January 20, 2017

Meet Nathan Cowan of Eventide Brewing in Grant Park

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Nathan Cowan.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Nathan. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
We started making beer because Geoffrey Williams, our head brewer and an old college roommate of mine, had a passion for craft beer. One day as we were drinking some beers, he made the comment that he really liked the beer we were drinking, but there were a few things that he would change if he had made it. He said, “I wonder if we could make this,” and my response was, “Well, somebody made this, so I’m sure we could make it”.

From there, we started educating ourselves about the brewing process and the history of beer making. We built a small pilot system and started developing our own recipes. It wasn’t until later that we had the thought about what it would take to make beer and sell it. In Georgia, you can make a limited amount of beer, but you are not legality allowed to even share it with your neighbor, let alone sell it.

We started looking into what it would take to build a brewery and ended up convincing my wife, Haley, and our friend, Matt, to join the campaign. Eventide grew from there.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
The alcohol business, in general, is not a smooth road, and it almost seems like it is designed to be that way. Getting started without a lot of backing is hard because the lead time is long and there are a lot of requirements for licensing.

Adding to that the three-tier system for distribution in Georgia (producer, distributor, retailer), breweries need to operate above a certain output before it’s feasible to try to enter the market. On the tasting room front, there are a ton of laws and regulations to hurtle with weird outdated laws governing how we can interact with consumers.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
Eventide is a small craft brewery located in Grant Park, Atlanta, GA right along the Beltline. Our motto is ‘Good Beer Doesn’t Have to be Complicated,’ and we live by that when it comes to what beers we create that go to market. While we can make complex brews, our focus is on creating the most appealing and true-to-form beer of each category. So our Pale Ale and Kolsch, which are available in cans all around Georgia, exemplify the best properties of each of those types of brews making them incredibly drinkable and delicious. Our Dry Irish Nirto Stout was just named by Atlanta Magazine as the next big thing in Georgia Beer.

While we make beer, which is what keeps the lights on, we really make all kinds of stuff. The brewery gives us the opportunity to engage with local artists and craftsmen, but also the opportunity to build different things that we use in production, as well as in the tasting room. If you come to the tasting room, you will see we have built most everything in there from the tables to the tap handles.

I think the thing I’m most proud of as a company and what sets us apart for others is our focus on craft and the empowerment of the craftsmen. Going back to the moment we realized if someone could make the beer we were drinking, then surely we could make it ourselves, we’ve made it a cornerstone of our business to support those who have a passion for their own craft and build a community around it.

What were you like growing up?
Growing up I was always taking things apart and building things. We lived way out in the country with a lot of lands, so most of my days we spent either out on the land fishing/exploring/climbing stuff or in our shop building stuff. I have always enjoyed vehicles and as the youngest of seven children, I never got anything new. I spent a lot of my time pulling together bikes, motorcycles, rail buggies or other ATV’s. It was just what you did. You always had two or three projects going on.

It’s nice because around the brewery there are always things that I can build, between crafting our tap handles to making our grain mill from scratch. Being a mechanical engineer by trade, this allows me to problem solve when it comes to the brewing process or even business development.

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