2012 was a big year for Modern Times because it started to exist. On January 13^th, 2012 I left my job at Stone Brewing Co. to wade full-time into the messy slog of building a beer factory from the ground up.

The ensuing 12 months consisted mostly of long stretches of hyper-anxiety dotted by brief moments of elation. I haven’t been shy about this, and a few people have pointedly questioned why I’m not constantly stoked out of my freakin’ gourd to be following my dream. In almost every case, these are people who have either never started a business or have profoundly delusional financial instincts.

Victories tend to get lost in the endless swirl of stress that characterizes the brewery start-up process. There is such a constant need to solve major, project-threatening problems that lingering on the rare successes isn’t really an option.

But Modern Times had a major success recently, and I want to dive-in to how it happened. The success: we brewed a really great beer. A beer that I think is going to be huge for us. A beer that will likely be a big part of our identity.

In September, I wrote a post for Beerpulse about how I’d raised $1.25 million to start the brewery. Last week, when I asked Modern Times’ Facebook fans for suggestions on my eventual Kickstarter video, a few people were like, “Whoa, whoa, WHOA there, Mr. Moneybags, what do you need a Kickstarter campaign for seeing as you already got all that sweet, sweet money? Eh, Lord Bountiful?”

Work on Modern Times has finally gotten to the point where it makes sense for me to start offering regular progress updates. Now that I have a building, there’s more or less a defined series of steps between here and opening day. That is a good thing.

For those of you familiar with the “I’m-starting-a-brewery” genre of blogging (and I am über-familiar, having read countless such blog posts as I ramped up this project), it’s pretty well-tread ground. So I’m going to take a slightly different approach. Rather than just updating you on the minutae of construction and licensing schedules, I’m going to dive a bit more deeply into one aspect of the process each Monday.