Beers to Match Our Mountains

California has lost its taste for success stories. We’d rather cry in our beer and chronicle the failures--the bankruptcies and plant closures, the tumble of property values, the rumble of vans hauling away our assets. California, we tell ourselves again and again, is a loser. Say it enough, and you begin to believe it. Say it enough and you can make it come true.

Here is a different kind of story. It begins in a far corner of the San Fernando Valley, in a time when that vast table of land across the Hollywood Hills still seemed almost rural. We go to the bedroom of a wiry teen-ager with a knack for science.

“Kenny,” Ken Grossman’s mother would later tell an interviewer, “always had projects going. Chemistry sets, all sorts of things. So when he brought home some new jars and plastic tubes I didn’t think much of it. He didn’t say anything about beer. . . .”

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Ken Grossman, Taft High Class of ‘72, had a friend named Steve Harrison. Harrison lived next to one Cal Moeller. Cal was a rocket scientist, a metals expert who helped engineer the space shuttle. He now lives up in Oregon somewhere. Cal had many hobbies. One was brewing beer at home. He taught a few tricks to Grossman and Harrison. They took it from there.

One suggests to Grossman that an ability to brew beer must have made him a pretty popular fellow at Taft High on Friday nights.

“You are trying to get us in trouble,” Grossman says warily.

“His mother hates this part of the story, by the way,” adds Harrison.

“She says I never drank any of the beer I brewed,” Grossman says.

Well?

“Of course I did.”

Whatever, the boys must have known when to say when and all that because they have done all right for themselves, as you’ll see.

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Chico is about an hour and a half north of Sacramento, a lush little college town with a rustic feel and few pretensions. Herb Caen, the San Francisco columnist, once described it as a town where Velveeta cheese can be found in the grocer’s gourmet foods section, but no matter. Grossman, who came up here to ride his bike and study chemistry, adopted it as his home.

Here he hooked up again with Harrison and Paul Camusi, a native of the Los Feliz district. Camusi also was a home brewer. Before long the hobby gave way to a grander scheme. “We thought this would be a great thing to do for a living,” Grossman recalls. “You know, brew some beer. We envisioned running a very small brewery. We never thought we’d get rich or anything. We were motivated by a love of beer.”

Like many California stories, this one involves a trend. Grossman calls it “the good beer revolution.” A more non-judgmental term is micro-brewing . In the early 1980s, as Grossman and Camusi were borrowing money from their folks to launch the Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.--Harrison was hired as their first employee--some Americans were growing tired of the beers being mass-produced by the majors. Foreign imports were hot. Also, all over the country, and particularly in California and the Pacific Northwest, small micro-brewers were beginning to roll out more flavorful “boutique” beers, novelty brands with great names like Red Tail Ale and Cable Car Lager.

The boys at Sierra Nevada caught this wave early--some say they pretty much created it--and rode it well. At first, they only sold their Pale Ale around town. They did not advertise then; they do not advertise now. They simply relied on word of mouth, but this eventually took them into venues such as Berkeley’s popular California cuisine restaurants. The foodies, having worked their way through the fine wine list, were looking for something different with which to wash down their free-range chicken. Jackpot.

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Today, Sierra Nevada beer is distributed across the country. Grossman and Co. opened a brewery four years ago and immediately outgrew it. Their biggest problem, in fact, is keeping pace with demand. Their brewing process does not lend itself to mass production. Still, they brew 110,000 barrels a year and sell them all.

And as they sit in the crowded brewery restaurant, telling their story, it is interesting what Grossman and Harrison don’t talk much about--things like the recession and workers’ comp and tax incentives. Harrison says: “All that macro stuff really doesn’t affect us much. We’re growing too fast as it is.”

There you have it. L.A. boys go off to the north country, brew some beer, make a bundle. Odd, isn’t it, how this simple California success story seems almost out of place, a burp in the familiar litany of gloom. But why ask why?