The Nano Brewer

CARRIER IS QUICK TO POINT TO THE most essential ingredient in a successful microbrewery: “impeccable buds.” Now she’s proving she has the tastebuds to keep customers coming back for more unique drafts at Throwback Brewery in North Hampton, New Hampshire.

A few years ago, the economics major decided she had a taste for more than business and marketing as an employee at IBM. She began brainstorming the brewery with wife Annette Lee, a former environmental engineer who interned at New Hampshire-based Smuttynose, and opened the door on the enterprise in 2011. “Annette said, with her aptitude for brewing and problem-solving and my background in marketing and business and love of spreadsheets, we should open a brewery,” says Carrier, who quit IBM last summer to focus full-time on beer. “It didn’t take too much convincing.”

Throwback Brewery focuses on sourcing ingredients within 200 miles of the operation—so far she is able to gather 70 to 90 percent of the ingredients (hops, wheat, barley, fruit and spices) within that range. Inspired by local produce, Carrier creates innovative beers—from beets, oysters or fennel flowers—that have been winning rave reviews from Draft magazine and Bon Appetit, which named it to its 2013 list of “10 favorite nanobreweries in America.” Throwback is now available in restaurants and shops across New Hampshire’s Seacoast region as well as at the brewery’s restaurant.

Carrier is planning some additions to the business, such as a farm and a five-fold increase in beer output. She also wants to appeal to a lighter palate: “I predict that cleaner, more crisp beers—like pilsners— will gain in popularity.” Come May they’ll roll out Spicy Bohemian pilsner in cans— “truly a labor of love,” she says.

“‘Throwback’ is a nod to pre-Prohibition brewers, who were community-oriented brewers who used what was around them.”