What a weird experience. I was standing against a wall, watching people shuffle around the room. I glanced over at him. He looked calm and peaceful, maybe for the first time ever, lying there in his black belt. I hadn't cried since the week before when he had passed. But that week was a mess and I cried a lot. I had been working on a packaging line at a crappy little brewery in the middle of no where. I talked to him almost every day on the phone and he sounded fine, but tha

Safety at the brewery left something to be desired. Safety, in general, in Vietnam was that way, it was definitely one of the scarier places that I've lived and worked. I'm not sure if they have safety regulations but from my experiences there, nothing was required. Learning to brewing in America, safety was the first lesson I was taught. I tucked my jeans into my knee-high steel toed boots, donned my high school chemistry class green chemical goggles, thick chemical resistan

I found that in order to successfully brew beer in Vietnam, one must have a detailed understanding that while the brewing process remains the same, the road to get to the end product is very different. Flexibility is a must. Temperature, cleanliness, education level and taste are very, very different in South East Asia. Vietnam has no indigenous ingredients required to make beer and the tap water is unpotable. All ingredients must be imported through one of the most difficult

Being a global traveler is the same as being a time traveler. It took four years and a couple laps around the earth for me to figure it all out. You see, it works a lot like this. You buy a plane ticket. And it has a very specific departure time. Then you board the plane and take off. You fly through the air for a certain amount of time, crossing longitudes and time zones. The plane ticket has a flight duration associated with it, but at this point, who knows what time you ac

I sat on a wobbly bar stool and lit a cigarette. I was tired from all the travel but so energized from my new surroundings that a beer...

https://py.pl/1nz9vFbZmCr

There really is something special about seeing people drink your beers in the wild. On a beautiful day, at the ballpark with the sun...

What to write about this time?! Should I write about the time I took a pod of jelly fish to the face while ascending during a scuba dive...

Oh yeah, this was nice. I was so cozy, so comfortable. I was in my super soft bed in my small yet comfortable apartment in Memphis. I had...

Are you sure it's legal for me to drive here? I asked. “Yeah, you should be fine” he replied. We will call him Gen Z. Gen Z was easily my...

This is how it always turns out for me. Battling the engineers. On some level I'm sure it's like the age ol adage of 'form over function'...

It was open mic night at the brewery when he came up to me. I had heard about him. We will call him Boy #2 and he was the brewer. At...

Alright, here we go again brewers. One door closes and another opens. This time to central America, Costa Rica and Nicaragua to be exact....

Brewery work meant mashing in on brew days or cleaning and packaging on other days. I implemented a production calendar in half...

When Mai and Mike first began selling his beers in the taproom, craft beer had not really existed in Vietnam. As I sort of explained...

In those early days, when I first got to Saigon, the tap room, it seemed that it wasn't really a cohesive idea yet. They saw the business...

We sold the beer in kegs out of the tap room on Do Quang Dau at first and quickly expanded from there. Mike's western home-brew buddies...

The evening before our first meeting with the marketing group, trouble struck. It finally happened. Everyone had warned me that I would...

The next morning, after an ample night's rest and another lovely English breakfast, we left for the brewery in the countryside. I was...

BANG, BANG, BANG! I sat straight up. Where was I? The room was dark and it took a minute to adjust. BANG, BANG, BANG! Vietnam. Someone...