A new
irection
From teaching to running a business
Not surprisingly, after graduation Cockman began his career teaching history and coaching football at Reynolds High School in Winston-Salem. Over the next 10 years, he also taught in Nashville, Tennessee, and then at Northeast Guilford High School. While Cockman said he thoroughly enjoyed working with the kids, the demands of teaching and coaching were very time-consuming, especially after he his wife, Courtney, started their family; the couple now has three children, Mac, 7, Brek, 5, and Callan, 2. As their family and demands on their time and energy expanded, the couple knew they had to make some changes. An emergency room physician, Courtney worked a crazy schedule, and Cockman was spending extended hours after school with the football team. Plus, there was the expense of daycare.
Photo by Annette Joyce/NWO
After 10 years of teaching history at the high school level, Josh Cockman opened Village Beverage Co., a craft beer and wine shop and bar in Summerfield, last fall.
by ANNETTE JOYCE When Josh Cockman entered Appalachian State University, his immediate future was already mapped
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out. Having excelled in history during high school, he planned to major in that subject in college while also playing football for the ASU Mountaineers.
DEC. 16, 2021 - JAN. 5, 2022
“Basically, my paycheck was going to pay for daycare,” he said. In 2015, Cockman, now 39, left his teaching career to stay at home and care for their kids. During that time, he also taught preschool music lessons and thought about what his next steps
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would be once the kids started school. One of the most important things for him was doing something he loved. In the back of his mind, he had always wanted to run a pub. He enjoyed tasting different craft beers and wines and even spent some time doing home brewing.
“I brewed beer for personal consumption and friend consumption,” he said. It wasn’t just the production and the taste of the beers that Cockman found fascinating, but also that each beer comes with its own history. Being able to incorporate his love of history into his home brewing was doubly satisfying. As his ideas began to take shape, the Summerfield resident started looking for confirmation that a bottle shop and bar would be a good fit for the community. One of those confirmations came when he went to the grocery store and saw about 30 people sitting around in the Beer Den drinking and talking. “There seemed to be a pentup demand,” he said. “If you lived up this way (on the western side of
