business spotlight

With Tailspin Ale Fest, Tisha Gainey’ s long voyage finally came in for a landing at Bowman Field – after, shall we say, a number of hops.

BY STEVE KAUFMAN | PHOTOS BY TONY BENNETT

Tisha Gainey’ s career has often taken the form of one of those Warner Bros. cartoon characters who steps off the side of a cliff and lands safely on a ledge, or on a bird, or on a passing cloud.

As Gainey took her journey – trying this, discarding that – she kept coming back to certain totems from her undergraduate life at Purdue University: marketing, computer programming, graphic design, real estate and beer.

Unsure of what she wanted to do after graduating in 1997, with a degree in marketing and communications, Gainey impulsively joined some college friends in Portland, Oregon.

She got a temporary job in customer service with an online startup called SHN. net, providing chat rooms and forums for people with serious and chronic diseases.

She liked the job well enough, but not the continually gray, drizzly Portland weather.

When she told her bosses that she had decided to move back to the Louisville area, they told her that they were just writing her a permanent job offer. But her mind was made up, so she declined the job offer and headed home.

“ That company became webMD. com,” she said.“ I would have been in on the ground floor of something big.” It was not the last time Gainey looked back and wondered. But if you listed her personality traits and joys of life, you couldn’ t find a better place for her to be, roughly 20 years later, than where she is now: running an events company called HB Productions and producing, among other things, the popular Tail Spin Ale Fest, held every February at the Louisville Executive Aviation hangar on the grounds of Bowman Field. It has history, it has people, and, most of all, it has beer. Beer has been central to Gainey’ s life since she started exploring various brews while in college. But not for her, even on a student’ s budget, the cheap pitchers of beer available in most campus bars. Her hangout was Lafayette Brewing Co., an off-campus establishment across the Wabash River from Purdue. And her first drink of choice was a sturdy, flavorful English cask ale.

The whole culture intrigued her so that she switched from her computer programming major and dabbled in the hospitality and tourism management school.

Not that it was a straight line from campus tavern to ale fest. There were side tracks and plenty of those steps into the unknown. After returning home from Oregon, she created ads in the weekend home sections for( at the time) Paul Semonin Realtors, and developed the very first web site of all the local MLS listings.

But in 2002, she moved again( an affair of the heart), to Orlando, Florida, and found work with Walt Disney Imagineering as project engineer on Disney’ s“ earport” store at Orlando International. She also helped Disney produce the first Lights, Motors, Action, Extreme Stunt Show in the park, at MGM Hollywood Studios.

When the show opened, her job ended, so she went to work with Ginn Development Intl. in Orlando on the pricey, luxurious Bella Colina housing development on Lake Apopka.“ Everything seemed to be taking me back to real estate,” she said.“ These were $ 2.5 million lots, $ 10 million homes. Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods and some Arabian prince took the helicopter tours and bought lots there.” But her affair of the heart soured. So, back home again in Indiana. Through her cousin, Todd Antz( owner of The Keg Liquors in Clarksville and New Albany), she found a job as a beer rep for World Class Beverages, covering the southern third of the state. At least she had a job when she stepped off the cliff this time. But it was not a job she’ d ever expected to have.

62 EXTOL • FEBRUARY / MARCH 2018