Ryan and Eric Roth were avid homebrewers before they acted on their long-harbored dream of opening a microbrewery. Their vision was realized with the creation of Roth Brewing company, a Raleigh business that develops and sells the Roth Brothers’ original beer.

Eric Roth, a senior in agricultural business management and co-owner of Roth Brewing Company, said although he and his brother had never run a business or had business training when they opened the company. They pressed forward with their goal, however, because enough people were willing to back them that they were confident they could turn dreams into reality.

“We decided we’re young enough to be a little stupid and we just started talking it out, just having fun. What would it take to have a brewery?” Roth said. “This was still when we were dreaming. What would be our dream brewery? We didn’t know anything about commercial brewing at the time.”

After being denied a $400,000 loan from the bank for a 30-barrel system, Roth said the two went back to the drawing board to cut down the cost.

“We took a weekend and cut everything out of our financial and business plan that we possibly could. We came back and it turned out we only needed just over $100,000 to start the company and so we took a loan,” Roth said.

After squaring things away with the bank, the brothers had to face their parents. After a game of golf and a few beers, the two received their father’s blessing.

“We just dove in. We loved to homebrew. We love beer. So we finally got the idea and just did it,” Eric Roth said. “We were lucky enough to have really supporting family and really supporting friends. We moved two of our best friends from Virginia and Chicago down here to help us start this business.”

Since they started out as homebrewers, Eric Roth said the company still holds a homebrew feel.

“Big breweries have big commercial systems and they’re all hard piped in. We have independent vessels, we have one pump, we attach all those hoses together and pump things out one at a time. A lot of commercial breweries will have basically a button-board that will open certain valves and switch on hard pipe pumps in and you’re going to push it all around,” Roth said. “It’s definitely a step up from what we’re doing but we definitely have a homebrew feeling to our brewing.”

Eric Roth said the company spent a long time coming up with the perfect slogan, but hit a roadblock with their first big idea.

“We actually came up with ‘A Revolution is Brewing’ first, but it turns out that is Port City Java’s slogan. If you look at the menu, right by the website it says ‘A Revolution is Brewing,’ in the smallest font. We had Googled it and sent it in and asked as many people as we could and they all said nobody had taken it,” Roth said. “One day during class I rolled into Nelson and got myself a coffee with a shirt for Roth Brewing Company that said ‘A Revolution is Brewing’ and they were like, ‘hey! That’s our slogan!’ and I was like, ‘you’ve got to be kidding me.'”

Eventually the company decided on “rebellious brewing” for their slogan, which N.C. State alumnus Ryan Roth said is a common term throughout many craft breweries.

“Most craft breweries say ‘this is rebellious brewing; we’re different than mainstream breweries.’ It’s like that all across the industry. We’re just some 20-something-year-old kids and we’re not tied down to styles,” Roth said. “We can’t say that we personally are the rebellion, we’re just trying to say the industry as a whole is morphing into ‘this is more of your local breweries, this more of your local taprooms.’ All these businesses around here come here. This is sort of their local bar. It’s actually going back to traditional style brewing where each town has one brewery or two breweries.”

There are currently three available beers the company markets, with two more still in the working stages.

“If you’re going to make the drive, you should be getting beers that you can’t get anywhere else. We’re working on our darker beers right now. We make the only barley-wine that’s year-round in North Carolina. It’s the highest alcohol beer made in the Triangle by any of the local breweries,” Eric Roth said.

This particular beer, Foehammer, is a pretty ambitious endeavor, according to Eric Roth.

“They are difficult beers to brew and there’s a lot of things you can do to mess them up, especially trying to hit your right sugar content to get to be 10.5 percent. It’s very difficult to do and you can mess up a lot trying to adjust those gravities,” Roth said.

Forgotten Hollow, a cinnamon porter, recently received label approval.

“It’s a big, sweet porter with lots of cinnamon in it. It was originally going to be a winter seasonal because it is very wintertime. However, we’ve gotten a lot of good response about it,” Eric Roth said.

Raleigh Red, their American Amber Ale, is on tap at Mitch’s Tavern on Hillsborough Street.

“We know those people pretty well. When we were originally applying for our loan at Capital Bank we wanted to come in with market credibility, so we went out to local bars that we wanted to be in, that were staples of the N.C. State community,” Eric Roth said. “We went in and gave them some homebrew, to see what they thought and then asked them what we called a memo of understanding. It didn’t legally bind them to do anything for us, but it basically said our beer was commercially marketable.”

While there are several other local breweries around Raleigh that Roth Brewing Company competes with, Eric Roth said they are all very helpful and willing to answer questions about brewing the brothers may have.

“We love the other breweries. We’re actually really good friends with a lot of them – most of them actually. The industry is so small; it’s such a community,” Eric Roth said. “When we run out of an ingredient – we ran over to Big Boss the other day and bought a bag of barley. There’ll be something weird, and we’ll call another brewery and they’ll tell us what to do.”

“They have so much more experience than we do. They don’t mind telling us how to do things and we don’t mind asking,” Ryan Roth added.

“We aren’t really in a position to help anybody, but we will be and if they really needed something we would help them,” Eric Roth said. “We’re itty-bitty right now, but I’m glad we’re on this system right now.”