Posted on June 22, 2011 in Beer
Mark Ruedrich is the President and Head Brewer at North Coast Brewing Co, which has been in business since 1988. Originally a local brewpub, North Coast now has a restaurant and is looking at farmland along the coast of California. They are involved with a number of local environmental initiatives, including a forest restoration project that utilizes the brewery’s spent barley and hops to create carbon-sequestering biochar that bolsters soil while mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.
While wine and cheese is often seen as the traditional pairing, Mark would argue that beer has a place on the table, alongside the world’s best cheeses. They hosted a booth at the 2011 Artisan Cheese Festival, which featured several of their beers, paired with local cheeses they liked.
Pairing beer and cheese is nothing new for Mark and North Coast Brewing Co., who have been doing it for the past twenty-some years. Their restaurant menu boasts an impressive pairing menu and Mark says they have created a database over the years of pairings that have worked, some good, some really great. “We have never prescribed to the idea that wine is the ultimate pairing for cheese,” he said. Although he says that people often like to hear that there is a formula for pairings, “it’s just not that straightforward…you just have to sit down with it and do the hard work” of trial and error.
Mark has been in the business for over twenty years, having first gotten interested in small brewing in England. He was living in Devon for a couple of years in the 1970s, where “there was a little brewery in a barn just up the lane from where we were living.” He found the brewery fascinating, as, at the time, beer brewing in the U.S. was all factory-run, he said. It was there that Mark became familiar with the well-developed beer culture and small producers in England. When he came back to the U.S., he took up home brewing when it became legal and applied the knowledge gained in England later on in the form of a business plan.
Now, he draws inspiration from other producers in the U.S. as well. He was happy to meet the folks behind Weeping Radish Brewery at the Good Food Awards, who got started several years before North Coast. “They actually inspired us to start looking at farmland of our own,” Mark said. “We have always wanted to get a little more vertical.” North Coast is now in the market for a bit of land along the coast to start their own farm; they hope to get started this summer growing vegetables for their restaurant, which they use as a way to educate their customers about beer. The restaurant is “an opportunity to pair food and beer and teach people about the place of beer on the table,” he said. Beer is “not just something you drink on the couch watching your favorite football team…not that we frown on that either.”
Posted on June 2, 2011 in Beer
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.”
