Maxwell Anderson is known as simply Gibbons to friends and associates. Although he came to Guadalajara five years before his Cerveceria Gibbons finally opened its doors, the Gibbons name has long been integral to his identity. His father, although adopted, had the Gibbons surname by birth and knew it originated with the Gibbons family and brand of beer, produced in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, starting after the repeal of Prohibition in the mid-1930s.
Anderson began making beer with his father at the age of six, far from Pennsylvania, in Sacramento, California. They started about the time a 1979 federal law finally lifted Prohibition-era restrictions on home brewing.
For years, it was Anderson’s dream to have a beer business that rose above the home brewery that he pursued through adolescence, even boasting a “kegerator” — a combination keg-refrigerator that dispenses brewed drinks.
Brewing beer involves many elements, Anderson explained, and as he got older, the background he acquired at home and in materials engineering, which includes a lot of chemistry, helped him understand the importance of water and minerals in brewing. Microbiology also helped, he said. “Yeast is the star of the show.”
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