1. Know thy neighbor and accept their beer from over the fence when offered.

It wasn’t until 1998 that Jamil realized that home-brewing was an actual thing. He studied micro-biology and writing at UC Davis and eventually made his career as a software engineer. But in that year, while doing some work in the backyard, he struck up a conversation with his neighbor, who offered him a beer from over the fence. It turns out that the beer from over the fence was a home-brew. Jamil recounts the story: “My neighbor Steve said, ‘Hey, try this beer.’ It was the best beer I had ever had, so I asked him where I could buy it. He said, ‘I made it.’ And I was shocked because I was thinking it was from a giant factory with German people or something.” That was Jamil’s first home-brew. Jamil told his wife about it and she bought him a Mr. Beer Kit for Christmas. Thirteen years later, in 2011, they opened the brewery in the Bay Area city of Pittsburg. Several things happened between the fence and the brewery, of course, but that’s the start of his brewing story. A neighbor. A conversation. A fence. And a beer. Boom-shakalaka!

2. Know thy suckiness and work hard to make your craft better.

So what happened in those thirteen years, between the fence of ’98 and the start of the brewery in 2011? What most people don’t know about Jamil is that he’s a real geek. “I tend to be obsessive about everything. Before beer, it was paintballing. I actually came up with one of the first semi-automatic paintball guns.” Jamil was also immersed in the world of scuba-diving. “I get geeky about whatever I’m interested in. I became an instructor and developed the first computer-based training for scuba-diving.” Once Liz gifted him with a brew kit, his interests turned to the world of brewing. Of course, Jamil’s first batches were terrible. He admits to thinking, “Wait a minute, I had a beer that was really good (from Steve) and then I made a beer that wasn’t any good. I knew what was possible, so given my obsessive nature about trying to figure out everything, I decided I was going to learn more about beer.” So he studied and brewed, over and over again.