Today we’d like to introduce you to Greg Smith.
Greg, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
Printer’s Ale was started a year ago as an offshoot of our printing business. The printing business was founded in Scranton, PA – which is just what it seems like on The Office, BTW – in 1911 by my Great Grandfather. We opened up this facility in Carrollton in 1982 to print record labels for recording companies that had opened up record pressing plants in the south. We purchased an old hosiery mill building maybe 5 years ago with the thoughts of moving the printing business into that building but just couldn’t make the numbers work. So a few years ago, while walking through the old building and noticing the large water main, natural gas, and trench drains in the floor, an idea popped into my head – why not try to open a brewery? I’ve been a homebrewer for 20 some years, I own a packaging company and can create this awesome brand stuff, I know machinery, I’ve got this building… So I went home and opened a homebrew and the laptop, did some quick calculations, and decided to do it. In the process, I learned that my Great Great Great Grandfather had been the proprietor of a gasthaus – basically a brewpub/hotel – in Germany, and his son ended up selling the gasthaus and moving the family to America after stowing away on a boat. So the brewery is called Printer’s Ale and is honoring a legacy of making great stuff stretching back some 200 years…
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?
Always challenging. The printing business is brutal, too many presses chasing too little work. The challenge is to know what you’re capable of, what you’re strengths are, and to try to play to those strengths. Maybe to know where the limits are as well, and where you can compete and what you can do. Always in printing we are battling the bigger entrenched companies and the notion that a small company can’t compete against the global scale of some of the larger guys. Our challenge is always to smooth out those concerns while showing that we can do the same job locally and better then the bigger operators.
So, as you know, we’re impressed with Printer’s Ale Manufacturing Company – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
In printing, we specialize in high quality printed folding cartons, like cosmetic boxes or golf ball sleeves. Pretty stuff you see on the shelf at retail. I love working as part of a supply chain, being part of a process that gets to help bring to life these great brands you see out there in the store. I love the collaboration that goes along with that, traveling to some factory and helping our cartons run through the process and then the end of actually seeing that in the stores. As a small company, we get to minimize the friction on our end as part of that process and can make very quick decisions and help these great companies get stuff done… We’re trying to bring that sort of fun into the brewing side as well. I don’t mind being a cog in the machine.
So, what’s next? Any big plans?
Beer! Packaging and selling beer, getting new equipment to help support that, hiring some new people along the way, create a great team to help make it happen.
Contact Info:
- Address: Printed Specialties
5200 Columbia Drive, Carrollton, GA 30117Printer’s Ale Manufacturing Company
940 Columbia Drive, Carrollton GA 30117 - Website: www.printers-ale.com
- Phone: 770-832-1341
- Email: greg@psincorp.com
- Instagram: printersbeer
- Facebook: facebook.com/printersbeer
- Twitter: @printersbeer
- Other: www.printedspecialties.com
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