Start-Up

Our stunning can designs.

Press Release

Modern Times Beer and Helms Workshop are proud to unveil the stunningly gorgeous can designs that will represent the brewery on retail shelves in 2013.

“Classic, vibrant, and oozing panache, these are the cans to drink while installing an Eames chair in your vintage Alfa Romeo lowrider. This packaging will upstage your favorite tiki mug. They are so devastatingly tasteful, a koozie would be a crime,” says Jacob McKean, founder of Modern Times.

The result of a painstaking collaborative process, the cans will house Modern Times’ four year-round beers: Fortunate Islands, a hoppy wheat beer; Black House, an oatmeal coffee stout; Blazing World, an amber IPA; and Lomaland, a food-friendly saison.

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.

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?”

Finding a building was tortuous. It consumed half-to-three quarters of my time for the last 6 months, and the process was characterized by a seemingly endless series of frustrations. I tried mightily to remain über-zen about the whole thing, but goddamn was that hard.

Well, now that fundraising is over, I can tell you all about it (the SEC requires private offerings to be just that, private). I wrote a blog post for Beerpulse detailing the ins-and-outs of raising this chunk of change, so you can head over there to give it a read.

Cheers,
Jacob