There’s a certain mentality that suggests that your business will suffer if you do it differently,” says Marika Josephson, one of the three owner-brewers of Scratch Brewing Company in Ava, Illinois. “But for me personally, I didn’t want to create food and drink that I wasn’t 100 percent proud of or a place I wouldn’t want to go myself.”
Josephson and her partners, Ryan Tockstein and Aaron Kleidon, really do approach their brewery model differently than most, especially for the town in which the brewery is located. Ava is two hours from the nearest big city, St. Louis, in a relatively secluded rural area. “We encountered a lot of people saying, ‘Well you’ll have to have a flagship beer; you can’t just do everything seasonally; you can’t not go through distributors.’” Ironically enough, they have successfully done everything they “shouldn’t” have.
The trio of homebrewers first met at a nearby liquor store in Carterville, what Josephson says is a central gathering place for local beer lovers because “back then there wasn’t a lot of craft beer around here.” It wasn’t just a brewery that the area lacked. “There was something we felt was missing from the industry, something we were really fascinated by,” Josephson continues. “We were interested in creating a product that spoke to us and the people around here in terms of the indigenous flavors and what’s locally available. We wanted to brew with ingredients from our backyard.”