You can’t build a brewery with a box of shrink wrap—but sometimes you’ve just got to try
The Unlikely Rise of Phillips Brewing
Matt Phillips grew up in the Ottawa Valley, steeped in a blue-collar ethic and an early curiosity for how things worked. Before starting his own brewery, he’d already cut his teeth in the brewing world—working for established names and learning the craft from the ground up. But with every shift he pulled, he kept noticing a gap. Too many beers were predictable. Too many breweries were just machines for mass production. And too many founders were more focused on margins than meaning.
So when Matt arrived in Victoria, BC, he wasn’t chasing a trend. He was chasing an idea. A small brewery. Quirky, bold beers. Five employees, max. The plan was simple: brew what he believed in, in a way that felt human. Not industrial. Not corporate. Just honest beer, brewed with stubborn care.
Today, Phillips Brewing is one of the largest regional craft brewers in Canada. But it didn’t start with a business plan. It didn’t start with investors. It started with shrink wrap.
The kind you buy at Costco for forty bucks. Enough to last a few months, if you stretch it. Enough to keep the pallets secure, the bottles upright, the dream intact—barely. And that’s where Matt Phillips found himself in 2003: broke, alone, and standing in a warehouse, staring down an empty box that had somehow become a mirror to his entire life’s work. The beer was brewed. The tanks were welded—by hand. The deliveries were made. And now, all that stood between him and collapse was a cardboard container that needed replacing.
Forty dollars.
You’d think it takes more to bring down a brewery. But sometimes, it’s the smallest numbers that break you. Yet this isn’t a story about giving up. It’s a story about calling the glass plant one more time. About stubby bottles that vanished, then reappeared. About credit cards stacked like poker chips in a game no bank would back. About the kind of exhaustion that whispers, “Quit,” and the kind of stubbornness that replies, “Maybe tomorrow.”
This is the real story of Phillips Brewing. Not the glossy version on a brewery tour. The messy, caffeine-fueled, sleep-deprived, why-am-I-doing-this version—the one every entrepreneur will recognize in their bones. So let’s go back to the beginning—not to the business plan the banks laughed out of the room, but to the day Matt Phillips walked into Costco, looked at that box of shrink wrap, and had to decide whether the dream was still worth forty bucks.
Because sometimes, that’s exactly how big dreams hang on.
When the Banks Say No, You Get Creative—or Desperate
Before the stubby bottles. Before the shrink wrap epiphany. There was the pitch. Matt walked into every bank and credit union in Victoria with a plan: a small brewery, specialized beers, a handful of employees, slow and steady growth. Sensible. Modest. Local. Every lender gave him the same look: part pity, part polite disbelief.
“You can’t start a brewery that small,” they told him. “It’s not the paradigm.”
So on his way out, he did what any slightly deranged, totally determined founder might do—he grabbed every credit card application in the bank’s foyer. Two thousand here. Five thousand there. Ten thousand on a good day. Interest rates that would make a loan shark blush. By the time Matt brewed his first batch in 2001, he wasn’t just an entrepreneur—he was a one-man walking liability. His venture capital wasn’t angel investors. It was Mastercard and Visa. While others were raising Series A rounds, Matt Phillips was gambling everything on high-interest debt and a belief that somehow, good beer and sheer will might be enough.
The One-Man Circus of Desperation
Matt didn’t just launch a brewery—he became one. Mornings were for bottling. Afternoons? Deliveries and door-to-door sales. Nights? Brewing. Somewhere between 2 and 5 a.m., he’d try to sleep—if only because his body demanded it. This wasn’t a startup. It was a one-man circus, and Matt was the ringleader, the juggler, the acrobat, and the poor soul cleaning up after the elephants.
And when something broke—which it often did—he didn’t call a repair guy. He picked up a welding torch. He built his own tanks from scratch, selling every second one just to pay for the materials for the other. It was part alchemy, part madness, and all necessity. Forget kombucha taps and beanbag chairs. This was craft beer with callouses.
The business plan he’d handed to the banks? It promised five employees in five years. Modest. Steady. Respectable. They said it didn’t fit the model. They were right. He wasn’t building a business to fit the model. He was building one to break it.
The Portland Miracle and the Stubby Bottle Prophecy
His lease started in June 2001. He needed beer on shelves by August, or he wouldn’t make it to September. He had the recipe. He had the hustle. But he didn’t have bottles. The supplier he’d always used was out. Not just them—everyone was out. The industry only ran production every three months, and the next wasn’t scheduled until October.
“I need them next week or I’m bankrupt,” Matt told them. Their response? A corporate shrug.
So, in a move equal parts desperation and delusion, Matt jumped into a five-ton truck and drove to Portland, Oregon. His last shot. His unscheduled field trip to the gods of glass. And when he arrived? The universe wasn’t done being difficult. The truck was six inches too short for their loading dock. The warehouse guy looked him up and down and grunted, “You’re the last guy I care about today. We’ll get you loaded by five. Make yourself at home.”
So he did.
This was pre-9/11. Security was loose. Matt wandered through the plant like a man possessed until he found them: dusty, iconic, practically glowing in the dim light—stubby bottles. The kind your dad drank from in the ’70s. The kind that made you feel something just holding it. The kind that screamed, “This beer is different.”
“Can I buy those?”
“Nope. Already spoken for.”
Of course they were.
And so they sat—for two years. Untouchable. Perfect. Haunting. The stubby bottles became a symbol. A vision. The “one that got away” in glass form. All the while, Matt kept grinding. Brewing. Selling. Welding. Sleeping in short bursts. Always wondering if those bottles might come back around.
The Shrink Wrap Epiphany
By 2003, sales were up and the bills were getting paid—but the grind was still brutal. No team. No time. No end in sight. And then came the moment that nearly ended it all—not with a bang, but with a box.
Matt stood in his warehouse staring at an empty box of shrink wrap. Forty bucks at Costco. Another few months of bottling, hauling, brewing, scraping by. It wasn’t the money that broke him. It was what it represented: more of the same. More late nights. More heavy lifting. More silence. That box became a mirror, and what it reflected back was a man dangerously close to burnout.
He called his dad and said he was done. And his dad, gracious and grounded, did what good dads do. He listened. He didn’t talk him out of it. He just understood.
But the thing about being stubborn is that it doesn’t switch off with a phone call.
That night, Matt didn’t sleep much. He turned the decision over in his head like a bottle on a label machine. And by morning, something inside him snapped back into place—not with confidence, but with defiance.
One more call, he told himself. Just to check.
He called Portland again.
The stubby bottles—the ones he’d tried to buy two years ago?
“Funny you should call,” they said. “We just had a meeting. They’re for sale.”
The Phoenix Rises From Stubby Glass
He didn’t hesitate. Matt bought the bottles and brewed a new lager, naming it Phoenix—after the vanished BC mining town that had once boomed with copper but was later bulldozed into history when the mine reopened during World War II. The town never came back. But the name still carried weight.
The metaphor was almost too perfect. A town destroyed for copper. A brewery nearly buried by exhaustion. A beer born from a bottle no one else wanted.
Phoenix Lager didn’t just sell—it soared. Enough to hire a second set of hands. Enough to breathe. Enough to move the needle from barely surviving to barely thriving.
It wasn’t in the original business plan. In fact, it broke the business plan. The same plan that the banks had called “too small”? Phillips tossed it the moment those stubby bottles hit his loading dock. Because when resurrection shows up in a truckload of nostalgic glass, you don’t ask if it fits your five-year strategy.
You brew.
The Culture Revelation
The brewery was no longer just Matt and his tanks. The stubby bottles had changed that. Phoenix Lager had bought him breathing room. A few hires. A few wins. A few nights of actual sleep. For the first time since 2001, Phillips Brewing wasn’t on the edge of collapse. It was…working.
But it was also growing. And that came with its own kind of pressure.
Matt had built the business on grit, independence, and sheer force of will. But grit doesn’t scale. Welding your own tanks doesn’t build teams. And obsessing over every label, every delivery, every boil and brew won’t mean much if the people around you don’t feel like they’re part of it.
Looking back now, he’ll tell you plainly:
“Understanding the value of culture earlier would have been a really wonderful asset. It was something I didn’t really understand until it was shaky—and it’s so much more difficult to rebuild than it is to maintain.”
It wasn’t the beer that made Phillips Brewing special. Not really.
It was the way people talked about the beer.
The way the labels made you smile.
The way bartenders championed it was like it was their own.
The way employees, years later, would become owners.
Culture snuck up on him—and then demanded to be taken seriously.
It started small. A voice on a label. A song in the brewing room. A shared inside joke. Then it became something more: the belief that weird was welcome, that people mattered, that you could make great beer and have fun doing it. That craft wasn’t just the product—it was the workplace.
Years later, when Phillips Brewing became partially employee-owned, it wasn’t just a structural decision. It was a full-circle moment. A founder who’d once nearly walked away over a box of shrink wrap had come to understand that the true glue of a business isn’t steel tanks or bottle supply chains—it’s people.
Culture is what you build when no one’s watching.
It’s what stays when you finally step away from the welders and let others take the torch.
It’s what makes a burnt-out brewer with no money and no margin build a place that people don’t just work at—but believe in.
The Entrepreneur’s Paradox
Here’s what Matt Phillips understood that the banks never did: sometimes being in the trough between two waves is exactly where you need to be. He started in 2001—after the mid-’90s craft beer boom had fizzled, but before the next wave surged in 2007. Everyone said the timing was wrong. But that’s why it worked. The equipment was cheap. The competition was quiet. And no one was watching closely enough to care if he broke the rules.
While other breweries played it safe—pale lagers, predictable branding, six-pack sameness—Phillips leaned into the weird. He brewed espresso stouts, hoppy IPAs, big-format bottles sold one by one. Beers that didn’t require brand loyalty. Just curiosity.
He wasn’t trying to scale fast. He was trying to make something he would drink. That honesty, that clarity of intent, is what set Phillips Brewing apart before it ever had a market to stand in.
And maybe that’s the paradox: the very things that made him uninvestable are what made the business inevitable. The crazy plan. The high-interest debt. The stubby bottles. The long nights. The empty shrink wrap box. None of it made sense at the time. But all of it mattered.
Being in the flow doesn’t always feel like movement. Sometimes it feels like grinding. Like sleeping four hours a night. Like welding your own tanks and calling Portland again and again just to hear “No.” But it also means being ready when that “Yes” finally comes. When the bottles come through. When the beer catches fire. When the people join you. When the mission becomes more than yours alone.
That’s the trick of entrepreneurship. You don’t always know what’s working until long after it does.
The Shrink Wrap Moment: Entrepreneurship’s Real Equation
Every entrepreneur eventually faces their own shrink wrap moment. That point where the cost of continuing—forty dollars, four thousand, four million—feels insurmountable, not because of the number, but because of what it represents: more months of the same grinding exhaustion. More nights alone in the shop. More invoices. More uncertainty.
Matt Phillips hit that wall. He didn’t just think about quitting—he actually quit. Called his dad. Said the words out loud. And then, like so many before him, he slept on it. And in the morning, he didn’t feel hope or inspiration. He felt defiant. Just enough to make one more call.
That’s not motivational fluff. That’s the real math of persistence: you quit, you unquit, you try again. You weld your own tanks when the bank says no. You max out your credit cards because nobody else believes in your plan. You look at an empty box of shrink wrap and decide—somehow—that it’s still worth it.
Here’s the paradox: all the reasons Matt Phillips was told he wouldn’t succeed—his timing, his size, his stubborn independence—are exactly the reasons Phillips Brewing exists today. He wasn’t early. He wasn’t late. He was in the trough between two waves, when the gear is cheap and no one’s paying attention. And that’s where resilience gets built.
Because if you’re ready—if you’ve done the hard work, kept your eyes open, stayed in the game—sometimes the universe circles back. The bottles that were out of reach two years ago have suddenly become available. The beer that was born from desperation becomes the one that defines your brand. And the culture you finally get to build with others ends up being the most valuable thing of all.
As a fellow Victorian entrepreneur, I don’t see Phillips’ story as a fairy tale. I see it as a blueprint. Not for brewing beer—but for surviving the build. For trusting that meaning can come from mess. For remembering that perseverance isn’t pretty. It’s welding. It’s bootstrapping. It’s forty-dollar decisions that somehow change everything.
So here’s to the founders standing at their own Costco moment. Here’s to the ones who’ve been told their paradigm is wrong by people who’ve never welded anything in their life. Here’s to staying in the trough—to stubby bottles, to debt-funded dreams, to making one more call. Here’s to doubling down when the odds are stacked against you—because that’s often when the universe finally calls back.
Josh Nash 
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