I feel happy when I’m able to bring people together. That’s what gives my life meaning.

By Betsy Vereckey

Nicole Carrier D’94, T’00 traces the roots of Throwback Brewery all the way back to a friend’s backyard homebrew competition. She and a friend partnered up and began to play around with ideas.

“I just fell in love with thinking of recipes that we could try,” Carrier recalls.

At the time, Carrier was working for IBM full-time but had started to tip-toe more into the brewery space. She and Annette Lee, her homebrewing friend, started showcasing their beer in a warehouse space on the New Hampshire seacoast. When a larger property became available in North Hampton, N.H.—a 1860s farmhouse on 12 acres—they decided to go for it.

“I thought to myself, ‘If I don’t jump into this and make it a success, I’m going to completely question myself for the rest of my life,” Carrier says. “I wanted to see our dream become a reality. And I didn’t want to kick myself when I was 80.”

Today, the award-winning, female-owned brewery operates a restaurant and a five-acre farm, where chickens, pigs, goats, and donkeys dwell happily. They are also committed to supporting the community by buying the majority of beer ingredients locally.

Carrier says that many of her skills from the corporate world came in handy when she became a small business owner. At IBM, she had been a product manager, where she did a lot of speaking, product development, marketing, pricing, and storytelling.

“By the end of my career at IBM, I was on stage a lot and talking to the press and analysts, and
all of those skills were completely transferrable. Instead of it being software, it was beer—a product that I feel a lot more passionate about,” Carrier says.

While Carrier is an ace presenter now, she recalls an experience she had at Tuck doing group work where she was so nervous to present to the class that she was “shaking like a leaf while reading off of cue cards.”

“I knew I had to fix my presentation skills before I got out into the real world,” Carrier says of her decision to enroll in an advanced communications course.

“There weren’t a lot of us in it, but by the end of it, I went from being super bad to having a ton of confidence in myself,” she says.

Her presentation skills came in handy when Carrier got the chance to introduce former vice president Kamala Harris at the brewery when she was making her presidential run in 2024.

“People were like, ‘Oh my God, you’re such a natural, and I laughed because I knew I wasn’t,” Carrier says. “The soft skills that I learned at Tuck gave me a foundation to build upon so that I could learn to communicate effectively.”

Tuck’s general management focus has also helped Carrier wear many hats at the brewery, from financial analysis to marketing. A self-described extrovert, Carrier also bartends and organizes community events like ’90s music Bingo, Pride events, cribbage, yoga, drag brunches, and book clubs.

“For me, it’s more rewarding to have a small business that’s making an impact on the community than to make a ton of money as an executive at a corporation,” Carrier says. 

“I’m not a billionaire, but I don’t need to be because I feel happy when I’m able to bring people together. That’s what gives my life meaning.”

This story originally appeared in print in the Summer 2025 issue of Tuck Today magazine.