The man behind Ground Breaker was trained as a machinist. His step-father was a machinist, and as early as 12 he was starting his career in the field. He went to college to study it, and worked as a machinist for seven years afterward. Opportunities were shrinking up, and around 2008, the company he was working for saw its vendors shrink from 400 to just ten. Over the course of the next few years, he went to culinary school, started homebrewing, and, critically, watched an ill friend go through an ordeal before finding out she had Celiac disease. It was Portland, so naturally she liked beer, but none of the gluten-free stuff on the market was much good.

As a machinist, he'd found work fabricating defense-related equipment, but was growing increasingly uncomfortable with that. Opening a gluten-free brewery seemed like a turn in the right direction. "This looked like a job I could have that would make people happy," he said. And so he began researching Celiac disease and how to make beer that was free of the offending proteins that caused it.

This is where the story gets interesting. If you're planning on making beer from barley or wheat, there are hundreds of resources available. They'll tell you how much water to use in your mash, how warm it should be, how many rests to use and at what temperature and for how long. They'll tell you what happens when you alter anything. But what happens if you start with lentils? Or chestnuts? Or brown rice? "If it has starch and doesn't have oil, you can use it to make beer," he discovered. But as anyone who's tried some of the odder or poorer examples can attest, that doesn't mean you get a tasty beer.

Neumeister knew he was on the wrong track with his early batches because they sounded wrong. "Like 7-Up," he said. This pointed to the consistency challenge--so many gluten free beers, lacking proteins, have the consistency of soda. Sourish, metallic off-flavors are also common, and Neumeister thinks this is related to yeast health. "I think a lot of the flavors people taste in gluten-free beers come from the yeast." He had his wort tested to find out what nutrients it had and which it lacked, and he prepares a custom dose of yeast nutrient to make sure the fermentation produces clean, normal flavors.