All About Beer Magazine • Volume 27 Number 2 • May 2006

AAB: Why Ft. Bragg?

MR: We moved to Ft. Bragg from Devon, England. Merle and I met in San Francisco, it must have been 1976. She's English. When she figured it was time for her to go back to England to spend some time near her mother, we decided it would be a good thing if I went, too. I was trying my hand at some writing.

AAB: You weren't in brewing yet?

MR: Oh no.

AAB: And you'd left biology?

MR: Well, I had my degree in zoology and had not yet managed to find a job in my field. We decided after a couple of years we'd have to return to the United States because the British government said, basically, "You can't stay here unless something happens: you get married or someone here decides they can't continue in business without your help,"—I think that probably sums it up. Or I would suddenly find myself with offers from publishers for my book—which of course wasn't going to happen.

We knew we wanted to move back to California. I had always had ideas of pursuing a career in marine biology, and the thing that I was interested in studying—the marine biology of the Pacific Coast—was here. So we made the decision to move someplace that we thought we'd really love to live, a beautiful place away from the city.

AAB: So Ft. Bragg came first and brewing after?

MR: Oh yes, quite some time after. We moved here in '79 with not much of anything. When we came here I lived in a tent for a couple of months till I found a place for us to live. I found a job in construction and Merle started a day care center.

The brewing was done out of necessity to begin with. I'd been thoroughly won over by the pub culture in England, particularly where we were in the country. At the time—25, almost 30 years ago—the pubs were very simple affairs, but the beer was really good.

Our English friends took the responsibility of teaching this American about beer very seriously. Every night it was down to the pub, the Pig and Whistle. We'd really have more of a drinking experience than I could begin to handle. These guys were serious—and not just about the volume. I learned a lot. Those were probably the most important lessons that I learned as a brewer. A very nice way to learn about beer and the role of beer in their society and their culture.

AAB: So you came back to the U.S. with something missing from your life?

MR: Yes, you can imagine a logging town in the 70s. The bar scene here was as you'd expect, and the selection in the stores was pretty paltry. So I joined the ranks of home brewers fairly early, out of necessity just to get a decent pint of beer.

AAB: And then comes the moment when someone says to you "This is great, you should go pro."

MR: Yea, it was actually quite a ways on. No one came to me and said "You should really do something with this," until 1986 or so after Triple Rock opened in Berkeley as Roaring Rock. It was sort of a serendipitous moment. It was a silly thing—ridiculous, really—to suggest that we would have done this in a town like Ft. Bragg. It was not a great idea. It was Tom's idea. Tom [Allen] would have an ideal like that.

At the time we met, Tom had bought a bed and breakfast in Mendocino. The company I worked for was doing a restoration on the building. Tom came to our other partner, Joe Rosenthal, with this article about Reid and John [Martin] at Triple Rock and said to Joe, "Hey, this is what this area needs. This place needs a brewpub." And Joe, of course, said "Well, Mark knows how to make beer!" It was one of those "Our Gang" moments

AAB: You traded construction for carrying huge bags of grain around?

MR: Yeah! (laughs) I sort of took the bit between my teeth and said "If you guys are serious about this, I'll look into it." I went to Portland to the 1986 Craft Brewers Conference—I'm not sure what it was even called—there were about eight people there. We went from there.

AAB: One of the things you and I talk about periodically is your interest in history. And here you are talking about renovating old houses, old beer styles, old breweries.

MR: Yes, I'm the president of our local historical society, in fact (laughs)

AAB: And that's what led you to the Acme brand, as well—the history?

MR: I have a great interest in history. The whole Acme thing has been a disappointment in some ways because I really haven't had the time to pursue all the material that's out there. It was such a huge company. We have talked to some people over the last four to six years who had associations with the company. I'm afraid they're all dying off without our getting their impressions of what it was like, which is sad.

AAB: What's the most fun you've had developing a particular beer?

MR: Originally, we knew what our portfolio needed to look like, and I did formulations for those beers: Red Seal, Scrimshaw, Old No. 38. That was all pretty straightforward.

With Old Rasputin and PranQster, I'd do the design work on paper and in my head, then we brew the beer and its pretty much what we want it to be. There's not an awful lot of fooling around.

But there have been some beers which have developed not so directly. The 10th anniversary beer that we aged in whisky barrels (back when not a lot of people were doing that) was a lot of fun, because we weren't sure what the hell we were going to do with it. It turned out to be a fantastic beer.

There's another beer, a sort of light Belgian we'd done for ourselves. You know, a drinker—relatively low alcohol, not the sort of thing we thought there'd be a great market for. It was after we'd brewed PranQster, so we called it Gangsta. We've recently used it as the basis for our 16th anniversary beer, with the apple juice in it.

AAB: You don't often use funky ingredients, do you?

MR: Never. That was an unusual step for us. For a along time, we were very principled about this no flavored beer. No fruit flavors for us. In this case, at 30% of the extract, it was such a big part of the beer it was no longer an addition, it was a full-fledged ingredient. That was kind of fun.

We're doing Old Stock in whiskey barrels now, and we've got some Old Rasputin aging in whiskey barrels because this year is its 10th anniversary.

When Whole Foods asked us to do their 25th anniversary beer last year we realized there was no way we were going to do [the cork and wire closure] by hand again. We went out and bought a cork and wire monobloc for our bottling line, so the finish is much easier. Having made that investment—it's beautiful, it's our Mercedes—we have to use it, so we're going to start doing a bunch of small batch, barrel-aged beers.

Being able to take our time and let a beer find its own way, those beers have been the most enjoyable for us: those that don't just come out of my head, but that we sit around—me and Pat and Chuck [North Coast brewers]—and drink and talk about.

AAB: What is your favorite combination of a North Coast beer and a food?

MR: There are some that really, really work well. Old Stock is a great beer with really big cheeses. One of my most favorite recent combinations is Old Stock with Montgomery Farmhouse Cheddar. Keen's Cheddar would be another in the same ballpark.

AAB: What do you listen to in the brewhouse?

MR: Well, there's no music allowed. You know, this is California, and that kind of thing would be considered a dangerous distraction. Just the music of the brewery.

AAB: How do you decompress, when you're not brewing?

MR: I have my dog, Moose, a big German short-haired pointer and he requires a lot of walking. Ft. Bragg has an old logging road, an absolutely gorgeous stretch of road—seven miles long, right on the ocean—a great place to walk the dog, a good place to decompress.

AAB: Finally, tell me about the tie-in with the Thelonious Monk Institute.

MR: Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? The cork and wire monobloc came first, so we needed beers that we could put in a cork and wire finish. We were looking at a range of Belgian ales we could produce, and kicking around names. This one has to be related to monastic themes, so we went through some lists of Latin-sounding names. We came up with Brother Octavius, things like that. Then Sheila, the office manager, said "How about Thelonius?" And we thought "Wow...and guess what? His last name is Monk!" So we had our little pun. [The beer is Brother Thelonius.]

Tom and I are big jazz fans, and we always had live jazz at the pub until we could no longer afford to do it—too many hep cats sittin' around drinking tea and taking up the tables.

But Doug [Moody, North Coast's senior vice-president], is very involved with jazz here. He has a weekly jazz show on local radio, and connections with labels and musicians all over the country. So when Doug caught wind of this idea, the next thing I know he's in touch with the Institute, proposing that we use the name and make a donation to the Institute for every case we sold. They would use it for jazz education all over the world.

For 10 years now, we have sponsored a local scholarship here for jazz musicians in the high school, so this is kind of moving it to another level.

Being able to take advantage of the opportunity the brewery presents us to get involved in these things is really what makes it so much fun for us.