Ten Pin Brewery Co. exceeding expectations

MOSES LAKE — Ten Pin Brewery Co. CEO B.J. Garbe lives in the best of both worlds.

He chased a dream, playing eight seasons in the minor leagues after being selected fifth overall by the Minnesota Twins in the 1999 amateur draft out of Moses Lake High School.

When the time was right, he came home to raise a family and build a business. The key to happiness, he said, is faith, friends and family and he has all that right here in Moses Lake.

“I’ve literally lived all over the country, but Moses Lake brought me back,” said Garbe, who won the 1999 Gatorade National High School Baseball Player of the Year award. “There’s no place like home. No place like the Northwest. The journey was absolutely worth it. Every part of your life gives you experience to deal with new ones and grow as a person. I don’t regret a single thing with baseball or my decision to come back home. It’s been a great ride.”

Overall, Garbe hit .235 in 722 games over an eight-year minor league career. Garbe, who also received a scholarship offer to go to Stanford, began his professional career hitting .316 in 41 games for the Elizabethton Twins, which would be the only time he'd average more than .275 in his professional career.

The former Moses Lake star, who is on the national Gatorade Player of the Year list with Gary Sheffield (1986-87), Alex Rodriguez (1992-93) and Clayton Kershaw (2005-06) and others, played with several minor league teams in the Twins organization, including the Quad City River Bandits (2000), Fort Myers Miracle (2001) and the New Britain Rock Cats (2002).

“It sounds funny now, but the game I loved so much was really hard for me when it became a business,” explained Garbe, who played center field. “Professional baseball is very much a business and it changed a lot of things for me. I ended up not enjoying the game as much as I used to. I never saw myself as a restaurant/bar manager or opening up a brewery or any of the things I’m doing now. But I’m a lot happier now than I ever was playing baseball.”

He opened the 2004 season hitting .201 for the Rock Cats, but in August of that year he was traded to the Seattle Mariners for Pat Borders. Borders would later go on to become the 1992 World Series most valuable player and play on the gold-medal winning U.S. team in the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, so Garbe’s stock was still good at the age of 31.

He wound up his career with the Florida Marlins organization in 2006, hitting .184 in 35 games with the Carolina Mudcats.

“People don’t understand the grind,” Garbe explained. “It seems really glamorous and there’s a lot of really awesome aspects to professional sports. But it is an incredible grind. There’s 162 games a year, plus spring training and then winter ball. Life throws you a curve-ball and it doesn’t always end up the way you envisioned, but it was all worth it.”

He was able to turn a passion for home brew into business with unlimited potential. The Russell family and Ten Pin Brewing Co. is ready to move into its new phase of development with the completion of its new 14,000 square foot facility with a custom-built 30-barrel brewing system that will give the brewery an initial capacity of 7,500 barrels per year, with room to grow.

Ten Pin Brewing Co. brewed its first batch at the new facility in April and looks forward to putting Ten Pin Brewing Co. on the map for craft beer in the area.

“I started homebrewing in 2012 as a passion project. I started going to homebrewing meetings,” Garbe said of the origins. “Then it looked like it might be a good venture for us, and we did it. It worked out really well.”

Ten Pin Brewing Co. has a born on date and is brewing into something big.

“The demand for our product has grown so fast that we decided it was time to take another step to do this on a much larger scale,” he said. “I don’t brew, but I happened to meet Jim (Madden), who’s our brew master. The timing was perfect. He’d been brewing for 20 years and every beer I had of his was really, really good. When I approached him on this, the timing was good for him. It’s been a bit of a dream come true.”

Ten Pin Brewing Co. has exceeded all expectations.

“We’re really happy with the direction of Ten Pin and where it’s headed,” Garbe said.