Back in 2011, Brian Mitchell and some friends asked themselves a question: “How cool would it be to be in the beer industry?”

Mitchell had a business background, most recently in Central Oregon’s then-troubled homebuilding industry, but his experience with beer back then was the same as most people’s: he liked to drink it.

Six years later, Mitchell’s Wild Ride Brewing regularly serves up 16 beers at its tap room on SW 5th Street in Redmond, and is always pushing to innovate with new tastes and styles, striving to stay one step ahead in the Pacific Northwest’s saturated beer market.

Last week, the brewery introduced its annual winter beer, the Twist and Shout Coffee Blonde Ale, at the Holiday Ale Festival in Portland. A light brew with hints of fruit and java, its booth at the hopping cold-weather festival stayed busy, keeping beer drinkers warm on December days.

Mitchell, bearded but baby-faced at 41, obviously loves the beer himself. Sitting in Wild Ride’s cavernous taproom one morning before opening, he smiles when asked what the best beer his brewery makes is.

“I’m on an IPA kick right now,” he says, naming the fruity, hoppy beer variety for which the Pacific Northwest is famous. “But I find myself drinking the Twist and Shout a lot, too.”

There was no guarantee, back in 2011, that the brewery would be quite the wild ride its name promised to be. Mitchell and his partners spent two and a half years planning out the business, from the brews to the finances to the location of the taproom. Mitchell says he knew that the main hurdle might be the beer itself. That’s where partner and “beer maestro” — that’s what it says on his business card — Paul Bergeman came into the picture. Bergeman, who joins Miller in overseeing Wild Ride’s day-to-day business, had previously been a brewer with two established companies, the Kona Brewing Company in Hawaii, and the award-winning Laurelwood Brewing Company in Portland.

The move has paid off. Wild Ride’s taproom is located in an old lumber storage facility, right next to the big, aromatic room where the beer is actually brewed. Proudly mounted on the wall of the brewing room is a white surfboard, on which are mounted plaques commemorating Wild Ride’s three consecutive People’s Choice Awards from the Pouring at the Coast festival.

Big windows look from the taproom into the brewing room, so beer drinkers can peer through and see where the ales they quaff come from. For Mitchell, that’s part of the point.

“It’s all about the experience of being at a brewery,” he says.

The experience of being at a brewery seems to suit Mitchell, who oversees the business on behalf of himself, Bergeman, and four silent partners that they found during that grueling two-and-a-half-year preparation period. The place is open seven days a week, and he’s there early, not just to meet visiting journalists but to prepare the taproom for operation, keep the staff in good spirits, and — critically — to plot out the future.

Wild Ride had opened expecting what Mitchell calls “controlled growth,” but his sales reps report that business is booming, with more beer moving every year, in six-packs, the 22-ounce bottles beer aficionados call “bombers,” and taps all over Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Alaska.

“We’ve got our 2018 calendar all worked out,” he says. He reels off an array of sour beers, an old style that’s coming back into vogue, that Wild Ride will be rolling out one-by-one next year. Plum, blood orange pomegranate, strawberry lemon.

He pulls himself a beer to pose for a photo, and then catches himself.

“Wait, I should have asked you — do you want a beer?” he says, turning around. It seems the answer to the question Mitchell asked himself six years ago is: very cool indeed.