What started with “poor decisions and lots of circumstances,” COOP Ale Works has grown into a company with a $20 million expansion plan at the former 45th Infantry Armory. Despite feeling like an outsider in the brewing community from not being a brewer himself, Daniel Mercer, CEO of Coop Ale Works, sees positives in his business-focused skill set.

“Once you get into the core of it, we ’re taking this brewery model, and we ’re expanding it and adding other new businesses to our model that put us right back in the same boat that we were in 10, 12 years ago,” Mercer explained. “We ’re getting into the hotel business or we ’re getting into this culinary business that involves a taproom in a restaurant and a speakeasy and all these event support spaces that have culinary features and a pool club, bar. Banks have been interested but not receptive to the total deal structure and scale. It ’s a large deal, and when you take a package to a bank that says you ’re going to spend $36 million over 20 months, including the money we ’ve already spent over the past couple of years in development, it becomes a scenario where virtually every bank is casting doubt, and then your solution, there, is to try to find alternative methods to finance your deal.”

“We spend a lot of time talking about diversifying industry in Oklahoma, and a lot of that talk is around, either, high-impact or high-level concept industries,” Mercer said. “Whether it ’s biomedical research or autoimmune disease treatment or mechanical devices... things centered around the oil and gas industry that may be new technologies and hardware technologies. But there are also plenty of other industries that just aren't ’t near as sexy, frankly. And I think, in Oklahoma in particular, we ’ve done a great job of focusing on the resources that we have. Particularly around the OU Health Science Center, around the oil and gas base that exists here and all the new technologies that have sprung out of that industry over the past, say, 20 years.”

https://coopaleworks.com/