California. The state of California’s influence on American beer culture cannot be underestimated. It may have begun brewing a lot later than other states but, given its influence on the contemporary craft brewing scene, it has more than made up for lost time and currently boasts some of the nation’s most innovative breweries and beers.
California began brewing nearly 250 years after America’s first brewery was formed in Manhattan in 1612. It wasn’t until 1849, a year before California was officially an American state, that Californians embarked on their first ale-making endeavors with the Adam Schuppert Brewery opening its doors on the corner of Stockton and Jackson streets in San Francisco.
1849 was a very good time to open a brewery. It was the height of the Gold Rush and more than 300,000 entrepreneurial “49ers” had arrived in California in search of shiny flecks of fortune. San Francisco was rapidly growing from a small settlement into a busy boom town and panning for gold was seriously thirsty work.
Beer was the panner’s pick-me-up and by 1852, San Francisco boasted more than 350 bars and pubs serving a population of little over 36,000. By 1860 that number had increased to more than 800 saloons supplied by more than two dozen breweries while San Diego, Sacramento, and Los Angeles, bolstered by the completion of a railroad in the 1870s, also became home to blossoming beer scenes.
The first Sacramento brewery was set up in 1859 by Hilbert & Borchers while San Jose’s first brewery was the Eagle Brewery. Californian breweries that opened in the 1850s included the Bavarian Brewery, the Albany Brewery, the American Railroad Brewery, the Union Brewing Company, John Weiland Brewery and, of course, the Pacific Brewing Company which is now known as the Anchor Brewery Company. Between 1890 and Prohibition, the Buffalo Brewing Company in Sacramento was the largest brewery west of the Mississippi.
Californian breweries could call upon a wealth of local brewing ingredients. Hops were first introduced into California in 1854 and, until Prohibition, Sonoma County was a major hops supplier to both California and beyond. By the late 1880s, the recipes for beers brewed as far away as Britain make mention of “California hops.” In and around Sacramento, Emil Clemens Horst owned the largest hop acreage in the world and in 1909 was responsible for inventing the hop separator, a mechanical instrument that eased the process of hop-picking.
The vast majority of Californian breweries were set up by German speaking immigrants and, in the late 19th century, they wholeheartedly embraced the new lager beer type which, having been first brewed in the European town of Pilsen in 1842, was fast capturing the imagination of American beer drinkers. In 1875, the Boca Brewery near Truckee produced California’s first lager.
However, lager was a beer type brewed with bottom fermenting yeast which performed best at low temperatures. Mechanical refrigeration, first unveiled in the Spaten brewery in Munich during the 1870s, had yet to reach America’s Golden State and California brewers, unlike their Bavarian and Bohemian brethren, couldn’t store their beer in chilly cellars cut deep into Bavarian mountains.
Even though the temperate Californian climate was hardly conducive to brewing lager, the Germanic brewing community remained loyal to lager yeast and brewed a beer known as “steam beer,” also referred to as “California Common.”
Synonymous with central California and San Francisco in particular, “California Common” straddled the dividing line between lager and ale. It was brewed using bottom fermenting yeast in wide shallow vessels yet, due to the California climate and the dearth of refrigeration, it fermented at a temperature more closely associated with ale making. It was a hybrid brew borne out of necessity and the “terroir” of its surroundings.
Brewed using local hops and barley, “steam beer” didn’t revel in the kind of reverence it receives today and, instead, was a rather rudimentary blue collar beer, cheaper than other brews on the bar and associated with the hard-drinking everyday worker.
Following the boom years and the emergence of “steam beer,” California’s beer scene was to change considerably. First there was consolidation; the emergence of mechanical refrigeration and pasteurization, advances in bottling, and the considerable improvement of the railroads allowed a handful of well-established, mostly German-inflected brewing companies to procure smaller concerns and embark on national distribution.
Between 1873 and 1910, the number of American breweries shrunk from more than 4,000 to approximately 1,500. Yet, in the same period, production grew by 600% to exceed 50 million barrels and, by the beginning of the 20th century, the number of saloons had doubled from 150,000 to 300,000 and drinking emporiums were mushrooming all over California.
Brochure for the Albion Ale and Porter Brewery in San Francisco, California, which operated from 1875 to 1919. The New Albion Brewery, which in 1976 became the first brewery to open in California following Prohibition and the first American microbrewery, was named in tribute to the Albion Ale and Porter Brewery. pike microbrewery museum, seattle, wa
However, the dreamy quixotic visions of these saloons were far removed from reality. Principally frequented, and often run, by the kind of folk you’d rather not introduce to your parents, saloons became synonymous with ne’er-do-wells and raucous behavior. They soon bred contempt among a growing temperance movement and beer began being blamed for a burgeoning society’s ills. Prohibition, spearheaded by the Volstead Act, was on the horizon.
Some Californian breweries tried to survive the 13-year “noble” experiment by peddling “near beer,” chancing their arm with root beer and malt extracts, non-alcoholic drinks, and tonics while some continued to brew beer under the protection of mobsters. However, Prohibition drove the vast majority of breweries out of business and very few survived the double blow of war and the Volstead Act.
Post-Prohibition, it was with a whimper rather than bang that beer returned. Initial attempts to resurrect small breweries were hampered by the Depression, legislative red tape that prevented breweries from owning saloons, and the shift toward drinking at home. It was only the big breweries that were thriving. They enjoyed post-war double-digit growth and the battle for brewing dominance switched to the west coast or, more precisely, the booming state of California.
By 1967 the top four breweries commanded a third of all beer sales yet while the big breweries were busy merging, acquiring, and shrinking into a ball of price-driven homogeny, the seeds of a brewing backlash were being quietly sown in California.
One of the most significant developments, one that was to later oil the wheels of American craft brewing, was the creation in 1958 of a brewing program and pilot brewery at the University of California in Davis.
Then in 1965, a 27-year-old with no knowledge nor experience of brewing and a lackadaisical interest in beer purchased a ruined, filthy fiasco of a brewery in downtown San Francisco renowned for brewing sour, downright awful beer. The likes of Pabst, Schlitz, and Anheuser-Busch hardly batted an eye, but Frederick “Fritz” Maytag III, new owner of the Anchor Steam Brewery and heir to the eminent Maytag washing-machine empire, fired the first shot across the bows of the big breweries.
Maytag began brewing steam beer again. It was small-batch, brewed with the finest, freshest ingredients. It snubbed hype in favor of history (dating back to 1896) and valued authenticity ahead of advertising. Unwilling and unable to compete on price or the national distribution of the goliaths, it played on its reputation as a loyal, local, west coast hero.
Maytag’s timing, and indeed location, was immaculate. In the early 1970s, a revolution was starting against the shrink-wrapped, frozen monotony of modern American food and drink and California was leading the charge. It, more than any other state, proudly flew the flag of epicurean enlightenment and stormed the gates of mass- produced mediocrity.
Boutique wineries were cropping up on the Pacific Coast and in the Napa Valley region yet beer wasn’t that far behind. In 1976, in the hippy Northern California backwater of Sonoma, the first microbrewery since Prohibition was set up by Jack McAuliffe, a Navy engineer who’d fallen in love with British ales while stationed in Scotland in the 1960s. The New Albion Brewery may not have lasted long (closing in 1983) but, throughout the craft beer community, McAuliffe is rightly revered for his visionary derring-do.
McAuliffe and Maytag succeeded in igniting the fire under the rocking chair of mainstream American beer but it was the legalisation of homebrewing in 1978 that really fanned the flames and California quickly emerged as the epicentre of a small yet passionate craft brewing scene.
In 1983, Don Barkley, formerly of New Albion, opened California’s first brewpub in Hopland and 2 years earlier, Ken Grossman had cobbled together a brewery using dairy equipment, called it the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company and brewed Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Distinctively hoppy in character, it was a marked departure from the big branded beers and became the golden giant on whose shoulders other West Coast beers now stand.
By 1994, California laid claim to 84 microbreweries and brewpubs (one more than there’d been in all of the United States a decade before) and that number has continued to grow. Nearly two decades on and, from San Diego in the south to Eureka in the north, California remains the jewel in the American craft brewing crown.
When it comes to cutting-edge beer, few cities can rival San Diego. Yet, 20 years ago, things were very different. While San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland were brewing up a craft beer storm in the eighties and early nineties, San Diego remained a wilderness for flavorful beer. Locals were forced to rely on brews produced “up state” rather than their own. After years of living in the brewing shadow of its west coast peers, San Diego’s beer scene came into its own in the mid-1990s.
Not content with a dozen maverick craft breweries, a mesmerizing array of switched-on tap-houses and a smattering of brewpubs, San Diego has even got its very own beer style. A strong, hoppy pale ale dubbed “Double IPA” is perhaps the signature beer of San Diego. At strengths often above 10% and with bitterness to burn, it is not a beer style for the meek. Heady “hop monster” beers run amok in San Diego, outselling other styles in leading beer bars such as O’Brien’s, Liar’s Club, and Hamilton’s Tavern.
For all the adulation received elsewhere, boutique beer has never met with a particularly warm welcome in Los Angeles. As to why, no one really knows. Some blame the climate; perhaps L.A.’s hot and sweaty weather stifles pub culture and big beers wilt whenever mercury rises. Yet, were this really the case, neighboring San Diego wouldn’t be such a hotbed of craft brewing creativity.
Others contend that Los Angeles is simply too tourist-driven and transitory. No brewery has managed to unite what is essentially a scatter of individual neighborhoods with no discernible center.
Having somehow remained oblivious to the west coast’s love affair with craft beer for quite some time, Angelinos are finally getting the taste for craft beer; you just have to look a little harder in Los Angeles than you do in other cities.
And then, of course, there’s San Francisco. San Francisco is the center of the California brewing scene. The city played an integral role in the birth of the American craft beer movement and it remains instrumental in today’s larger artisan food and beverage renaissance. As for the big brewers, California offers the largest population of any state, and Anheuser-Busch InBev operates breweries in Los Angeles and Fairfield, and MillerCoors’ beers flow from Irwindale. Regardless of the type of beer, California is well supplied. As of 2010, there were more than 250 breweries in California, more than any other state in the United States.