12 Foxtrot to 12 Fox Beer: Brewing Community & Finding Family

In this episode of Exit Buddy: Veteran Stories to Guide You, Kathleen chats with Joe Hogge, an Army combat engineer who turned a love of Bavarian beer into a Texas Hill Country brewery named after his old MOS. He shares memories of his first-year transition, the hidden trauma from years of explosives training, and the decision to start the Fireside Chat Support Network—sparked by a local veteran's suicide. Joe’s story reminds us that finding (or creating) your family is key to thriving post-service.

Chapters

• 02:25 – Military Roots & German Beer Awakening
• 06:13 – Family as a Lifeline & Fighting Hidden Trauma
• 11:02 – Choosing Between the GI Bill and a Job Offer
• 14:39 – Home-Building Crash to Wedding Venue Pivot
• 16:22 – The Birth of Fireside Chat Support Network
• 22:15 – Final Advice on Finding Your Family

Key Takeaways

• Support Is Essential for Transition: Joe’s wife and in-laws became his first civilian unit. Having support is key to navigating life after losing your military family. Family can be built, not just born, so actively seek it out to avoid isolation.
• Hidden Trauma Adds Up—Even Without "Big" Combat: Years of routine explosives training can leave lasting effects. Recognize it, talk about it, and lean on support—it's not always obvious until someone points it out.
• Military Communication Doesn't Always Translate: The direct, profane style that works in the military can end careers in the civilian world. Adapt your language to avoid HR issues around the water cooler.
• Step Out & Find Your Tribe: Whatever your interest, get online, attend meetups, and show up. You might find friends, partners, or purpose—don't stay home alone.

Follow us for more real veteran stories to guide your transition, and share this episode with a service member who needs a reminder to find their post-service community.

Subscribe to our LinkedIn newsletter, Exit Buddy: Veteran Voices, to stay updated and connect with other listeners and guests.

Until next time, keep connecting—your Exit Buddy is right here with you.

#VeteranStories #MilitaryTransition #ExitBuddy

Visit us at https://exitbuddy.buzzsprout.com to learn more about the show.

Have feedback or questions for us? Email us at ashleyjones.creative@gmail.com.

Transcript

Joe Hogge 00:00

If I mess it up somehow, guess what the sergeant's gonna do? "What?" You piece of [expletive] and all that—you're so dumb, you just killed everyone in the unit. Get your ass back out there. Do it again. "Yes, sir," off you go. That's how they train you. So when you get out and go get that office job or Walmart or Home Depot or wherever the heck you're going to work, you can't talk like that at all. If you speak anything like that, the next day HR is at your desk and you're gone.

Kathleen Smith 00:34

Welcome to Exit Buddy: Veteran Stories to Guide You. This podcast shines a light on the real struggles and triumphs of veterans navigating life after the military.

Rachel Bozeman 00:44

In each episode, we dive into heartfelt stories of resilience, setbacks, a little humor, and growth as veterans transition and find new purpose in civilian life. And here for the journey, we're your hosts. I'm Rachel...

Kathleen Smith 00:57

...and I'm Kathleen. If you're looking for inspiration, practical advice, or just a reminder that you're not alone in your transition, Exit Buddy is here to help you thrive beyond the uniform. Enjoy today's story from our next honorary Exit Buddy. This is Kathleen, and yes, I'm flying solo again today, but I am so excited that we finally got a chance to chat with Joe Hogge, an Army veteran who decided it was time to be an entrepreneur because he learned a few things about brewing beer and building community during his service, and he's now the owner of 12 Fox Beer in Texas. Welcome to the show, Joe.

Joe Hogge 01:38

Thanks for having me. It's an honor. I don't just start the entrepreneur—I've been doing that for about 20 years—but you're right, the basis of it was given to me by the skills I learned being an NCO in the military: being disciplined, taking notes, and doing the things so that you're ready for the next day.

Kathleen Smith 02:00

Let's get into that conversation. Take us back—throw back the way-back machine, as they used to call it in the cartoons in my day—and sort of talk about your military experience. Obviously there's something with the name associated with your military experience, but maybe some of your experiences that really led to starting what you did here back in the United States.

Joe Hogge 02:25

I was stationed in Germany for Bosnia. They were doing the big buildup because NATO wasn't doing so well, and we needed to go in and help them. I had just got into the military in '94, stationed at Fort Hood, and I literally was there for maybe nine months and I was shipped off to go to Germany. Landed in Germany, and three weeks later was on a bus going across country of Europe to head to Bosnia—in a blizzard and snowstorm. Just getting there is a story that's good for a campfire. Once I got through that deployment and really got back to Germany and got settled in, my wife flew in. We jumped in, and I got a German host family to adopt me basically through your USO or command program that they had for adopting single soldiers. When I first got there, I was single and got married later, but I got in the program. It was amazing because now, 25 years later, I still have what I call my German family. They really showed us the German culture and that beer—the famous beer of Bavarian breweries. What I found is in Germany they have a German Purity Law, so you're allowed to have four ingredients in beer and that's it. America has no such thing, so everything in America has all these adjuncts and other chemical stuff and preservatives so that it can sit on a shelf for six months or a year. That always gave me a hangover. When I went there, I really didn't like beer—I didn't like those big products. They just gave me a hangover. But when I got there, I drank true, fresh German beer. You could have three or four beers and not wake up with this hangover. So I really liked it. My first beer was Hefeweizen, and it got me into all the others. Long story short, I got out right after that and came back to Texas and became a home builder. But about six, seven years ago, we decided to go ahead and do this beer thing and go a different direction. I had been in the same business for a while with my wife, and I wanted a little bit of a change, so we started making this beer and opened up 12 Fox. I named it that because that's what I was when I went in the Army—I was a 12 Foxtrot, a combat engineer. Then literally a year later they kind of just said, "Hey, you guys were all just 12 Bravos. There's a whole bunch of you 12 series, and we're just going to make you all 12 Bravos." But yeah, we started making the beer, and people loved it. I've been going what, six and a half, seven years now.

Kathleen Smith 05:12

I love that you mentioned that your first beer was a Hefeweizen, because that's what I drank when I lived in Switzerland. You're right—there's a different quality to the beer in Europe than there is in the United States. I remember inviting friends who used to embarrass me by being able to drink me under the table when we were here in the United States, and I got to turn the tables on them when they came and visited me in Europe. It is nice to have much more fresh ingredients, and we'll definitely get into more of that. But I want to talk a little bit more about your transition. It's a complex process. Everyone faces it very differently. Everyone has very different networks, and it sounds like your family really played a key part into how you transitioned and what your choices were. So let's share a little bit of that.

Joe Hogge 06:13

That truly was key for me, and I truly think it's key for anybody who's struggling, to be very honest. If you feel alone in this world and you don't feel like you have friends and family you can talk to, it's so much harder to get out of a difficult situation. When I did get out, my wife and I decided, okay, where do we want to live? I just want a small town. I don't care where in America, but just small town America. She was like, "Okay, well, I want to go back home." So we did move back. I think that was the key to the success—was having my wife's family close by. Literally, the first year, mom and dad lived on the first floor, and we lived on the second floor, so we lived together. It helped me get through that first year. What you don't know is—even though I never really saw massive combat or any major traumatic stuff, except for being a combat engineer—Sergeant's time on Thursday, every single Thursday was how much C4 can we blow up? You do that for seven, eight years in the military. What I come to find out 30 years later is I had it explained to me this way by a pretty good friend. He looked at me and he goes, "Joe, you keep denying that you have this." He kind of reached up and he just tapped me on the forehead, and he said, "How many times did you blow up C4?" And I was like, "Thousands. I don't even know." He goes, "If I tapped you 10,000 times in a row, you'd be a little irritated and kind of upset, wouldn't you?" It just opened my eyes. I didn't see traumatic things, but I did have traumatic things happen to me. So if I hadn't had my family when I got out—because when you're in the military, that is your family, those brothers and sisters to your left and right—you know that they have you and you have them. When you get out, you kind of lose that. I had my wife. I knew that she had my back. But the rest of the world is kind of—are they really there for me? What are they trying to get from me? You feel uneasy. To have that time to transition and have support of somebody—when I did have a bad day, because it took about three months, and then all of a sudden I realized I was depressed. I wasn't me. I wasn't my normal, happy, let's-go type person. I was down and grumpy. The next three to six months wasn't so fun. I definitely had to go through kind of that depression and then come back out of it. They don't really give you those skills when you're getting out of the military. They don't teach you some meditation and some breathing, some basic life skills. They spend a lot of time tearing you down when they first get you to rebuild you into what they need. But when they let you go, it's just like, there you go. Here you go. Having that and then having my wife and her parents close by to be able to keep me engaged, keep me focused, and just say, "Hey, what are you doing?" or "What do you want to do?" Having that family and that support is huge. I really think it comes to the base of anything when you're transitioning in any kind of life, but especially coming from a military world to the civilian world. We don't translate properly. When we get out of the military, we're speaking one way—like the F-bomb then comes out. It's a verb, a noun, a pronoun, an adjective. You can make it be anything. As a combat engineer, we're dealing with explosives and all these different things. On Sergeant's time, we're out there training, and it's Joe's turn to go up. I go out there and do whatever the mission is. If I mess it up somehow, I come back and guess what the sergeant's gonna do? You piece of [expletive] and all that—you're so dumb, you just killed everyone in the unit. Get your ass back out there. Do it again. "Yes, sir," off you go. That's how they train you. So when you get out and go get that office job or Walmart or Home Depot or wherever the heck you're gonna work, you can't talk like that at all. If you speak anything like that, the next day HR is at your desk and you're gone. Can't talk like that around the water cooler.

Kathleen Smith 11:02

Let's talk a little bit about finding your job. I understand you sort of had this decision point during your transition where you applied for college with the GI Bill, but you were also interviewing for jobs, and lucky you, you got accepted to both. So how did you decide which one you wanted to go with?

Joe Hogge 11:24

That was a really hard decision. It's probably one of the hardest decisions I've had in my life. You are right to give that story a little base. I helped my wife start a business. Once we got out, she started a flower business, and I was kind of the behind-the-scenes guy, helping her with bookkeeping and doing basic stuff. I just knew I can't be in the flower business, and I'm definitely not an accountant. Joe needs to go be Joe, and this isn't it. I went looking for work first. I wanted to be a construction guy and build homes and commercial, whatever. I just wanted to build things, and I couldn't find a job. Everywhere I went, it was the same response. They all wanted me to have this college degree that I didn't have. I was like, "Well, I have eight years of experience." "No, we need you to have those college things." I was really getting depressed. I think six months went by. I quit getting interviews—there was no one else to interview with. I said, "Okay, I got to go to college. That's what they want. I need this degree. Everyone tells me." I applied through the VA, and I think about three months go by—it wasn't very long at all. I totally qualified for voc rehab, and they basically said, "Pick a college and pick a degree. Go." I literally got that letter in the mail. I'm in the office at my wife's place, and I call her in there, and I'm like, "Holy cow, look at this. I just got the letter. I'm accepted." She was like, "Oh, well, I have this guy outside at the counter, and he's a home builder, and he's looking for a superintendent. I'm doing his daughter's wedding with the flowers. I've been talking about you for months, so they kind of know you already, but he came and just happened to drop in and he wants to talk to you." I'm like, "Okay, well, he's here. Let's have this conversation. Let's have this meeting. Come on in." We talked for about an hour. The guy's a great guy. He's still a good friend. The next day, he offers me a job. All of this turmoil for almost a year, and now I'm there, and I'm like, "Honey, what do I do?" She goes, "This one's on you. I'm not going to guide you and say you should do this, because if something happens, you're never going to blame this one on me." I literally had a couple days of just turmoil in my head. It came down to: Do I want to spend four to six years in college, living off of the government, trying to do all of these things to get this degree? At the time, I'm 30. I had already done some military. I've got two kids. The other route was: I'm here, this guy can show me what to do, and I'll be able to learn when I need to learn to start my own business, because that's what I want anyway. I said, "Let's go make some money, and let's learn on the job—because that's how we do it in the military."

Kathleen Smith 14:39

And so tell us how that led to your leap into entrepreneurship for yourself.

Joe Hogge 14:46

That came several years later. Everybody remembers 2008 through 2012 and the housing crisis and all that stuff. So all of that kind of went away. But while I was building houses, my wife talked my dad and I into building a wedding venue instead of her doing the flowers. That was going on. Mom and Dad were kind of running that. In 2010, everything was crashing, and my boss was slowly letting everyone go until he had to let me go. It was fine. I said, "It's totally fine. I need to go help my family with this wedding venue thing." I jumped in, helped Dad do some stuff, and the next thing I knew, I was giving tours and doing the emails and all the things. I loved meeting people anyway—that was good with that on my home building side, just meeting the couples and getting a rapport with them because you're going to be working with them. I think people really liked me and thought I was kind of genuine, and it really helped the wedding venue kind of take off. I didn't actually go straight into home building at all after that. My wife and I ran wedding venues from 2010 and we still have them to this day. It's kind of our base money and our base job. Then on my side job, I get to do the brewery that I started a few years ago.

Kathleen Smith 16:22

I understand that you're doing some really important work within the community, and you started a nonprofit called the Fireside Chat Support Network. Do you want to share with our audience a little bit about the Fireside Chat Support Network?

Joe Hogge 16:35

I do. This is my first time to do anything like this. It kind of came out of nowhere. I had met a gentleman who lives here in town through the brewery, and it's kind of become known as the veteran-friendly place to go. My town's only a few thousand people—it's not big—but when the aunt or uncle or cousin or brother, whoever in the family, comes to visit and they happen to be in the military, the family drags them to me. They're like, "You got to go out to 12 Fox and see this place." I got to meet the whole community over the first couple years. About three years ago, one of those guys decided that he didn't want to be here anymore. He made that dumb decision that he was alone and that he couldn't make it through, and no one saw it. To me, this was the guy who was Special Forces. He had lost an appendage and was like one of the first people—he didn't take the no from the military. He goes, "I'm coming back to my unit," and he made it back to his unit with an amputee. So he retires. He writes a book. He does all these things. You're like, "Okay, that's the guy that figured it out." Then one Sunday, he decides, "Hey, I don't want to be here. This is too hard."

Kathleen Smith 17:57

You never know.

Joe Hogge 18:01

It just took me by surprise. I don't know why. It just hurt.

Kathleen Smith 18:06

It does hurt. It hurts a lot.

Joe Hogge 18:08

Why didn't I see this? Why didn't anybody notice? When it comes down to it, he was good at hiding it. It wasn't anything that we did, but it really affected me. I made a post on 12 Fox, just on my brewery page, and it kind of went viral here in our area and made it to all the different neighbor pages. I had a lot of people reaching out to me from the community saying, "Hey, I want to help. I'm a doctor. I'm this. I'm a that." I had this overwhelming response to just a very honest video that I made. I told my wife, "We have to do something. I don't know what I'm called to do, but I'm called to do something." I had a friend of ours that I met during the shutdown in 2020 who was a filmmaker. I have this really big fire pit off to the side. He was just like, "I love fire pits, because when you're standing around a fire with your guys and you're drinking a beer, that's when you let your walls down, that's when you let the story out, that's when you talk." He was like, "I have this vision. I want to have this thing called Fireside Chats where we're just standing around a fire chatting, talking." Stacy remembered that phrase, and she said, "Hey, you know why? I'm with Fireside Chats." I called up Dallas and I was like, "Dallas, I want to steal this. Am I allowed to use this phrase?" He was like, "Dude, if you're going to do something with it, go do it." He let me have it. I said, "Okay, I'm going to do something with it." I made another video and said, "Hey, I know that we have the VFW and the American Legion here in town, but there needs to be something more. What I'm going to do is—I'm not open on Mondays. I'm just going to open my brewery on Monday nights from seven to nine p.m. so you can get off work and then get out to me. Don't eat dinner—I'm going to feed you—and then we're just going to hang out. I'm just calling all vets." I put that video out on a Tuesday. About a week later, I got tons of people saying, "Hey, I want to come." The problem here in Texas is three years ago in February is what we call the Snowmageddon or ice apocalypse—we had about two weeks of 17 degrees, which is not normal in Texas. That storm starts coming in, and my wife is telling me Saturday and Sunday, "We got to cancel this. The storm is going to hit just as we're doing this." I said, "It's too late, honey. The word's out. Those grunts are coming. They don't care what the weather is. They don't care how cold it is—they're gonna show up." We decided that we're gonna cook some chili because it's gonna be cold. My brewery at the time wasn't very big—it wasn't very enclosed. It was kind of a beer garden space like I found in Germany—it's all outdoors. I lit a bunch of fires outside and a bunch of patio heaters in my brewery. I'll never forget it—28 people showed up, and it was 28 degrees. So cold. That was my very first meeting three years ago. We haven't missed a Monday yet. Our base is probably about 150 people in town and the community, and on any given Monday, there's 30 to 50 people that show up. What it started out was suicide awareness—we got to talk about this. What I noticed is about two months in that if we just keep talking about this constantly, I'm going to lose everyone. They've got the point. So how do we change that? This is where it really goes back to what you're doing, young lady, because I went back to my wife, and I said, "When I got out, what I needed was a family. And you gave that."

Kathleen Smith 22:15

And now you've created the family there for everyone else. That's absolutely wonderful. Well, our time is pulling short here. So I just wanted to ask you, Joe—other than this amazing work that you're doing with the Fireside Chat Support Network—is there any other last bit of advice you would give to other service members out there from your experience?

Joe Hogge 22:40

Yes, ma'am. You have to find your family. Whoever that is, you have to find them. If you don't have family to go back to—there's a lot of people go in the military because this is their last resort. They don't have anywhere else to go, and they need to get their feet on the ground. They need to get their heads on straight so they can get back to life. A lot of people in the military don't have huge connection of family. I got lucky—my wife loved me, and my wife's family loved me, and they accepted me right away. If you don't have that, you need to go find it when you get out. Whatever your calling is—do you love horses? Do you love construction work? Do you love to bake cakes? What's your passion? Then you need to get online—this thing called the internet and this ChatGPT stuff—it will tell you where to go. It will say that there's this meeting and this meeting here at this place. Go to them. Just go.

Kathleen Smith 23:39

Yep, get out of your comfort zone.

Joe Hogge 23:40

You got to step out of your comfort zone, but you might find your best friend. You might find your wife, your partner—you don't know. But get in that realm where you want to be and hang in it and find those people, because you will find friends and family that have commonality with you, because that's where you went to. My suggestion is you have to have that support. You need a friend or family, and if you don't have it, then go look for it—because if you sit at home doing nothing and start drinking and smoking and all that other crap, you're going to go in a spiral that's not fun to come out of.

Kathleen Smith 24:18

Joe, thank you so much for your inspiration and for sharing your story. I really appreciate you joining me on the show today.

Joe Hogge 24:24

Thank you, ma'am. Thank you so much. Love everyone. Thank you.

Kathleen Smith 24:27

One of the things I love about doing this show and talking to people is learning their passion, learning their challenges, and hearing what they've done to follow the passion and overcome the challenges. Joe really shared with us that having family was very important—rebuilding it, building it, rebuilding it again—but then also realizing the importance of family to his local veteran community by starting the Fireside Chat Support Network. Yes, you too can take that passion in and give back to the community. It's something that I've done many, many times, and it's very rewarding. Well, that's it for today. Be sure to follow for our next episode and join us over on LinkedIn, where we have a LinkedIn newsletter where I recap each one of our episodes, but we also have some engagement in connecting with other people that listen to the show, and another way to expand your network. Take care everyone.