OUR STORY

Before Hangar 24 was a brewery, it was an airplane hangar at the Redlands airport. A handful of friends, a guitar, a grill, and the smell of aviation fuel in the air as daylight faded and conversations carried on into the night.

I was a broke biology student at Cal State San Bernardino who wanted to fly more than I could afford. So I traded the only thing I had to offer for the one thing I wanted most. Thursday nights belonged to Kit Palmer’s hangar. I brought the beer I brewed myself, dressed up with labels made from photographs of everyone’s airplanes, and before long the pilots were handing me the sky in exchange for what I poured. Someone would take me up while the light was still good. When the planes were put away, we dragged out the lawn chairs, lit the grill, and somebody started in on a guitar.

Nobody out there was trying to build anything. But something bigger than the sum of us moved in those nights. I could feel it even then. If you had asked me what it was, I would have called it the universe, or good energy, or plain good luck. I would not have said God.

I did not yet know that what I was feeling had a name.

Years later, when the brewery found a home across the road from that same airport, I had already named it. Hangar 24. I sketched the logo on a diner napkin, a hangar with a wing thrown open on either side, then called Kit to tell him the name and hear what he thought. He said he had a hunch his own hangar might be number 24. He honestly couldn’t remember. He hadn’t looked in so long. I had no idea. He checked after work that day, and there it was.

Hangar 24.

I filed it under coincidence and did not think a minute harder about it.

The beer did what good beer has always done. It gathered people. One beer in particular carried our name far beyond Redlands. We handpicked oranges grown right around the brewery and puréed the whole fruit into a wheat ale. It captured the flavor of the place we call home, and people couldn’t stop sharing it. Orange Wheat put Redlands on the map, the beer people handed to a friend, saying, you have to try this.

The brewery grew. We filled rooms, threw an airshow that filled the sky, opened restaurants. I bought the plane, the boats, the freedom to chase whatever I pleased. I believed I was building the American Dream, and by the world’s definition of success, I had achieved it.

I denied myself nothing.

And still I was empty.

Here is what I could not have told you then, but would stake my life on now. There was nothing wrong with the gifts. The plane, the brewery, the friends, the music, the beer. Good things, many of them beautiful. The trouble was that I had made them my gods, pleasure and comfort and achievement, the whole bright catalog of the American Dream.

And a good thing makes a terrible god. It cannot hold the weight of a soul. Every pleasure promised what the last one had failed to deliver. Every new freedom turned out to be a finer cage. I had won the game only to learn I had been playing the wrong one the whole time.

The unraveling came the way these things often do, slowly and then all at once. I woke one morning in Mexico, in a beautiful place after a beautiful night, the sort of weekend the American Dream swears will finally be enough, and I had never felt so hollow. Party, repeat. Party, repeat. I was exhausted.

That morning I said something that surprised even me. I asked the others whether any of them had ever really looked into Jesus, to find out whether He is real. There had to be more to life than all of this. Did anyone want to walk away and go see? Every one of them said they would love to. Not one was willing to leave the trip to find out.

Then, as the room emptied, one of my friends found me. He said quietly that he had been going to a church in Costa Mesa for six months and had never breathed a word of it to anyone. He said he would go with me. I asked if he meant right now.

He said right now.

So we left in the middle of the trip and drove north toward something I could not yet see.

That Sunday, a woman stood at the front of the church and painted while the pastor spoke. He spoke about a life built on more than material success, pleasure, and comfort, more than everything I had just watched fail me in Mexico, and then he pointed to where the true purpose of life had been all along, in Jesus, in a God who made us for Himself and would not stop pursuing us. It was as if the message had been written for me.

And while he spoke, the canvas slowly resolved into a pair of open hands cradling a basket of fruit. A dove in the upper corner. And at the very top of the basket, plain as anything, two things.

An orange.

A stalk of wheat.

Orange Wheat. The beer that had become the foundation of everything I had built.

The dove was not just a symbol either. I later discovered that our building in Redlands, and the buildings next door, had once belonged to Mission Aviation Fellowship, a group of missionary pilots who flew the gospel into places no road could reach. Beside the building next door, they had laid a giant dove into the ground in river rock, wide enough to read from the cockpit of a passing plane.

The very dove in the corner of the painting.

I had spent my whole life believing I was the one writing my own story. The brewery, the pilot’s license, the success, all of it my own work. Sitting in that room, I understood it had been the other way around. Someone else had been directing my steps the whole time. I had not gone looking for God. He had come looking for me, and He had spoken in the one language He knew I could not argue with. Beer.

My scientist’s mind still demanded an explanation. For weeks I turned it over, sure there had to be a trick. Someone must have known I was coming, must have told the pastor exactly what I was struggling with and what I needed to hear, must have told the painter what to put in the basket. There was no way a sermon and a painting could speak to a man that directly. It tells you something about my pride that I found it easier to believe a room full of strangers had built their whole morning around me than to believe God was real.

But no one had known. There was no trick. There was only pursuit.

So I bought a Bible and read it like a map, and I kept going back, week after week. I had always taken myself for a good man. Better than most, I would have told you. But the more I read, the more I realized the standard had never been other people. It had always been Jesus. Measured against Him, I could no longer pretend. For the first time I saw my own sin laid out plain. The selfishness, the pride, the running, the endless attempt to build a life big enough to save myself.

And it grieved me.

One day, worn through and out of arguments, I gave up. I fell flat on my face on the floor, crying, and told God I could not do this anymore. I had spent my whole life trying to earn my own worth, and lying there, I finally understood that the very thing I was killing myself to earn had already been bought and paid for. The open hands the woman had painted that Sunday were the hands of Jesus. Hands that had broken bread, washed feet, blessed the undeserving, and been nailed to a cross for me. He had done what I never could. What was left for me was not to perform, prove, or bargain.

It was to receive.

So I did. And a weight I had carried so long slid clean off my shoulders. That was the morning I got my life back. Or, nearer the truth, the morning I finally gave it to the One who gave me His.

I did not become a different man overnight. The drive stayed, and the stubbornness, and the appetite to master a thing until my hands knew it without being told. What changed was not my wiring but what it was for. The worth I had spent years trying to win was simply handed to me, free. And God did not take from me the brewery, the flying, the table full of friends. He set them back in their right place, under Him instead of over me. Held in an open hand instead of clutched in a fist, they finally became what they were always meant to be.

Good.

And it was then that I understood what Hangar 24 had been from the very beginning. It was never really about the beer. The beer was only the reason a person pulled up a chair. The table was where the real thing had always been happening, all the way back to those lawn chairs in Kit’s hangar, the friends who came after a hard week to be reminded they were not alone in the world. We had all been hungry for the same thing out on that tarmac. We simply did not know that what we were hungry for was not a thing at all.

It was Jesus.

The napkin, the number on Kit’s door, the orange, the wheat, the dove. None of it had been random. It had been a hand, patient and unhurried, setting the table for me long before I knew enough to come looking.

So I finally have words for what Hangar 24 is called to do. Bringing Heaven to the Table. Not as a slogan or a religious performance. As an offering.

We believe Heaven is not only a future promise. Its life can break into an ordinary room wherever people are met with truth, grace, joy, and love. And the rooms need it. Ours is an anxious age, bent by fear and division, outrage and noise, loneliness in the middle of the crowd, and a quiet despair underneath it all.

We choose another way. We bring people together, after work, after the road, after the ordinary day, through beer, food, music, and hospitality, into places where people are welcomed, seen, refreshed, and reminded they were made for more than consumption and distraction. Our purpose is not simply to sell beer or food. It is to draw people closer to Christ and closer to one another through the table, not by pressure or pretending, but through excellent work, truthful love, generous hospitality, and the quiet witness of lives shaped by Jesus.

That purpose no longer belongs to me alone. Everyone who touches this place helps set the table. The brewer protecting the batch, the cook who takes pride in the plate, the partner who keeps a promise, the server who notices the guest carrying a hard week, the host who makes a stranger feel expected, the regulars in the corner who make the room feel like home. You do not have to share my faith to belong here. But every clean glass, every honest answer, every kept promise, every welcome sets the table a little further. A small rebellion against the darkness of the world.

The freedom I was given was never meant to stop with me. The American Dream could not fill me, and it will not fill you. If there is an ache in you that nothing seems to reach, do not be afraid of it. It may be a mercy, the part of you that remembers you were made for home. I tried to earn my way there. No one can. Jesus already has, and His hands are still open.

The table was set long before I knew whose hands had set it.

There is a chair pulled out for you.

Ben Cook
Founder and Master Brewer
Hangar 24 Manufacturing