The Newest News

My wife, who's signed up on the email list for Beer In Hawaii, forwarded me their new interview with Andy Baker. Baker's story is pretty interesting, but I personally was most intrigued by his mention, near the end, of the two companies that will be coming out of the dissolution of Aloha Beer. From piecing together the bits of info I've stumbled across, here's how I understand it (and I may be way off--a lot of the business dealings in Hawaii seem to be played very close to the vest, with plenty of secrets; innuendo and rumor are often hard to differentiate from truth):

First of all, Aloha Beer is still in business. I'd been wondering about this because you can still find their bottles on the shelves of local stores despite the fact that the brewery's been shut down for nearly a year and the original business partnership behind Aloha Beer seemed to crash and burn like the Hindenburg. Apparently, one of the original owners (those owners being Steve Sombrero, James Lee, and Dave Campbell) maintained rights to the brand, and has plans of creating a new brewpub location and adding a new beer to the bottled product line. (The bottled beers, by the way, were never brewed on the islands; the beer in those bottles has always been handled by a commercial brewery in California.)



Secondly, the actual brewery--that is to say the equipment and location that had been used to make the beer served in the Aloha Beer brewpub--will be reopening with a new name: Hoku Brewing. They've got a website up which is still largely under construction, but it features plenty of pictures of Dave Campbell, the original brewer behind Aloha, so I figure it's safe to say that he'll be involved. As to whether he'll be the sole owner of Hoku, or whether one of the other folks from the original Aloha Beer partnership is going to be part of this... who knows?

Now that I've delivered the meager hard-facts I've managed to gather, I'd like to take an opportunity to spew (probably unwisely, considering my general ignorance) my personal thoughts. Mainly, I'm hoping that Dave Campbell is sole owner of Hoku Brewing. He's the dude who brews the beer, he's the guy who does the real work. The other two dudes--Sombrero and Lee--strike me as businessmen (Sombrero is president of commercial real estate company NAI ChaneyBrooks, and Lee is a partner with the Honolulu law firm Devens, Nakano, Saito, Lee, Wong and Ching) who were primarily involved for business reasons. Campbell, on the other hand, has been a passionate member of the brewing scene in Honolulu for nearly 30 years--he even opened up the first homebrew shop! The sense that I get--mainly from unfounded supposition--is that the shit that went down with Aloha was mainly provoked by the other two guys.

Other news? Well, Honolulu Beerworks still isn't open, and neither is BREW'd. (Remember my post back in September of last year? At that time, the word on the street for both Beerworks and BREW'd was that they'd be open by November.) Rumors continue to float around concerning other potential breweries--like this one, who apparently got funding but haven't been able to move much farther along--but precious little actually seems to take place in the real world of Honolulu. This town just doesn't seem to be a very easy to start a business.

News relating to my personal brewing? Well, I've been developing a greater interest in mead, and have been revisiting my cider attempts--but both of those are topics for future posts.

Hawaii Brewing Doldrums

We're into the third month of 2014, and I'm finally getting around to posting here for the first time this year. Why the silence? Well, a couple reasons. First of all, I came down with a cold, and then I got the stomach flu, and after that it was the regular flu. And then I had to go back to work, which is something I like nearly as much as being sick. Also, I've recently been putting most of my writing time into my new fiction project--a metaphorical exploration of the gentrification of San Francisco... with zombies--which has left me less time for this blog.



But frankly, looking around the beer scene in Oahu, it doesn't seem like I'm the only one going through a fallow period. Two of the big beer-related things we've been looking forward to around here--the opening of the Honolulu Beerworks, and the opening of a Kaimuki-located craft beer bar by the people behind the incredible REAL: A Gastropub--are still not open. And there's no telling when they might come to fruition.

The last I heard about The Honolulu Beerworks was the post Tim Golden put up on Beer In Hawaii on January 17th. The title of that of post--"Honolulu Beerworks is Brewing!"--got a lot of people all excited. Finally, more than 6 months after the closing of Aloha Beer, we'd have a chance to drink ales and lagers brewed on Oahu without having to go to Gordon Biersch! (No offense to Gordon Biersch, their beer's are good, but it's not easy for me to get excited about a chain.) But... a month and a half later, and there's still no sign of when Honolulu Beerworks will be opening their doors. And then I went back and looked at the first in-depth piece Tim Golden wrote on the brewery, which was published in Honolulu Magazine last September, and saw that the estimated opening date at that time was November. Which means we're currently at least three months behind schedule.

November, it so happens, was also the planned opening month I'd heard about for REAL's new location in Kaimuki (which is gonna be called BREW'd). I heard that date back in August, when I'd decided to try to trick REAL owner Troy Terorotua into giving me a job. "Yeah, try contacting me again when the new location opens up. Oughta be in October or November," he told me. Well, yesterday I ate breakfast across the street from the storefront that BREW'd will hopefully be occupying sometime soon. They had the signs up, but as you'll see from the picture I snapped (which follows below), they've still got a long ways to go.



So, the two new beer places we've been eagerly anticipating here in Honolulu are both at least three months behind schedule, and there's no telling when they'll be opening up. Considering the astronomical cost of rent for business spaces here, delays of that sort seem like a potential threat to the viability of the businesses themselves. I mean, if you're paying tens of thousands of dollars in rent every month, then every month you aren't earning is a month you're building serious debt. And that sort of debt seems like it might be hard to deal with and still survive. (All of this is of course supposition on my part, and I'm an ignorant schmoe who's never owned a business of any sort, so take it all with a grain of salt.)

At first I was wondering if the delays were just examples of "Hawaii Time," in which nobody's in a hurry and everything takes ages longer than it's expected to. But a recent conversation with Bill Comerford, the owner of four of the Irish bars in Honolulu, clued me in that other factors might be involved. In our conversation, which turned into an anti-government rant by Bill (which is exactly what's happened to every conversation I've had with him), he told me that he'd been trying to get approval to open up the upstairs section of Anna O'Brien's pub for a year and a half, and that the city still hasn't granted it to him. So maybe the delay's for Honolulu Beerworks and BREW'd are city-related.

In any case, Honolulu still doesn't have locally-brewed beer, and Kaimuki still doesn't have it's new craft pub. People are getting thirsty--me especially.