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Strong Teams, Growing Companies: Stoneface Brewing Co.

Published Thursday Sep 3, 2015

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Stoneface Brewing Co.

A Vested for Growth Business Champion

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EROL MOE, LEFT, AND PETE BEAUREGARD


When your company name is an homage to the Old Man of the Mountain, has his rocky visage embedded in its logo, and has a “Live Free, Drink Craft” tagline, you know you have a uniquely New Hampshire business.

Back in 2001, Erol Moe and Pete Beauregard met while working at the same technology company in Portsmouth.  Beauregard had been homebrewing for a few years and introduced Moe to the hobby.  After about 10 years spent brewing in the garage and winning some homebrew competition medals, going pro began to seem viable. 

“We sat down and discussed if we could (start a business) without dissolving our personal relationships,” said Beauregard. “Erol has strengths I don’t and vice versa. We’re very complimentary.”

So they started work on a business plan.

“We weren’t afraid to ask ‘dumb’ questions of other brewers and distributors,” said Beauregard. “We followed their advice, learned as much as we could, and they started to encourage us.”

With co-owner Tim Finelli, they opened Stoneface Brewing Company in Newington in January 2014. The brewery launched with a 500 barrel-per-year capacity. (A barrel is equal to 31 U.S. gallons.) Today, after adding fermentation tanks and other equipment, the brewery can produce 3,000 barrels a year.

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“Our 2015 target is 2,500 barrels,” said Beauregard. “Hitting our production numbers and still being in demand is really exciting for us because it means people like what we are doing.”
Stoneface had three IPA styles in its tanks as of mid-June, while Beauregard experimented with more than a dozen recipes, including a dark porter and an imperial stout brewed with coffee and Tahitian vanilla.

A few Seacoast restaurants pour the company’s draft brews, and its bottles are on the shelves of dozens of stores throughout southern N.H. “Demand is outstripping our supply,” said Beauregard.

A solid business plan has helped Stoneface Brewing meet and exceed its production goals, but that doesn’t mean the owners aren’t willing to tweak their model when needed. For example, they were surprised and pleased by the high traffic since they opened a tasting room. As a result, they’ve recently opened the brewery on Sundays, when they were previously closed.

In addition to the three partners, Stoneface Brewing employs three additional brewers, a full-time retail manager and four part-time servers. With such a small staff, “teamwork is huge,” said Moe. “Everyone who works in production rotates through and does every job. That fosters innovation.”

That close-knit atmosphere also allows the team to “improvise, adapt and overcome” challenges, said Beauregard.

Moe and Beauregard said Stoneface Brewing will continue to focus on end-to-end quality.

“From the get-go, we’ve invested aggressively in high-quality production equipment and quality control,” said Beauregard. For example, the brewery purchased a state of the art analyzer that detects dissolved oxygen, too much of which can spoil beer.

“We want to know what we can do to improve,” said Beauregard. “It’s a constant quest for knowledge.”

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