Business student plans to go big with his pint-sized pursuit

Matt Cummings spends every weekend in his parents’ cramped, two-door garage in St. Thomas, Ont., peeling fruits and brewing beer using a Gatorade cooler and a turkey burner.

“I love beer,” says Cummings while shrugging. “It’s that simple, beer is my passion and my art.”

Cummings, a fourth-year commerce student at the DeGroote School of Business, is the founder of Pint Pursuits Brewing Company and is in the process of moving beyond home brewing to become a craft micro-brewery.

He says that in order to go beyond using crude and minimal equipment to brew beer, he needs to move the company into the pilot stage for six months—a stage, he says, that people often neglect.

“Once I graduate [this summer], I can dedicate all my time to the pilot project, which means I’ll be testing and refining the business instead of focusing on profit right away.”

Cummings aims to raise around $13,000 through family support, engaging in a Kickstarter project, and applying for funding from Futurpreneur. His education in business at McMaster has given him an extra edge, he says. He’s written his own financial statements and business forecasts for a Futurpreneur grant and is currently in the process of getting it approved.

For now, however, Cummings is making a name for himself. 

“Right now, I can’t sell, but I can give,” he says. Over the weekends Cummings brews two batches of beer, kegs it, brings it back to Hamilton, and throws tasting parties for his friends. He also bottles his brew and hands them out to people, who in turn pass them on.

“This is just to get my name out,” he says. “As for establishing my name as legitimate, I participate in competitions.”

In July 2015, Hamilton held one of Ontario’s largest beer festivals run by Because Beer. The festival featured beer sampling from already established craft beer companies and also held a homebrew competition.

Cummings entered the competition and submitted three different beer concoctions. One of his creations placed third in the Robust Porter style category, while another received an honourable mention in the Imperial IPA style category.

According to the Ontario Beer Network, there are 287 registered breweries in Ontario, including microbreweries, brewpubs, and contract brewers. Cummings says he aims to stand out amongst the crowd.

“I want to go a step further; to get passed just calling myself ‘craft’. I want to make experimental beer and be unorthodox,” he says. “The only problem is that competitions are lagging in the area where I want to take my craft. They don’t usually have categories for the style of my brews.”

His style is indeed unorthodox. On the Pint Pursuits website, Cummings features an array of his craft of beer creations, and others in the works, where he’s used blends of chocolate, grapefruit, and Japanese Sorachi Ace hops, amongst others. Right now Cummings is working on a new experimental beer: sour ale aged on top of guava fruit.

“I’m looking to find the next trend before it becomes a trend,” he says.

Cummings is not blind to the difficulties of business, however. He says that profits will come once he moves beyond the pilot project and into the commercial stage where he can sell. For now, he says he needs to learn from any failures and successes that come out of the pilot brews.

Cummings says he envisions a small operation that has a communal feeling, where drinking beer is about the experience and less as a means of getting alcohol into your system.

“It’s a craft venture,” he says.