Nearly a decade ago, I started working on a concept for a revolutionary small scale brewery. A fully automated brewery that will allow anyone, regardless of experience, to brew excellent beers from raw ingredients. Great ideas are plentiful, however rarely executed by one individual. It’s taken me a few years to figure that out. This story is not just about a brewery, it’s also about community.
Fast forward to 2009. I had moved my office to Santa Cruz, California, and had been looking for web application developers with a particular skill set for an unrelated project. While we’re not far from Silicon Valley, there was a notable lack of local talent (with the aforementioned skill set)in our sleepy little beach town. With the help of a local college student, we put together a program called Santa Cruz App Dev to take entry level programming students from the area colleges, and provide them with the skills needed for this project. We provided this training program free of charge, in exchange for coding on our project. We ran two such training sessions in 2010.
In 2011, a weekend hack-a-thon was proposed by a friend of mine. Called Tech Raising, the goal was to form a team and execute an idea to the point of a minimally viable demo. I was reluctant at first, but I decided to pitch my brewery idea at Tech Raising. I asked several members of the App Dev team to join me for the entire weekend. Much to my amazement, everyone was on board to sacrifice their weekend for my crazy idea.
In 48 hours we created a proof of concept brewery control system with a live demo. We created a slick user interface with a recipe database, beer style guide, and a working process control system, including fluid and temperature. I’m fairly certain the owners of the venue did not expect to see a 100 foot garden hose in the center of their brand new office building, but the demo went without a spill.
The real story here is that without a team of people behind my idea, it would still just be an idea. Finding the right group of people can be a challenge, and I feel fortunate to have found a group of people willing to rally behind a crazy home brewer.