Beer Republic Brewing will move into a 56,000-square-foot space on N. Clayton Street and open a brewery, taproom and retail space. Beer Republic is serving as the parent company for two smaller companies: Big Kettle Brewing and Ironshield Beer. Big Kettle Brewing will offer contract brewing services for other companies and Ironshield Beer will be Beer Republic’s house brand. Owners Dave Rice and Glen Sprouse plan to produce more than 30 varieties of beer, the release saysThe brewery expects to employ 50 people within the next five years. Positions will include brewers, cellarmen, packaging operators and lab technicians. Beer Republic aims to be among the top five largest breweries in Georgia.

Glen Sprouse

Glen Sprouse is an engineer, brewer and sales/business development executive in Roswell, GA formerly with Siemens Industry, Inc. and has done extensive independent consulting and small system integration work in the food and beverage industry.  Since graduating with a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech, Glen has done engineering design and product development, been a plant and project engineer, sold automation products and solutions and provided application engineering support at the corporate level. He has developed job descriptions and business plans for new industrial sales and management positions at the National Account Level and then successfully hired for or occupied those positions.

Glen temporarily left the process automation world in 1995 to earn his Master Brewer’s certification at the Intensive Brewing Science and Engineering program then offered at UC Davis, later to become the American Brewers Guild. He then helped write and pass Georgia’s brewpub legislation and funded, designed, built and operated a successful craft brewing business in a 350 seat brewpub in Atlanta, GA. He made extensive use of a brewery process automation system that he designed and built to improve product quality and consistency to levels beyond what was achievable in the craft brewing industry at that time. His automation system was a feature of several process automation industry articles, case studies and manufacturers’ marketing collateral over the next four years.

Glen has more than ten years professional brewing experience and more than 30 years experience in manufacturing and process automation, focused in the food and beverage, brewing and applied chemical products industries and has provided consulting services to improve production process quality, reliability and consistency. Though focused on sales and business development, Glen has always been intimately involved with the application and engineering aspects of his clients’ needs, often helping them develop new solutions to persistent problems in their production, packaging and quality improvement processes.

His brewing ventures have earned him numerous regional awards for his European style lagers and Belgian style ales including a world-wide rating of 7th for his Seven Sisters Münchner lager, 9th for his Bavarian Hefeweizen and 8th for his Me262 Maibock on the worldwide beer rating website  in 2006 through 2008.

Glen has designed, automated and supervised many new brewery installations throughout the U.S. over the last 15 years including a brewery at the Kansas City Station Casino in Kansas City, MO, Santa Fe Brewing Company in Cancun, Mexico, Thunder Canyon Brewing Co in Tucson, AZ and Glasscock Brewing Company in McAllen, TX. He has designed and built controls and automation solutions for Anheuser-Busch, Miller Brewing and Coors as well as numerous craft breweries nationwide (Stone Brewing, Red Hook, Ballast Point, Left Hand, Pyramid Brewing, Gordon Biersch and others). He has also provided consulting services in beer formulation and recipe design, brewery chemical and sanitation processes, production optimization, and draught beer dispensing system design through his company Brewery Development and Automation, LLC.