Fairfield County Business Journal 062915

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FAIRFIELD COUNTY

BUSINESS JOURNAL June 29, 2015 | VOL. 51, No. 26

11 | CLEAR EXPECTATIONS

14 | GOOD THINGS HAPPENING westfaironline.com

YOUR ONLY SOURCE FOR REGIONAL BUSINESS NEWS

HEADY ENDEAVOR

Craft beer experts make a home for their brews BY DANIELLE BRODY dbrody@westfairinc.com

Mark and Tess Szamatulski, owners of Veracious Brewing Co. in Monroe. Photo by Danielle Brody

AFTER MORE THAN 20 YEARS of running a homebrew supplies store in Monroe and sharing their expertise by writing books, Mark and Tess Szamatulski said they were ready to take the next hop in their business and build a brewery. “We decided we’ve been doing this for so long, we might as well just do it on a larger scale,” Tess Szamatulski said. In June, the couple opened Veracious Brewing Co., a taproom and brewery, on Main Street in Monroe. The Szamatulskis, of Trumbull, have written two homebrew recipe books and have served their beer at festivals and at their store,

Maltose Express. They said they always wanted to open a brewery but that it did not make sense prior to three years ago. That was when the Ace Hardware next to their store closed, giving them the space to expand, Mark retired from his post as an engineer at defense company Northrop Grumman in Norwalk, and the state became friendlier toward breweries. Mark Szamatulski said up until two years ago, Connecticut sold the least amount of craft beer in the U.S. He credited the founders of Two Roads Brewing Co., which opened in 2012 in Stratford, with introducing more people to craft beer and pushing legislators to update the state’s alcohol laws that previously limited what breweries could sell. Now, breweries can selfdistribute and sell pints, cases of 24 beers and growlers to go. “For us it made it affordable,” he said. “We actually were able to start a brewery and we could make money at it. That was a big thing.” » BEER, page 6

The River rises

A UNIQUE $60M VENUE TAKES SHAPE IN NEW CANAAN BY BILL FALLON bfallon@westfairinc.com WHEN GRACE COMMUNITY CHURCH CONGREGANTS gather at The River — their new sanctuary and community center — Oct. 11, they will worship among 80 acres of God’s green Earth in New Canaan. Their journey through a wilderness of bearing witness in unused school spaces will have ended at the doors to a new 86,000-squarefoot facility that mimics a pristine river in all its symbolic, subtle power. Given that work on the unique, serpentine building is 90 percent complete, the project as presented on a recent hard-hat tour has vaulted from “In the beginning” to “And it was good.” It is mostly glass — low-iron, low-lead and superclear — as if “Let there be light” were a design dictate from above.

The tour capped eight years of planning and two years of construction. The official opening is Oct. 9, with a community day Oct. 10 and the first services Oct 11. The price tag is $60 million, with details including: • an 11,000-square-foot sanctuary with 700 seats that will be a music venue, as well; • a 6,900-square-foot commons with dining and living areas able to accommodate 300; • a 950-square-foot pavilion welcome center and music venue; and • a 7,500-square-foot multiuse �ymnasium with an adjoining media lab and game room. “It will be an open, welcoming place where people can explore nature, foster community, explore life and work toward the common good,” said Sharon Prince, president of the Grace Farms

Foundation, which spearheaded the project. “This will be a nexus for organizations to flourish and for emerging justice initiatives.” The �ym at one end of The River and the sanctuary at the other end, plus three more meeting spaces in between, are called walled volumes. They are connected under one fir-sheathed roof, with some lengths of the walkway left open to the elements so animals can pass through and so people can more easily interact with nature. Fifty-five 500-foot-deep geothermal wells help cool and heat the building. In a statement, Grace Farms said, “Members of the public may share a meal in the dining room, make use of the library, enjoy one of the artistic programs that will be woven through » RIVER, page 4


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