The Big South Bay Brewery That Could

San Diego Magazine's Happy Half Hour · Dec 22, 2023 · 1h 9m

"I said to myself, this was the biggest failure of my whole life," recalls Tiago Carneiro, founder and owner of Nova Kombucha and Novo Brazil Brewing. In this week's episode of Happy Half Hour, he's talking about his business' epic near-crash-and-burn during the pandemic. Which, if you do some quick back-of-the-napkin math, wasn't all that long ago. We learn a lot in this episode. Tiago tells us he's from a restaurant family in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, which is the cattle- and therefore beef-producing region of the country. His dad started in bakeries (giving Tiago his first up-close look at…