Breaking Even

So, we make beer. We do a lot of other stuff too, but beer is the most evident gravitational center that holds all the other stuff together - it is our center of mass. Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia doesn’t mention beer in its entry on “break-even,” and so this must be a metaphorical force. Let me ask — when was the last time a beer broke even with you? When was the last time you even paused when you were drinking a beer?

That’s what we aim to do — to break some of zero-states in beer. We want to create beer that is worthy of thought and reflection in all aspects — what it is, how it is made, where it is, who is around. All that stuff.

What you might think about when you are drinking our beer is “what makes this so…?” And in thinking that, you’d be right on the money. First off, it might be our insistence that beer is, in essence, liquid community. Just like the other communities that we are all involved in, a community requires care and intention to truly thrive. “you get out what you put in,” is a good way to put it.

What we put in, foremost, is a lot of care, deliberation, and intentionality. We oftentimes move forward by looking back. Many of our beers are tinged with inspiration from brewing traditions and practices, but none are executed with the intention of emulating those liquids (however transcendental they might be). That would be very “break eveny”. From the very beginning we have been attentive to where our ingredients come from, and how they get to us. This is one of our breaks – that we are trying to carve out our own thing, built on and nurturing to grow the local and regional agricultural economy.

Dreamers? Sure. We wouldn’t be very Californian if we weren’t dreamers. Nostalgics? For some things sure, but a lot of bad stuff happened over the years too, you know?. Mystics? Uh-huh. Absolutely. There is a thin veil between what is real and tangible and what is roiling beneath the surface. Mythology is always based on reality, and we would argue the inverse is true as well.