CBB // How did you get started in the brewing industry?
GM // Back in 2001, I visited Maui for the first time and fell in love with it as an island, as a place. I was an investment consultant living in San Francisco and was 23 years old at the time, and thought it’d be a great place to retire one day. I was drinking “local beer,” which meant Kona, and over multiple visits here, I learned that it wasn’t local but actually made on the mainland and shipped here.
I grew up in San Diego and went to the University of California, Davis. Local beer was a thing, although the word “craft” was still a new thing, but I saw an opportunity to create something authentic as opposed to something that was being shipped in and passed off as local. The simple idea of giving authentic local craft beer to the people of Hawaii led to the birth of Maui Brewing Co.