most of those go to market in very limited runs, so you can find them in bottle shops and things like that around Atlanta a little bit, but they're pretty tough to find, and the whole collection is always available here, where some of them don’t make it out into the market at all.
So I would say about 80% of the Curious Collection is actually sold here at the brewery, and we only have two Creature Comforts Brewery tap rooms. We have one here in Athens, Georgia and one in Los Angeles. We have cask ale on often here, which you can only find at one or two other places in Atlanta, but we always have a cask engine running with something on the cask, which is a uniquely English way to serve beer, so a lot of unique ways to experience the Creature Comforts brand here specifically.
How’d you go from Athens to LA?
So back in 2017 our beer Tropicalia, was really difficult to find in Atlanta and it was creating a lot of buzz around the city. People were sort of chasing the trucks around, and package store clerks were hiding them behind the counter only for their really good customers. During that time, the Russo brothers were directing the film Infinity Wars in Atlanta and they caught wind of this beer that a lot of people were talking about, so they sent a production assistant to go find it, who then came back with a couple of six-packs. The cast and the crew tried it together and it was a hit. So they continued to send out PAs for the coming weeks and months as they were filming, and it became a greenroom staple on that set.
We started to get calls from Joe Russo about wanting to meet up with us, and a couple of people at Creature got the opportunity to go visit him on the set of Infinity Wars which was pretty amazing, but eventually we went to a dinner and met Joe and a few of his business partners and landed on the idea of working together by opening up a brewery and taproom in downtown Los Angeles underneath Joe's AGBO offices.
AGBO is his production company. He was just very excited about our brand and wanted to find a way to work with us and we were equally enamored with everything that Joe has done within the film industry as far as changing the game with content production and subsequently creating one of the largest grossing film of all time in Avengers Endgame, for which he gave us a pretty premium product placement spot during the lead-up to opening the brewery in LA. We had no idea but he was planning something pretty big for us. In the scene where Thor is on the rebound and coming out of his sort of “rough patch,” he asks what kind of beer is on the spaceship and then cuts to a scene of Fat Thor holding a Tropicalia with a big smile on his face, walking onto the spaceship to go save the world.
We couldn't believe it. It's a very surreal experience to see that happen, but we worked on building that brewery for many years. We dealt with the pandemic and supply chain trouble, but we eventually got it open in 2023 in October, and we just celebrated the one-year anniversary. So it’s been a really fun ride.
How do you see your values active at CC?
So our values are meant to be guardrails against careening off of the cliff of limitations of behavior.
So “Make It Better” is one of the more important ones to me personally. I have an impulse to almost always be slightly dissatisfied with the work product. I'm continually focused on faults and making things better. So, the way that you translate that personal impulse into a cultural habit is by really fostering a culture where managers and everybody is expected to listen to their people. We want to make them feel listened to, valued, and understood, even if the idea doesn't get utilized. We really have to protect the pipeline of ideas coming up through the organization that reaches the decision-makers who can make a difference. So making it better and having a best ideas culture is work because we get so busy. It's easy to pass on great ideas, and you've got to have the kind of open-mindedness and culture that values people who may have a quieter voice.
“Moderation Matters” is another important one. I mentioned earlier moderation in terms of beers. Like we're never going to have the most bitter or most sour beer. But it also means being moderate in your approach to life, such as balancing things, balancing the energy that you put into work, community, family, friends, etc. We try to create a workplace that can allow for that and foster relationships within the company that are healthy for people but also encourage people to have relationships outside the company and get involved in their community.
We have a value called “Leave A Legacy,” which is really about how we want to set our successors up for success, and the legacy that I hope that we leave is one of making the communities in which we operate better. Proving that you can do that as a company in a capitalist world, such as being successful and doing the right thing by giving back, and what’s right for the environment and your employees.
“Crave Curiosity” is one also. When we started the company, we looked around for “What do we all have in common with each other?” We wanted a real commonality and a thread that we could pull and be authentic about. We all found that we are intensely curious about the world and that manifests in a lot of different ways. People follow their curiosities down rabbit holes and we try to encourage that here as much as possible, by exploration of our various crafts.
Every job here is a craft. That's another part of our value system, “Master Your Craft.” You can’t be a master until you go through the exploration phase, which requires you to crave curiosity. So you're not going to be a master on day one. It's the work to get there, that requires making it better. Craving curiosity and dedication, once you accomplish that, there comes a great feeling of pride, which happens with being a master of your craft. So that's a little bit of the story of our values. This is just a belief system that we have, and have created over almost 11 years now.
The Person: Adam Beauchamp
1. Who is Adam?
2. What brought you to Athens?
3. What keeps you excited about brewing?
4. How do you enjoy yourself outside the brewery?
5. What does it mean to you to “Get Comfortable?”
Who is Adam?
I'm a very curious person. I have a deep passion for beer and creating spaces for people to experience life together, is what you could consider the headline. Going way back, I always had a lifelong love of nature and science, so I went down that path for a long time.
I wanted to be a veterinarian when I was little, and then I wanted to become some kind of a biologist or geneticist. I went to the University of Georgia to study genetics, and then I added a major in ecology because I became fascinated with the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis. So, I added that degree as sort of just a passion and a curiosity, but then I went to grad school for genetics and molecular biology. I thought I would go into academia. I got a scholarship at Emory, to get a PhD in genetics, but academia was missing something for me. Looking back, I think it was missing some of the art, passion, and entrepreneurship. So I began to look around for something else about two years in. I had a friend who was working at another brewery in Atlanta, and I met my now-wife at the time. We started going on dates at a craft brewery and they had a vibrant taproom environment, that was basically in the warehouse. I could see everybody that was working. They looked really happy and they were all having great success. The place was packed, the beers were selling in the market well, and I could tell there was some science behind what they were doing. There's engineering, there's art on the labels and in the beer itself. I just got inspired and thought that this could be for me. I already had a pretty healthy love of craft beer too. I loved to get an IPA at the time and this seemed like it could be a little more fulfilling for me. I dropped out of grad school and I joined up there.
I worked in every department in production and learned how to operate a brewery. So brewing, cellaring, lab work, packaging, and then at the end of about seven years, I decided it was time to make the move to open up my own brewery. I had that entrepreneurial intention when I started working in the craft beer industry, but I didn't know how I was going to get there. I just started to realize I need to make the move now. So, I began to look around for opportunities. I met somebody who had basically invented the brand of Creature Comforts and they needed a brewer.
We then needed to find investment and so David, the other co-founder, found some investors. They had this building that we're now in, and we went to work raising more money, working on construction plans, leases, and things like that, to get the brewery started.
My part historically was always brewmaster. I was the one with all the production experience and I did that for many years. I built a big production facility about a mile from the tap room. During that time, I was also beginning to learn business and I got promoted to chief operating officer in charge of finance, accounting, and production. Then more recently, our CEO Chris, moved on to pursue other opportunities and I was promoted to CEO.
Having been a board member since day one, and having 10 years of mentorship from Chris, I felt like I could do the job. It's been a learning curve for sure. I know this company deeply and I love it deeply. Being able to be the decision maker and take care of business in the many ways that we run our business and being a great company and growing company, is a real honor, and something I've been enjoying for the last six months. It’s still very new, but it's something that I'm really beginning to enjoy and I'm happy to see what the future holds.
What drew you to Athens?
Originally I was drawn to Athens for my undergraduate degree at the University of Georgia and I really enjoyed my time here. When I visited, it was really obvious that it was a place that had a lot of passion for the arts, music, learning, and education. It's a culture that's defined by the university, which has so many disciplines that it excels at, and so many engaged individuals that are fully passionate about what they’re pursuing in their various disciplines that exude it everywhere you go. There are a lot of really intelligent people here, that influence the culture, and I think that's what drew me in initially.
When I left to go to Emory, I lived in Atlanta for 10 years following that, and I didn't think I would ever come back to Athens, but this opportunity came up and I was very familiar with the building that we're in and the culture of Athens and I knew that at the time, Athens only had one other craft brewery which wasn’t as many as you’d expect in an American college town.
I thought the opportunity was good, and I thought that it was a place that I would enjoy and lo and behold, when I started coming back more often, I started to notice the town had developed into more than just a college town. We've got a lot of excellent things for adults to do here as well. Great food, all kinds of entertainment, state botanical gardens, the Georgia Museum of Art, cocktails, interesting performance art, film, and all kinds of really high-level societal things that you can experience in a city. So I think Athens just has a lot to offer, and I'm happy to be a part of this community.
What elements in brewing keep you excited about it?
It's the endless cycle of improvement. It's not a trade that you can fully master, particularly in craft beer, when you're expected to make a new product all the time. We come out with around 90 unique beers every single year, and the challenges that come with perfecting all of those are very real. Some of them are repeats from the year before. Actually, today we're brewing the 1,000th batch of Tropicalia, and it's still a work in progress. We're still finding minutiae that we can make improvements on.
It often has to do with the varying inputs. We have agricultural products that we're using to make beer, such as grain, hops, and water, all have variability, and the yeast itself sometimes has a mind of its own. So there's always going to be work to stay in the same place, but improving is incredibly difficult, and it's like detective work.
It’s a really fun mystery that you get to work on every day and experiment on. We have five full-time scientists that work in our lab, and so we're constantly devising experiments to try to understand issues and diagnose things, then fix them, and then make sure that they're fixed. So it's the ongoing imperfectness of beer that keeps me fulfilled.
How do you enjoy your time outside the brewery?
Well, I’m a dad of a three-year-old girl, and so that is the main thing. I've got a wife, Katie, of 17 years, who also works at Creature Comforts. She's our director of hospitality, in charge of the front-of-house operations, and sort of VIP guest management. I really enjoy spending time with them.
My parents live here locally. We just get together, cook, go on a hike, have a picnic, whatever it is. The challenges of raising a child have been insanely interesting to me. It's clear and present. It's right in front of me. I think it's the most important thing that I do outside of work. Work takes me into the community as well, which is another sort of facet of my job, but also my life. We do a lot of community volunteerism. From time to time, I do trail improvement projects, and we volunteer at soup kitchens and food banks and things like that. I think a big part of my life has been just learning how I can be involved in different facets of this community and how I and our company can add value to it. Being an entrepreneur, your life gets a little bit blurred with the business over time. It's all part of one big thing that I’m always working towards.
Why is your program “Get Comfortable” so important to you?
It's important to me because it is intended to be dispassionate about the issues that we are addressing. So, the program is intended to channel resources, using data and experts, into the most pressing needs of our community. We don't have a pet project; we don't have a passion project. This is Creature Comfort's taking a step back and saying, “We're here in this community, and what is the need here?” And “who is doing the best work to address the need?” We get dollars and funnel them to those places. It’s really important to me because I've come from a science background, where we use data but also that we gauge our success on data.
There's a huge amount of philanthropy that happens without a feedback loop. A lot of corporate philanthropy programs are just about cutting the check and having an event and, doing it again next year. Our program is designed to be results-driven. So our metric currently, is third-grade reading level in Athens-Clarke County.
We are currently sitting at around 20% of third graders in Athens who can read on grade level when they're in third grade. Those that can’t, tend to fall behind in school after that. Basically, in third grade, there's an inflection point where you go from learning how to read to reading how to learn. If you don't know how to read when you're in third grade, you're falling behind.
So it's a very important metric and we want to change it from 20% to 60%, which is our goal. We're using all sorts of interventions that have research behind them but haven't been tested in this exact same way in a school environment. So we're in year two and we have two pilot schools, and we test those against control schools, basically that aren't getting the treatments that we're using.
We're using statistics with standardized testing, to be able to tell whether or not the intervention is causing an improvement. The good news is that so far we've got two years of really good data and it is causing a massive increase in literacy.
It's really important to me that we do something for our community in the first place. I believe that capitalist organizations have a place in society to make our communities better. It's also important that we do it in a way that we can prove to an onlooker, that it's actually working.
Recommendations:
1. How to start brewing
2. An Athens itinerary
Getting into brewing?
There's a ton of great resources out there. I enjoyed Charlie Papazian's books. I enjoyed Ray Daniels' books as well. I think a really important thing to know at the beginning, is that your beer is going to be bad. It will definitely not be good unless you get lucky, or you may just not know how to detect “off” flavors. Sometimes you don't know that it's bad, and it may not be bad to you, which isn't necessarily a problem. If you like it, then keep doing what you're doing. If you want to serve it to others, you should learn how to diagnose those “off” flavors. Learning what all the common beer off-flavors taste like is a really eye-opening experience.
It, in some ways, can ruin beer drinking for you. You'll start to taste them everywhere in the world. But if you want to get better at home brewing, and have others enjoy your beer, then you should get a simple kit of off-flavors. There are lots of ways that you can DIY it on the internet to find different things that you can get in the grocery store to train your senses on what various chemical compounds taste and smell like, to get insight into what might be going wrong in your home brewing process. So that is something, that I don't think often gets communicated very clearly to the home brewer.
The last one is to invest in good fermentation and quality ingredients. You can ferment in a closet and have it get to 90 degrees, but the beer is not going to be great. You really need temperature control. You need to treat your yeast with care, and you need to access quality ingredients, which aren't always easy to find. There is a huge gradient. All hops are not created equal. All malts are not created equally. There are lots of ways that those ingredients can be good when they start, but wind up being bad if they're stored improperly or if you just get some that were never good to begin with.
What’s the best way to take in Athens?
If you're here to take in the city for a day, you should stay in town and walk a lot. Our downtown is extremely vibrant, so I would find a good spot to get breakfast and then probably have a walk around North Campus. We have the oldest state school in America. Our charter was in 1785. There are some amazing old buildings and giant oak trees, and it's incredibly scenic up there.
After that, we have the state botanical gardens which, if it's spring or summer, are going to be exceptionally beautiful, but they also have trails for any time of year that are really gorgeous. We also have the Georgia Museum of Art, which is a state institution here. It's also on campus, so it gives you a chance to do something on campus that's kind of worldly before you get into drinking beer in the afternoon.
So pick out a good place downtown to get some lunch. Lots of good opportunities to enjoy craft beer downtown, but also just tons of great food. You should come by the brewery obviously. We usually have at least 25 to 30 beers on tap, and I like people to get a good range of experiences. So get a flight of beers where you can try four small samples to be able to experience a range of what we do here. If you're in it for two flights, it's not a ridiculous amount of beer and you get to try eight unique things, which is pretty cool.
I would then get dinner around town and go for a show. We've got amazing music venues downtown, and we have amazing opportunities for nightcaps as well.
Stay curious my friends.