Three Cities. Eighteen Years.

People sometimes ask how I ended up here.

From the outside it probably looks straightforward. A guy starts a brewery, builds another one, and now he’s opening Pablo’s in downtown Phoenix.

The actual path was nowhere near that clean.

It started in Texas.

I founded Guns & Oil Brewing Co. in Austin in 2013. One beer. An American-style lager.

This was back when the Texas beer scene was still being figured out. Craft was all the rage. We bet the other way. One thing, done well. An American lager. The next great American beer. The category caught up to us about a decade later.

Every shelf was a fight. Every account was a conversation. You drove the truck. You made the pour. You signed up the bar yourself. Craft wanted us dead, we co-packed and were not local, and big beer did not like us infringing on their space.

The brewery grew.

By the time we were running at full strength, Guns & Oil was in seven states, working with twenty-eight beer distributors. One of the biggest beer distributors in the country, out of Houston, was on our line card. So was a small startup out of Dallas. Our sales rep made out with Johnny Manziel while selling beer in College Station. I filmed a reality show and shot a pilot for our own. You learn a lot doing it all and working with players big and small.

Here’s the part of the story that catches most people off guard.

For all of that, Guns & Oil never had a taproom. We never brewed our own beer. The whole operation was contract brewed. Someone else’s brewhouse made the liquid. Our team built the brand, the packaging, the distribution, and the relationships.

All of that taught me something specific. Brand and distribution can carry a beer company a very long way before any of the physical pieces show up.

It also taught me how badly I wanted the physical pieces.

Texas taught me what a brand actually is.

It is not a logo.

It is not a tagline.

A brand is the sum of every small thing a person experiences with you. The label on a can. The way it sits on a shelf at 6 pm next to forty other options after a long day at work. The way a bartender hands one across to a stranger. The conversation about whether to buy it again next week.

Later, when you do get the rooms, it becomes other things too. The wallpaper in the bathroom. The music. The font on the front door. The temperature of the patio in August. The way the bartender greets the regulars.

You don’t get to opt out of any of it.

Once you’ve learned that lesson, you can’t unlearn it. It became the operating principle behind every concept I’ve built since.

In July 2018 I got to build them.

We moved to Boise that summer. I founded Western Collective in Garden City, Idaho. For the first time, I had a brewhouse. For the first time, I had a taproom. For the first time, the brand and the liquid and the room were all one operation, under one roof, with my name on every piece of it. Our intent was to build one of the best craft breweries in America. From my perspective, we did that.

I still own Western Collective. I still operate it. Eight years in, it’s one of the most distinctive hospitality brands in the state, and I’m proud of every team member who has helped build it.

But Idaho was hard.

I’m not going to dress that up. Craft beer got brutally crowded right around the time we were planting our flag in Boise. It went from 1,500 breweries in 2010 to 10,000 breweries in 2019. That is a lot of choice. Too much choice leads to overwhelm.

There were stretches where every macro condition that could turn against an operator was turning against an operator at the same time.

Then there was COVID.

Weeks where the only thing you could do was open the doors again the next morning.

I’m telling you this because I think operators who only share the clean version of their story are doing each other a disservice. The hard chapters are real. Most of us go through them. Most of us don’t post about them.

Here’s what I’d tell anyone reading this from inside one right now.

It compounds.

Not the pain. The lessons.

Every dollar spent in a hard quarter, every build-out that ran over, every conversation that didn’t go your way, every team meeting where you had to be the steady voice in the room. None of that is wasted. It is exactly the asset you are going to deploy in your next swing.

The version of me opening Pablo’s is unrecognizable from the version of me who signed the first lease in Austin in 2013. Almost everything I now know about how to actually build a hospitality brand was paid for by some chapter that was harder than I expected.

Sometimes things take the time they need to take.

We started looking for locations in Phoenix in 2023. In December, we walked through a 1952 Spanish-style building at McKinley and First.

I had eighteen years of operating behind me at that point. Nine states. A category cycle. A pandemic. More buildings than I can count. A partner in business and in life who I have gotten to walk through most of it with.

I knew exactly what I was looking at.

I knew which corners cost money to fix later. I knew which kinds of rooms are worth fighting for and which ones aren’t. I knew how to read a build-out timeline and silently subtract the four months that everyone in this industry forgets to add. I knew what a real cocktail program needs to feel like. I knew what a real design team sounds like in the third meeting versus the first one. I knew what a real construction partner sounds like on a Friday afternoon when something went sideways.

I knew, very specifically, what kind of operator I needed to be on this one.

That clarity didn’t come from a book.

It came from eighteen years.

We didn’t rush it. We came back to that building again and again over the next eight months. By the time we signed the lease in late August 2024, we had walked every room a dozen times.

In October 2024, Melissa and I left Boise and moved to Phoenix. We weren’t doing this from a distance.

We break ground on Pablo’s this week. The first project under Saguaro Nights Entertainment Group, the hospitality company Melissa and I are building in Phoenix. The cocktail program is being developed with Barter & Shake, Mat Snapp’s team behind Century Grand, Platform 18, and Undertow. The design is being led by Crater, the hospitality division of Arkham Projects out of Mexico. We are a few months into the build of a project that has been imagined, redrawn, and re-imagined for the last two years.

It is the most ambitious thing I have ever attempted.

It is also, by a wide margin, the project I am the most prepared to attempt.

Phoenix is what eighteen years bought me.

If you are reading this from somewhere in the middle of a chapter that feels heavier than it should, keep going. The lessons are stacking even when the wins are quiet. The version of you that gets to the next swing is not the version that started this one.

We’re heads down on Pablo’s.

And we’re just getting started.

Cary Prewitt is the founder of Saguaro Nights Entertainment Group, a Phoenix-based hospitality company developing immersive nightlife venues across the American Southwest. Pablo’s, the company’s flagship, opens in Downtown Phoenix in 2026. Cary is also the founder of Western Collective in Garden City, Idaho, and previously founded Guns & Oil Brewing Co. in Austin, Texas.