Original subtitles

Hard work is a funny thing, right?

Because everybody applies their perception of hard.

And because that perception of hard is very different today than it was before,

I think hard work today is under attack because the perception of hard is under

attack.

Doing less is never better. Doing more always seems to work.

I can say for me, at times, I haven't worked hard enough, and those are the

times I'm most disappointed in myself.

I think if you looked at the American dream, the people that came way before

they were just willing to do the work to build a better life.

That's kind of the American dream wrapped up. Are you willing to do the

make a better life?

And they were.

Will my kids understand the American dream?

I mean, God, I'm going to grind it into them.

It's going to be painful.

And I think they're set up for a bunch of failures.

But I'm not going to use that as an excuse.

We're just going to keep trying to teach them what it is to work hard.

So the first thing we had to do was we cut the hole in the barn to put the

brewing equipment in.

And once we got the brewing equipment in, we had to figure out how to use it.

this was some of our first kind of chemical equations. I don't quite

but Freddie, my master builder, and Kobe, my brother, they had Lawrence, the

master brewer, teach them how to do all this.

So we started writing it down.

They were like, where should I write it? I was like, write it on the wall.

Kip brings an intense energy that

I've never seen in another human being.

He's like a force. If you work with Kip, he's going to push

you really hard. And that's not for everyone, but if you can

handle it and you can try to keep up, you can go on this ride with him

and get to the point where you realize, okay, I can put up with some hip storms

every now and then because it's worth it.

When I was probably six, we were camping in Montana with my

grandfather, my brother, and myself, and I think I...

I vividly remember like a bear outside of our tent, and I just didn't want to

there anymore and just cried, and everybody was just like, ah, it's fine,

okay, and I was scared to death.

It doesn't matter that you're scared. You can't change where you're at in

You can only do more.

My father was a Marine, and he was a Vietnam vet, and he took pride in what

did. And so when he did something, he did it 110%.

And so even just watching him put his uniform on in the morning, it was like

every little detail was taken care of.

My brother and I were tight growing up, you know, typical brothers. He's only a

year and a half older than I am.

He's a Marine, hardworking.

We battle a lot. We're very different, but we have the same vision.

So he can take apart his whole Harley in the living room.

I can't take apart my flashlight.

So we're very different from that perspective. But, yeah, we grew up the

kind of way, living outside.

Kip was in college in the University of Maryland playing lacrosse.

I joined the Marine, so different world,

worlds apart kind of thing.

I met my previous partner, Kevin Plank, while we were at University of Maryland.

And he had this crazy company he started.

He was making tight -fitting shirts.

And he was working out of his grandmother's basement.

And I was like, wow, these shirts are amazing. And I tried one for lacrosse.

And I went right back to him and was like, how can I help?

And I started packing boxes in his grandmother's basement.

So at Under Armour, when we first started, it was really just two of us.

worked all day, all night.

That's the thing that I would press upon people on starting anything.

There is no such thing as nine to five.

I think our first year in business, we probably lost 17 grand, and when I left,

we were at about $4 billion.

When I left Under Armour, the only thing I was thinking about was what's next. I

wasn't thinking about the last 20 years. I was thinking about the next 20 years.

We're going to make some rent tap handles.

We made these for the tap room, and they worked out really good. So we

have three jockey boxes that we use for off -site events and different

marketing things.

And instead of them just having the plain old black plastic

handle, we're going to make a...

some more wrenches to put on our jockey box.

Actually, when I was at Under Armour, my brother had left Under Armour, and we

had started to use my farm, started to grow hops.

So I had already kind of planted a seed that there was something that I was

really interested after Under Armour.

So we wanted to use our farms. We wanted to be outside and use our outdoor

background to build a business. We just didn't know what it was.

And then, you know, we spawned this idea after growing hops for a few years and

selling it to other people.

We were like, man, we just need our own beer brand. We just need to use our own

hops.

I actually started a custom car shop, truck shop.

And we ran it for about a year and a half. And we had really poor success,

we had to shut the shop down. But I wanted to keep the team because they

geniuses. And so we took a bunch of car mechanics, and we taught them how to

brew beer. And I hired a guy from Corvallis, Oregon, who was a beer

he taught us for a year.

And we're master brewers now, so we started off canning.

I remember the first day the tap room opened.

And, you know, it's jam -full and we're doing well. And I went over and I said,

you've got to be happy.

And we're looking around and he goes, at what?

And I said, look at all these people. Like, they're consuming beer and we're

doing well.

He goes, nah, man.

He goes, we're on to the next thing.

The drive that it takes to get where he's going.

He goes hard.

And if you're next to them, you're going hard, too, or you're left behind.

You know, I grew up with a dad who worked on furnaces, drove an old truck.

Mom drove a school bus.

That's where my drive comes from.

Seeing my parents, like, work hard every day to provide for my family.

It was locked in me.

Go hard, have that drive.

And we're trying to put together the company with the team of people that we

have that same drive.

And then how that drive just feeds right over to what Big Truck is, what

Big Truck stands for, and brewing and getting this beer to the people that

hard every day and actually appreciate what we're doing and what they earned.

They earned this beer today.

There's two things that are really important to the making of the beer and

quality of the beer, and that's the grain and that's the hop.

And it's one thing being able to focus on both of those and having both of

in the ground on our own farms.

It's pretty important.

So when we first started, we couldn't get plants to grow. We had a lot of

problems.

Just not a lot of knowledge. It was really hard.

Seven years, I think, really the first three, we could get barely anything to

grow. And finally the team figured it out, and we figured out some processes,

what to feed them, the right type of string. One year we used one string, and

the wind blew it all because it was made out of paper, and we had to retie all

the strings.

It was the worst.

But we got a good team and we have a lot of ingenuity, so we figured it out. So

this will be our ninth season growing hops.

The hops in this field go right up to the brewery, either in a wet hop or they

get pelletized and dried.

So they go right from the farm to the glass.

We got three varieties, Cascade, Chinook, and Southern Cross.

They're really the only ones we could get to grow in Maryland.

We serve them right up to the brewery.

This is what we make here at Big Truck.

We start with a silo full of Pilsner malt.

We run it through our mill up into our grist case.

Then we drop it into our mash tun.

It rests in the mash tun for about 40 minutes.

Then we run off to the kettle.

where we bring it to a boil, typically for 90 minutes.

That's where our hops come into play.

We add our hops in multiple additions.

We add an 80 -minute addition for some, 60 minutes for some, 15 for some.

We'll go through the heat exchanger to cool it down from a boil temperature to

fermentation temperature.

We'll knock out into one of our fermenters.

We have 15, 30s, 60s.

It stays anywhere there from...

two weeks, all the way up for our lager, which can be up to five or six weeks.

After it ferments, it's ready to keg off, either a six -stool or a half

or we can it. Our cans are loaded in our depow, comes down through a twist

rinse, goes across the decoder with the date on the bottom of it, goes to our

five -head fill machine where we inject CO2 for a purge and a pulse, goes into

our double -headed steamer.

out of the femur, through another rinse of water and air, makes a right turn

down to our labeler, through the labeler, into our Pac -Tec machine, and

out onto a pack -out table, loaded into trays, onto pallets, and out for

distribution.

I was from a divorced family, was right at that young age, 12, 13.

No cell phones, no FaceTime, no dad, because now he's stationed in a

place. So I was left with no father at that age, and I think that has a huge

X factor on trying to prove that I'm worth having a dad that wants to stay.

For me, there's a deep...

deep why the why is rooted around proving i'm worth it it's i want to

prove to people that i can do things i want to i want to win winning is the

ultimate proof i would never want anybody to think that i

don't struggle through or i don't doubt myself i think you know there's a

there's a lot of internal conversation i have with myself

based around fear of succeeding, doubt if I'm making the right decisions.

And you just have to be willing to just kind of fail a little bit. And we've

made some mistakes, cost us some money.

I just really feel like once you start making fear -based decisions, you're

already screwed.

And so I try not to operate that way. I try to think of...

glorious, amazing outcomes all the time. Like, oh my God, if we do this, what if

this happens? What if that happens? I do that constantly to counterbalance the

doubts and fears.

It's the what if it works.

I'm sure people thought we were crazy when we decided to start Big Truck.

It really was an evolution, though.

We started with the farm and growing hops, and then we

decided to try to make beer, and it's just really grown from there. So I think

people saw that once we started, we kind of had a passion for it.

I think people believed in us to make it happen.

I think the American dream is going out there and

doing something that brings you success, but also brings you a feeling

of contributing to the bigger picture, contributing to the

community.

making life a little bit better for anyone you can.

I'm really proud of the work we've all done at Big Truck.

We're really a group of family and friends, and most of

the people who work here are people that, even if we're not related to them,

they're basically family to us at this point.

Even our taproom staff is mostly local kids.

And I'm just really proud of the way we've all come together and

figured this out.

What do you want?

Oh, my God.

I've never had a group of people that are ungrateful

slackers. They don't do shit.

You got to ride them on everything.

This team just works hard.

You never have to ask. They do it.

I mean, I ask a lot, but they're already doing it. So this seems great.

Everybody does a great job. And, yeah, I don't think anybody's going to, yeah,

you can't get in our way.

Unstoppable.

What's next?

Bringing big truck to small towns everywhere.

Cheers. Big truck.

What's going on?

How are you?

I know you love the law.

I'm very proud of the work I do.

I feel like I'm pretty fortunate to hop on board from day one.

I think the American dream is like, you know, working hard, providing for your

family. That's what my parents said to me, and that's what I'm going to do to

kids. I just want to leave my kids with...

The motivation to create things, to be brave,

and try something that they know nothing about and

that they can learn and they can do anything.

What does the American dream mean?

Get out there and make it happen.

That is the dream.

Like, it's not someone's going to do it for you.

It's not it's going to be handed to you. There's no right.

It's literally the American dream is one that's built on blood, sweat, and

tears. That's the American dream. No one says the American dream was I inherited

a ton of money.

That's not the American dream. The American dream is I built this from the

beginning by myself.

Or I built this with a group of people.

who believed it.

I think the impact I want to have, if any, is people like, well, he did it.

I could do it too.

If that single thing sparks, then something good is going to come out of