 And welcome to Moments with Melinda. I am your host, Melinda Moulton. And my guest today is Sean Lawson. Hey, Sean, how you doing? I'm doing great. Good morning, Melinda. Thank you for having me on. Well, thank you for spending this snowy morning with me instead of racing up to Mad River to get your runs in. But I am really glad to have this time with you. Let me share with my viewers who don't know you. I'm sure most people do, but let me share with them who you are. Sean Lawson is a naturalist, forester, environmentalist, social justice soldier, lover of wildlife, conservationist, community builder, entrepreneur, business leader, philanthropist, beer brewer, and devoted husband and father of two daughters. Is that about right, Sean? Wow, that is impressive. Thank you very much, Melinda. Can you send me that list? I will. You'll see it. It's going to be up on YouTube. So you will see it. So Sean, you grew up in New Jersey. Tell me a little bit about growing up in New Jersey. I did the garden state. And although New Jersey gets a bad rap, it was a pretty decent place to grow up. I grew up right near the beach, the Jersey Shore. So not the Jersey Shore that you see in the MTV show, but the real Jersey Shore where regular people do regular things like hang out and go swimming. And I spent a lot of time growing up chasing fish and blue claw crabs. I was kind of an avid outdoors person. And growing up by the ocean, it was a great place to grow up. And like a lot of kids from New Jersey early on, we started making trips to Vermont to go skiing. And it helped that I had family here in Vermont too, because we'd come up to see my uncle. He was a professor at UVM for just about 45 years in psychology, Robert Lawson. And my grandmother had a lake house on Lake Moray where we'd go to visit in the summer and spend a couple of weeks at the lake house recreating and more fishing and water skiing. And I got hooked on Vermont early on, but New Jersey was not a bad place to grow up. But thankfully I don't have any Jersey accent, no coffee. Well, I'm from Pennsylvania and I used to travel, me and my friends used to travel to Port Jarvis to drink. Drink beer probably. And all we had to do was drive across the Jersey border because drinking back then was much more liberal in New Jersey than it was in Pennsylvania. So what was your favorite beer back then? My father drank Rolling Rock and had it on tap in his den. What was your favorite beer back then? Oh gosh, I remember one of the first beers that I got turned on to was the black and gold Miller Genuine Draft. And then in college, although it was not quite legal drinking age, it had just changed in Vermont. It had been 18 in Vermont. So it was a bit more liberal back then. And the beers, my favorite beers were whatever's on sale. So as a college student, it's like, what's the cheapest? Rolling Rock was in the rotation. Oh my gosh, Milwaukee's best. But you were a Miller High Life guy, what can I say? Yeah, I still enjoy it. I'm an equal opportunity beverage drinker and enjoyer. So I don't turn my nose up at macro beers. They have their place and their time. So yeah, a Miller High Life, it's called the Champagne of beers for a reason. You're kind of an equal opportunity guy anyway about everything. So you used to come to Vermont and visit your grandmother and your uncle taught at UVM. So what brought you here to live? What finally brought you here to settle? It was choosing the University of Vermont, which is a fun story when I was looking at colleges. And my cousin, Steve was a student at the time at UVM. He's three years older than I am, and that's my uncle, the professor, Robert, his son. And so Steve hosted me for a tour. He took me around the campus. I had a good time visiting, going to some of his classes, learning more about the school. But it was that evening that really sealed the deal because he took me out to go visit with his friends. And it's a Tuesday night. And he's like, Hey, I want to go over. My buddy's having a keg party at his apartment. And I'm like, it's a Tuesday and you're having a keg party. He's like, yeah, and there's this band playing down at the bar called Nectar's. And we're going to go check them out after the kegger. And so I was like, cool. And we went down to Nectar's. And what do you know? There's this band in 1988. Called fish. That had about 30 people at the bar there. And I had such a good time that evening. I was hooked on. UVM and I decided that's where I would go to school. And that's how I, that's how I ended up in Vermont full time. That's outstanding. What we can give credit to fish and Nectar's and. And they're all still around as are you. So tell us a little bit about. The nonprofit organization keeping track that you worked at one of your, I think one of your earlier. You know, careers. And you were more out of Jericho. Tell us a little bit about that nonprofit. Yeah, that was a, those years were incredible. It was very formative. And I think it's a, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you uh, you know, you know what? Those years were incredible. It was very formative for me as a, as an aspiring naturalist and. As a forester to spend that time with Sue Morris so Susan Morris is. Um, she has many things. She is a wildlife. Guru. She's a wildlife purposes. Tracker. She's a wildlife habitat specialist. She's an amazing photographer. She writes brilliantly and she's a walking encyclopedia of all things wildlife and their habitats. So when I, Mad River features, like Mad River Glen has this thread that runs through my whole life in Vermont starting in college when I first skied, there I hadn't skied at Mad River before I went to college. And so at the time I had it all the thread ties things together is that I was a ski patroller at Mad River Glen back in the mid 90s, first as a volunteer and then as a paid professional. And I only, I had an esteemed career as a pro patroller for one year at the end of which I broke my femur which was pretty a pretty devastating injury. I spent nine days in the hospital. But like with every sort of major challenge or really significant problem or even in tragedy, there's opportunity. And the opportunity for me was to take a fresh look at what I was doing for work. And so that summer I was looking around at job opportunities where I could get around still with a cane. I was using a cane and I was rehabbing and I saw this job for a park naturalist at Brighton State Park up in Island Pond. And I was able to land the job and that really was started my avocation as a naturalist. And so it was through that experience that then the next year I proposed to the newly formed Mad River Glen cooperative that we started naturalist program and start to educate people about the outdoors and incorporate that into the mission of the mountain to preserve and protect for other skiing and recreational access that, hey, maybe we should have an educational component. And the board loved it. The general manager back there then was Boomer and he was supportive of the idea. And so we started the naturalist program and it was shortly after I started that program that I connected with Sue Morris by going to one of her presentations. She puts on a great slideshow and she's a captivating speaker and she has an amazing sense of humor as well. And so I met her and then I don't know how the opportunity for the job came up. I don't recall exactly, but I applied for and landed the job with keeping track that was a growing nonprofit at the time four or five people with a mission to do citizen science training and wildlife education and to train people how to use track and sign in their local community to inform planning and conservation in their local community. And so that time that I got to spend with Sue in the field and driving around to do various programs, I learned so much about tracking and about the wildlife that inhabit the North country here. And she's just a really fun person to be around. She has a great sense of humor and she is a way of captivating groups when whether she's giving a slideshow or she's out in the woods with a group of folks that are doing a program with her. So it was a really formative time. I worked for keeping track for about six years and I led their youth program. So I focused most of my time on doing programs both in schools and out in the field for school groups. Well, hats off to Sue Morris. Yeah. Watching Sue really truly. And I sort of see you as kind of being the Mr. Rogers of the nature track. Tracks and that for Glenn. And that program's still going strong. Am I correct? Yes, still going strong. I'm still involved in the program. I've led a handful of programs up there this year and we're off to a great start for the season. We've had some renewed interest in the programming this year. Well, I was in the base box the other day at lunch and some guy goes, look, look. And we looked out and from the bottom of the practice hill running over towards the board for the ski school was a white ermine with black tips on his ears and black on his tail. Awesome. He was racing. So anyway, this is a little controversial but H191 is heading into the legislature this year. And I worked on banning the leg hole trap with Iris Mugenthaler all the way back in the 1990s. What's your position on leg hole trapping? You know, I haven't really considered that issue. I've given that much thought, which has been an interesting journey as a business owner because when we started a business 15 years ago, our approach and our sort of strategy was let's not get involved in politics. Let's remain apolitical. But the last few years have shown us that saying and doing nothing is taking a position and that we have a responsibility as a business to use our voice and our platform to advocate for the values that are central to how we run our company and who we want to be in the world as a business. So we found it more important to lean into the idea of taking a stand on social and racial justice issues and the issues here in Vermont of affordable housing and living wages and child care. Those are all things that are central to us. As a wildlife enthusiast, I'm a strong advocate for a balanced approach to managing our landscape. And I support folks that want to ethically hunt animals, especially folks that harvest deer for that it's an important source of their diet over the course of a year. So I try to walk the fine line of being both a conservationist and a pragmatic business owner. Well, absolutely. And I really honor you in that. So, Sean, I want to tell my viewers your website. It's longswithanest.com. I suggest you go to the website because it's so much fun. It's colorful, it's fun, it's informative. So when did you realize that you had a knack for beer brewing? The origin story of Lawson's Finest and of my journey here in Vermont. And it was while I was a student, I was a junior. And my friend, Matt Robinson, who just called me a couple of the days ago, we lost track of each other for a number of years. But we reconnected in the last year, which has been really great. And so he invited me over one day. He said, hey, you want to come try some of my home brew? And I was like, well, heck yeah. So I went over to his apartment and he cracked open a couple of bottles. And he poured it into a couple of glasses. And I started sipping on it. I was like, wow, you made this? He's like, yeah, I made this. I'm like, this is great. This is better than anything that I can buy in the store. Can you show me how you made it? And he's like, of course, I would love to. And so I did what every aspiring home brewer does, which is run out to the store, buy a copy of Charlie Papasian's The Complete Joy of Home Brewing, and a starter kit, and a big soup pot, and a couple of plastic buckets, and a glass carboy. And a couple of weeks later, Matt came over to my apartment. And we were cooking up my first batch of home brew on the kitchen stove. Of course, which I then promptly didn't pay close enough attention to, and the infamous boilover happened, where right when it hits, comes to a boil, it gets really frothy and foamy. And it likes to just pour right out of the top of the pot and make a big sticky mess on the stove top, which is why partners and spouses are often not fans of their home brewing partners, because they make a big sticky mess in the kitchen. Oh, I got a great story in the fact that you connect with it. So he tasted your first home brew, and how was it? It was pretty good. I remember it well. I was inspired by the beers that Catamount Brewing was making at the time, and the Vermont Pub and Brewery. So that's when a couple of years into college, I discovered really flavorful beer that moved on from the Miller Genuine Draft and the Rolling Rock and Special to the Burley Irish Ale and the Bombay Grab and the Maple Ale that the Vermont Pub and Brewery and their Spruce Tip Ale. Those are all beers I remember fondly, and Catamount Brewing, their Porter. And so I made a Maple Wheat Ale was my first home brew. And so Maple is featured prominently in the beers that I've made ever since then. I've always been fascinated by using this uniquely Vermont ingredient in beer. And it's very healthy for you. It is very anti-harmful. So from that, then we're going to get into how it grew into where it is today, which is this extraordinary. But tell me a little bit about meeting your wife and your business partner. Karen, tell us a little bit about that. Again, the thread runs through Mad River Glen. And so I was living here in the Mad River Valley, and this is back in 1999. And Karen and one of her friends came up to Mad River Glen for one of our popular Full Moon snowshoe events. And at the time, we were doing a potluck dinner with Before the Snowshoe. And so she came to the potluck dinner with her friend. I certainly noticed her. And yet at the time, I was dating another woman. And so we didn't really connect then. She, in her words, she could tell my love life was not on. And so not available. And so a year later, I was single. And she came back to do another Full Moon snowshoe. And we hit it off. And we conversed quite a bit on the snowshoe. And it turned out through that in the small world that she had interviewed with my uncle when she was being considered as a student for the Masters and Public Administration at UVM. So she applied for and got into the MPA program. And my uncle, Robert Lawson, was instrumental in helping to get that program off the ground when he was the dean of the Graduate College. And so she had interviewed with my uncle. And she's like, are you related to Robert Lawson? And I'm like, yeah, he's my uncle. So it's a small world. And then after that, the fun part of the story was we didn't see each other for a few weeks. And there was a spark there. But we hadn't exchanged phone numbers or anything. And a couple of weeks later, it was February 6th, which is Bob Marley's birthday. And we both ended up at the old Bluetooth for a reggae band and an event celebrating Bob Marley's birthday. And there was clearly something. Love was in the air when we met up that night. And we danced. And it was a full moon. And we ended the evening with our first kiss. And from there, it was a year later, we got engaged. And we were married in 2001. So it's a pretty romantic love story. Beautiful love story. So Sean, I was sorry to hear about the passing of your dad. You've been so very, very proud of you. Can you tell us a little bit about him? Yeah, thank you for asking. I appreciate that. The family background on my dad's side is pretty interesting because his mother, Isabel, emigrated from Ireland when she was a wee lass from Belfast. She came over on a boat. And they went through Ellis Island. They ended her family ended up in New Orleans somehow for a period of time, but not for very long. And then they came back up to New York City because there was a pretty distinct Irish community in the Bronx. And so they moved to the Bronx where there were other families that had emigrated from Ireland. And that's where my dad grew up in kind of a, I don't know if hard scrabble is the right word, but I heard a lot of stories about how little to nothing that they had growing up. They had a one bedroom apartment. And my grandmother had met her husband, Robert, through working and they got married and had three kids. My dad was the middle of the three kids. His older brother was Robert and his younger sister was May. And so they grew up in the Bronx and a one bedroom apartment and a walkup. So I forget they had a whole bunch of flights. There was no elevator. There was a dumb waiter. And so of course my uncle and my dad were prone to pranks. So we heard a few stories about using the dumb waiter to jump from their side of the apartment over into the apartment of an attractive young lady that lived across the hall when the parents weren't around so that they could visit. And so my uncle who passed away this past year put together this amazing little book, a tribute to my dad. It's really the story of both of their lives growing up. And so after he, one more just quick story about my grandmother because like what was reflective of their upbringing was that he remembers times of dinner was getting a beef marrow bone from the market and whatever he worked at a vegetable stand and they would get some of the scraps and some of the seconds or the discards that were still edible but were not the prettiest. They were like, before gleaning was a word that's what they were doing. They were gleaning from the fruit and produce stand. And that would be dinner would be some barley, a marrow bone and whatever vegetables they could scrape together in a big pot. Beef barley stew was one of my grandmother's specialty dishes and she had just the right seasonings to make what would otherwise be a pretty meager offering into a pretty tasty meal. So from the Bronx, they moved to New Jersey. That's how I ended up growing up in New Jersey. And he went to, I mean, there are so many stories I could tell about my dad. He went to Mammoth College. He was not a very good student at first. He was more interested in partying than studying and he managed to fail himself out. And so my grandmother and grandfather kicked him out of the house and said, you're on your own. And so that really taught him the value of hard work. And so he went out and he got a full-time job. He reapplied to get back into Mammoth College, which is now Mammoth University. And he worked and paid his way through the rest of college, which was pretty impressive. And he went into accounting. He cut his teeth in New York City working at some of the big CPA firms. And then after gaining some experience, he and my uncle on my mother's side, Frank Grasso and another one of his friends decided to strike out on their own and form their own accounting firm. And they went into business together and over the years, my dad had a succession of accounting firms. And so I didn't realize it until I was a few years into business that in a way, like he was really an entrepreneur. I always thought of him as a businessman, but really he was an entrepreneur because he wanted to go into business for himself and work for himself. And so he was very proud that Lawson was the first name on the masthead at the companies that he started and worked with a team of people because they were partnerships. So the teamwork was essential. Well, the acorn does not fall very far from the mighty open and entrepreneur. Definitely business people. And as you are, I mean, you have built up a sensational company with Lawson's liquids. And your products are adored and early on, you can only find them if you've got to healthy living. I'm shot in Burlington. If you had to get there on a Wednesday by 11, lined up for 40 feet with our carts and they'd just be picking up. But anyway, you're a sensation. So you built your brewery, your tap room and your retail store in Watesfield in 2018, your wife Karen runs your social impact program, your SIP, which is extraordinary in the amount of money that you folks donate to the most important things that we all should be focused on is remarkable. You were named Vermont Small Business of the Year in 2020 and you received the Dean Davis Outstanding Vermont Business Award. And I would venture that you've probably won many more awards and accolades. And as we're coming to the end of this show, I want to dig into your brain a little bit about what do you tell young people, your two daughters today about the world they are growing up in and how do we teach them to navigate and advocate? Wow, well, that's the hardest question of all, Melinda, because it's a complicated world out there and it seems more challenging to navigate every year. And so what I focus on in the positive aspect is first, be safe, stay safe and know what the real hazards are out there and follow your passion is really what I am trying to instill in them as young adults is that the world is full of opportunity. And so if you really focus on what it is that is important to you, that resonates with you internally, that feels right and you work hard at it that you can achieve almost anything. And so my older daughter is going into college next year. She's a senior in high school and so she's interested in studying business management. And I've told her, you may take those classes and find out that really business management isn't for you and maybe there's some other business your type of aspect of it that you're interested in, whether it's the marketing or the sales aspect or maybe it's not business at all. I was an environmental studies major and I ended up in the beer business. So you never know where life is. Or maybe she's interested in becoming the CEO. She might be. Which might be where she lands, right? Yeah, yeah. So with the right set of life experiences and education that's a real possibility for her someday which is pretty exciting. But we also think about it in terms of follow your own passion. We don't want to saddle our kids with the burden of the business. And so if they have no interest in the business that we've created, that's fine. I don't expect that they should or that they have to get involved in the business. However, they both have jobs there and they've been working, they've worked their way up just like every young adult that gets a job with Lawson's Finest. You start in the kitchen at the dishwasher and you wash dishes. And as you gain skills and experience there you do a few more things in the kitchen and if you're interested you can move out onto the floor and be a floater, runner, a busser which is sort of a beer tender in training. But of course you have to be 21 to serve and to sell the beer. So they have a few years to go yet. So well, bravo to you and to Karen for your beautiful daughters. So now you are a stargazer I understand and you have the SkyGuide app and you are a universal thinker. So what is your vision for the future of our planet and our species? Oh gosh, well we need to address the climate crisis really head on. That's the most significant challenge and it's really right there in front of us if we can move away from fossil fuels. And I worked on a project as a senior when I was at the University of Vermont in environmental studies that was a practicum and it asked just this question to vision the future and I tried to envision what it would it be like in an ideal world. And even back then that was more than 30 years ago and it was clear that it's right in front of us that the power of the sun can fuel our planet in a way that creates clean and green energy. So I really feel like solar power and the electrification of our transportation and heating and cooling and energy systems is that's the promise of the future to get to a more carbon neutral planet. And then I think there's just the earth is so resilient in its systems and if we allow the earth to recover from all the abuse of that humankind has subjected it to over the last few hundred years she can recover quickly. So I love the half earth mission I can't articulate it quite accurately but you're familiar with it and this premise that if we protect EO Wilson and if we protect half the earth we're well on our way to building a resilient planet. And you're going 100% solar I understand. We have our next project coming online this spring it's in progress. So the electrical work is largely done and we're upgrading the power to the buildings down at Madover Canoe Road. And so that project will bring us to generating right here in Watesfield, Vermont at nearly the 45th latitude all more energy at least as much if not more energy in the form of electricity than we use each year. So I'm really proud of that. And we set a goal to do it by 2025 and we'll beat that goal by two years. And so once that's completed we'll start envisioning the next three to five years what are the steps that we can take to become more carbon neutral overall as a company and continue to reduce our energy in our carbon footprint. Wow. Well, you know we're out of time Sean and I could talk to you forever and I know my viewers would love to hear about you forever. So thank you for giving us the world. Thank you for giving us that little sip of sunshine and all of the double and triple and little sips of hope and happiness and you are a bright star. You and Karen and your daughters are a bright light in the world. And I wanna thank you for being with me today and all that you do for Vermont and especially for the Madover Valley and to all of my viewers out there going down to Watesfield and check out Lawson's it's right there on Route 100 and it's just a beautiful place to be and I know probably most of my viewers are certainly loving your little sips, right? Excellent. Well, thank you for all those kind words Melinda. I really appreciate it. I appreciate the opportunity to speak to your viewers and if they wanna learn more about our social impact program or anything about Lawson's finest or our core values and our mission and vision for the future, Lawson's finest.com is where you can find it all. Lawson's finest.com, you bet my friend. Well listen, we get a snowstorm brewing out there and I know you wanna get over to Mad River and put in some runs. So I'm gonna say goodbye and wish all my viewers a beautiful day and stay safe out there.