The Origin
A Recession, A Homebrew Kit, and a Hunch
Scott Steffens grew up in Seattle - a city that, by the early 2010s, had been thoroughly baptised by craft beer. When he moved to Lisbon in 2010 with his wife Susana Cascais, he did what any reasonable person would do: he packed his homebrew equipment and brought it with him.
He had good reason. Beer in Lisbon at the time meant Sagres or Super Bock. That was about it. Not bad lagers, but not exactly a spectrum. Scott started brewing at home, friends tasted it, and the usual thing happened - the thing that has launched a hundred small breweries - people said it was good and asked for more.
"The idea of making a brewery - we were thinking it for six months, and then in October 2013 we decided to form the company."
- Scott Steffens, co-founder
Portugal was in the middle of a real economic squeeze. Finding work was hard. Susana wasn't finding steady employment. They were jumping between projects. The brewery idea, which might have seemed wild in calmer times, started to look like a rational bet. In late 2013, they registered the company.
The name came from the city itself. Two crows - dois corvos - appear on the coat of arms of Lisbon, protecting a ship. It was a deliberate choice: this was going to be a Lisbon brewery, not just a brewery that happened to be in Lisbon.
In 2014 they found a disused industrial space in Marvila - at the time described as a neighbourhood of abandoned warehouses where owners didn't even bother listing properties because they didn't think anyone would rent them. They built out the space themselves, largely because money was limited. Equipment arrived piece by piece. They assembled what they could.
By summer 2015, the first commercial batch was brewed. By the end of that same year, they opened what became the first taproom of its kind in Portugal - a place where you could sit next to the tanks and drink directly from them. That, in a country where craft beer culture was almost entirely absent, was a small revolution.
