Wine Country
ANDERSON VALLEY BREWING CO.
17700 Hwy. 253 • Boonville, CA 95415 (707) 895-2337 • avbc.com • Established: 1987
SCENE & STORY
By all means if you get the chance, “jape” on down to the verdant farm-country town of Boonville to enjoy one of America’s most distinctive breweries. Jape? Yep. That’s the word for “drive” in Boontling, the folk language of this old farming community, said to have been developed by isolated farmers in the area’s early sheep and hop fields. Few use the dialect now, but you might be able to find some locals to teach some choice phrases over some bahl hornin (“good drinking”) at Anderson Valley Brewing. The partially solar-powered brewery itself is a down-to-earth affair, quaint and unpretentious, located on a farm with its own well, livestock, tasting room, and eighteen-hole Frisbee golf course. But inside the brewery are some of the most beautiful brewing kettles in the United States, polished to a mirror finish, and tours are a popular primer for the twelve-tap tasting room. In 2011 the brewery celebrated the fifteenth annual Legendary Boonville Beer Fest (held at the Mendocino County Fairgrounds), with over fifty California breweries and thousands of thirsty fans.
PHILOSOPHY
Traditional, unpasteurized brewing using well water rich in bicarbonates, pristine practices in the brewhouse, and a sense of humor everywhere outside it.
KEY BEER
With the soaring ascent of IPAs and Belgian-style beers over the last few years, an uncommon but essential beer style has slipped off the radar: the humble amber. This is too bad. Unpasteurized and never sterile-filtered, AVBC’s flagship Amber (5.8% ABV and brewed under the watchful eye of respected industry veteran Fal Allen) has a lively kick and caramel-kissed smoothness, not to mention a glowing garnet color that’s as attractive as the copper kettles inside the brewery. Also don’t miss the mahogany-hued Brother David’s Double, a rich and malty Belgian-style ale melding cavalcades of malt flavor with a bracing 9% ABV, and if they have any, the recent, innovative Blood Orange Gose, a salty, citrusy treat.
RUSSIAN RIVER BREWING CO.
725 4th St. • Santa Rosa, CA 95404 (707) 545-2337 • russianriverbrewing.com • Established: 1997
SCENE & STORY
The little brewpub in downtown Santa Rosa where Russian River sells its beers directly and a vast menu of Italian-American pub grub isn’t long on atmosphere, and you can’t tour the brewery (for now at least), but it is still a top stop for beer travelers in wine country. There are fifteen beers on tap, eight bottles to go, occasional live music performances and other beer-related events, and dependable crowds on weekend nights. Lunch-time and Sundays are quieter; order the fifteen-dollar sampler immediately to taste everything.
PHILOSOPHY
Belgian beers and a laid-back West Coast attitude.
KEY BEER
Tart, fruit-enhanced Belgian-style beers run the gamut from offering a nice, mild, back-of-the-tongue zing to the sort of full-on, face-contorting shock human taste buds seem designed to avoid. Supplication (7% ABV) is complex, woody, tart, and fleetingly sweet, infused with the juice of whole sour cherries while aging in pinot noir barrels. It’s one of those beers referred to as a “life-changer.”
LAGUNITAS TAPROOM & BEER SANCTUARY
1280 N. McDowell Blvd. • Petaluma, CA 94954 • (707) 769-4495 • lagunitas.com • Established: 1993
SCENE & STORY
Suddenly, Lagunitas is everywhere. In 2011, the makers of some of America’s cleanest-tasting and most distinctive pilsner and IPA announced $9.5 million plans to quadruple capacity to around 600,000bbl/yr, putting them in the league of Boston Beer Company (Sam Adams), Sierra Nevada, and Goose Island. In the meantime, for the last two years their headquarters on the outskirts of sleepy Petaluma has turned into a circus—literally.
For the “Beer Circus,” a series of raucous parties now held at the Petaluma fairgrounds, the fun-loving owners have gone more Burning Man than Bozo, with crazed-looking stilt-walkers, burlesque, the “R-Rated Marching Band,” and a bondage demonstration for good measure (all fairly tame, actually, and the beer garden is understated and quite stylish). Should you miss the big top (the parties always sell out in advance), visit for a brewery tour and then beers on a warm night under the stars with live music (roots, rock, and reggae, of course, offered about five nights a week during the warmer months). And with the Bay Area, redwood forests, and the Point Reyes National Sea Shore within easy reach, Lagunitas makes a great place to cap off an idyllic Golden State adventure. Brewery walking tours are free Wednesday through Friday at 3 and 5 p.m.
If there is one brewery that defines the changing American craft beer landscape of post-2000, it is Russian River, led by the affable Vinnie Cilurzo and a lineup stretching the parameters of American tastes for beer. The son of winemaker parents, Cilurzo could have his own winery by now, a patch of heaven near Temecula, California, where he worked in the cellar during harvests as a boy. “Pretty much all I’ve done in life is fermentation,” he says. But it wasn’t winemaking that got him excited during his college years. It was brewing beer.
By 1997 Cilurzo had brewed enough in his free time to score a job running Korbel Champagne Cellars’ fledgling beer division, Russian River. But soon Korbel, like so many other Johnny-come-latelies, facing a looming industry-wide downturn, planned to drop the line. Cilurzo decided to buy the division out, firm in the belief that beers like Blind Pig, a 6.5% ABV Double IPA he’d come up with in 1994—the nation’s first such concoction—would find its fans. “We didn’t do any market research,” he claims. “We just believed passion would carry us through.” Cilurzo scraped up investors and reopened Russian River in 2004. Good move: Soon the craft beer market had returned to double-digit growth and Cilurzo was dominating prestigious tastings. Today fans of his most sought-after beer, Pliny the Younger (a resinous double IPA of 11% ABV, brewed once a year) line up—quite literally by the hundreds, for days—to take home a few bottles before it’s gone.
Aside from Pliny, most of Cilurzo’s beers are fermented in French oak barrels for up to two years. They’re fermented using wild yeasts and bacteria (that give the beer funky flavors more commonly found in rare cheeses), then wire- and cork-topped to create an ironclad seal for vigorous natural carbonation in the bottle.
And they’re incredibly rich, complex, and drinkable. But this mad scientist approach—he adds volatile bacteria like Lactobacillus and Pediococcus to certain creations—has its risks. Brettanomyces, the wild yeast strain with a leathery, earthy-sour profile used in certain Russian River beers and some of Cilurzo’s Belgian inspirations, can run amok, altering fermenters, pumps, and hoses for good, and must be carefully quarantined. “It’s like playing with fire,” Cilurzo says. “You know how a dog can sniff out a person who’s afraid? With Brett, bugs, and critters, if you’re afraid of it, it’s going to bite.”
PHILOSOPHY
Hippietarian with a great sense of humor. Amid the Great Recession of 2010 and 2011 their contribution to gross national happiness was a protest beer called Wilco Tango Foxtrot, or WTF for short, “a malty, robust, jobless recovery ale.” Back in 2005, founder Tony Magee (a sometime reggae band member) was hit with a potentially ruinous one-year license suspension for an employee caught smoking some of California’s largest cash crop on-site during a sponsored “420” party (the cops were undercover for weeks). On appeal, the sentence was cut to three weeks, and Lagunitas used the ban time to install a massive new bottling line.
Their dues to society paid, they later dared the regulators to approve a new beer called Undercover Investigation Shut-Down Ale, printed with some choice antiestablishment Benjamin Franklin verbiage and pointed mockery of the agents who had been unable to get anyone to sell them any pot—it was, naturally, always offered for free. But recently, “free” has not been the buzzword at Lagunitas, which in 2015 announced some fairly stunning news, given their antiauthoritarian bent: in a groundbreaking $500 million deal, Heineken took ownershi
p of half the company. With the suits involved, will the clever circus continue, or turn into a global Cirque-du-So-What?
KEY BEER
Lagunitas Pils Czech-Style Pilsner (6.2% ABV) is great, now almost standard, go-to beer suited for all occasions. And it may have a goofy name, but their Sonoma Farmhouse Hop Stoopid Ale (8% ABV) is a serious beer in the Double IPA style (a.k.a. Imperial IPA), with cavalcades of tangy West Coast hops “for those mornings when you have to cut right to the chase.”
Chico
SIERRA NEVADA BREWING CO.
1075 E. 20th St. • Chico, CA 95928 (530) 893-3520 • sierranevada.com • Established: 1980
SCENE & STORY
These days Sierra Nevada’s beers are easy to find, but not long ago, out in the fertile farm country of the northeastern Sacramento Valley in Chico, home brewer Ken Grossman—on an obsessive quest for the perfect pale ale—was the only one drinking them. While roasting his grains at home, jury-rigging brewing equipment out of fish tanks and washer-dryers (for an ill-fated experimental malting operation), and squeaking out rent as a bike shop repairman, he dreamed of bigger things: real brewing kettles, the copper kind. He had a long way to go and little money. In 1976 he opened a home-brew store “to feed my hobby, really,” Grossman recalls.
Grossman doggedly kept home brewing, keeping meticulous notes, dreaming big. Inspired by Anchor and New Albion, he wrote a business plan with a partner in 1978, then hit up the banks, who weren’t the least bit interested. To get started, “I spent all my savings, all my business partner’s savings, and the savings bonds my grandfather had given me for school,” Grossman recalls. Finally, with the help of family and friends, Sierra Nevada (named after the mountain range), brewed its first batch, a stout; the first pale came a few days later. (A dozen batches went down the drain until he arrived at a brew he was happy with.) And with his young daughter in the passenger seat, Grossman delivered the first pallet of Sierra Nevada beer from the back of a beat-up one-ton ’57 Chevy pickup.
The pale ale he labored so long to get right struck a chord, and today, the piney, balanced brew is widely imitated, and one of the two best-selling craft beers in the United States, next to Samuel Adams Boston Lager. Grossman, who was sixty-one in the end of 2015, got those gleaming copper kettles, to say the least. The brewery has gone from strength to strength, and now has a massive state-of-the-art brewery near Asheville, North Carolina. What’s more, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale now comes in cans.
In the brewery, tours take in lovely trompe l’oeil murals in the brewhouse from a glassy elevated platform and other marvels no other American brewery can boast, like one of the largest private solar arrays in the country, utilizing heliotropic cells. There is nothing unconsidered, dusty, or out of place; the scope is awe-inspiring, and the rows of 25,000-gallon conditioning tanks lined up in majestic symmetry are a sight to behold.
Today, the operations take up fifty acres, with estate-grown hops and a thirty-five-acre barley field. The taproom and restaurant has its own organic herb and vegetable garden the size of a Walmart. The brewery’s own cows are fed partly on healthful spent grain from the brewing process, and the restaurant and taproom cook over almond wood fires. The bright and comfortable eatery is full of art nouveau stylings, stained glass, and brilliant copper trim work. And no matter what beer you try, from the lightest Summerfest lager to the Estate line (using all ingredients from the property) and high-octane barley wines and collaboration beers, the beers are all superbly crafted (try the too-often overlooked Porter, for example). After a bite, visitors can catch concerts in the state-of-the-art concert venue, or catch a ride on a kooky (but highly enjoyable) pedal-powered, stereo-equipped rolling tap-mobile. It’s a brewmaster’s dream come true.
Of a company that does all this for its fans without spending a dime on shameless TV advertising, there’s little left to say but “Thanks. What are you brewing next?”
PHILOSOPHY
Pioneering, eco-conscious, and consistently delicious, Sierra Nevada’s beers are made with fanatical attention to detail and a generous, family-driven spirit.
KEY BEER
The beer that changed everything is Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. It’s still brewed with whole Magnum, Perle, and pungent Cascade hop flowers, giving it a satisfying bite and grassy, floral nose. It’s easy to forget that it’s bottle-conditioned, meaning each individual bottle is carbonated by means of tiny additions of yeast and brewer’s sugar—an insanely difficult thing to pull off on such a large scale. And as mentioned, it’s now in cans. Brewers like to debate whether or not you can taste a difference.
Central Coast
FIRESTONE WALKER BREWERY
1400 Ramada Dr. • Paso Robles, CA 93446 • (805) 238-2556 • firestonebeer.com • Established: 1996
SCENE & STORY
Run by former Marine Corps captain Adam Firestone and his brother-in-law, British expat David Walker (a former high-tech entrepreneur), Firestone is located in somewhat of a flavorless industrial area just outside town. There is a good-size tasting room and gift shop with dark wooden tables, but the most interesting action is amid the fifty-barrel brewhouse and its extensive barrel program; you’ll want a tour. There’s also a restaurant in Buellton (near Santa Barbara) with high-end fare and fresh Firestone beers.
PHILOSOPHY
Experimental yet restrained. The brewery uses a variation on something called the Burton Union System, a Rube Goldberg contraption developed by the British that links oak barrels with a yeast-collecting network of troughs, resulting in extraordinarily soft, smooth beer. Marston’s, in England’s Burton-on-Trent, is the classic example of a brewery making beer in this fashion, and explains it all by means of a three-hour tour. You won’t need quite that much time at Firestone Walker, and the beer at the end is more interesting across the board.
KEY BEER
The pale ale (“31”) has been around so long it’s almost retro. But don’t pass it up. Big beers like Sucaba really get beer geeks fired up these days. This spring seasonal release, a bourbon barrel-aged barley wine, all caramelized brown sugar, dark chocolate, tobacco, and dark cherry notes, as rich and smooth as a mousse, ideal to pair with strong cheese. And I’d be remiss without mentioning a new cult classic, Pivo Hoppy Pils, a formerly festival-only favorite that the brewers wisely scaled up for bottles and cans. Pivo (Czech for “beer”) has a grand, fluffy head, dry, crisp finish, and lush aromas of bergamot and lemongrass from additions of German Saphir hops. At the 2015 Great American Beer Festival, Pivo Pils and DBA (Double Barrel Ale) each earned gold medals in their respective categories for the third time, including three in a row for Pivo since its inception in 2013. Not bad.
FIRESTONE WALKER BARRELWORKS
620 McMurray Rd. • Buellton, CA 93427 (805) 350-7385 • firestonebeer.com • Established: 2013
SCENE & STORY
From their iconic Pale 31 to DBA, Wookey Jack, and Pivo Hoppy Pils, Firestone Walker is in a class of its own (and the awards committees definitely agree). I asked Matt Brynildson—the brewmaster in charge of every one of them—to shed some light on what it’s like being an American brewer today. “It’s very nice to simply be the nation leading the cause for better beer after so many years of being the ‘light lager nation.’ I don’t know exactly where it is going, but I do know that we are collectively tuning back into better food and better health through our food. Craft beer fits into that movement, and the people behind it are as passionate as any artisanal producer can be about their trade.”
One direction it’s all going, for sure, is into the sour spectrum—food-friendly beers made by means of benign bacteria additions (often added in oak barrels) which create depth, complexity, and tartness, a process that’s far from simple. In 2012, Firestone Walker opened Barrelworks, its own standalone sour beer operation, in Buellton, about an hour and twenty minutes south from the original brewery, just off 101. Head blender (and original Firestone Walker brewer) Jeffers Richardson took some time to describe the project. “
We are learning. This style of beer is hard to make, to control, to manage, and it takes time. Some are fermented spontaneously, some in barrels; all use a menagerie of wild yeast and bacteria to complete the fermentation process.” What you’ll find when you visit is pretty spectacular: a huge swath of barrels, stacked neatly beneath high ceilings and huge wrought-iron chandeliers. The tasting room itself is a small affair nestled between the barrels and restaurant. All the rare and barrel-aged beers Firestone Walker makes are available in three-ounce pours, but note, there could be few bottles to go.
PHILOSOPHY
“Whether it is hoppy beer or sour beer, balance and drinkability are always the keys,” Brynildson told me. “With our wild beer program, we focus on using tart, sour flavors to enhance the experience. Beers with acid help to ‘lift’ heavy or fatty food. Acid creates depth. These beers should drink like wine. But the acid shouldn’t lead, it should support the rest of the beer.”
KEY BEER
“Agrestic is a sour beer based on our original flagship beer, Double Barrel Ale, or DBA,” says Richardson. To hear him describe it attests to the massive effort involved. “[It] begins its journey as DBA then continues on through a ‘chrysalis’ process involving 87 percent French and 13 percent American Oak barrels, and our proprietary collection of microflora. To blend, we selected beer matured eight to twenty-four months in barrels . . . toasted oak and lemon pith swirl on the nose and palate, followed by an amazing harmony of vanilla, coconut, Earl Grey tea, and spice. The finish is crisp, with a mouth-watering acidity and chewy tannins.” There you have it.
The Great American Ale Trail (Revised Edition) Page 12