BREAKOUT BREWER: FIELDWORK BREWING CO.

Braden and Tweet appear to be an odd couple. Braden is a no-nonsense, clean-cut businessman. Tweet sports a bushy red beard, and bold tattoos peek out from his shirt sleeves and collar. But the pair became fast friends when they met at a bottle share.

The satellite locations are possible thanks to the California Type 23 liquor license, which allows breweries to hold six duplicate licenses for tasting rooms in addition to a brewery. Braden hopes to announce Fieldwork’s fifth satellite location by the end of 2017, and a sixth and final offsite location will soon follow. The settings vary widely, from a former Odwalla juice factory (Berkeley), to a trendy Wine Country market (in Napa’s Oxbow Public Market), to a midtown location (Sacramento). But each of them were carefully chosen as areas that Braden and Tweet believed were underserved when it came to craft beer. Creating this footprint was part of the plan from the start.

“It’s the way that we most like to express our feelings about our beer—as fresh and as close to the consumer as possible,” Braden says. [We want to] have that beer served within days or ultimately not more than a week after it was put in the keg.”

Braden and Tweet appear to be an odd couple. Braden is a no-nonsense, clean-cut businessman who also counts on twenty years of experience in business development for software and hardware companies in Silicon Valley. Tweet sports a bushy red beard, and bold tattoos peek out from his shirt sleeves and collar. But the pair became fast friends when they met at a bottle share. Tweet was just getting started at Ballast Point, and he became a regular at a restaurant run by Braden. Tweet actually crafted the beer that would become Grapefruit Sculpin as a New Year’s Day alternative to a mimosa (he referred to it as Beermosa) for Braden’s bar.

At the restaurant, the pair often chatted about opening a brewery. Tweet assumed it was just talk that would never come to fruition. But Braden was serious all along. In Tweet, Braden saw the same type of ingenuity he’d seen in tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. “It’s the same profile,” Braden says. “It’s a person who’s really interested and curious and passionate about what they do and isn’t willing to be boxed in and isn’t afraid to take chances.”

Like taking a gamble on an ever-revolving tap list.