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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.