Siblings Alex and Gregory Zobel are wearing matching beige sweatshirts. They did not plan it. But they sure think it’s funny.

“So,” Gregory pauses, before a chuckle. “We didn’t mean to dress like twins. [Alex] was literally just like, well, it’s a good thing she’s not taking a photo today.” Sitting at a long community table on the colorful second story at Armistice Brewing Company, their co-owned 3-year-old Richmond craft brewery, they look at each other and laugh.

It’s hard to believe that the Zobels, five years apart in age, were ever estranged, or at odds with each other at all. They repeatedly quote each other, finish the other’s sentences and occasionally nitpick over petty things like dates and the space’s aesthetic details, like, they say, whether red or blue pillows should sit on this colorful room’s surrounding benches.

Today, they run a successful (and recently expanded) brewery and Richmond taproom and beer garden, near the city’s developing waterfront, where they bring well-executed craft beer to an underserved part of the Bay Area. They see each other every day, working in tandem to grow a small craft brewery in a volatile and ever-changing local beer market.

But the Zobels didn’t always get along — even more so than other siblings. Before either hit their teenage years, their parents separated; Gregory stayed with their mother in Napa, while Alex followed their father to Concord. They saw each other on holidays and during periodic visits, but family dynamics and distance perpetually strained the relationship.

“That's the genesis of the conflict between us,” says the younger Gregory. “We grew up with different experiences, different people, different schools, different everything. There wasn't a lot to relate to at that age.”

Around 2009, however, priorities changed. The two, both then over 21, were living separately in Los Angeles: Gregory was working on the sets of major TV shows and films, and Alex was working on her doctorate in 16th century English literature at UCLA. At home, their mother, who had been battling health issues since 1998, began to seriously decline. For her sake, Gregory and Alex attempted to rebuild their relationship.

“We started drinking craft beer a lot more around that time,” Gregory says. “We were discovering craft [beer] as the L.A. market was just starting to discover itself.”

One year, for his sister’s birthday, Gregory pulled the “classic little brother move”: He bought Alex a homebrew kit, admittedly not just for her. He wanted to try homebrewing, too.

“We totally f—ed it up,” he recalls of that first homebrew. “At the time, we thought it was the greatest thing ever. It's a good thing we had nobody around with a real palate at the time who would’ve stomped on our dreams. [Then] it was either after the first batch or the second batch that we literally were like, ‘Oh, we're going to open a brewery now.’ Like idiots.”

It turned out the two had more in common than they’d thought at that time in their lives. They’d both began to mull a career switch, and brewing seemed an attractive, though naive, choice. But there was another significant reason the two held fast to the idea of opening a brewery.

“It felt really important to us around this time to have something that we could do together, especially because Mom was not doing well,” Alex says. “The cancer at that point had migrated to her liver and brain. We were like, OK, we know that this is something that's really important to our mom — to see that her kids would get together and be a happy family unit once she was gone.”

The Zobel’s mother, Kathryn Tunstall, had run a medical startup, and served as a breadwinner for not just her immediate family, but as financial assistance for her siblings’ families. She held close to her family, so she took the divorce and separation hard.

“I think that ‘taking care of your own’ and [the idea of] being tight with your family was very important to her, and I'm sure that the divorce really challenged that worldview for her,” Alex says. “I think she was very upset that her nuclear family broke up. So it was awesome to be able to demonstrate to her that we were actually doing this and not in some artificial way that she had orchestrated for us.”

In 2012, Tunstall was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, and by the following year, both Alex and Gregory had returned to the Bay Area. Alex began teaching and finished working on her doctorate remotely, and Gregory left his job on a television show — the CW’s "Jane the Virgin" — to be near their mother. The brewery idea, meanwhile, was still taking shape; they had a plan and recipe ideas, and were seeking brewery locations and investors.

Gregory recalls a day he watched Alex read their mother the business plan for their brewery. By then, her brain and her sight were deteriorating, Alex recalls, “but it just felt important.”

It was, inevitably, a surreal period. Cancer was ugly, and the siblings found not everyone could talk about it.

“Gregory and I had the only real open and clear, clean line of communication during that time,” Alex says. “Like just the horrible things, like, ‘Did you notice that Mom couldn't find that word? That it never came to her?’ ‘Yeah, I noticed that.’ ‘What does that mean?’ Those are the sorts of conversations we weren't really able to have with our step-dad because he just couldn't talk about it. It opened up a totally new, very honest vector of communication that we still tap into sometimes.”

Tunstall passed away in June 2015, two years before the two opened Armistice Brewing — named for the truce the siblings made to work together.

“Alex likes to say that we're ‘trauma bonded’ — it's kind of true, right?” Gregory asks. “There is literally no one else who's gone through that life experience the same way I did. [Except] Alex. She's the only other person I have fully shared it with.”

Founding Armistice

As Alex was finishing her dissertation, Gregory began a stint at St. Florian’s Brewery in Windsor, where he learned the basics of brewery operation, and how he and Alex might (or might not) financially fund the business.

A search for investors and other supporters came up almost empty, forcing the Zobels to pursue their own capital. They took a loan from a local credit union, and together, decided to invest the payout from their mother’s life insurance policy.

By opening day in August 2017, their aggressive social media campaign to rally neighbors to come to the brewery, billed as specializing in English and American-style ales, appeared to have paid off — too well.

“I don't think anything could have ever prepared us for what we saw on opening day, to be honest,” Gregory remembers. “It was insane. One of the craziest days of my life, honestly.”

They made money, but they also ran half the taps dry, which presented a major issue.

“You can't be a taproom-oriented brewery with three beers on tap,” Alex recalls saying. So they took their opening weekend earnings — their very first profits — and immediately handed it over to buy a fourth tank and a new walk-in refrigerator.

Those first couple years were marked by change; not necessarily in their own lives, or in the business’ trajectory, but in the beer industry as a whole. The importance of freshness sustained, but consumer preferences evolved. The English beers they had loved brewing — Bitters and Browns, for example — had to be spaced out on a menu of hazy IPAs and similar styles in order for the brewery to generate income.

“We're pretty liberal about what we're going to have on the board,” Gregory says. “We'll change in a heartbeat; if everyone decides they don’t like the hazy IPA, we’ll stop making hazy IPA. The reality is we’ve got to keep the lights on.”

Still, consumers will usually find an English Mild or Barleywine on the menu, which delights one of the Zobels’ “heroes” in beer, Admiral Maltings co-founder Dave McLean.

McLean, who made a name for himself in the Bay Area by brewing English styles at the brewpub he founded, Magnolia Brewing, now finds himself occasionally in the Armistice taproom — a place where he gets to enjoy his favorite styles of beer.

“I think it's [hard] to get bitten by the English ale bug enough to feel compelled to brew them,” McLean says. “It's a bit of a relief to know that at least a few younger brewers are carrying that torch and going a bit against the grain to make sure there's still a place for traditional English-style ales in 2020.”

In a fanciful way, Armistice’s taproom also appears very English. Globular overhead lanterns light the warm, wooden slab making up the main bar; its surrounding walls pay homage to Alex’s schooling, featuring large-scale images of 16th century English woodcuts of dancing minstrels and bipedal forest critters in haberdashery. A fenced-in outdoor beer garden just outside sits under a canopy of twinkling lights. That area in particular has been popular with families, so last year, they added a second patio when they significantly expanded the taproom by taking over several neighboring storage unit spaces.

“I get a little bit of English pub energy there,” McLean says. “I also think every good pub/bar/tasting room/what have you is — or should be — an expression of its founders' personalities. Armistice seems to have a flavor of hospitality that is more than just, ‘let me tell you about our excellent beer.’ It's warm and welcoming and makes it feel like a nice place to relax and hang out.”

That sentiment is shared by Richmond locals, says Janet Johnson, the city’s economic development administrator.

“[Breweries like Armistice] keep people in the city who don’t have to travel for craft beer,” Johnson tells SFGATE. “That’s good for all of us.”

Businesses similar to Armistice, including the area’s German style-focused brewery East Brother Beer Co. and the brand new Origin Brewer, have been a boon for the city’s reputation, she says.

“It’s always nice to bring in the types of businesses that organically grow, that people want,” she continues. “We’re bringing people into the city that may have had a different view of Richmond. They’re starting to understand how wonderful and beautiful the city is.”

Things seem to be running smoothly for the Zobels, in part due to more promising development in the neighborhood. There’s a Starbucks across the street now, a row of Tesla charging stations, a gym and a newly opened ferry terminal nearby. Even more customers will be incoming by way of a hotel and apartment complex, both currently under construction. On the horizon, they say, is a second Armistice taproom somewhere else in the Bay Area — as soon as they find and agree on a fitting space.

Making such major decisions for the company hasn’t always been easy, but some members of their family are surprised they can stand to be around each other at all.

“To this day, a lot of our family can't believe that we have a relationship where we see each other every day,” Gregory says. One reason they can, they say, is separate offices. Another: radical honesty.

“The biggest benefit to working with your sibling is when we're having serious discussions about where the business is going to go,” Gregory says. “We're not walking on eggshells … I'm going to tell her exactly what I want and she's going to tell me exactly what she wants. Oftentimes, that means that we're going to have to go into a little battle about it, but when we get out of it, there's no subtext.”

“Our fates are so tied,” Alex continues. “Our finances are the same, our family's the same. We know what's going on in the background, we know what's coming down the line. You don't have to wonder what the motivation is.”

The motivation, at least for now, is to set up the business for prosperity. This taproom was meant to serve as Armistice’s original proof of concept, but that was three years ago. Now, with the expansion finished, another taproom in the works, and a clear knack for wearing matching stylish beige sweatshirts, Armistice is poised for growth. Alex turns to Gregory. “Are we still in proof of concept?”

Not anymore, Gregory says. “We’re in do or die now.”

Armistice Brewing is located at 845 Marina Bay Pkwy #1 in Richmond, Calif. View the company's San Francisco Beer Week events here at the official Beer Week website. San Francisco Beer Week begins on Friday, Febr. 7, 2020 and runs through Sunday, Feb. 16, 2020.

Alyssa Pereira is an SFGate digital editor. Email: alyssa.pereira@sfgate.com | Twitter: @alyspereira

