2008 CEO of the year; New Belgium's Kim Vordan: tapping a collective energy.

• Author: Taylor, Mike

Back in 1991, Kim Jordan and Jeff Lebesch hiked into Rocky Mountain National Park with a jug of Jeff's basement home brew and penned a mission statement for the business they were about to launch: "To operate a profitable brewery which makes our love and talent manifest."

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All three of those elements - love, talent and profitability - abound today at New Belgium Brewing Co., which helped launch the craft-beer craze in the early '90s with the now-ubiquitous Fat Tire beer and a steady unveiling of brews that now number 13, including limited-release and seasonal beers.

The enterprise that began in the couple's Fort Collins basement has become the nation's third-largest craft brewing company and eighth-largest brewer overall with sales of $96 million last year and a projected 8 percent revenue increase in 2008.

But beer sales are only part of what distinguishes New Belgium Listening to the CEO Jordan, revenues seem almost a means to an end - that end being what Jordan describes as "an incredible engine of good will and shared vision."

Propelled by the 3Rs - reduce, reuse, recycle - the company embraced sustainability long before it became a mantra of business; employees voted to make New Belgium the first 100 percent wind-energy brewery in 1998, even if it meant the cost difference being taken out of their yearly bonuses.

And then there's the brewery's onsite water treatment plant in which wastewater is run through an anaerobic digester where nutrients are collected, turned into methane and converted to electrical and thermal energy.

"Up to 20 percent of our electrical energy needs are produced that way," Jordan says. "The thing that's elegant about that particular process is that you're closing a waste loop and turning it into another useful product."

But Jordan is perhaps more passionate about the small, personal measures of sustainability. "Everyone likes to talk about new technology, but it's really important to also harvest the low-hanging fruit of conservation," she says. "And that's something we've always done here at New Belgium."

The brewery is also fairly renowned for hanging on to employees, with a 92 percent retention rate. "We care deeply about one another, and we also care deeply about being very good at what we do," says Jordan, this magazine's 2008 CEO of the Year.

At their one-year anniversary, employees begin earning stock ownership in the company. They're also given their own cruiser bicycle, much like the water-color rendering on the Fat Tire label and a nudge to encourage biking to work.

Jordan was a social worker and Lebesch, her husband, was an electrical engineer before launching New Belgium. The two met at a party hosted by a mutual friend and married in September 1990. They were selling beer by June the next year.

"I think Jeff was probably cooking on that idea before we even met," says Jordan, 50, who is described in company literature as "New Belgium's first bottler, sales rep, distributor, marketer and financial planner."

In the early years that meant putting their two young sons, Zack and Nick, now 23 and 16 respectively, to bed at night and going...