Iron Hill at 20: Always something brewing with these beer guys

We always hear about the shiny, new food companies. The Spot is a series about the Philadelphia area's more established establishments and the people behind them.

Three men own Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant, which, with 12 locations, is by far the region's largest chain of brewpubs and its most honored.

The owners formed the business in Newark, Del., from widely divergent backgrounds. The commonality was a love of beer and food.

Kevin Finn, now 55, and Mark Edelson, 52, were homebrewers - Finn with an MBA and an interest in his family's billboard business, Edelson as a chemical engineer with AstraZeneca. Kevin Davies, 60, was a specialist in restaurant operations.

They sat down last week at Iron Hill's Media location.

How did it start for you?

Kevin Finn: My future wife, [Susan], was living in Boston, and I was living in Delaware. She would call me up at night wondering what I was doing. I was out. I was in my late 20s, pretty active social life. She decided that I needed a hobby. For my birthday, she bought me a home-brewing kit. I got into home brewing. I remember the first batch of beer I brewed was horrible. It was before I was brewing with Mark. I was living with a roommate, and the dog actually came and drank the beer just as we put in the ferment. Eventually, Mark and I started making beer together. It's kind of a cool-weather thing as a homebrewer, particularly back then. He would come over, usually in the football season. We'd sit and drink, make beer, hang around my kitchen making beer. One time we were brewing in my kitchen in North Wilmington and we blew the stove up. We quickly got kicked out of the house and moved to the deck and my wife bought me a big propane cooker and a big pot, so we couldn't make beer in the house. Then we eventually moved and started making beer in the basement. Mark would come over and I was a recipe guy. Mark was always tinkering with the equipment. Eventually, my family had a billboard business, which we sold in the end of 1994, and I really needed a job. We had been kind of thinking about getting into the brewing business, Mark and I, for a while. We were dreaming it was excuse to go visit pubs throughout the country.

Eventually,  it got serious for me, then more so for him. About that time, [restaurateur] Xavier Teixido, who was a mutual friend of mine and Kevin [Finn's], was also a client of mine in the billboard industry. Kevin was the general manager at the Columbus Inn at that point.

Xavier introduced us and said, why don't you guys join forces to create a brewery restaurant?

Kevin Davies: He thought it'd be great that the three of us get together because I had the food and beverage in the restaurant background and Kevin and Mark are both engineers; they had a lot of experience with home-brewing. We just had different skill sets. Kevin has an MBA and handles a lot of the finance side of what we do in the administrative side. I always an operations guy and that was my role.

Mark Edelson: My background was a chemical engineer and I worked in pharmaceuticals production for 10 years before we did this. The equipment side was very natural for me. Kevin [Finn] did a lot of the formulation. He never wrote things down much. So, he would say yeah, we did this and I would take the detailed notes on what we did so that when we did it again to make it better, we knew what we did the first time. He would always write like two things and I would write 40 things in there to make sure we captured that.

Tell us about that first day, Nov. 14, 1996, at your first location in Newark, Del.

Mark Edelson: We had to stay away from the wet paint.

Kevin Davies: Well, we really started on a shoestring. We were the guys sanding and staining and shellacking all the woodwork, and we were only doing everything that we could to get -

Mark Edelson: - a little money before we opened.

Kevin Davies: So, I was talking to the vendors, I'm like, "We might have to stretch you guys out for a little while." It took us forever to build it. We finally got it open.

Kevin Finn: There were people standing at the front door waiting for us to open.

Kevin Davies: I remember Kevin Finn in the middle of the day when, like all restaurants, there's no customers between 3 and 5 p.m. He was walking around going, "Oh, no. We're going to go bankrupt." It all worked out.


How did your second location come along?

Kevin Finn: [In late 1997] we were approached by a friend. He said, "You should really come to West Chester. There's no restaurants in West Chester to go to. There's this great site on Route 52 right outside of town. So we drove up, met the real estate agent, and it was an old factory there with a tree growing through it.

Mark Edelson: The tree is still growing through it.

Kevin Finn: The walls are falling down. We just kind of laughed. I thought, not for us. So, we went into town to get lunch, and we drove by the Woolworths. It had been closed, and it had a for-lease sign up, and I said, "Well, that looks like it would work for us," and the agents said, "It just got leased to Rite-Aid." We were like, "Well, if something happens, let us know."

Lo and behold, a couple of months later, we got a call from the agents, who said the deal fell through. So up we went to West Chester. We did some research. I remember one of the first times we went into town was, it was Friday, they'd do the old-fashioned Christmas parade. The three of us went to the real estate agent, and they had drinks and the parade's coming by and families and stuff. I'm like, "Wow. This is great," because usually, there was nothing going on in downtown West Chester at that point. I think it was Kevin who said it seemed like tumbleweeds would roll down the street at night.

Kevin Davies: I was afraid we were going to go bankrupt with them.

Kevin Finn: It was scary.



Have you ever thought of just opening one centralized brewery rather than doing it at each location?

Kevin Finn: There really wasn't any thought for many, many years. We felt that the model really worked. We are looking at a bigger brewery. We've gotten into canning. It's been pretty successful, but we struggle sometimes when we have the big seasonal runs and certain other companywide seasonal promotions.

Mark Edelson: We find there's an importance to have the brewery on site rather than just ship it in, but we are looking at that [centralization] for a number of reasons. One is to make the brewery footprint smaller as we look to open more locations. To do that, we would take our flagship [labels] and brew them at a central brewery and do all of our seasonal brewing out of [the local pubs].

Kevin Finn: The canning has been really successful. To have to-go cans all the time in the stores is something we want to do as we grow. Right now, we just aren't able to do that.



Now that you're up to 12 locations, what is the future?

Kevin Finn: We think we have a great concept and also a great culture. I'm proud of the people that work for us. We want to continue to grow and create opportunities for the people that work for us. When I got into this business 20 years ago, it was all about making great beer. We still do that, but for me personally, the thing that gets me up every day is the ability to have a growing company and to watch people grow within our organization and have a career.

Our goal is to build it up, three or four restaurants a year, focused on the Northeast market, probably anywhere from Boston down into North Carolina.



Do you have any plans to sell the company or retire or any of that?

Kevin Davies: Retire, yes! Someday.

Kevin Finn: Well, we did just do private equity, which is helping us to grow the company, but we're still owners of the business, and we're going to continue to operate it. I think our goal is to transition the company to the next level of leaders within our company and to hire great people. We've got, I think, a great leadership team that we're developing to take on our roles in the next five to 10 years. For each of us, I think that's different, in terms of when that transition happens.

Mark Edelson: Can't get promoted unless you have your replacement.