Content area
Full Text
La. 421 cuts a crooked swath through the rolling West Feliciana countryside a few miles-north of Jackson. Packs of buzzards and deep potholes line the tiny highway. Slow-moving pickups carry hay bales to nearby farms, holding up impatient motorists in the process.
In the vicinity, amid the pine trees, Baptist churches and barbed-wire fences, a small microbrewery called Rikenjaks is making its mark: not on the landscape -- unless you know exactly where it is, you'll likely miss it -- but on Louisiana's burgeoning beer industry.
The company opened less a year ago and already has had to increase its brewing capacity. "Our biggest problem right now is keeping up with the demand," said Rikenjaks president Theda Little.
Little and her husband, Jack, started the business with a loan from an industrial consulting firm they own and a small line of credit from the Bank of Jackson.
The idea was born two years ago out of an obsession with home brewing shared with friend Rick Nyberg, who worked with Jack at the Riverbend nuclear power plant. Nyberg is now Rikenjaks' brewmaster and a minority partner in the business.
"Every free minute, they were home brewing," Theda Little said. "They went totally berserk -- they were obsessive-compulsive. I was mostly an observer, but I dabbled in it as well.
"We would have these grandiose conversations while we were sampling the product. One day I said, 'Let's start a microbrewery.' And they said, 'Yeah, we should do that.'"
And so they set out to turn their whims into reality. Theda Little researched the permitting process -- to her dismay, she quickly learned that being in the beer business also meant continually dealing with a mountain of tax-related paper work.
Nyberg and Jack Little, both engineers, began designing and modifying equipment to save on the cost of buying new brewing machines. With the help of computer programs they also formulated the company's first three beers: Old Hardhead Scottish Ale, Real Ale and American Ale.
The Littles and Nyberg developed the brewery inside a small, three-room building on the same 23-acre site where the Littles live. A noisy native of the area, a red pileated woodpecker (called "lordgods" by the locals adorns the company's bottle labels, bumper stickers and...