Hi! If you found your way here, you’re probably a friend. If you’re not, I hope that you become one! Pull up a stool, introduce yourself, and tell me something about you. I’ll give you a beer if I can. If not, then a raincheck.

Why does this place exist? That’s a really good question. I’ve been interested in beer for a long time. I grew up in Oregon, home of McMenamin’s. The friendly-aging-Deadhead vibe they affected really attracted me and gave me good associations with craft beer. Upon graduation from college in 1991, a friend and I did a craft beer trip up and down the West Coast – far sparser then than it is now, and looking back I realize how much we skimmed the surface.

I brewed beer once in business school in 1996 on a lark – just a Pale Ale. I enjoyed it and had designs on doing more—I recently found some label mockups I did back then that I’ll share at some point—but life intervened in the form of moving to Los Angeles, chasing a demanding job, raising kids, and all that. Hobbies took a backseat.

It’s also hard to remember from the vantage point of 2021 how hard it was to get good information on how to homebrew in 1996. Today we live in a world where, for better or worse, the internet has made it easy to slide into an obscure subculture, whether that involves writing homoerotic fiction about Harry Potter characters, trying to overthrow the US government, or brewing beer. Back then, leveling up from throwing yeast into a bucket of syrup to creating something you could proudly serve to friends was more likely to involve a lot of 10th-generation photocopies and knowing a guy.

However, time marches on for both me and the global information revolution and we appear to have met one another right around the time the world shut down in March 2020. I had expected to be an empty-nester with a big and fairly public job; instead, my kids returned home and I parted ways with the company for which I was working. I needed a hobby—one that allowed me to exercise my creativity, resulted in a product, and preferably took up a lot of time. I decided to pull out the old homebrew kit and give it a go.

I quickly discovered how rich the homebrewing world had become and how easy it was to tap into resources that would uplevel me. And I’ve got that thing where when there’s a lot to know about one of my pastimes, I want to go both deep and wide. And I felt that this was something that I could get good at; so, it was time to get good at it.

I also discovered in brewing a way to unpack my mind.

Let me explain this better. I love the arts, I love ideas, I love symbols. I love the friction that all these create when they rub against one another—humorous juxtapositions, connections, insights. I’m a bit of a frustrated creative writer—I wrote stories when I was younger but frankly lacked the discipline and insight to make anything meaningful of it. I’m also a very visual thinker, but I never developed skills in the fine arts.

When I started to create beer recipes, I was most excited by the ideas that created associations for me. When a cluster of associations congealed, it would often generate an image. This image expressed what the beer was about—there’s a sense in which it completed the beer. Finding artists to bring those images to life helps me to explain what I was thinking when I made the beer, allows me to play with the ideas in my head, and leaves something permanent behind when the beer is all drunk.

Everything is clear now!

So coming back to your question: this place exists because I love my hobby of brewing beer, because I use this hobby as a way to rummage through the ideas that are bouncing around in my head, because I translate these ideas into images that are funny and weird, and because I wanted to create a place where I could share all of this with you: the beers, the art, and the things that I’m thinking.

I’d love to share my beer with you. I’d love to tell you why I made it. I’d love to share the music I associate with each brew—you’ll find a link on the appropriate page. If you’ve had one of my beers, I’d love you to share your thoughts in a review on the site. I’d love you to get yourself a tee with my label art on it and share it with the world.

Mostly, I’m just glad you’re here. Cheers!