Crider’s mom gave him a homebrew kit for Christmas in 1999. By March of the next year, he had 42 kegs, 10 taps, and he’d built himself a 10-gallon system. You might say he got a little obsessed.

"I was brewing 20-40 gallons a week, dumping beer,” Crider says. “It was good. It was really good. Out here, when you have three or four dudes drinking the beer, you can't drink 20 gallons of beer a week. We tried several nights. But I'd dump beer so I could make another batch of beer, so I could try different recipes."

After homebrewing for six years, Crider's uncle proposed the idea of starting a brewery. It was Thanksgiving 2006, and the pair were on a ski trip in Utah. By the end of the trip, his uncle had convinced him. So he immediately started reading books by Dogfish Head’s Sam Calagione and Brooklyn Brewery’s Steve Hindy, trying to learn all he could about the business. Crider also took a short, four-day course at the Siebel Institute about starting your own brewery before enrolling in the full Siebel course in February 2008. He’s not shy about what he learned there.

"When I got back from Europe, that didn't gain me anything,” Crider says. “I came back and brewed exactly as I was always brewing. That school teaches you every single brewing aspect in the world in about 12 weeks—normally it takes 12 years.”