A conversation with Dan Carey, co-founder and head brewmaster of New Glarus Brewing Company, reveals how a shoestring-budget dream hatched in 1992 became one of Wisconsin’s most beloved craft breweries — and why, after thirty-two years, his proudest achievement has nothing to do with beer medals.
This is part 2 of my interview with Dan Carey. If you missed the first, check it out here: Inside New Glarus with Co-Founder and Brewmaster Dan Carey
A Dream Hatched in Fort Collins
Long before New Glarus Brewing Company became a Wisconsin institution, Dan Carey was doing something that might surprise the craft beer faithful: supervising production at Anheuser-Busch. The year was 1992, and Carey was stationed at the company’s Fort Collins, Colorado, facility — at the time, he recalls, the finest brewery in the entire Anheuser-Busch system. It was a comfortable position by most measures, the kind of steady corporate career that many would have been content to ride for decades.
But the corporate ladder, as Carey and his wife Deb quickly discovered, had a catch. Climbing it meant packing up and moving — repeatedly. “The joke was that once you open that last box after a move, it’s time to move again,” Carey says, with the dry humor of someone who lived it. Every few years, a new city, a new school district, a new set of neighbors. For two adults without children it might have been manageable. But the Careys had daughters entering junior high, and Deb had seen this movie before. Her own father had moved the family around when she was a kid, and she knew the social toll it took on adolescents.
So Deb made a counter-offer. Rather than follow the corporation to St. Louis — where Carey had been offered a promotion — they would head home to Wisconsin, the state where she was born and raised. Her pitch was simple and audacious in equal measure: “Let’s go back and I’ll build you a brewery and you can make beer for yourself, rather than for a large brewery.” It was a line, Carey says, that changed everything.
Starting with Nothing but Sweat
If the origin story sounds romantic, the reality that followed was anything but. Dan and Deb Carey arrived in the village of New Glarus — a small Swiss-heritage community of roughly two thousand people tucked into the rolling hills of Green County — with passion, a work ethic forged in the fires of corporate brewing, and almost no money whatsoever. “We lived in a trailer that I think cost five thousand dollars” when they were first married, Carey recalls. There was no family wealth to draw on, no inheritance waiting in the wings.
The financial landscape for craft brewing in 1993 was nothing like today’s relatively accommodating market. “Nowadays, at least up until maybe this year, craft brewers could easily find money,” Carey explains. “There’s a lot of people — like Michael Moore always says — there is a lot of money floating around. You just don’t have it.” But finding outside investors willing to back a small Wisconsin craft brewery in the early nineties was a fundamentally different proposition. Banks were skeptical of the concept. Venture capital had no interest. The Careys were largely on their own.
Their solution was the oldest one in the entrepreneurial playbook: sweat equity. Carey welded his own equipment, cut concrete, did electrical wiring, and logged shifts that stretched to twenty hours at a stretch. A typical week ran seventy hours across six and a half days. “Craft brewers had to do everything on their own,” he says simply. To fill the brewery, they haunted agricultural auctions and bought secondhand dairy equipment for cents on the dollar — the kind of creative resourcefulness that today’s well-funded craft breweries rarely need to consider. Even something as fundamental as yeast required ingenuity. In the pre-internet era, commercially pitchable quantities of brewing yeast weren’t a click away; Carey had to obtain strains on slants and propagate them in the family kitchen.
A Market That Didn’t Yet Exist
The challenges weren’t only logistical. The cultural context for craft beer in the early 1990s was almost unrecognizably different from today’s. When Carey tried to explain his vision to local farmers he’d hired to help stand up his first tanks, the conversation took a revealing turn. What kind of beer was he going to make? Lagers, Pilsners, Helles-style beers, Carey told them. The farmers’ response was immediate and clarifying: “Is the beer gonna taste like Miller, Coors, or Bud? Because I can’t drink Bud — it gives me a headache. So don’t make a beer like that. Make a beer like Coors.”
In Wisconsin’s taverns, the tap lineup was equally sparse. “They’d have Miller High Life, and maybe a dry beer or ice beer,” Carey recalls, “and if they were really adventurous they might have a craft beer amber ale.” A hop-forward IPA — now perhaps the defining beer style of the American craft movement — “would have just thrown people for a loop.” The market, in other words, had to be educated alongside the brewery’s construction. New Glarus wasn’t just building tanks; it was helping build an entirely new category of consumer.
The Invisible Giants: A Lineage of Mentors
Amid the long hours and lean budgets, Carey was quietly assembling something equally important: a network of mentors whose collective knowledge reached back to the tail end of Prohibition. It is here, perhaps, that the deepest story of New Glarus Brewing lies — in the web of relationships that shaped Carey’s philosophy and technique.
At the Siebel Institute in Chicago, Carey encountered Walter Swistowitz, a brewer who had begun his career at the dawn of the post-Prohibition era and carried within him a living record of American brewing history. From Germany came Carl Strauss, who had served as brewmaster at Pabst and who, Carey says, “was very kind to me.” These were men who had navigated a very different brewing world and were willing to share hard-won wisdom with a young, hungry brewer from Wisconsin.
The Pope of Beer
But towering above all of them, in Carey’s estimation, was Ludwig Narziss — the longtime principal of the Weihenstephan brewing school in Bavaria, widely regarded as the world’s oldest brewery. To call Narziss simply an educator is to undersell the man dramatically. “If you’re drinking German beer,” Carey says, “most likely it’s been influenced by Professor Narziss.” He describes him plainly and without exaggeration as “basically the Pope of beer.”
What made Narziss irreplaceable wasn’t just his theoretical knowledge but the extraordinary generosity with which he shared it. For thirty years — thirty years — Carey and Narziss spoke by phone every single week. Every challenge Carey faced in the brewery, every technical puzzle, every moment of doubt, he could bring to this man in Bavaria who had spent a lifetime accumulating answers. Narziss passed away at ninety-seven from COVID-19, a loss Carey clearly feels deeply. “For thirty years he was my number one mentor,” he says quietly.
Carey also describes another German brewmaster, Josef Engelmann, with something approaching reverence. “He knew more about practical brewing than anybody I’ve ever met,” Carey says. The practical emphasis is telling — Engelmann’s knowledge wasn’t abstract or academic. It was the accumulated wisdom of decades on the brewery floor, and he dispensed it freely. Carey recounts calling him out of the blue with a problem in a Weiss beer fermenter and being met not with irritation but with immediate, specific recall: “Yeah, I’ve seen this. I saw this in 1978. What you need to do is this.” The breadth and depth of that kind of expertise left Carey genuinely astonished. “How could somebody know so much about beer?” he still wonders.
Rounding out the lineage was Michael Lewis, Carey’s professor at UC Davis — another iconic name in American brewing academia. Together, these figures constitute what Carey calls, with a note of affection for the uninitiated, “the rock stars of late-twentieth-century brewing.”
What Success Actually Looks Like
Ask Dan Carey about his greatest achievement and he will steer you away from trophies and ratings almost immediately. The medals are “fun, nice,” he acknowledges. The scores on Untappd are gratifying. “But all of those things are a little bit vain.” What he describes instead, with genuine feeling, is a moment that happens periodically in the brewery: an employee brings in a newborn child to show off.
New Glarus Brewing now employs 125 people, and when Carey looks out at those employees — at the young families being formed, the houses being purchased, the milestones being reached — he sees the real measure of thirty-two years of work. “I see these young families that have a paycheck that is a good paycheck, a living wage and full health insurance, and their families are safe,” he says. “When I see people get married or engaged or have children or buy a house or get a new car, it makes me happy that we’re able to bring good things to people.”
People First, Always
This isn’t sentimentality masking a harder business philosophy — it is the business philosophy. Carey describes himself, only half-jokingly, as probably the only principal in a craft brewery with genuinely socialist tendencies. His hierarchy of obligations is unambiguous: employees first, community second, investors third. “If you take care of your employees and you take care of your community,” he says, “everything else sort of falls into place, because the people are what make the difference.”
It’s a worldview forged, in part, through necessity. In the early years, when there was no money for elaborate systems or redundancies, the brewery ran on trust — Carey trusting his small team, his team trusting him. That dynamic never left. “They trust us. We trust them,” he says. “As long as a decent effort is put in, we all do well.” The brewery’s longevity — surviving three decades through recessions, a pandemic, and the churning uncertainty of a market that barely existed when they started — owes something to that mutual commitment.
Running for Sanity
For all the philosophical groundedness Carey projects, he is candid about the personal cost of running a business for three decades. Asked how he handles stress, he laughs first. “Not very well, actually,” he admits. What he has learned over the years is that stress becomes most corrosive when you face it in isolation — when fear and solitude compound each other. Surrounding yourself with capable, trustworthy people is, he says, the first and most important mitigation.
The second is simpler: he runs. Carey has been a lifelong middle-distance runner, logging fifteen to twenty miles a week alongside twice-weekly weight sessions. He races competitively across distances from four hundred meters to half marathons, though his heart belongs to the mile. It’s not about fitness vanity. He recalls seeing a t-shirt at a race that summed it up perfectly: “I don’t run for vanity, I run for sanity.” The discipline, the rhythm, the particular clarity that follows a hard effort — these are, for Carey, as essential to running a brewery as any piece of equipment on the floor.
Thirty-Two Years and Counting
The story of New Glarus Brewing is, at its core, a story about stubbornness in the best sense of the word: the stubbornness to build something worth building, even when the money isn’t there, even when the market doesn’t yet understand what you’re offering, even when the path forward requires welding your own tanks and propagating yeast on your kitchen counter. It is also a story about the quiet, compounding power of relationships — a wife who had a vision, farmers who pushed back honestly, and a circle of extraordinary brewing minds who saw in a hardworking young brewer someone worth investing their time in.
Dan Carey will tell you, without much prompting, that the medals and ratings aren’t the point. The point is the 125 families — and all the families that came before them — who built their lives, in some measure, around a small brewery in a small Swiss village in southern Wisconsin. That, in his view, is what thirty-two years of hard work looks like when it’s done right.
Henry Nosek is the host of Midwest Microbrew. This article was adapted from his interview with Dan Carey, co-founder and head brewmaster of New Glarus Brewing Company in New Glarus, Wisconsin.
