Bennett: Noble has the winning beer-making formula

When Evan Price was hired as brewmaster at Anaheim’s Noble Ale Works, the nearly 2-year-old brewery was floundering. Earlier this month, the Orange County craft beer darling was named one of the best in the world.

Launched in 2009 initially as a contract brewery — meaning its beers were made on someone else’s system and then released under the Noble Ale Works name — the brand was at first undercapitalized and underutilized. Not to mention, the beers weren’t good.

Even after opening a tasting room in an industrial park within walking distance of Angel Stadium and the Honda Center, where beer-drinking, game-going customers are all but guaranteed, Noble could never get people to come in and drink.

“I came to an anniversary party here as sort of a cordial, welcome-to-the-neighborhood kind of thing,” Price remembers. “I bought one beer, drank a few sips — which was all I could handle — went over to a drain and secretly poured it out. Then I handed them the empty glass, said thanks and left.”

When the unstable brewer abruptly left the company in 2011, the future of Noble was uncertain.

“It was one of those scary things, like now what?” says CEO and partner Brian Rauso, who came on board around that time.

Earlier this month, Noble earned three medals for individual beers and was named the best small brewery in the world at the prestigious World Beer Cup, which is often referred to as “the Olympics of beer.” The competition happens every two years during the annual Craft Brewers Conference, and this edition saw 6,596 entries from 1,907 breweries representing 55 countries, a 38.5% increase in the number of entries from 2014.

The wins come as little surprise to local beer drinkers (including the sports crowds that now flood the tasting room before games), who have been following Price and his brewing team — which includes lead brewers Brad Kominek and Matt Fantz and assistant brewer Joseph Isaac — for the last five years, chuckling at their cheeky online and public personalities and fawning over out-of-the-box creations like The Good Ship, a British-style ESB infused with Earl Grey tea, and cult favorite Naughty Sauce, a golden coffee milk stout served from a nitrogen tap (an occasionally released stronger version is called Bean Bump).

But Noble’s beers are more than just cleverly named novelties. Its juicy West Coast-style IPAs are ones for the record books: In addition to earning a gold and bronze at this year’s World Beer Cup, a session IPA won a bronze at the Great American Beer Festival last year and they took first place at the L.A. IPA Fest two years in a row (this year they got second).

“We might have a reputation for being funny guys, but that one minute you see [us making jokes] on Instagram is the one minute of the day we’re having a good time,” says Kominek. “For however many other minutes are left in the day, we’re hard at work and it’s grueling.”

With Kominek as his right-hand man (the two refer to each other as their “work wives”), Price is at the heart of Noble’s current beer program, and his sense of humor is one of the driving forces behind the brewery’s approachable attitude.

Voted class clown his senior year at Anaheim’s Savanna High School, he picked up brewing while working at various BJ’s restaurant and brewhouse locations about a decade ago. He got hired early on at Redlands’ Hangar 24 before landing at TAPS Fish House & Brewery in Brea, where he learned to make traditional beer styles and newer American classics from then-brewmaster Victor Novak, one of the winningest brewers in Orange County history.

From Novak, Price learned to use the best ingredients possible, even if it means spending more money or waiting for a shipment to come in from Europe. TAPS won the title of best brewpub group in the country both years Price was brewing there.

“Evan is an artist, but he’s also a scientist in a lot of ways,” says Rauso. “He clowns around, but when it comes to his beers, he’s a perfectionist. He’s not afraid to throw a batch away if it’s not up to his standards.”

“When you work under somebody and you don’t realize how much you learn from them until you leave, then you hear yourself talking and you say, ‘That’s Victor’s thought,’ ” Price adds. “He had this attitude of the craft — the idea that it should only be great.”

The process of building Noble from a tarnished name into a successful local (and now internationally recognized) brewery has been a slow burn.

It took years (and several batches of beer down the drain) to dial in specific processes like water filtration, hop additions and brewing techniques that work for their system and their beers, knowledge that was expedited once the brewing team became large enough for Price to take a step back and research new ideas instead of churning out beers every day.

There’s more Noble goodness on the way too; a massive expansion is currently in the works. The team has purchased the warehouse next door and plan to break down the wall, which will triple the brewery’s footprint and increase the size of beer production and a space for the public to come and drink it all.

As for how he feels winning the World Beer Cup title, Price is still getting used to it.

“I think they messed up,” he says, laughing. “I’m still trying to figure out how it happened.”

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SARAH BENNETT is a freelance journalist covering food, drink, music, culture and more. She is the former food editor at L.A. Weekly and a founding editor of Beer Paper L.A. Follow her on Twitter @thesarahbennett.