Mike Frederick is the brewer and co-owner of Brookings, Oregon's five year old Chetco Brewing. Chetco opened as a nano brewery with just an 8 gallon kettle in April 2013 and sold 29 barrels in that first year. You may have heard of Chetco first in 2014 when out of nowhere they won a Silver Medal in the Imperial Stout category at the prestigious World Beer Cup. Chetco is along the Oregon coast and not that far North of the California border, the brewery shares a name with the Chetco River and Chetco point park. With their early success and a warm embrace from the small local community, Chetco Brewing has just recently opened a new taproom outside the expanded and now 7bbl brewery that will produce more than 600 barrels this year.

Mike Frederick is the head brewer/co-owner and still works his day job part-time as a massage therapist mostly helping in injury rehabilitation work, a job that he says he loves almost as much as brewing.  Frederick was inspired to take up homebrewing in the 80's by his borhter in law Mike Rowe, "It blew my mind.  To me it was like he built a Space Shuttle in his basement." He came back upon homebrewing when his wife Alex (who now works Chetco Brewing's front office) bought him a homebrew extract IPA kit in 2004. It took him months to use the kit but did inspire him to take the hobby seriously, "I was very apprehensive about it.  While I was brewing it, it just wasn't right.  Not authentic enough." By his second homebrewing batch he had already moved to an all-grain method and was ordering rhizomes to grow his own hops and by the 4th batch he had his own mill for grains. Nearly from the beginning Frederick fantasized about owning his own brewery, his wife had production management experience in Los Angeles that could be put to use and both of them were self-employed so they decided to take the leap.

"we had absolutely no idea what we were getting into.  I never worked at a brewery, and didn't know anyone in the biz.  We were completely ignorant financially, production wise, everything!" says Frederick. Atleast all was not lost though, a silver lining emerged "In retrospect, that was a very fortunate thing, because if we'd had any idea what we were in for, we would have been too scared to try."