Making It

Brothers brew success with their American-style beer

Living in San Francisco in 1998, Rich Fleischer was making about $60,000 a year as a pharmaceutical researcher for Bayer, and had plenty of spare change to throw parties, travel and dine out.

When he decided to make beer for a living instead, his money started disappearing like foam on a cold one.

Rich had been an avid home brewer, and with so many entrepreneurial success stories surrounding him, he decided in 1999 to go commercial with his beer. It cost about $35,000 to get the business going, but he was thrilled to be selling his filtered, American-style beer to numerous gourmet shops around San Francisco.

Rich called his beer Hook & Ladder in tribute to his time as a volunteer firefighter with the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Rescue Squad throughout high school and college. He wanted to build a business that would give back to firefighting charities.

But even as dot-commers were making millions, Rich couldn't cover his costs. For a while, he kept his job at Bayer and took two-hour lunches to call on accounts. But he finally quit his biotech work in 2000 to concentrate on the beer business. The next year, his brother, Matt, left his $60,000-a-year technology job and signed on to help.

Hook & Ladder won a gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival that year, but the company never provided enough money to live on. "I would go to bed at 11 or 12 at night, exhausted, and wake up at 3 in the morning thinking, 'How am I going to pay for this and that?' " Rich recalls.

Defeated, the brothers moved back to suburban Maryland. Rich got another biotech job and signed on again as a volunteer firefighter. But Matt went to business school, at the University of Maryland, with plans to figure out the beer business.

Hook & Ladder started up again in May of last year, after Matt graduated, selling the same beer but in a different way. Rich quit his biotech job (again) and joined Matt full time. Once sold in six-packs, Hook & Ladder is now distributed only through bars and restaurants, on tap, which is a better way to get people to try a new beer. With several dozen accounts in the Washington-Baltimore area, sales may reach $250,000 at the end of this year, says Matt, 30. Even after donating to firefighter charities, the brothers are earning what they did at their tech jobs.

"What's nice is that we can pay ourselves a living salary and go out to a bar that has us on tap and sit there and be the owners of a beer company," Matt says.

With $300,000 in financing from angel investors, the Fleischers plan an aggressive expansion along the East Coast and back into six-packs. Rich, who is 34 and still a volunteer firefighter, knows he's lucky that Matt didn't give up.

"Not many entrepreneurs get a second chance," Rich says. "They sort of throw everything into their business, and it either works or it doesn't."

"He owes me a beer," Matt says.

Margaret Webb Pressler wants to hear how you're fulfilling your financial ambitions. Her e-mail address is presslerm@washpost.com.