MB // In 2013, I had the pleasure of listening to Annie Johnson’s podcast on the Brewing Network when she won 2013 Homebrewer of the Year. That was a big deal for me because we’re from Sacramento, and this is a Black woman. Now I have somebody that looks like me, and from the same area as me, [who] just reached the pinnacle of homebrewing. That really motivated me, even to the point to where I implemented some of the brewing philosophies that she talked about. And then I actually made my first good beer—a robust porter that’s now … one of our core beers.
I started [taking] beers to different places, and a local brewery let me have a tap takeover. All of those beers ended up tapping out that night, and they ended up offering me an assistant brewer job. I still worked full time as a fraud manager for Citibank, working about 50 to 60 hours a week, but then I took on a “part-time” job at another 36 to 38 hours a week. I worked there for a year, and I couldn’t take it anymore. Upon quitting, Mike, my current business partner—he [had] actually invested in the brewery that I was previously working for—we were out having a drink. And I looked at him and said, “When are we gonna open a brewery?” He looked at me in the eyes and said, “I’ve been waiting for you to ask me that.” We started working on the business plan literally two or three days later.
Here we are four years later, with the brewery. It’s crazy that I can [tell] that story because a lot of individuals don’t get into the beer scene that easily or get the opportunity to open a brewery.