Capt Keith's Beer Blog

Tickets are on sale now for a very unique opportunity to meet Ken Grossman of Sierra Nevada Brewing Company. He will host a beer dinner at my new Gastro-Pub, The Meddlesome Moth on February 21st at 6 PM. See the flyer below and call to secure your tickets immediately. We sold 40 tickets in the first 10 minutes they went on sale.

Back Story: Twenty Years ago, I had my first Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and it was the beer that changed me forever. I think we all remember the brew that changed the way we think about BEER (and brewing.) Back then their Pale Ale seemed to like a hop bomb yet it is relatively mild in comparison to some Pale Ales and IPAs in today’s market.

I have been in the craft beer business since the early 90′s and have always felt Sierra sets the bar for craft beer. I have had the pleasure of meeting with Ken several times before and I know him to be a very humble man. His story is extraordinary – pioneering the craft beer movement, starting his brewery on a tiny budget in a storage warehouse In Chico, CA and growing it to the Sierra Nevada we know today.

Come meet the legend and enjoy our Chef prepared beer dinner with some fantastic limited offerings.

Cheers!

I was invited to BEER CAMP by Steve Grossman of Sierra Nevada Brewery. Steve is the ambassador of Sierra Nevada. Sounds like a great job and guess what – he looks pretty damn happy.

As I have mentioned before, getting to Chico from Dallas is not that easy. But once we get settled, its nice to be there. Six of us were there to brew beer with Scott Jennings, the director of their Pilot Brewery.

Beer from the fermenters

Scott has been with Sierra for 9 years now. He seemed genuinely happy to see us and to show us how his brewery within Sierra Nevada worked. I must say, it is state of the art & he has some great beers fermenting, which he allowed us to try. The Pilot Brewery that he runs is where they tweak ideas for new recipes.

Fish bowl with Steve and Scott

In the “Fish Bowl”, we all met up to discuss our project. Steve tells us about the history behind Sierra Nevada.

It is a cool story and I will share some tidbits with you, other than what you may find on your own History of Sierra Nevada.

From 1980 – 1989 they had only a 10 Barrel Brewing System. The original kettle is an odd looking fabricated piece of used dairy equipment that Ken made himself. That kettle is still used to this day by the boys at Mad River Brewing Co. At first, the beer was sold in bottles only.The three original beers were Pale, Stout and Porter, which are still around today and excellent examples of each style. The first kegs were used in 1983 and were the old style Golden Gate kegs. They bought them from AB for about $15 each – a fraction of the cost of new kegs. The head brewer is Steve Dressler and he has been on their team for 27 years.

Early days at Sierra

In 1981: New Albion was producing 450 barrels annually, Sierra – 1500 barrels, Anchor Brewing – 25,000 and Yuengling 200,000. Today Anchor does around 100k barrels and SN is doing around 1M barrels. In 1989 SN moved into a new building and bought a 100 Barrel system. In 1998 they bought a 200 barrel system and expanded creating an east side and a west side. Today, they have 800 barrel fermenters, 50 of them. The daily brewing schedule requires the use of over 100,000 pounds of grain.

Sierra has a 9 acre organic hop field next door – for their Chico Estate Harvest Ale. They grow two row barley on 30 acres near their rail station. The brewery  uses about 4 rail cars of grain per week. At any time they have almost 1M pounds of grain on hand.

Grain Hauler

Let’s talk about Green living for a moment. I learned that 99.6% of all solid waste is recycled at SN. That their hop field is watered with their treated water from brewery production. The trucks are biodeisel. Their rooftops have 10,000 solar panel systems to feed the energy to their fuel cells. They have a farm that the local university uses to train their students on animal care and land management. The cattle on the farm are fed the spent grain from the brewery and the beef is used at the SN pub. All in all, SN is about 92% self sufficient and definitley setting a good example for sustainability. We don’t learn this from their marketing plan – it’s just how they think the brewery should be run. They’ve created a pretty incredible work environment. The group seems pretty darn humble and every person I encountered seemed genuinely happy to be there.

The Beer that is coming to Texas very soon will be called The Edge of Darkness. The campers decided to do a robust brown ale that was 6.5% abv – using Pale Two Row malt, Caramel Malt 60 and 120 L and some chocolate malt for color and flavors.

Rusty adds the grain

Mashing the grain

Testing the PH levels of our wort

The hop bill was HUGE – this is something Sierra is known for and they encouraged us to dig through their hop storage and use whatever we wanted. Scott was careful to keep us in the right direction and not let us pick anything too far out there.