Today we’d like to introduce you to Jonathan Baker.
Jonathan, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
Monday Night Brewing is an Atlanta-based craft brewery. We brew beers for the weeknights – balanced, flavorful ales that pair well with food.
The idea for Monday Night Brewing grew out of a small Atlanta Bible study back in 2006. We started brewing beer together on Monday nights as a way to get to know each other better. As we got more engrained in the industry and more people started showing up to brew with us, beer quickly became more than just a weeknight hobby. We spent almost 5 years perfecting our beers before bringing them to market. Years of minor tweaks, arguments over hop profiles, and experiments with different brands of base malts are poured into every glass that we brew.
We launched commercially with kegs in 2011 and started bottling in 2013 out of our original location in West Midtown. In 2017, we built and launched a barrel-aging and souring facility in the West End, called the Garage. Both locations are open to the public 7 days a week.
Has it been a smooth road?
Has anyone actually said it’s been a smooth road? Alcohol is a highly regulated industry and back when we launched, we were just the 3rd brewery in Atlanta (behind Sweetwater and Red Brick, both of whom had been around for 15+ years). Learning to navigate the laws here in Georgia was a challenge. I started out as the first employee, working from my couch, back in 2011. I was the only employee for 8 months before we hired a part-time salesperson. Now, we employ about 30 full-timers and another 35 part-timers. It’s been hard learning to grow with the company – learning how to scale, translate our company culture, build effective teams, etc.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Monday Night Brewing story. Tell us more about the business.
We brew beers for the weeknight. Blind Pirate Blood Orange IPA is our current best seller but that tends to change based on the season. We’ve won the most awards at GABF and the World Beer Cup of any Georgia brewery in the past 3 years – and we don’t plan on slowing down. Our new barrel-aging and souring brewery has an on-site orchard, a Coolship, 3 separate barrel-aging rooms with climate controls, and its own lab. We pride ourselves on our consistency and originality, with both process and recipes. Our signature symbol is the necktie (we have an entire wall of neckties at our West Midtown location). I started this business with my 2 business partners and the 3 of us had white collar day jobs at the time, and had to wear neckties to work. The loosened necktie is our rallying cry – it’s about having fun with work and doing what you love.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
Craft beer is exploding, particularly in the Southeast. The number of breweries in Georgia has more than tripled since we launched and I don’t see that slowing down. Right now, the trend is hyper-localization. Particularly with Georgia’s better beer laws, I think you’ll see more and more small breweries popping up in smaller cities and towns in Georgia. There is a visceral connection people have with their “local brewery” and, it’s fun to be a part of that.
Contact Info:
- Address: West Midtown: 670 Trabert Ave. NW, Atlanta 30318
Garage: 933 Lee St. SW, Atlanta 30310 - Website: https://mondaynightbrewing.com/
- Phone: 404-352-7703
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mondaynight/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mondaynight
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/mondaynight
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/monday-night-brewing-atlanta
- Other: https://www.yelp.com/biz/monday-night-brewing-garage-atlanta-2
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