Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Ben & Eve Passmore. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Ben & Eve , thank you so much for joining us and offering your lessons and wisdom for our readers. One of the things we most admire about you is your generosity and so we’d love if you could talk to us about where you think your generosity comes from.
At the most basic level, our shared desire to live generously comes from the awareness that everything we possess has been given generously to us!
By American standards, we didn’t have a lot. As kids, we both often went without things or experiences that our middle-class peers enjoyed.
But as we grew up and saw the way so much of the rest of the world lives, we became increasingly aware of the “wealth” we actually possess/contain:
Eve: I was blessed to be born and raised in a loving home, with hard-working, compassionate parents.
Finances may have been “tight” for most of my life, but I’ve always known I could improve my situation.
Through relatively little effort of my own, I’ve been physically, mentally and emotionally strong.
I’ve been given a large network of supportive people who have cheered me on every step of the way.
I was raised in a home which valued faith in a benevolent higher power, so believing that my life is in good hands has come easily to me. The confidence and courage that belief produces is immeasurably valuable!
I could go on and on, but I’ll get to the point instead:
If I thought that I had somehow earned all of this goodness in my life, I’d probably feel compelled to protect it and keep it for myself.
The awareness that we both had nothing to do with our blessed start in life, (and relatively little to do with the blessing that followed) makes us want to share it with others.
If we can pass along even a little of our [freely-given] abundance, we get to help put someone else in the same position of blessing.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
We are husband & wife founders/operators of a local brewpub in Central Florida. Prior to moving here, we spent 11 years overseas with our children, doing non-profit humanitarian work. One of the projects we started was a music cafe/pub venture… which we alternately survived and thrived in!
Following a family tragedy, we returned to the USA in 2016 for some healing.
BEN: “Soon after our return, Eve bought me a ‘brew your own Belgian Tripel kit’ as a sort of joke, because I’d been missing some of the beers I’d fallen in love with during our time running that pub in Europe.
I made my first beer, and even though it turned out pretty bad, it triggered something in me. I found a home brew shop nearby, picked up some more grain, and brewed another batch in the garage. And then another and another…
Within a couple of years, friends and neighbors were asking for beer for parties, weddings, Christmas gifts, you name it!
When a friend came to us one evening with a little cash in hand and said “Buy a bigger brew system.”– it was a drop in the bucket. But it was a kind, generous, unmerited drop, and the exact vote of confidence we needed to take the next step into our dream.”
EVE:
Our dream is our continued mission, and it’s represented in our business name: Eden Abbey Brewing Community.
I’ll break it down word-by-word:
Eden: is our identity statement. It’s our origin, our destination, and our daily reality, inasmuch as we understand it to be so: mankind living at peace with its Creator, and spreading that peace to the rest of creation.
Abbey: references the old European communities of faith, where people would come together around a shared belief system, and often put their hands to a craft together (whether that was woodworking, cheesemaking, beer brewing etc). This was where the pub originated as! The “public house” was where the monks sold their beer to the public to pay for the good works of the community. And that’s our “why” in this. Fundraising for our nonprofit missional work was exhausting, and frankly, we weren’t very good at it. It’s hard to convince people to give their hard-earned dollars to our pet projects. But people are happy to pay for a delicious craft beer, or homemade empanada. So now, rather than putting energy into fundraising, we get to have fun making fantastic beer and sharing it with people, and then using the profits to continue doing the good works we love in our community and around the world. It’s our missional business, supporting more mission!
Brewing: well this one is fairly self-explanatory. But besides beer, we’re brewing coffee, tea, and most importantly, we’re brewing…
Community! It is our joy to bring people together around a table. When we sit next to someone we didn’t know before, and enjoy the same music for a moment, and taste the same beer, it gets a little easier to see them as someone else on a similar journey to our own. Maybe we voted differently, or worship differently, but we soon start to realize that at our core, we all want the same thing.
This is a community gathered around a desire for ALL to know their value. To know their identity, their origin, their destination… to know they matter.
And we believe that with every beer or burger we serve, we’re stating just that:
“You’re worth it. You matter.”
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Eve:!
One QUALITY that has impacted me from a young age is SERVANT LEADERSHIP. I will highlight one man in particular, though I’ve been blessed to work under 1 or 2 others who also lead this way. “Uncle Lou” is a well-educated, well-traveled, well-spoken man, to whom a large number of organizations and individuals credit some measure of their success. The main thing that differentiates his leadership is the way he serves. I have watched him voluntarily take the low road over and over in his efforts to help others succeed. He risks his own time, finances and reputation to give others a leg up. He DOES the work, and allows others to watch and learn. He consistently rejects status symbols or well-deserved elevations of his rank, and willingly does what is needed alongside the rest of the team– be that making product deliveries himself, sending the thank you notes, listening quietly to complaints (usually of those who have it much easier!), offering wise counsel when asked, or simply staying up late and washing the dishes. Sitting under his kind of leadership for so many years has been an honor, and I hope to one day lead as well as “Uncle Lou” does.
A personal SKILL that has had a tremendous impact on the trajectory of my life, is HOSPITALITY. While I recognize that it is a gift we all have in varying measures, I’ve had a healthy portion of it since I was young, and I really began to cultivate it in my later teen years. Someone I respect once said “Practice Hospitality”, and it stuck with me. It’s not JUST a gift we have. It’s something we get to practice and get good at! Working in hotels and restaurants gave me continuous opportunities to hone the skill, and I realized I loved it! When we got married, my husband and I began to open up our home to people, and when we lived overseas, we grew to hosting hundreds of people a year from all over the globe. Working and living with people from different generations and cultures really stretched and strengthened my “hospitality” muscles, and created a lifelong love of the art form!
As far as AREAS OF KNOWLEDGE that I lean upon, there are plenty and they all take priority in different seasons, but one that I’ve been digging into again recently has been the STUDY OF HUMAN PERSONALITIES. Obviously, we can’t all go get psychology degrees to help support our current career path, but there are some things we can educate ourselves on in this area. Specifically, there are loads of personality profiling systems out there (Myers-Briggs, Enneagram, Disc etc.), and while I think some are definitely more useful than others, I’ve come to the conclusion that any of them have the ability to help us understand ourselves and those around us better.
And in our line of work, where communicating value to people is our number one goal, I’ve grown to appreciate any tool I have at hand to help get that message across!
So yeah, my advice based on those points?
1. Find, watch, and listen to a good servant leader. They may not have written books, or have a big visible presence online.. Look for someone in YOUR community, who is older, and who has non-family/professional relationships which have lasted for decades. Cultivate a relationship with this person, and see how they support others.
2. Practice Hospitality–Regardless of your line of work, in whatever way and measure you’re able, even if it doesn’t come naturally at first. This will grow you.
3. Look up the Enneagram (or another personality test, if you’ve gotten too annoyed by people talking about that one! haha), and learn a little more about yourself and those in your sphere of influence.
Before we go, maybe you can tell us a bit about your parents and what you feel was the most impactful thing they did for you?
BEN: My mother taught me compassion, and to value my relationship with my Creator above all. Even in the midst of personal difficulties, and the challenges of being a single mother, she prioritized me, and taught me the value of listening to people and empathizing with their situations. She invited me along on her spiritual journey, which eventually resulted in me having one of my own.
My dad taught me to work hard and not give up. I watched him build a successful business with nothing more than a dream, hard work, and intelligence. He took risks and sacrificed his own comfort to invest in the future of his family. He had been raised with very little, and was on his own by the time he was 16. They were both teenagers when I came along, and he vowed that he would do whatever it took to give his children and grandchildren a different launch into adulthood than he’d had. I’m immeasurably grateful that he did.
EVE:
My parents gave us so much. but one of the most important gifts was TIME.
We didn’t have a TV, so our evening entertainment was family. Whether it was reading or playing table or yard games, or baking, or going out to church or school events, we spent a lot of time TOGETHER.
While my lack of access to the 80s/90s sitcoms “all the other kids” were watching made me feel like I was deprived at the time, I am now incredibly grateful for the things that grew during those hours. It was in those hours that we traveled, practiced music, devoured books, learned to cook, write, and work… and developed the art of building relationships.
I love this question; it takes me right back to my opening point about gratitude and generosity.
Without the kindness, love, and generosity of so many, (starting with our parents!) we wouldn’t be where we are today.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.edenabbeybrewing.com
- Instagram: @edenabbeybrewing
- Facebook: @edenabbeybrewing
Image Credits
photo credits to Vela Visuals.
