We're excited to be a Baltimore-based
and Maryland-based business. We love our
home city and state, and we want to do good.
My name is Adam Benesch, one of the
co-founders here at Union Craft Brewing.
We just celebrated our sixth anniversary
this summer, and we started the brewery a
quarter mile down the road from our new
current location on Union Avenue in the
Hamden-Woodbury area of Baltimore.
Myself, my two partners Kevin Blodger and
John's Zerivitz each had a very strong
passion for craft beer. We all were born
in the Baltimore area and grew up in the
area and decided to combine our passions
over beer in Baltimore to create Union
Craft Brewing. Now, over the past six years
we've had really a wonderful support
from the local community and beyond, and
that's allowed us to continue to grow
...outgrow the original space,
which we had just moved from and to create this new facility that we're sitting in
today. You know, the idea around Union Collective is obviously bigger than a
brewery. It's not just us. It's a
collective of seven to eight other
Baltimore-based growing businesses, and
we're in many ways, in this together now
and working with each other on the
collaborations on programming of events
that may draw one of our fan bases to
the other and vice versa. When we kind of
set out on this project we started
looking around the country for other
examples of this, and we're pretty shocked to find that
there weren't any certainly of this scale.
And now surprising to us. We feel that
just like there should be diversity in
your workforce in all the things that
you're doing there's to be diversity and
land use in a city setting and there was
less and less land allocated to
industrial uses here in Baltimore City.
So, we're hopeful that we can prove to 
not just Baltimore, but the cities across
the country that it makes sense to have
pockets of industrial space in your
city. It creates good jobs. It moves
people to the city. Half of our employees
now, more than half of our employees, live
one within one mile of the brewery.
So we've seen an influx of our workers
move from the county other parts of the
city to be right here in this
neighborhood, and that's powerful that's
meaningful that's seeing the dollars
that people spent here reinvested in our
employees to then reinvest it in other
businesses in the same neighborhood. And
you know that's exactly the type of
ecosystem I think Baltimore needs and
other cities beyond Baltimore, as well.
