Kyle Pool Engineered a Brewery for the Friend Who Never Orders Beer

The most revealing customer in Kyle Pool’s business is not the craft-beer obsessive studying a tap list like a racing form. It is the fifth friend. Four people want a brewery. One does not. That person may prefer tea, seltzer or kombucha, and a perfectly pleasant evening now contains a tiny piece of municipal planning: where can everybody go?

Pool’s answer was to treat that social snag as a design brief. New Motion Beverages would make drinks outside the usual beer lane. Embolden Beer Co. would serve the beer crowd. Both would share a production floor and a tasting room in San Diego. Later, Shogun by Embolden would add matcha, hojicha, yuzu and ube to the map. On a supermarket shelf, these are separate categories. Around a table, they are simply reasons nobody has to leave.

This is a founder story with an engineer’s skeleton. Pool trained as a civil engineer at San Diego State University, became a licensed Professional Engineer in California in 2013 and added a Project Management Professional credential. His public project record includes the LAX Landside Access Modernization Program and the long-running Meridian redevelopment near March Air Reserve Base. Then fermentation entered the blueprint.

First, a fizzy paradox

Pool and Andy Sist were college roommates before they were co-founders. They first encountered kombucha in 2014. Two years later, Pool, Sist, Megan Alkana and Ari Jarrell were homebrewing a hard version. Their ambition sounded philosophical in a 2019 trade-association interview: they wanted to resolve the tension between doing what one ought to do and doing what one wants to do. Their recipes borrowed from cocktails; their process borrowed from beer.

The early details are delightfully ordinary. Before making their own, Pool and Sist’s go-to kombucha flavor was GT’s Trilogy. Asked for the saying they lived by, they offered: “Work Hard, Play Harder, Love Always.” It reads less like a corporate mission statement than something written on a garage wall before a long brew day. That is probably why it works.

“Work Hard, Play Harder, Love Always.”Kyle Pool and Andy Sist, 2019

New Motion began taking public shape. In late 2018, Pool and Sist pitched it in the semi-finals at Brewbound Live, where alternative adult drinks shared the stage with beer startups. The proposition kept widening. Hard kombucha led to hard seltzer and sparkling tea. Pool brought the habits of an engineer and project manager: organize the work, watch the numbers, solve the immediate problem without losing the long plan.

Then the building rewrote the plan

In 2020, an equipment broker brought the team an opportunity. The former 32 North Brewing facility in Miramar was available. It had a 20-barrel brewhouse and a canning line, an unusually large machine for the alternative-beverage concept they had been building. It was also available at the peculiar moment when the pandemic had made brewery real estate both dangerous and negotiable.

The sensible response to excess capacity is usually to buy less capacity. The interesting response is to ask what else the asset can do. Cody Morris, a brewer with years in San Diego’s craft scene, had joined the group. The equipment was already suited to beer. The team had people who knew how to use it. Pool asked whether they should start a beer company beside New Motion.

They did. New Motion Beverages and Embolden Beer Co. opened together on November 21, 2020. One side handled hard tea, seltzer and kombucha. The other made ales and lagers. The move looks expansive from the outside, but operationally it was a form of concentration. The labels could tell different stories while the expensive steel, packaging equipment and tasting-room overhead stayed shared.

The distinction matters. A founder can mistake variety for distraction because variety is visible. Shared infrastructure is quiet. Pool’s portfolio puts the colorful disagreement on the can and the discipline in the back room. If a tank, line, sales route or tasting-room seat can support more than one coherent offer, the company gets another chance to earn from the same fixed base.

The fifth friend is a business model

In a 2024 podcast conversation, Pool described the “fifth friend philosophy.” Its charm is that it begins with a person, not a segment. The fifth friend does not need to become a beer drinker. The group does not need to split up. The menu absorbs the difference.

That idea changed the venue from a showroom for one product into social infrastructure. Embolden can pour an IPA while New Motion serves tea or seltzer a few feet away. Events, markets and collaborations give people another reason to arrive before they know what they will order. The company’s own crowdfunding materials later reported more than 17,000 tasting-room customer interactions and said the Miramar location contributed more than a third of revenue.

The awards cabinet makes the same argument in miniature. The company was named Best New Brewery in a local 2020 poll soon after opening. Later recognition landed in different corners of the operation: a gold medal for the Cantina Getaway hard seltzer, silver for the Berried Deep hard kombucha and bronze for LiteHouse Blonde. Awards are imperfect instruments, but this assortment is unusually on-message. Pool’s team did not merely stock several categories to make the menu look inclusive. It learned to compete inside each one, using the same facility to produce liquids judged by very different expectations.

Pool’s community instinct also predates the taproom. His professional profile records volunteer work with Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd beginning in 2006, including building more than 30 homes in the Tijuana-Otay Mesa area. It is a different sort of building, but the through line is plain enough: plans matter because people eventually have to inhabit them.

A passport printed on the can

The next chapter grew from collaboration. Embolden worked with Matcha Cafe Maiko San Diego on events and beers using Japanese ingredients. Small releases gave the team live feedback. Enthusiasm around the experiments became Shogun by Embolden, a distinct line with a matcha hazy IPA, hojicha lager, yuzu blonde ale and ube hazy IPA.

The naming turns a tap list into light travel: Midnight in Tokyo, Dusk in Kyoto, Spring in Okinawa, Dawn in Ube. Pool described the collaboration as a way to transport drinkers to Japan through flavor. The company signed with Nagano Trading in 2023 to distribute core and specialty beers and hard teas in Japan. By 2025 it was promoting Shogun through California retailers and using the line as the leading edge of a broader distribution push.

“Consumers are looking for new experiences and escapes in the beverages they choose.”Kyle Pool, on the Shogun launch

Keep the purpose, renegotiate the form

There is an easy version of Pool’s story in which a civil engineer bravely leaves one career and follows a passion. The more useful version is less cinematic. He did not discard engineering. He moved its reflexes into a messier medium. Tanks have capacity. Production has sequence. Distribution has routes. A tasting room has throughput, but also mood. The work asks for systems and judgment at once.

The company has had to keep renegotiating its form. It started with kombucha, widened before launch, acquired more plant than expected, opened during a pandemic, added a beer label and then built a culturally specific line with partners. Its 2025 regulatory filing showed a small operation with six employees and the financial strain common to physical consumer businesses. Steel is patient; payroll is not.

Pool’s clearest ambition is therefore not merely more flavors. The public plan includes stronger tasting-room sales, wider retailer distribution, direct shipping, frequent small-batch releases, events and international export. Each route is another attempt to make the shared operation work harder without making every product sound alike.

What can another founder steal? Start with the fifth friend. Find the person whose preference quietly controls the group decision. Then inspect the expensive asset. Ask whether it is oversized because the purchase was wrong, or because the problem was framed too narrowly. Finally, separate the customer promise from the machinery that fulfills it. Three labels can be confusing. One underused brewhouse is worse.

Pool built his career around literal infrastructure before he arrived at beverages. His current work is softer at the edges but recognizably structural. The beams are brands. The traffic is a group of friends deciding where to spend the evening. The bridge holds when the fifth person crosses too.