Some folks come to the City of Angels for a shot at stardom; Bob Kunz arrived to make beer. The owner of Highland Park Brewery, which now has two locations in California’s biggest city, he arrived more than a dozen years ago and found “a nonexistent beer scene that has become what I consider one of the most vibrant beer scenes in the United States.”
Kunz, a native of Washington State, was an English major in college when he discovered homebrewing and quickly became “obsessed.” After stints at breweries in the Pacific Northwest, such as Boundary Bay Brewery in Bellingham, Washington, he wandered about and eventually landed in Los Angeles where he got a job as assistant brewer with Craftsman Brewing and began to hone his craft. A move to Father’s Office, a well-known beer bar and restaurant in the city, further sharpened his skills (and helped him save a bit of money) before opening Highland Park Brewery in 2013.
“[Our production] brewery is awesome; it’s one of those scrappy rustic breweries that you just make happen,” he says. And it’s in a place where things happened. The original 7-barrel brewery with two 15-barrel fermentors was crammed into a 500-square-foot back room of The Hermosillo, a now-trendy wine, beer, and cocktail bar that was once an escort club. The brewery is housed in what was the VIP room but wasn’t always confined to that space. “Most of the brewery sat in the parking lot. We had a shipping container jimmy-rigged into refrigerated cold storage next to barrels, puncheons. It was tight.”
The beers were exceptional, however. Using a variety of local ingredients, trying different techniques to tease out nuanced flavors, all while making sure that the pints being served met his exacting standards led Kunz to quickly become a well-respected brewer in the city’s beer culture.
He and the five other members of the brewing staff have largely done it by offering up beers that could easily show flaws if done poorly. Pilsners and lagers are the stars of the show, alongside more modern New England–style IPAs (Highland Park Brewery was an early adopter in the city), and of course, barrel-aged saisons dosed with a house yeast. “We have a cool culture,” he says. “It’s a communal experience, drinking our beers and other beers and massaging out a flavor profile based on what we’re experiencing, then improving our process, figuring out where we want to go and how we get there.”
There’s now an even bigger avenue to explore with a second Highland Park Brewery location that opened earlier this spring in the city’s Chinatown section, directly across from the Los Angeles State Historic Park. Most visitors to the tasting room will concentrate on the large windows in the 9,000-square-foot site looking out toward the city and the green, but true beer fans will see the potential waiting to happen in the 15-barrel brewhouse.
Two Paths to Follow
This new location allows the brewers to now clearly follow two paths, says Kunz. The first is the predictable path—“beer made in stainless with one yeast strain, and we try to control the process and the parameters as much as possible.”
The other path “is more exciting: mixed-culture fermentation.”
Some brewers are happy to get their wild strain from a lab or are plucky and pull a strain from the air and cultivate it over time. Kunz has the time thing down pat, but his strain is more akin to a kitchen-sink culture.
Over the past ten years—back to his days as a homebrewer—he’s kept two corny kegs where he stores yeast he comes across: slurry from finished batches, bottle dregs from Belgian beer, and more. Everything goes in and has since become the mother strain for the beers Highland Park makes.
They call it Zowza, and it is a healthy mix of Brettanomyces, Lactobacillus, Pediococcus, and Saccharomyces, all living in harmony and happily imparting a range of flavors and esters to beers that are often released for special events.
“Those two kegs have never been clean, and they keep a lot of culture. It’s taken on a life of its own, but it’s pretty cool to have a culture uniquely ours.”
The new brewery space means that they can continue down this second path, going a little deeper. They’ve done three seasons of spontaneously fermented beer through a coolship, and in 2018, got seven days where the temperature in Los Angeles dipped to 45°F (7°C) at night, allowing them to brew more than ever before.
While the idea of coolship-fermented beer might conjure up thoughts of rustic farms, such as Jester King Brewery in Austin or Mantra Artisan Ales in Franklin, Tennessee, having one in the middle of the city makes perfect sense, says Kunz. Think of Cantillon, one of the most revered coolship breweries in the world. “They are right in the middle of a city, in a mixed living and industrial area. There’s nothing rustic about it, and the beers are phenomenal.”
Still, being in a city means the beers will traverse an unpredictable path, “which is fun because we’ve had some cool results with some,” Kunz says. “For us, we’re on the path where we’ll never achieve perfection, but it’s always a pursuit of that, a quest for excellence.”
It’s also a lesson in patience, as anyone who has brewed via a coolship will tell you. “It’s crazy to wait a full year to see results from the previous year, but we’re taking good notes. That’s important [so we] remember what we did on these days, how we did it, and what we can do to apply it to next year’s batch of spontaneous beers.”
Over the seasons, the brewing team has learned a lot “about the complexity of textures” hoping to find and create balance and not lean heavily on acidity, bitterness, or pungency.
“It’s out of your hands but in your hands. You need to be in tune with your environment.” That philosophy translates to just about everything else the brewery makes. While looking through the beer menu at both locations, you’ll see things that appear familiar, but Kunz says they are actually “style adverse.”
“All you need is a vision for a beer, and sometimes it doesn’t fit into existing categories, so you just try to make something unique rather than fit into something already there.”