He connected with Beth and her husband David Harris through the ZZ Hops Homebrew Club, and they eventually started looking to open their own brewery in north Johnson County. In his free time, he would collect, propagate and hybridize wild yeasts, which today can be tasted in Pathlight’s peerless local wild ales.
Vaughn was a Honeywell engineer for more than a decade, designing non-nuclear components of nuclear devices. “You would go down there and find a grisette on peaches just hanging out in his basement.” “He cultivated his own yeast strains and microbe cultures when he was just a homebrewer, and he had his own barrel program in his basement,” Beth Harris says. But as co-owner and operations manager Beth Harris tells it, brewer Tanner Vaughn had already been developing some key ingredients a decade before. Pathlight opened in June 2020, just as the coronavirus lockdowns lifted, and it has emerged as one of the city’s best breweries. Before there was Pathlight Brewing in Shawnee, there was “Tanner’s basement” in KCK.
