The story of Virgin Islands Pale Ale begins when two college buddies quit their jobs to live on the island of St. John.
Chirag Vyas, who grew up in North Providence, R.I., had been living in California and working as a scientist at NASA. A friend from the University of Vermont, Kevin Chipman, was working as a physical therapist in Boston.
Their first month on the island, Vyas and Chipman bused tables and paid someone $250 to sleep on an old sailboat. The boat had no electricity, so they ate by flashlight and stored food on a block of ice.
The two soon found a cheap apartment to rent and worked their way up to bartending. But boredom set in, not with island life, but with island beer.
So, like any inventive 20-somethings marooned in vacation paradise, Vyas and Chipman headed over to the public library in Cruz Bay and logged on to the Internet.
If breweries can make beer, why couldn't they? A few clicks later, they had ordered a $50 beer-making kit.
Vyas and Chipman's beer-making venture didn't really take off until several years after the two first begun brewing beer in their apartment in 2001.
By mid-2004, they had perfected their recipe for a pale ale with a hint of mango (extract, that is; the fruit was too strong), and later that year Vyas moved back to St. John.
"We knew that we were filling a void" in the island's beer market, Chipman said.
"To have a locally created beer," Vyas added, "is something that we thought would go over well."
Their "test market" amounted to their friends who drank their beer.
At first, they had no bottling company, so they sterilized large, glass water bottles. They later hired a bottling company, but didn't have a distributor. (They used to buy blank cardboard cases for six-packs and pack up the bottles themselves, often after a full shift tending bar.)
Their first batch of more than 1,300 cases of Virgin Island Pale Ale arrived on a 40-foot container from Portland, Maine, in June of last year. Chipman and Vyas boarded a ferry from St. John to St. Thomas to pick up their load and hauled it to the warehouse in their 1989 Toyota pickup.
During their last run, it began to rain, the roads became slick with oil and their pickup began to slide backward down a hill. They had to get out of the truck and unload 50 cases into someone's driveway until the truck was light enough to make it up the hill. Then they drove back to pick up the rest of the load.
Were they ready to quit?
"We were ready to get a distribution company," said Chipman.
Their driving ethos seems to be to enjoy life; to have fun.
After delivery runs, Vyas said, they'd often run down to the beach and jump in the water.
"We don't want to make it like a job," he said. "So we try not to forget that we live in paradise."
had been living in California and working as a scientist at NASA. A friend from the University of Vermont, Kevin Chipman, was working as a physical therapist in Boston. 
way up to bartending. But boredom set in, not with island life, but with island beer.
St. Thomas to pick up their load and hauled it to the warehouse in their 1989 Toyota pickup. 
