Hana Hou Magazine's beer feature

As luck would have it, when my girlfriend and I flew to our new hometown of Honolulu, the issue of Hana Hou magazine (the inflight magazine for Hawaiian Airlines) on board had Hawaiian craft beer as its focus. You can read the article here, or, if you want to cut to the chase, here's a summary of what I found most interesting:

The first important "beer person" mentioned in the article is Tom Kerns, who runs a brewpub on the island of Hawaii ("the Big Island") called Big Island Brewhaus. The picture above--taken from the Hana Hou online version of the article--is of Kerns. He's been brewing for 19 years, 16 of which have been in Hawaii, and the article refers to him as "probably the most decorated beer maker in the Islands." He used to be head brewer for Maui Brewing, but now focuses on his own stuff. As far as I can tell, the only place to try his beer is in his brewpub.

The article goes on to mention, briefly, Hawai'i Nui brewing, "the state's lone commercial bottler of beer." They're located on the Big Island too, in Hilo, but they're working on a pretty small scale--3,000 barrels a year.

From there the article gets into Kona Brewing, by far the largest brewery with Hawaiian origins, though none of the bottled Kona Brewing beers actually come from Hawaii anymore--they're brewed on the mainland now. The article goes into the financial aspects of running a Hawaii brewery--basically its more expensive to brew here than elsewhere because of higher taxes, higher energy costs, and higher shipping costs (ingredients and bottles boated in, then finished product boated back out). Kona was started by the family that started Kettle Chips, but was bought out in 2010 by Craft Brew Alliance, a company headquartered in Portland Oregon. If you want Hawaiian-brewed Kona beer, you're limited to what's on tap in their brewpubs--one in Kona on the Big Island, and one in Hawaii Kai on Oahu.

Kona Brewing's mainland-brewed beer, and the controversy relating to them still marketing themselves as Hawaiian, leads the article into the origins of Maui Brewing, started by Garrett Marrero. He's a 33-year-old dude from San Diego who was apparently so pissed off to discover Kona beers' mainland origins that he started Maui Brewing in protest, figuring to cut costs on production by packaging in cans instead of bottles. Or at least that's the story he tells, capitalizing on controversy to get more coverage for his company.

In any case, as far as I can tell, none of the above-mentioned brewers actually come from Hawaii; they're all mainland transplants who came here to start businesses. The article does include coverage of Dave Campbell, brewmaster for the recently opened Aloha Brewing, though his inclusion is mainly in a sidebar and no mention of Aloha Brewing is made in the article's primary text. I'm not sure if Campbell is island-grown or not, but he did go to high school here, and he's been involved in the local brewing scene since the 1990s.

There's mention, too, of Primo Beer, Hawaii's beer of yesteryear, which constituted 3 out of every 4 beers drank in Hawaii in the 1960s. Primo was bought out by Schlitz in 1963. Now it's owned by Pabst, and brewed at the Miller plant in Irwindale, California. Humbug.