Deborah Carey, founder and President
New Glarus Brewing Company
New Glarus Brewing Co. was not the first company Deborah Carey founded but the third, the craft brewery founder told listeners at the closing keynote address at the 2026 Wisconsin Economic Summit in Eau Claire.
Among the lessons her entrepreneurial journey brought her: “You need to start small,” she said. “Starting small allows you to make mistakes you can recover from.”
Starting the company was as much a personal decision as a business decision, she noted: Carey sought to find a way to return to her roots in Wisconsin while also allowing her husband to put to work the expertise he’d built during a career in the brewing industry.
“I felt like Wisconsin was the right place for this business,” she said. “We have a long history of brewing… and we support each other in times of distress.”
After purchasing a building her husband had come across during a quick research trip, the young company brewed about 3,000 barrels in 1993, Carey said.
How Spotted Cow was born
Within the first five years, the company grew to produce about 10,000 barrels annually and even won an international specialty beer competition, but was still in search of a product that would really allow it to make a name for itself with consumers and would become its signature offering.
Carey had a yeast she liked “that produced a pleasant flavor,” and inspiration struck for the Spotted Cow name during a road trip around the English countryside.
“People are either going to think this is really funny and they’re going to love it, or they’re going to think it’s the stupidest idea ever and we’ll go out of business,” Carey recalled thinking.
Becoming a household name
Fortunately the farmhouse ale with a quirky name was a hit. Despite making a decision to sell only in Wisconsin, by 2006 the company was brewing 86,000 barrels a year in a building that had only been meant to brew 30,000.
This brought its own challenges as the brewery scrambled to keep up with demand from establishments serving their product on tap. “If you let them run out of something that is supposed to make them money on a Friday night, they will not forgive you,” said Carey.
That led to the construction of the company’s current hilltop brewing facility, a $21 million project that opened in 2008. That facility is now undertaking another expansion, an estimated $55 million project expected to be complete in 2027.
As eye-popping as those figures might seem to a business owner who bought their first equipment for $117,000 at a foreclosure sale in Appleton, Carey said she has learned that “you cannot save your way to making more money. You have to, at a certain point, invest.”
Carey emphasized the role New Glarus had played in the brewery’s success, recalling how neighbors would offer to pick up their kids from school or would order pizza delivery for them when they saw them working around the clock at the brewery to get it up and running in those early years.
“At the end of the day,” she said, “I’m really proud to be a part of Wisconsin and the New Glarus community.”
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