The beer is ready for dry hopping. Diego Benitez unscrews the bar clamps that keep a massive metal lid fastened to the top of one of his brewery’s handmade fermenting vessels.

As he pries up the lid’s rubber lip, breaking a pressure seal that for the last week has kept the fermenting brew isolated from the air outside, Benitez talks about his years growing up in Mexico City, the son of an Italian and a Spaniard who met there and started a window installation business; how he traveled to Europe to visit his relatives every summer and loved discovering new countries and cultures; how his parents made wine in their closet and how, after he came to the United States in 1999 to attend Caltech, he couldn’t help but do the same.

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