Why beer after JPL?
I’ve been interested in beer since I was in high school and my brother sort of knew I was amused with beer. He was going to buy me a homebrew set up, but he was too busy, so my wife got me into it. I pretty much went off the deep end. I made a simple batch of beer at home and started doing that a lot. I made a tent scale model of the smallest commercial brewery and brewed on that for awhile, and started to get serious about wanting to do it professionally. This was while I was still at JPL. I leased a small 500-square-foot space in Old Pasadena and started going jumping through all the regulatory hoops…I left JPL in late ’96. My second day as a full-time brewer, the landlord of the space we had in Old Town nailed a notice to acquit to the front door and told us to leave and get all our equipment out of there because they were going to tear the building down to build a Boston Market. You got evicted from the space? That was kind of a blessing in disguise. At that point, we had 6 to 8 cu
