So, you now know how we all met each other, but that is only part of the story. We still had to come together and form the beer-producing-Voltron that Indie would eventually become. Learning each other’s personalities and developing a chemistry certainly didn’t happen overnight. I’m going to let you in on a little secret: beer played a part.
Kevin and Connor started throwing around the brewery idea first and I was later added to the mix. We started meeting on the regular…like every week…after our tedious day-jobs…well into the night…much to our wives’/girlfriends’ chagrin…closing places down. It was a labor of love, but we all had a lot to say. Each of us needed to take the time to articulate our personal vision of the brewery, hashing out every detail. This took a lot of time and an equal amount of beer.
We all live in pretty different parts of LA, so each week we would rotate who got to choose where we met. Naturally, we picked our favorite beer-centric establishment and got to visit some really excellent places along the way. We eventually determined that we wouldn’t kill each other, and had a great list of locations that we could hope to get our beer into in the future.
Once we got James in the mix, he flew out for “intensive” training (for us, not him). This involved: recipe development, eating lunch, more recipe development, arguing over which saison from Fantome was best, more recipe development and, of course, taste testing. He also had to help the three of us unlearn our crappy homebrewing habits, and only made fun of us a dozen times, or so.
Through our late-night meetings, we all came to know each other very well and crafted our vision for Indie. It is where we became more than the sum of our parts; something that is authentic and personal to each of us, and we can’t wait to share it with you!
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