The Great American Ale Trail (Revised Edition)
Page 13
SANTE ADAIRIUS RUSTIC ALES
103 Kennedy Dr. • Capitola, CA 95010 (831) 462-1227 • rusticales.com • Established: 2012
SCENE & STORY
Adair Paterno and her business partner Tim Clifford, like many other beer pioneers, perceived a need for good, innovative beers exactly where they lived, and set out to make it happen. Paterno, a lawyer by day, and Clifford were (and still are) supercommitted beer geeks with a passion for tart, funky saisons and hop-forward IPAs. In 2011, the duo started gathering old dairy tanks and whatever they could make work in a small space in Capitola. Opening on Memorial Day 2012, they were immediately slammed. An early draw was bottle sharing nights. Paterno and Clifford had perfectly divined the area’s thirst for good, hoppy, fresh beers as well as sours made with a variety of carefully cultivated microorganisms: bottle dregs, in other words, that they used and reused and grew and trained into a delicious house culture.
PHILOSOPHY
In a wide-ranging interview with Good Beer Hunting, a website out of Chicago, the charming and upbeat Paterno reflected on the brewery’s mission. “We want to add to the tradition of saison making. But first and foremost, we are a home brewers’ brewery. We have a piece of equipment from Lipton that we turned into a kettle and we have a bunch of used dairy tanks hanging around.” It’s an approach, you might say, that is more about beer drinking than it is about the shiny, ever-expanding industry and commerce of beer. “We really don’t need all of our beers to be ‘shelf stable.’” Paterno says. “I’m not packaging a clean, hoppy beer that needs to be consistent three months down the line when someone buys it at a liquor store. We do brew those beer styles, too, but those beers are getting tapped and enjoyed and then they are gone in about two weeks.”
KEY BEER
Vanilla Joe is a an occasional, taproom-only version of their Joe Chavez porter infused with coffee and vanilla beans overnight in a home-brew keg. Also look for Cask 200, a tart, complex saison aged in a 660 gallon wine foudre. But the best known brew is West Ashley, a delicious, tart saison aged in wine barrels with California apricots (7.3% ABV).
Los Angeles and Surrounding Areas
Until recently L.A. (like New York), was a craft beer Mojave Desert. But thanks to the arrival of several craft breweries plus some beer-savvy chefs, a nascent beer culture is changing the entire timbre of the L.A. food-and-drink scene. Angelenos (like Portlanders, Denverites, and even New Yorkers before them) have embraced craft beers, all the better when made with locally foraged ingredients like so many snap peas, heirloom pork bellies, or pinot noirs. Instead of the coolly manufactured glam of, say, Spago, a more communal, unshaven, nose-to-tail chic is all the rage now. Food carts have gone upscale; local coffee roasters and farmers’ markets are multiplying. And yet, there are still relatively few local breweries—so far. In a city with 9.8 million people (compared to, say, Portland, Oregon, which has 675,000 people and around ninety breweries), it’s only a matter of time before Tinseltown gets the beer bug in an even bigger way.
THREE WEAVERS
1031 W. Manchester Blvd Inglewood, CA 90301 • (310) 400-5830 • threeweavers.la • Established: 2013
SCENE & STORY
L.A.’s beer scene leaped forward with Three Weavers. Founder Lynne Weaver (whose three daughters are the “three weavers”) chose an industrial section of Inglewood not far from LAX and fought for the right to brew in an area where residents weren’t in favor of more alcohol vendors. But Weaver had the chance to tell her story and convince local officials to give her a chance, and she succeeded. It’s a good thing. They were poised for success early on. Weaver’s head brewer Alexandra Nowell had parlayed a paid internship at Sierra Nevada into a cellar job at Drake’s, then helmed the kettles at Kinetic Brewing Company, where she won a pair of medals at GABF. The interior is clean, stylish, and colorful. It wasn’t long before Three Weavers was one of L.A.’s most talked-about brands, with glowing coverage in the Los Angeles Times, Eater.com, and others. In October 2015, LA Weekly named it L.A.’s best new brewery.
PHILOSOPHY
Officially, “It’s more than beer. It’s community.” Three Weavers marches to the beat of an altruistic drum, with a chorus of communal sentiments, from unity to fairness and equality. It’s a true improvement to L.A.’s often plastic-y social fabric. And the fact that it at least began as an all-female business (and it may well still be!) is commendable in a sea of arriviste craft breweries staffed by self-serving “dudebros.”
KEY BEER
Deep Roots ESB emerged as an early flagship, but it’s the one-offs and experiments that have really soared, like Cambria’s Seafarer Kölsch, a grapefruit-accented triumph that was a personal favorite at in the Farm-to-Table “Paired” event at the 2015 GABF.
BEACHWOOD BBQ AND BREWING; BEACHWOOD BLENDERY
210 E. 3rd St. • Long Beach, CA 90802 (562) 436-4020 • beachwoodbbq.com • Established: 2006
Seal Beach: 131 Main St. • Seal Beach, CA 90740 • (562) 493-4500
SCENE & STORY
With two locations and a new, massive, 1000-barrel blendery project (next to the Long Beach location), you’re coming here for baby back ribs, brisket, fried green tomatoes, hush puppies, and coleslaw—and beer, of course. Long Beach is the larger, more popular location. With roll-up doors opening into downtown Long Beach, mini outdoor beer garden, and thirty taps of super well-made beers (as well as guest taps), you’ll have to take your time running through the list. Know this though: the beers running through the lines are well cared for. Founder Gabe Gordon is not only famous for beer and barbecue, he’s become well known for something jokingly referred to as the “Flux Capacitor,” a wall of valves that can control keg pressure and the gas mix therein (still with me?), ensuring the beer is never flat or foamy. What sounds like a lark is a smart concept that several other breweries and beer bars have employed (with Gordon’s help), like Tørst in Brooklyn (see page 303), and Crooked Stave, in Denver.
PHILOSOPHY
Ambitious barbecue and beer, what’s not to like? The barbecue hews to North Carolina style, marinated and dry-rubbed pork, with sauces on the side (and subtly discouraged). The beer is excellent across the board, and you’ve got to love the most off-kilter names (Pablo Escobeer; Hef Leppard).
KEY BEER
While the blendery is “on an undoubtedly geeky quest to create American-style lambics” (so just see what they have available in any location when you arrive), my pick for barbecue is Amalgamator IPA, a tangy, citrusy, dry American-style IPA very much in the West Coast tradition. It’s great with spicy fare like ribs and pulled pork.
LAUREL TAVERN
11938 Ventura Blvd. • Studio City, CA 91614 • (818) 506-0777 • laureltavern.net • Established: 2008
SCENE & STORY
With its simple black façade, hardwood floors, exposed brick walls, pressed tin details, and L-shaped bar, this San Fernando Valley bar looks almost too perfect—like a movie set instead of a real, live, breathing beer bar. But it’s definitely the real deal. With funky sky-blue metal stools along the bar, Edison lighting, and an artful food menu, there’s little not to like. The short but sweet menu is based around beer-friendly foods like prosciutto and burrata, chorizo fondue, roast marrowbones, a bratwurst plate, and a famed burger with white cheddar, arugula, and caramelized onions. As for the beers (sixteen on tap, no bottles), most are California taps, with a pair or three for East Coast treats like Allagash and Dogfish Head. Word to the wise: Avoid weekend nights, or come in very early to get in position for the best people watching.
PHILOSOPHY
Craft beer gets its SAG card.
KEY BEER
Craftsman Heavenly Hefeweizen for starters (4.7 % ABV), which has the lively spice and ample heft of authentic German hefeweizen. “I think it’s completely misunderstood in America,” says Craftsman brewer Mark Jilg, citing Widmer and Pyramid brewing companies by example, whose hefeweizens are markedly less spicy. “We’re going for a dry, crisp beer, with a clovey
, banana-like estery palate. And we encourage people to lose the lemon slice.”
TONY’S DARTS AWAY
1710 W. Magnolia Blvd. • Burbank, CA 91506 • (818) 253-1710 • tonysda.com • Established: 2010
SCENE & STORY
This dive bar reborn as an eco-friendly, full-on craft beer palace has forty taps of hard-to-find beers and a no-bottle, no-can policy—the conservation ethic runs deep. The main menu item is gourmet sausages (with extensive vegan options, too); beers are organized into IPA and “Not IPA.” Both categories are filled with exceptional beers from the likes of Stone, Alpine, AleSmith, Bear Republic, and Russian River. In 2011, founder and owner Tony Yanow organized the “colLAboration” series of pop-up beer gardens around L.A. with Verdugo and the Surly Goat’s Ryan Sweeney, among others, bringing craft beer to the streets of Los Angeles. A new classic bar—and likely, a new tradition—was born.
PHILOSOPHY
“All Craft, All Draught, All California.”
KEY BEER
Stone’s Smoked Chipotle Porter (6% ABV), which is sable black and laced with spicy, rich notes of pepper and smoke.
THE SURLY GOAT
7929 Santa Monica Blvd. • West Hollywood, CA 90046 • (323) 650-4628 • surlygoat.com • Established: 2010
SCENE & STORY
When you tire of dodging the beautiful people who cram the streets of Hollywood, sipping beer under the mounted head of a mountain goat named Gus starts to sounds a whole heck of a lot better. Luckily, this nearly unmarked beer bar has a sweet rotating list, solicitous bartenders, leather seating, and a couple of old arcade games and a foosball table to keep things on the lighter side. There are even a few screens with a rotation of retro movies (Star Wars, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off); if you get hungry, you can bring in food from the barbecue place next door, to name one very close option. There are twenty-seven taps and a cask beer, with genuinely rare bottles to choose from as well (ask for the leather-bound list). This is a spin-off of local beer maven Ryan Sweeney, who opened Verdugo Bar and helped propel Los Angeles’s interest in craft beer into what it is today: a genuine movement.
PHILOSOPHY
Not particularly surly, really. Just remember the usual Friday and Saturday night caveat—you might have to wait to get in.
KEY BEER
This is a great spot to try some of the latest creations from new-school California brewers like Bagby, Ladyface Ale Companie, and Societe.
VERDUGO BAR
3408 Verdugo Rd. • Los Angeles, CA 90065 • (323) 257-3408 • verdugobar.com • Established: 2008
SCENE & STORY
A complete renovation of a 1930s bar known for being quite sketchy—in a neighborhood that still is, so heads up—the Verdugo Bar has no windows and just a simple old glass, black-lettered sign light reading “cocktails.” It’s not much to look at, but then you walk inside to its serpentine, dimly lit bar, low couches, DJ in a booth, and epic beer list. There’s a California-centric twenty-two-tap row, eighty-five bottles, and one cask to choose from, all served at the proper temperature and in the right glass, never sloshed on the bar. Thanks to L.A. craft beer scene maker Ryan Sweeney, a Certified Cicerone (one step down from beer’s equivalent to Master of Wine), things are looking even better already.
Once you’ve got your beer, step outside to the patio and picnic table area. On the best weekend afternoons at 3 p.m., you’ll find a “patio session” in progress: As the DJ spins, a chilled-out crowd lounges in the sun enjoying some of the city’s best gourmet food carts like the famous Grill ’Em All (burgers) and Danky’s Döners (kebabs and sandwiches).
PHILOSOPHY
Beer, booze, and beats.
KEY BEER
Look for Tropical & Juicy IPA from Hop Concept, the all-hoppy brews offshoot line by Lost Abbey. And go on Mondays. If you do, you keep the glass your beer came in.
BLUE PALMS BREWHOUSE
6124 Hollywood Blvd. • Los Angeles, CA 90028 • (323) 464-2337 • bluepalmsbrewhouse.com • Established: 2008
SCENE & STORY
While Hollywood these days is full of reality show losers, tourists, and plastic surgeons, it’s not all bad. Eight blocks from the Walk of Fame and adjacent to the historic Henry Fonda Theater is one of the city’s best beer bars, with a strong, constantly rotating, and California tap list of twenty-four (plus ninety bottles and a cask), a tradition for brewmaster appearances and beer dinners, and a good and none-too-pricey food menu. It’s got Prohibition-era terrazzo floors, high ceilings in ruddy red, wide wooden beams, oversize mirrors, and some living palms, giving it a nice touch of Old Hollywood ambiance.
PHILOSOPHY
Retro look, today’s beer.
KEY BEER
Sudwerk Lager, a German helles-style beer from Davis, California, is a solid starting point—light, grassy, grainy, and bright on the tongue but not without a malty backbone (4.9% ABV).
EAGLE ROCK BREWERY
3065 Roswell St. • Los Angeles, CA 90065 • (323) 257-7866 • eaglerockbrewery.com • Established: 2009
SCENE & STORY
Jeremy Raub, a former film music editor, and his father, Steve, an ex-Navy man and dedicated home brewer who taught his son to brew, overcame a mountain of red tape delays in order to get their 15bbl brewhouse open in 2009, making it the first brewery in Los Angeles proper in some sixty years. Its ultraclean, organized taproom has been busy ever since, giving tours on Sundays from 12 to 6 p.m. As at Verdugo, food trucks are often on hand to provide the sustenance.
PHILOSOPHY
“Beer for the People” is the slogan, and the Raubs play with a neo-revolutionary theme in beer names like Manifesto and Solidarity. The beers are technically vegan (in avoiding fining, or clarifying, agents from animal products), and run the gamut of styles, from English mild to American wild, with some experimental ingredients (rose petals).
KEY BEER
Solidarity Dark Mild (3.8% ABV) is a light, chocolaty, grainy-tasting British session beer, meaning it’s low in alcohol and meant for sustained periods of beer drinking without intoxication.
Orange County
THE BRUERY
717 Dunn Way • Placentia, CA 92870 714) 996-6258 • bruery.com • Established: 2008
SCENE & STORY
A few years ago, Patrick Rue was reluctantly headed for a law career, but the trouble was, beer brewing was the only thing that held his attention. With his nose buried in a home brewing book his wife bought from a ninety-nine-cent bookstore, Rue was soon blowing off homework to craft dozens, even hundreds of batches. “I’d brew almost every weekend and during the week when I was ‘studying,’” Rue recalls. In other words, he was preparing for a different kind of bar.
After taking a massive leap of faith with family and personal investments, one of the more successful American breweries of the last two decades was born. Rue and head brewer Tyler King hew mainly to Belgian brewing traditions, which, generally speaking, tend to produce beers that are spicier, more intensely flavored, and higher in alcohol content than their American counterparts, and often bear the tannins and acids from wood barrels and wild yeasts. They’re wild, but often delicious and food friendly. The hype surrounding the beers has been surprisingly loud, cranking up even higher after a dominant showing in the 2010 World Beer Cup in two hotly contested categories with sixty-eight runners up in all.
Visitors to the brewery in Placentia encounter a bland exterior (with a taco truck if you’re lucky), but inside, there’s a brighter space, with yellow and sage walls and a nice little tasting bar area next to fermenters and stacks of oak barrels. This is also the site of beer release parties, like one in October 2009 he might prefer to forget. The plan was to release 2,400 bottles of an onyx-black, 19.5% ABV, bourbon-barrel-aged stout called Black Tuesday, and 700 people showed up to buy it, causing a minor melee when supplies ran out, which left about seventy-five people empty-handed. “It was insane,” Rue recalls. “We heard some people flew in to get it. It’s almost embarrassing.” The 201
0 event was a somewhat smoother affair, only crashing the website. Such scenes are now, remarkably common around the country when reserve beers are released. By late 2015, Rue and Co. planned to open Bruery Terreux, a separate, sour- and barrel-aging and blending business designed to isolate wild beers from the rest of production and capture the zeitgeist rush for sour and wild ales.
PHILOSOPHY
Unorthodox. Since its inception, the Bruery has released beers conjured out of such ingredients as Thai basil, pasilla chiles, and purple mangosteen, some of the concoctions only dimly recognizable as beers to the layperson. To make his award-winning Autumn Maple, Rue roasts yams on a barbecue until they are soft and sugary, then smashes them up and adds them to a mash tun, the brewer’s tank used to extract fermentable sugars that normally come entirely from grain.
KEY BEER
Orchard White and Black Tuesday have made the biggest splashes, but try the Humulus Lager to really shock your expectations. It’s a superstrong lager (in the bock territory, at 7.2% ABV), aromatically hopped like an IPA.
A BEER WITH
MARK JILG, CRAFTSMAN BREWING COMPANY
1260 Lincoln Ave., No. 800 • Pasadena, CA 91105 • craftsmanbrewing.com
Pasadena’s Mark Jilg is as likely to expound on the paradox of being an artisan brewer in the middle of Tinseltown as he is to offer an impromptu lecture on the tendency of hops to spontaneously combust (true story). About fifteen years ago, Jilg left his job as an analyst for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to make beer instead, founding Craftsman in 1995. Today, his tiny brewery, in an unassuming industrial park about forty miles from Disneyland, produces beers that are defiantly pushing the outer limits, too, with Valencia orange rind, Cabernet grapes, white sage, and Brettanomyces. “There are a lot of people that are focused on food culture here, savoring wine and so on. But they haven’t considered beer, so when they taste something like mine, it blows their mind,” he told me.