Mendocino Brewing

By this time, the New Albion Brewery was closing down and I got together with Jack and we worked out a deal to buy his brewery and bring him and brewers Don Barkley and Michael Lovett into our new enterprise. At the time, Jack and I became roommates in the little house next to the brewery and we all started to work on building the Hopland Brewery. “In The Traditional Manner” became our slogan, thanks to Jack.

We cut the New Albion brewery apart and hauled it up to Hopland from Sonoma over a six week period and welded it back together.

I had worked out a lease with John Fetzer of Fetzer Winery at the time. John owned the property and was also excited about the idea of the now legal brewpubs in California. For the first time in California, since prohibition, a brewery in Hopland CA was legally allowed to open that not only sells its’ own beer at its’ own bar on premises, but serves food to boot. We rebuilt the ex antique shop into a bar and loft, reinforced the 100 year old walls and added a hop kiln style building to the pub as a brewhouse with mostly gravity flow.

We used the hop kiln design because it was an old tradition in the area (100 years of growing hops). Norman and I actually climbed up in the Milano Winery building, took measurements and drew up plans using the same two story framing design of the building, which was one of the old hop kilns in Hopland. We always liked to say we built the last hop kiln in Hopland. There were four left at the time in Hopland. Very traditional, as the area had grown hops for around a hundred years.

We hooked the hop kiln style building, now the brewhouse to the old antique building and put rest rooms and a kitchen in. Then fermenting rooms and a bottling area, although at the time, we were in kegs only.

By now there were the six of us working on the building and the beer garden area, all of us with various degrees of construction experience. Myself, Norman Franks,John Scahill, J Holden, Don Barkley, Michael Lovett and Jack.

To research the design of the bar, the word was traditional again, like our ales. I decided go make a trip to San Francisco to, ah, study bars. I spent a couple of weekends there and actually obtained sketches of the basic design elements of several bars some of which were over 100 years old. Being a rabid blues fan, I spent time at The Saloon, well described by a patron:

“This place is the oldest bar inn San Francisco and one of the oldest bars in the US. It survived earthquakes, fires and the Prohibition and it definitely looks and acts the part. 
The bar, with the wooden panels and mirrors, makes me think of Al Capone time, as if you stepped through a time machine door and are now in the 20s Nothing pretentious, everyone is just having a great time. The music will make even the squarest of squares get on the dance floor and shake that flat booty of theirs.”

I did get enough sketches to bring to Hopland to start the design of the bar.  I drew up plans and we went to work. We naturally wanted a very traditional oak bar and hired Tim Hustead and Rick Garren for the cabinet work and carving the pillars. The bar had a solid oak bar rail. We decided on a loft both for more seating and it also acted as a buttress for the unreinforced 100 year old brick walls.

After seeing that a trickle of dust kept falling on the bar, we decided to take out the stamped tin ceiling. As I was crawling on the rafters, pounding the tin down, I’ll never forget Jack’s words: “Hey Michael — how do you like all that dust? “ I was completely covered with brown dust. “You know, don’t you” Jack said , “That’s a hundred years of rat shit”. Yeah, I gagged.

Working long days, often more than 10 hours a day we finally were getting close to opening.

Soon we were brewing in the old New Albion brewery equipment, set up in a similar manner as the Sonoma brewery. We decided to use nearly the same recipes and of course kept the New Albion yeast. We did bottle conditioning for carbonation and used whole hops as we still do — in the traditional manner.

In 1978, my brewing partner Norman and I, at the time, had been homebrewing for about 4 years and developed a beer based on Fred Eckhardt’s small homebrewing pamphlet out of Portland Oregon. Fred called it a steam beer as it was brewed at a higher temperature than lager beer. After much study and practice, we eventually were making some good brews. We had converted a broken down garage in to a small home brewery, with its own walk-in refrigerator room, built from the entrails of an old refrigerator, an old gas stove, a big stainless steel pot and several 5 gallon glass water bottles.

After a while we began to be consistent with the brewing and became somewhat infamous in Mendocino County for Thunder Beer. It appeared at lots of parties and dances that we threw at the Redwood Valley Grange Hall and other places.

When Jack McCauliffe opened his small brewery in Sonoma CA, we immediately drove down there in my 61 Cadillac 2 door hardtop with a few 6 packs of homebrew. The Cowboy Cadillac party car, as we called it. After he saw that we were hooked on brewing and loved the art of brewing beer, he warmed up and eventually Jack and I became friends. I brought him up to Mendocino County a number of times to pig hunt and party always having a new batch to taste.

Jack had, from the first, taught us about the importance of cleanliness and sterilization so the beer wouldn’t go bad. Then he showed us the importance of fermenting temperature control.

What a guy. Jack would read operating manuals for entertainment. At New Albion, he designed and welded together a brewhouse with 50 gallon Coca Cola drums and extensive temperature controlled fermenting rooms. Jack also rebuilt an old time bottling machine to fill 12 ounce bottles. To me he was a mechanical genius.

Jack had a rough time of it in the business, not only being one of the first Americans to brew a full flavored beer, but also because the New Albion Ales were not pasteurized and they were bottle conditioned, meaning you put just the right amount of yeast back in the brew to carbonate it. “In the traditional manner”, as Jack always said. This, of course, meant that the beer had to be refrigerated and carefully handled. Distributors didn’t want to mess with this new kind of beer and were not selling the beer nor treating it properly. It took the distributors several years to figure out that the return on this kind of beer was worth it. Too many years for the New Albion Brewery to stay alive.

One day, Jack said to me, ”Michael, Your beer is as good as mine when I started – you ought to start a brewery.” I talked the idea with the original founders, Norman Franks, John Scahill, as we did our now weekly homebrew batches. After studying the increase in sales of imported beer each year, I became convinced there was a market for full flavored beer. I decided to take a small business course at Mendocino College. The object of the course was to write a business plan for a business. Well, I had a business imagined and we started gathering data in 1981.

We didn’t have any money to start a business, no family money or inheritance, so after much discussion, we decided to raise some with investors. The business plan was exciting because it seemed like it would work. It took about a year, but we raised $100,000 and went for it.

Check back in a couple of weeks for the second installment…