Ken Grossman was experimenting with beer before he was old enough to buy it.
As a high school student in the late 1960s, he bought his first home brewing kit and mixed the ingredients in a bucket, hiding his early batches from his mother.
About ten years later, before most Americans knew what craft beer was, Ken decided to build a brewery in Chico, California.
With $50,000, a few piles of scrap metal and some hand-me-down dairy tanks, Ken and his partner built Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, and crafted a beer with a distinctive, hoppy bitterness.
Today, as the third largest craft brewer in the U.S., Sierra Nevada Brewing Company – like so many other businesses – faces unprecedented challenges due to the Coronavirus crisis.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.