Alosta Brewing

To truly tell the story of the Alosta Brewing Co. we have to go back about 20 years. Co-founder, and Director of Brewing Operations, Herb Adams was a local homebrewer. other Co-founder, Byron Fisher was a videographer. The two of them met through their wives, who had already been friends for several years. When Byron found out that Herb was a homebrewer, he asked him if he could possibly film the process one time, in order to get more footage to work on his editing skills. Fast forward a few weeks. Byron filmed Herbs brew session, and edited together a "How-to" video on homebrewing. It just so happened that at the time, Byron had a friend who was the local cable access television director. She was looking for new and original programming to put on the air, so she asked if she could air this video. Not giving it much thought, Byron and Herb said "sure." Several weeks later, Byron received a phone call from his friend at the cable station. People absolutely loved the video and were asking for more. The catch was, she wanted to make it a monthly show so it would need a title. That's when "Brewin' with Herb" was born. Soon after, they were nominated for a W.A.V.E. award, which is essentially the academy awards for local cable access. Unfortunately, they didn't win. However, within a short time, they were getting requests from cable access stations all over the Unite States. After completing each episode, they would make copies, and ship them all around. Keep in mind, this was the mid-90's, and the internet was still young. YouTube wasn't even a thought at this point. There was however, a small start-up Internet streaming service called ExtraNettv (it was essentially YouTube, before YouTube). They also requested copies of the show, and began streaming it. After about 4 months, "Brewin' with Herb" was pulled from the site due to too much bandwidth usage. The show was averaging 40k views per month (again, mid-90's), which was using way too much of the sites bandwidth. It was during this time when Herb and Byron talked about how cool it would be to open their very own brewery, and the first name that came to mind was Alosta. However, the costs of starting a brewery along with the laws in the state at the time, it was more of a pipe dream.