Will It Take a Stoner Savant to Lead the Craft Beer Revolution?

True to form, the plan Magee devised last fall to take over the world of craft beer was hatched not in a boardroom but after a “wake and bake”—getting high before making the half-hour drive to the brewery through the rolling hills and vineyards of Sonoma County.

That morning, his wife, Carissa Brader, a Downers Grove native who’d met her future husband in a music class at Northern Illinois, stood at the bathroom sink in their ranch-style home in the woods of Point Reyes Station and complained about the high costs of sending beer to Chicago, New York, and other markets back east. Brader oversees shipping for Lagunitas, and she projected that the company would have to spend $140,000 a month in 2014—$1.68 million for the year—to ship beer to markets east of the Rockies.

During his commute, Magee experienced an epiphany: If he could land a bank loan, he could rent a complex in an industrial area of his native Chicago and equip the facility with the same gleaming state-of-the-art mash mixers and fermenters used in his Petaluma headquarters. The Chicago brewery (estimated price tag: $22 million) could serve as Lagunitas’s eastern base of operations—and the monthly rent would roughly equal what he was spending every month on shipping. “It would be practically free,” Magee reasoned.
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