[bizprofile]
by clay whittaker
@A:B;
for Olde Meck!
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J
ohn Marrino is installing two new lager tanks on this day. We sit down to talk in the rustic taproom, built in the image of his favorite place to drink in Germany. Through a few large windows several large stainless steel tanks, predominant in of the brewing operation at The Olde Mecklenburg Brewery, are visible, like an open kitchen. The taproom is cool, but when a door into the brewery opens, a hint of the bready, warm malt smell wafts across the room in shallow waves. Marrino says once the new tanks are up and running, it will bring his capacity to 3,900 barrels of beer a year, which will almost quadruple what he started with just a year ago. It’s an impressive amount of growth for just one year. The 43-year-old engineer and brewer says they have almost 150 bar and restaurant customers, and are averaging two new ones a week. He’s currently working on the seasonal offerings for his second winter in the business. Marrino developed an Excel spreadsheet program to help him build his different beer recipes. Using a few criteria, he plugs in what he wants the beer to be, and out comes a recipe. He’ll spend a few weeks tweaking it on paper, and then the beer will go straight into production without so much as a test batch. And it works. “It’s more of a thought process than anything,” he says modestly. Marrino plays with color, sweetness, bitterness, and knows what a good beer looks like on paper. It’s the kind of foresight and cleverness that is now carrying Olde Mecklenburg around town. And it’s the same set of characteristics that got the master brewer to beer from unusual beginnings in the water treatment industry.
34
august 2010
Business is Brewing Marrino graduated from Tulane University in 1988 with a degree in engineering and business management. He entered the water treatment industry in 1989, working as a sales engineer for a small German company selling ultraviolet disinfection and ozone oxidation technologies for water purification. They had very good technology, says Marrino, and the company began to grow very fast. In 1993, the company moved Marrino to Germany to run the international sales department. Then, they sent him to setup and run a joint venture in the U.K. In 1997, they bought a struggling New Jersey company, and brought him back to the U.S. to run North American operations. After successfully turning the company around, Marrino ended up in Charlotte to build a new factory to accommodate its growth. Marrino says the arrangement was good for a young graduate: “I asked for a lot of opportunities, and I got a lot of opportunities. I was young, I was single, so for me it was a fantastic experience. I traveled around the world, sold water treatment systems everywhere from South Africa to Taiwan, and was exposed to many different management challenges in my 20s and 30s.” In 2004, when the German parent company was sold to a conglomerate, Marrino declined a leadership position with the new company, opting for a management position within their sales operations. But after a couple of years, he became disenchanted. “I’ve always been a man of action, I guess,” Marrino offers, “and it’s important to me to be able $ to get things done—make things happen.”
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