Drink. Share. Brew.

You don’t have to go far in the tech hub of San Francisco to find innovative people looking for new ways to disrupt the status quo. It’s the capital of the sharing economy and the headquarters of companies like RelayRides, Airbnb and Uber. But one of the newest shared ideas has nothing to do with software, applications or technology at all. It’s all about homebrewing.

“There are no secrets,” explains Cole Emde, head brewer and co-owner of the city’s Black Sands Homebrew Shop. “In the brewery, we are going to tell everyone everything there is to know about our beers—how we make them, what goes into them and any special techniques, if there are any.”

Black Sands owners and brewers Emde and childhood friend Andy Gilliland, both 32, grew up in Cleveland and moved to the Bay Area after college. The two say they’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit. “Cole and I used to take concert posters from the L trains in Chicago and sell them on Ebay,” laughs Gilliland, recalling some of their early business ventures.

They came up with the idea for their brewery over three years ago after Emde moved to New York for a job at the Museum of Modern Art. In his spare time, he became heavily involved with the Brooklyn Brewsers, a homebrewing club.

Their brewery concept, referred to loosely as “open source brewing,” invites people to visit the brewery, enjoy the atmosphere, drink the beer and then if they’re interested in homebrewing, go next door where customers will be given recipes to make a scaled down version of the same commercial batch of beer they just consumed.

“This brewery was a pipe dream for a while, but we talked about it a few times a month while we were bicoastal and it just came together,” says Gilliland, who left his job as a director of design in January to launch the brewery. When Gilliland and Emde met Robert Patterson, a restaurateur and entrepreneur, and Stefan Roesch, a software engineer, the concept finally crystallized and the four formed a business partnership.

The homebrew shop, which opened last September, occupies a small converted garage adjacent to the future brewery on a busy corner of the Lower Haight neighborhood between the Magnolia Brewery and Toronado Pub. Gilliland and Emde hope to open the three-barrel brewery in late June.

Andre Sanchez, co-manager of San Francisco Brewcraft, the city’s only other homebrew shop, says the Black Sands concept is the only one he knows of in the area. “I think it’s great,” he says. “It would be great to see more of it because you can get a lot more people interested in brewing because you have the hands-on aspect.”

The Black Sands supply shop offers kits, ingredients and neatly filed recipes for making beer at home, but Gilliland and Emde aren’t just offering up their own recipes. They also convinced Magnolia Brewery and Anchor Brewing Company to share their recipes as well, scaled down for homebrewers. And they’re currently working with other local breweries to offer more recipes.

“It’s a sharing economy here and we wanted to bring this to the brewing scene,” says Emde, adding that the idea has been well-received.

Dermot Stratton, competition chairman at the San Francisco Homebrewers Guild and an Apple engineer by day, says that while members of the guild come from all walks of life, a number of them work in the tech field. “There’s a lot of brewers who are the do-it-yourself type who like to to build their own equipment and tinker, and that lends itself to the engineering discipline,” he says.

Back at the brewery, Emde and Gilliland walk through the construction and explain how they plan to set up the space. Only a few weeks out from opening their doors, it’s starting to resemble a brewery. When asked if they are worried about people using open-sourced recipes from Black Sands to start their own breweries, Emde quickly answers. “We have absolutely no concerns,” he says. “Even if someone tried to take our recipes and open a brewery, good luck! It’s really hard to do.” ■