When Jason Wilson left Gadsden to study business at Auburn University, he thought he was putting the city in the rearview mirror for good, he said.
But when he got the idea for Back Forty Beer Company, Wilson chose Gadsden as the company’s permanent home.
“We have a long history with alcohol in the state of Alabama, so there were a lot of stereotypes to overcome in the beginning,” he said at the Hoover Chamber of Commerce February Luncheon. “But I’ll say this, those same little old ladies that weren’t excited about us opening our operation in downtown Gadsden are the same ones that pinch me on the butt walking down Broad Street and tell me how proud of me they are.”
Wilson said he remembers visiting a craft brewery while visiting his brother in Colorado, and he calls this a “breaking point” in his life.
“I just remember being so taken aback by the authenticity of what they were doing and the craftsmanship of what they were doing,” he said. “More importantly, I was picking the brain of the brewmaster of this place — and he was obviously tired of talking to me, but we were a couple of hours into the conversation — and I said, ‘This is really cool! You’ve got to be the most popular guy in town, right? You’re making the beer.’”
The brewmaster said yes, but that’s not really why they do it.
“So I said, ‘Well why do you do it?’ And he said it’s because the Budweiser truck doesn’t deliver when there’s 14 feet of snow on the ground.
“Coming from a long line of tradesmen and craftsmen in my family, that really resonated with me, and it was something that I kind of developed a passion for,” Wilson said.
Wilson would go on to visit hundreds of craft breweries around the country. Other people started to pick up on his passion.
Wilson was a supply chain analyst with Georgia Pacific for seven years. He was in a meeting with the CEO at the time, Pete Correll, discussing plans to gut and redesign a paper and pulp woods facility in North Carolina.
“Apparently, I had made several references during the meeting to how beer flows through a brewery — how our product needed to be liquid, it needed to be able to move freely throughout the building,” Wilson said.
At some point, Correll stopped the meeting and said, “Son, how many brewery tours have you been on?”
“And I said, ‘I don’t really keep count, but I know it’s over 200,’” WIlson said. “And at the time there were only about 400 breweries in the country. And he said, ‘Maybe this is more than a hobby for you,’ and just went on with the meeting.”
After the meeting, Correll stopped Wilson at the door.
“You’re obviously passionate about this,” Wilson remembered Correll saying. “You have a small window in your life to go pursue a dream, and you can fall flat on your face and still have a pretty good career in the supply chain world, so you need to go make your leap now.”
Wilson said he went back to his desk, called the Alabama Beverage Control Board and asked for a licence.
“And William Thigpen, the assistant director of ABC was who I was speaking to, he said, ‘Son, we haven’t given out one of those licenses since prohibition,’” Wilson said, laughing.
A Series of Incredibly Fortunate Events
Wilson had read about Jim Koch from the Boston Beer Company and how Koch had convinced a brewery with extra capacity to let him brew beer there while he went out and sold it.
Wilson called Koch’s office every few weeks, hoping to get advice from Koch himself. Wilson joked that he became very good friends with Koch’s assistant.
“One day, I was walking down Peachtree Street in Atlanta on my lunch break when my phone rang, and it was Jim Koch,” he said. “And two hours later, he had given me pretty much everything I needed to get started. So I started calling every brewery in the Southeast.”
Wilson found a brewery in Mississippi, called Lazy Magnolia Brewery, that had some extra tanks. They worked out a deal and left a key under the mat for Wilson on the weekends.
“So Friday afternoon I would get off my full-time career in Atlanta, and I would drive through the night — eight hours to Kiln, Mississippi, down along the coast there,” he said. “I would brew beer all day Saturday, and then half the day Sunday, and clean up and get back in the car in time to be back at work in Atlanta on Monday morning.”
He did this commute every weekend for the next 18 months until he left Georgia Pacific and moved back to Gadsden.
“From there, we just had a series of incredibly fortunate events that got us to where we are today,” he said.
His fraternity brother was a real estate attorney, and Wilson met with him next.
“We talked for a good bit, and I said, ‘Oh by the way, I don’t have any money to pay you for anything,’” Wilson said. “And he said, ‘Jason, I’ve been at this firm for 18 months. You think I’m going to walk in to the partners and tell them I’m going to do a bunch of pro bono work for a brewer in Alabama of all places?’ I said ‘Yeah, just give it a try.’ And he said okay.”
The next day, he called Wilson and told him that his partners said yes.
“Like any good salesman, I know when to shut up when you make the sale, so I never asked him why or what he said to them,” Wilson said.
Six years later, Wilson’s friend spoke at a conference that Wilson attended, and his friend told the story about that day.
“(He’d) said, ‘I’ve got this buddy from college who’s pretty crazy and he wants us to do some work with him on the front end and delay the payment,’” Wilson remembered. “They said, ‘Why do you think it’s a good idea?’ And he said, ‘Well, because he’s either going to end up wildly successful or in jail. Either way, it’ll be a good client for us,’”
From then, Wilson said, they set out to brew great interpretations of classic beer styles.
Back Forty opened in 2009, and in 2010, they released Truck Stop Honey, their flagship beer. It won silver medal that year at the Great American Beer Festival, which Wilson said is like the Oscars or Academy Awards for beer.
What’s In a Name
The name Back Forty refers to an agricultural term. The back 40 acres are the furthest from the farm, the hardest to maintain, the hardest to irrigate, and “where the tractors go to die,” Wilson said.
“In a lot of ways, Alabama was kind of seen as the Back Forty of the craft beer world,” he said. “There’s a perception that we live in the Deep South because we never made it out, you know, lack of sophistication or a lack of a culinary palette.”
“We took that as inspiration for the name and said, ‘OK, well if no one else is willing to do the hard work, to clear the tractors off the back 40 and run the irrigation, that we’re willing to do it, and we’re going to ingrain that work ethic into the name of our company.
“Here’s the irony of the back 40,” he continued. “If you actually clear those tractors, and plow that soil, it’s the freshest dirt on the farm and you can expect a much bigger harvest out of that 40 acres than you can any other aspect of the farm because it’s been neglected for so long,”
When Wilson opened Back Forty Birmingham, he saw that metaphor come to life.
“It’s right around the corner from where all of the cool stuff is — a little bit off the beaten path, where nobody really wanted to go or saw any value in,” he said. “And we came in and took over that location and revitalized it, and now, I think Cathy Sloss was telling me that they’ve leased out the entire 600,000 square feet of Sloss Docks since our opening.”
Bringing Beer to Hoover
After telling his story, Wilson took questions from the February Luncheon audience. Hoover Councilman John Lyda asked how Hoover — one of the largest cities in Alabama that does not have a brewery — could attract a brewery.
“There are some legislative issues still to overcome,” Wilson said. “For us, we’re really interested in building multiple locations, but there are some legislative challenges to that. Right now, the Alabama Alcohol Code doesn’t allow me to own multiple locations as a single manufacturer, which is why we had to do a franchise-style model with the Sloss Docks location. So that’s one challenge.”
Wilson said there is a piece of legislation being introduced that would lift the restriction.
“If that happens, you’re going to have several breweries that would be actively in the market to come to Hoover,” he said. “Right now, their hands are kind of tied behind their back.”
Wilson laughed as he remembered what it was like standing in front of Gadsden’s City Council — of which he now serves on — for Back Forty even though Gadsden had only gone “wet” a couple of decades before.
“Revisit your local ordinances,” he told Lyda. “Make sure they’re prepared and they’re favorable to brewers when they come in. Reach out to other communities that have operating breweries and talk to them about some of those hiccups that have happened along the way.”
To learn more about Back Forty Beer Co., visit backfortybeer.com.
