San Diego Magazine's Happy Half Hour

“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 fermentation, a big theme in his adult life) and moved on to restaurants, eventually founding a major Brazilian fast-food burger chain and craft soda brand. Tiago went to college to study engineering, only to feel the pull back to his family roots and switch gears to food science. From there, he launched an award-winning brewery that would go on to become South America’s largest and winningest. To know Tiago is to know tha