Tim Smith and Devin Nail have known each other since the late 1990s when they became tomodachi (friends) in a Camas High School Japanese class. As adults, they both got into the Portland beer scene and started homebrewing in 2004. They eventually reunited in Taiwan. Nail moved to the Asian island in 2008, followed by Smith in 2010. There, they began brewing once again, motivated by their new country’s relative lack of quality craft brews.

The Camas natives made a lot of beer — one several-gallon batch every week — by purchasing previously impossible-to-find ingredients from a newly opened online homebrew store and emulating the recipes of some of their favorite beers from back home, such as Deschutes Brewery’s Black Butte Porter. They made so much that they didn’t have to buy beer anymore

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