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Small Business Week Through the Eyes of a SWFL Brewery

Rachel Iacovone
/
WGCU
A flight of beer at Millennial Brewing Company in downtown Fort Myers

Messages have long circulated the internet, encouraging people to shop local at small businesses. They usually say something along the lines of “When you shop at a locally owned business, you aren’t helping a CEO buy a third holiday home. You’re helping pay for a little girls’ dance lessons or helping a mom put food on the table.”

But, what else does small business do for a community? Quint Studer says, a lot.

He wrote the book, “Building a Vibrant Community: How Citizen-Powered Change Is Reshaping America,” which covers that very subject.

 

Studer joins Gulf Coast Live to talk more about how this is a critical time for people to connect locally by doing business with local entrepreneurs, like Fort Myers-based Millennial Brewing Company co-owner Kyle Cebull.

 

Cebull also joins Gulf Coast Live to talk about the business of microbreweries.

Credit Rachel Iacovone / WGCU
/
WGCU
The interior of Millennial Brewing Company

Millennial Brewing Company is teaming up with barbecue grand master Steven Raichlen this month for WGCU's event, Bites & Brews.

Raichlen is a New York Times bestselling cookbook author of titles that have won multiple James Beard Awards and IACP-Julia Childs Awards. He's also the man behind numerous American Public Television series based on and around the art of cooking by fire.

Raichlen joins Gulf Coast Live to discuss his new book, "Project Fire," and to talk a bit about his upcoming smoking and grilling demonstration at Millennial Brewing Company.

Rachel Iacovone is a reporter and associate producer of Gulf Coast Live for WGCU News. Rachel came to WGCU as an intern in 2016, during the presidential race. She went on to cover Florida Gulf Coast University students at President Donald Trump's inauguration on Capitol Hill and Southwest Floridians in attendance at the following day's Women's March on Washington.Rachel was first contacted by WGCU when she was managing editor of FGCU's student-run media group, Eagle News. She helped take Eagle News from a weekly newspaper to a daily online publication with TV and radio branches within two years, winning the 2016 Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Award for Best Use of Multimedia in a cross-platform series she led for National Coming Out Day. She also won the Mark of Excellence Award for Feature Writing for her five-month coverage of an FGCU student's transition from male to female.As a WGCU reporter, she produced the first radio story in WGCU's Curious Gulf Coast project, which answered the question: Does SWFL Have More Cases of Pediatric Cancer?Rachel graduated from Florida Gulf Coast University with a bachelor's degree in journalism.