Honors on tap: Alaskan brewery owners named small business persons of the year.

• Author: Stewart, Corenne
• Position: Alaskan Brewing and Bottling Co. owners Geoff and Marcy Larson

It started as a joke, really-during a lively after-dinner conversation among friends over a cool glass of home brew. But add to the jest a pioneer spirit, artistic vision, two serendipitous finds at the Juneau Historical Society and 80 investors and what do you get?

In the green and misty glacial moraine country of land-locked Juneau, Geoff and Marcy Larson are brewing a world-class beer-and drawing attention for their efforts.

Since its first bottling run of 253 cases produced by a four-person crew in December of 1986, Alaskan Brewing and Bottling Co. has become one of the nation's premiere breweries, with 34-plus medals and awards, 47 employees and four nationally and internationally recognized brews. Moreover, in 1988 its Alaskan Amber achieved the rank of Best Beer in the Nation. Now, the Small Business Administration, Alaska District, has named the Larsons, owners and founders of the company, the 1999 Alaskan Small Business Persons of the Year.

The Larsons ascribe their success to the combined product of hard labor (they recall months of 20-hour workdays), luck and the moral and financial support of other Alaskans.

"If you think about it," Geoff said, "back in 1986 we were a couple of 20-something-year-olds and this was going to be the 67th brewery in the U.S. There are now more than 1,400, but back then it was a novel idea."

While people have been supportive from the beginning, the Larsons say potential investors warned them about the rather grand failure of a former Alaska brewery, the Prinz Brau. Still, no one said they shouldn't try it.

"In Alaska you can have a crazy idea and nobody downtrods you," Marcy said. "People trusted us. They believed in us. ... Even now that trust is so much more a part of the whole thing than our success."

Marcy describes coming across their first brew recipe as accidental. "I was researching some beer memorabilia," she said, "and found a newspaper article that talked about how Douglas City Brewing Co. brewed their beer, using a method of cold fermentation." The article did not list ingredients. However, it described the physical setup and included details about the cold fermentation process.

Marcy's next accidental find was a copy of the shipping records for the Douglas City Brewing Co. The list included saaz hops, a variety of hops grown only in Czechoslovakia and coveted across the globe for beer brewing. Today, the Larsons import their hops directly from Czechoslovakia just as Douglas City did. The...