THE FIRST DAYS

DON'T SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF

The best piece of seemingly useless advice I'd ever been given with respect to what it would take to start the brewery was this: "Imagine the largest amount of money you think it will require to get the brewery up and going, and then triple it." I can't exactly remember who said that to me, although I wish I could, because I'd like to call them and tell them that they were right. I wouldn't be calling to thank them, because that would be like calling to thank the guy that yelled "Stop!" right before you got creamed by a speeding bus. But right they were.

By 1992 my wife and I were slowly rising from the marital and economic ashes, a little worse for the wear and tear, while my younger brother was working for a big and famous brewpub chain in Oregon. He described the business and told me where I could get a kit to make a batch of home brew. Up until then I had never even considered the idea of making my own beer. I'd been digging getting drunk at the famous Marin Brewing Co. pub and I thought the gear for brewing was pretty sexy looking. For me, cool and functional stuff has always been sexy — like a nice reverb unit, a great speaker, or a vintage guitar — and brewing gear fit right in.

So I went down to the local home-brew supply shop my brother recommended and got the standard five-gallon plastic pail, a strainer, hop packets, yeast, malt syrup — everything you need to brew beer. I had my first brewing "stuff," and with it, I made a batch of a prefab recipe pack called "California Common Beer." It turned out pretty vile. I hardly knew why, but the instructions were simple enough, so I blamed myself and tried again. This time, I brewed a different prepackaged recipe of a California pale ale ... and it was transcendent. Again, I hardly knew why.

There is one basic truth to learning how to play a musical instrument: if you practice, you will get better. You may never be Itzhak Perlman (and maybe that's not really a bad thing), but you will eventually improve. I knew that the same had to be true for brewing, and so I set about discovering what it was that I didn't know.

In principle, brewing is a primitive process that Mother Nature was doing all by her omnipresent lonesome, eons before humans were imagined, with just a wad of starch, some heat, a little rain, and a random flock of yeast. Humans have evolved it into a very complex process filled with precision and control, but the essential operation is as simple as singing a major scale: do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do. In its fullest expression, brewing approaches Stravinsky and even beyond. Learning is often less a system of affirmation than a process of elimination. As in: "I'll never let the dog lick the spoon again before I stir the pitching yeast."

As brewing awareness morphed into understanding, I developed small opinions about what I wanted to accomplish when I brewed a beer. This is another music-simile-laden moment. When you begin to really learn a melodic phrase, you ask yourself, What do I want to try to get these notes to say? After the first couple of brews, I remember asking the home-brew supply shop owner which yeast strain might convert the most sugars to alcohol (even then I only wanted to make stronger beers), and I remember him looking away from me and saying to the ceiling, "That is not a question a brewer would ask." I wasn't deterred, but in that moment I already knew I would be making unconventional and non–stylistically describable beers.

Up until just recently, I wrote all the recipes for the brewery myself. Now I art direct, which is just as much fun. Strict style has never really figured into our recipes. Because of that, we have never done well in the myriad brewing competitions that happen each year. "Not appropriate for style" is the most common comment. Styles are for home brewers and academics. For us, they are jumping-off points for further improvisation. As a student musician, I won plenty of medals and awards of special recognition, but in the end, that didn't mean that I would be a successful working musician. It is the work that matters. All of the awards are just fingers pointing at the moon, and you should never mistake the finger for the moon. There are maybe two judged events that we enter each year — the Great American Beer Festival (GABF), in particular — mostly because it is required in order to be part of the public tasting sessions that follow them.

But even if we were to accidentally win a medal at GABF, I wouldn't make a big deal out of it with posters or advertisements. Some beer companies will, and that's cool for them, but it's not important for us. I mean, if you win, it doesn't mean that you will succeed, and if you lose, it doesn't mean you will fail. So why not just avoid the background noise altogether and get back to work? But I digress.

Back in early 1993 I was reminded of something called the Florence Nightingale effect, where wounded soldiers routinely fall in love with their nurses during recovery. I think that brewing was like my nurse as I came out of an unusually hard period in my life, and by the third batch (after three weeks of brewing), I was already sitting on the living room floor making up a pretend income statement and intensely adding up columns of guesstimated production volumes and costs and overhead and everything I could think of to get some idea of how much beer I would have to make to break even. My wife and I were $38,000 behind on taxes by then, and at that point I aspired merely to break even. But before I had any idea what I was going to do or what it was going to take to get 'er done, I rented a space in a nearby building, applied for a license, bought and installed a three-tier home-brewing setup, and began plans to install a real commercial brewery ... while also still learning how to make beer. By December of that same year, all of these things actually happened.

My crude initial income statement predicted some...