How John Walker Built Athletic Brewing Into a Non-Alcoholic Giant

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There you are in the liquor store, or the grocery store, or the Target. Maybe it’s Dry January or Sober October. You’re facing down a wall of non-alcoholic beers, because everyone is in the NA game now, from the conglomerates to the craft brewers. How do you pick from the dozens of options? Specifically, how do you tell which companies are making non-alc beer because they’re passionate about it, and which ones are making it just because they saw the market trend forecast?

I know at least one company whose non-alcoholic philosophy is in the right place, and it’s not simply because I’ve tried their beers, though I have sampled many cans from Athletic Brewing Company. It’s because when I hopped on a video call with John Walker, co-founder and chief operating officer of the largest dedicated non-alc brewer in the country, his Zoom background told me everything I needed to know.

“This is a mash tun with a bunch of fresh hops in it,” Walker told me with a slight grin, describing the image behind him, which looked to me like a spaceship. Instead of taking video calls with a hyper-curated bookshelf behind the 44-year-old’s floating head, he chose an overhead shot of a brewing vessel that no one but beer nerds would recognize.

Yes, Walker is indeed a beer nerd of the highest order. Before founding Athletic with CEO Bill Shufelt, Walker was the head brewer of a craft brewery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Just eight years after leaving that job, he’s now the COO of a non-alcoholic beer empire that is valued at $800 million. And there are no signs of slowing: In 2025, the brewery expects to open a new San Diego facility that will be capable of producing 750,000 barrels a year, 300,000 more than their Milford, Connecticut brewery at their headquarters where Walker works, and 600,000 more than their current San Diego output.

How did Walker make that jump from award-winning, small-time brewer to an industry leader on the national stage? (Or, more accurately, the international stage, as Athletic beer is available in Canada, the U.K. and parts of Europe too.) What are the habits he cultivated throughout his career that led to his success? And do Athletic teammates (their word for employees) just drink non-alcoholic beer in the office all day? I asked Walker all of this and more during our interview in December as the company geared up for Dry January — or as they’re calling it, Athletic January.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

InsideHook: Can you set the scene when you were first experimenting with non-alcoholic beer? What did that look like when you and Bill were first like trying to figure out recipes for Athletic?

John Walker: I met Bill [in 2017] and at that point he was so excited to do something with somebody because I think he had been lonely on this project for a long time. Before I moved [to Connecticut] from New Mexico, he had ordered this pilot system — a three and a half barrel brewing system, which is great, we still have it, we still use it every single week — and it showed up at this warehouse that we rented, which had no utilities, no floor drains, no water hookups, nothing.

[He was like], “So can we plug it in and brew?” I was like, no, not at all. It’s going to be a very long time before we can do that, even to get the electricity to it. But I had some stuff that I had fabricated from my homebrewing days prior. We jury-rigged a turkey fryer, a keggle that I had made out of an old keg. We bought some old Gatorade jugs and made a mash tun and a water vessel. [Editor’s note: If you want to see that setup, scroll down on this page.] We were literally doing five gallons at a time, homebrew scale.

It was trial and error and trying to figure out what the best process was going to be, and also a process that was going to be scalable because brewing is a complex beast in terms of engineering and fluid dynamics. How can you make this thing work at a five-gallon scale and then at a 200-barrel scale?

I love that you still have the original setup that Bill bought.

It’s one of the most important things we have, honestly. That’s where all the ideas come from. Part of what’s really attractive about brewing for all the people in it is it’s super creative and culinary and scientific. It’s like another world of secret chefs and wizards. If you look under our roof, we’re experimenting all the time.

If brewers want to make something with doughnuts or with a new hop varietal or a new grain varietal, whatever it is, they can buy it, they can trial it on the pilot system. If it works, we’ll scale it up and launch it on e-commerce and see how it does — like Free Wave, that was the first batch that came out of the pilot process, which is now one of our most successful flagships.

We’re running this story during Dry January, so I wanted to ask: How important is that month to you? Is this your Super Bowl?

To some extent it is, mainly because of the amount of trial that you get from people who wouldn’t otherwise join you in November, for instance. You get this big cultural momentum event that is bringing people into this category and they’re reviewing their year past, their year in advance, and they’re like, what can I do to make things a little better? That said, I’d have to imagine that we get a pretty close number of trials in a cooler at a beach during the summer.

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Talking about your personal routine and habits, what does your morning routine look like before a day at the office?

I’m the first riser in my family typically. Coffee is first and foremost, then dogs, get them out, get them fed, consume more coffee. If it’s cold, I’m going to make sure the fire is on because a cup of coffee by a warm fire is just about as good as it gets. Then, assuming nobody else is up, I’ll do emails and check in on the day and just prepare, get in the mindset. Then I’ll wake my children up and prepare them for school and make lunches that I hope that they eat.

What kind of fireplace are we talking?

We’ve got a pellet stove and a wood stove. The pellet stove is nice because my whole family can click it on and off, and I can also require my son to carry the [pellet] bags up as exercise and he’ll get payment. But tree work and firewood and splitting and playing with chainsaws is therapeutic for me. I love that.

In terms of blowing off steam and relaxing, you like to get out the chainsaw?

I don’t have the mountains around me like I used to, but still marching into the woods with a chainsaw, finding a tree that’s fallen and harvesting it and then making firewood out of it is very peaceful and enjoyable for me. Really any sort of outdoor activity. If I can find the time to snowboard, there is no other time in my life where I’m less in my head than when I’m flying down a mountain on a snowboard. I think that’s the only time my brain just shuts off.

Have you been snowboarding your whole life or is that like a relatively new thing?

I learned when I was 24, 25. I had no idea. But I learned out West and quickly fell in love with it.

Do you have a normal fitness routine?

I guess I’d prioritize time outdoors versus time doing fitness. With fitness, I try to be pretty efficient. I like rowing because it’s very effective in a short period of time. Between the business and family and all the other things in life, just trying to have something that’s very accessible that doesn’t require a lot of gearing up, gearing down and then time spent.

Do you have a rowing machine at home or do you go to a gym?

At home. Yeah, again, I try to consolidate. I like efficiency. Like getting ready in the morning: my daughter has to brush her hair, so I know that that’s 15 minutes that I can get on the rower. I’ll try to squeeze that in.

What rower do you have?

I bought a Concept2 when I moved to Connecticut. I’d always wanted one. It’s fairly analog — just one of those tiny screens, which I honestly love because there’s nothing else. I can see my speed and my distance and the time spent, but beyond that, I can still look around, I can listen to a podcast, I can watch the birds.

I read that you and Bill put together an employee handbook at the beginning when you founded Athletic in 2017 that focused a lot on the culture you wanted to build, and that it hasn’t changed a ton since then. What are the key pillars of that?

So “it hasn’t changed a ton” — that depends on who you ask. [laughs] Thematically, it’s all still there. Very sound, very important. What it comes down to is integrity, communication, hard work, collaboration and just generally being good.

We’re a very communication- and collaboration-heavy company. We are not shy about asking questions and noodling in other people’s business so that we can each learn a little bit and understand what’s going on, but also poke holes. Anybody’s allowed to come into my world and poke holes. Nobody should ever be scared to come up to me and be like, “Why’d you do that?”

And then giving time back: There’s Two for the Trails [an in-house conservation grant program; last year, Athletic donated $2 million]. We’ve got Two for the Team, so every teammate is an owner on day one of their employment. We were just going for: what do we want out of a workplace? Great benefits, retention. Those things are important to us. There’s a little more structure around that handbook these days, but all those sentiments and human necessities are still in there.

You’re in your office right now, so what do you have around you? What’s unique about your workspace?

I’ve got an old bike that a friend and I built together. I don’t ride it very often, but I like it because my friend was like, “Hey, do you want to learn how to build a bike?” And he showed me how. I’ve also got a whiteboard, a fridge, too many notebooks and not much else. It’s pretty sparse.

Are you a fan of handwritten notes over digital tools?

Yeah, I love hand notes. I love crossing things off. For me, and this is going back to early brewing for me, I would learn by watching and taking these horrendous, just the worst penmanship possible notes because I wasn’t looking at the paper. I was trying to watch somebody and draw and document what they were doing. Then I’d go home at night, I would transcribe them once and I’d take them back. I’d watch the same process, make notes on my notes, and then I would go back and usually do a final edit in a new notebook.

I still do digital, but I don’t know that there’s quite the satisfaction there. I find myself emailing myself more often than not as a reminder.

Anybody’s allowed to come into my world and poke holes. Nobody should ever be scared to come up to me and be like, why’d you do that?

Talking about the bike, is that something you’ve had for years or did you build that in Connecticut?

No, I built this in New Mexico. My friend, he’s a bike geek, and he’s got dozens of frames and miscellaneous parts in his shed. And one day he was like, “Hey, you should have a bike — we should build a bike.” I was like, I have no idea what I would do. But I said, okay, cool.

This might be too on the nose, but that feels like a representation of Athletic. You didn’t know how to build a bike, but you were excited at the idea and accomplished it with a friend. In 2017, you were the head brewer at a craft brewery in Santa Fe, but then you partnered with Bill and together built a company that’s now valued at $800 million. What has helped you most to grow into this much more consequential role?

A couple of things come to mind: Bill in general, team and quality.

Bill is just a phenomenal partner and human and person. Part of me wanting to join him on his wild adventure — or what was considered really wild at the time — was largely a function of meeting him. I had looked at a bunch of brewing jobs here, there and everywhere, and he was great, and his vision and mission about what he wanted to do was really valuable for me.

The fact that he and I can have a conversation in this tone that you and I are having over the hardest (and best) things we’ll ever encounter is so important to me, just in my human-ness and needing a calm, steady environment. Neither of us are afraid of challenges, but I think when people get erratic and out of control, that is what’s really unsettling. So none of us do that. We all tackle these things with a cool, calm, collected mindset, which is super important.

The team is phenomenal. Most of our early teammates are still here, and a lot of them are in director roles and they’re just kicking ass. The concept of standing on the shoulders of giants is what comes to mind when I think about the team around us.

Then the other part, like what makes it doable? Because, yeah, it is kind of daunting, especially when you say it out loud. But it’s our fixation on the important cultural things, like Two for the Trails, Two for the Team and then the dedication to quality. If you know that, at the end of the day, you and your team are totally dedicated to quality, day in and day out, no matter what, and you have a company and people who are there to support you, and you know that you’re allowed to execute the best you can, it just makes it…not easy, but totally doable and accomplishable.

One final thing I’ve just been wondering about: Do you have refrigerators fully stocked with Athletic beer in the office that people are just drinking all day since it’s non-alcoholic?

Yeah, we’ve got fridges. I’ve got a fridge in here with beer. I mean, think about all the sensory [quality assurance] that has to happen on any given day. We’ve got two tastings a day with like 10 people in each panel. We’ve got people drinking beer all over the place. And it is nice. Everybody’s still calm, cool, collected, but enjoying a good beer.