Excerpt:

Twenty-one years after the closure of the San Francisco Bay-area Naval air base where her father had served in the 1970s and ‘80s, international beer judge Herlinda Heras sat munching on a Reuben and a charcuterie plate at an on-base restaurant that had opened just a few days earlier. As she sipped on a locally brewed beer, she watched a slender man pull a tall heavy rake through a bed of barley spread out on a warehouse floor separated from the dining room by glass.

As she contemplated visiting the other drinking destinations in the brand-new post-military conversion project – the Almanac Beer tasting room that shares the World War II-era dry goods storage house with the malthouse, the sunset-facing Faction Brewing, St. George Spirits located in an airplane hangar and Rock Wall Wine Company at the water’s edge -- she overheard a group of men swapping incorrect information about the malting floor on the other side of the internal wall-to-wall window. Clearly knowing more about beer than they, she interjected with a correction and spent the next half hour enchanting them with her insight.