For a long time, Von Ebert Brewing owner Tom Cook didn’t consider himself a creative person. He was mainly a numbers guy with a long career in financing fast-casual and fast-food restaurants.
He liked his job, but missed working with and mentoring people, so when a mutual friend introduced him to the folks behind Fat Head’s Brewery, Cook says he decided to plunge back into the daily operation side of things by partnering with the Ohio-based brand as a franchisee with the goal of introducing Ohio craft beer to the Portland market.
The thing is, the splash it made in the Pearl District—near a part of town historically known as the Brewery Blocks for being the original site of the Blitz-Weinhard Brewery—wasn’t substantial enough, especially in a city in which its citizens will grant their loyalty to corporations, so long as they’re local. After just a couple of years, Fat Head’s pulled the plug on its Oregon operations and packed itself back to the Midwest.
That move left Cook with an empty building and a bunch of out-of-work employees, which is why he wasted little time in getting things back up and running under a new brand, Von Ebert Brewing.
“I’d spent five years with Fat Head’s and realized I’d learned a lot, and now I had this confidence to be creative,” Cooks says. “So I went out and hired smart creative people and leaned on them to get Von Ebert dialed in.”