Reuben's Brews

We’ve all heard the old adage about teaching a man to fish.With a slight twist, it often rings true in the beer industry,too: Buy a man a beer and he’ll drink for an hour, but give him a homebrew kit and he’ll quit his day job and open a brewery. Something like that.

- Kendall Jones

When Grace Kim Robbings bought her husband, Adam, a homebrew kit just a few weeks after their first child was born, she never imagined that the new hobby would turn into an obsession and completely alter the course of the young family’s life. In just a couple of years, her husband matriculated from homebrewing newbie to brewmaster and co-owner of one of Seattle’s most ballyhooed breweries: Reuben’s Brews, which was named after the couple’s by-then-toddling son, Reuben.

“Looking back, I suppose I should have seen the warning signs,” says Grace Robbings. “Adam is a bit of a foodie, has always enjoyed beer, and was getting to the state where he would sample a beer and think about ways he would modify it to suit his tastes. He got hooked on brewing immediately, and he started absorbing everything he possibly could about it—from books,friends,forums, clubs, brew school, and lots of market research.”

“Bloody Good” Beer

It turns out that Adam Robbings has a knack for brewing—perhaps a genealogical phenomenon related to his British roots. The 42-year old native Londoner moved to the US in 2004 and started homebrewing in 2010, which is when his Roasted Rye IPA won first place in the People’s Choice Awards at the PNA Winter Beer Taste, one of Seattle’s longest-running annual beer events.

In 2011, Adam enrolled in the Intensive Brewing Science program at the University of California, Davis to learn about commercial brewing. The next year, he opened Reuben’s Brews in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood.