I started Beer, Beer & More Beer with my brother Darren in a 150 square foot potting shed April, 1rst 1995. I had graduated from Long Beach State the previous spring and had been instantly stripped of any grand notions of what life would be like with a ‘real job.’ Fortunately I had been presented the opportunity to sell life insurance. I must salute anyone who can make it in this tough, depressing business because I only made it a month. I did however hold on to my verbal cold calling script and during the next five years I kept it taped next to my desk. Anytime I felt like the mounting debt was suffocating me or that we were not going to make it I literally read that to myself. I did this a lot and you can ask my partner Chris to verify that, but more on Chris later. 

So in April 1995 Darren and I purchased $2,000 worth of inventory and put an ad in the local yellow pages that was to come out the following November. Darren ran a landscaping company as his main business and after quitting from Prudential I pushed a lawn mower during the day and worked on beer stuff every night. Darren provided me some space (a vacant potting shed), a little money, lots of help, and most importantly emotional support. Without Darren there is absolutey no way Beer, Beer & More Beer would have started. 

Starting a homebrewing supply company is not a stroke of genius. Most shop owners that I ran across in 1995 were really lucky if they could do it as a full time job. But it was a tangible, real idea and I was more than motivated to start something that mixed my two passions, business and brewing. I had started brewing in college when my roommate brought home a brewing kit from Costco and continued to brew with my brother Darren after graduation.

Our yellow page ad came out in November of 1995. The first call was from a very excited guy who was ecstatic that a brew supply shop was opening close to where he lived. I told him that I did not have a storefront but was offering free delivery. He ordered a sack of grain and told me he did not want the first order 10% discount I was offering because “he wanted me to stay in business.” At that time I don’t think I had 50 lbs of combined grain let alone a sack. So of course I told him no problem and proceeded to drive 4 hours the next day to pick up a sack of grain from the distributor and deliver it back to his house.

When I got to his house I met the customer, Regan Dillon. Regan non-chalantly asked if I wanted to see his brewery and of course I said yes. What I was about to see would forever change the course of brewing as we know it. He had a room attached to his house, but with a separate entrance, that was dedicated to brewing. Two thirds was devoted to his all-grain system (which at the time was a foreign concept to most brewers) and the other third was sectioned off and temperature controlled for fermentation. I was speechless. Not yet done he motioned me to his garage where I practically kneeled down in front of the holy grail of all things beer. There in front of me was a three-door, glass refrigerator fully stocked with over 800 bottles of homebrew and as a bonus, three kegs on tap. To this day I have never seen such an impressive collection of bottled homebrew being perfectly aged. “Are you serious? Are there others like you out there?”