Meet California Winner Bison Brewing

Posted on Thursday, June 2nd, 2011 in Beer by Heather Hammel

Daniel de Grande became the owner and brewer at Bison Brewing, a fully organic brewery, in 1997. The brewery hosts events in the local community, practices on-site wastewater treatment and has conducted a carbon footprint analysis of its operations. Daniel also teaches at the American Brewer’s Guild on brewing engineering twice a year in Vermont.

I caught up with Daniel del Grande from Bison Brewing on his drive down to LA for the Natural Products Expo, a trade show where Daniel connects with other producers and finds ingredients for his many of lines of flavored brews. He comments on the flower blossoms along the freeway, and then we got down to talking about his new website.

Bison Brewing’s biggest new project is a cooperative website called the coHOPerative, which was launched at the Craft Brewers Conference in March. It functions as a buyers’ cooperative for a variety of hops and as a way to organize the 40 or so organic-buying brewers across the country. “There has been a bit of grumbling from brewers about the price of hop crops and the quality they are getting for it,” Daniel said. “And then [there is] grumbling on the growers’ end that they are never informed about what brewers want and that no one is willing to make a long-term commitment for their crops.” The goal of the site is to “create a really robust hop market so that we can say to growers ‘we need this amount of this variety of hops’ and one grower can say ‘we can provide this much’, and another grower can say ‘we can provide this much’,” he said.

Daniel himself sources not only hops from local farmers, but also fruits and basil, which he uses in his special brews. He is currently working on creating a second-use for blemished fruits from Frog Hollows Farms, which, while still tasty, cannot be put into CSA boxes. His fruit brews will be release in May or June, just in time for a refreshing summer. His other summer brew, the Honey Basil Ale, used organic basil from Watsonville, CA. The honey, however, he has to import due to strict regulations on honey production that make it impossible to produce organic honey with the existing land grid, as bees can travel and pollinate at a vast expanse of land.

For his part, Daniel is looking to educate others on organic beer. He organizes brewmasters dinners twice a week in his local area in order to educate distributors, restaurateurs and customers, who have been resistant to buying and selling organic beer in ways they have not been resistant to other organic products. “We’ve seen a lot of pushback from retailers, even from Whole Foods, for carrying organic products,” he said. “When it comes to beer, they have the same old beer on the rack. They are not giving the beer recipe the same attention as they do for other products and are not putting their money where their mouth is.” Daniel hopes to change this attitude by taking his brewmasters dinners on the road in the near future as an outreach effort both for his own product and for the industry as a whole. But he isn’t always on the move; he is also happy to just enjoy a good product. Sitting a Berkeley bar last night, he ordered his own India Pale Ale, a lighter bodied brew that highlights the flavor of organic hops, and was content sitting back and saying “man this is good, good job Dan.”