CCHERNEY WAS NO STRANGER to shifting gears in life . He first enrolled at UC San Diego in Revelle College , on a pre-med track to follow the footsteps of his physician father . He heard it often growing up : “ My son , the doctor .” Yet the varied “ Renaissance man ” education of Revelle took hold , and Cherney found himself connecting more with his required courses in humanities , or better yet , disconnecting with those instructors . “ I remember an ethics class where the professor and I just disagreed fundamentally ,” he says . “ We would kind of spar in class , and it made me realize how much I like proving a point .”
Cherney transferred to Muir and became a philosophy major ; he took LSAT prep classes and at graduation was on such a course that his father was willing to pivot to “ My son , the lawyer .” Then came that visit to the Home Brew Mart , and Cherney was left to explain to his parents why he ’ d throw away a worldclass education to become a clerk working for $ 3.75 an hour . “ It only took them about 10 years to get used to ,” he says .
But throughout those years Cherney did put that Renaissance education to use . As White ’ s first employee , he did everything from ordering merchandise to making the catalogs , and of course was a major player in all the craft brewing the team did on the side . The back room of the shop became a kind of test kitchen for Cherney , White and his former roommate at UCLA , Peter A ’ Hearn , with several experimental recipes going on at once . “ In those days ,” Cherney recalls , “ every waking moment was spent thinking about beer , writing newsletters about beer — it was really all-consuming .”
All the while , Cherney kept his UC San Diego ties strong . Through his class at the Craft Center he had met a PhD student named Chris White
WHILE BALLAST POINT WOULD EVENTUALLY BECOME ONE OF THE BIGGEST SUCCESS STORIES IN CRAFT BEER , BACK IN 1996 , IT WAS JUST THREE GUYS DOING ALL THEY COULD TO KEEP UP .
( no relation to Jack ), a biochemist studying how strains of yeast can produce proteins that affect heart disease . The pair had been brewing partners throughout college , with Cherney often crashing the lab during late nights while Chris did coursework . “ We had a kind of parallel existence in the lab ,” says Cherney . “ Everything Chris showed me helped me understand how yeast made such a big difference in brewing . And when we needed a brewer ’ s yeast to sell in the shop , that influenced Chris to adapt what he was doing and go on to develop that strain .”
All the while another culture was developing in San Diego , with the Home Brew Mart becoming a hub for others equally impassioned for craft brewing . “ It was the place to go if you were a brewer in San Diego at the time ,” says Marshall grad Jeff Silver ’ 94 , who homebrewed for 20 years before starting Rough Draft Brewery in 2000 . “ You ’ d always wonder what they had brewing in that back room there .” Fellow Triton brewer and Muir grad Matt Akin ’ 03 of Benchmark Brewing also recalls buying his first homebrew kit at the shop . “ The influence that store had on the San Diego beer scene is almost immeasurable ,” he says .
WHERE IT BEGAN Yuseff Cherney ' 92 ( left ) was the first employee of Jack White ( right ) at Home Brew Mart , a major catalyst in the San Diego craft brewing movement and precursor to Ballast Point as well as Cutwater Spirits .
38 TRITON | SPRING 2018