Aus-Tex Printing and Mailing
2431 Forbes Dr., Austin, Texas
1991—With large shipping bays to the side and plenty of room for trucks to maneuver, this looks like a perfect building for a brewery. In fact, it was the Celis Brewery, one of the shining lights of the mid-1990s. That Belgian brewing legend Pierre Celis founded a brewery in Texas was nearly as exciting a story as the classic beers he produced. He sold the majority interest to Miller Brewing in 1995, then the rest in 2000. Shortly thereafter, Miller closed the brewery, eventually selling the beautiful equipment and brand names to Michigan Brewing. “It’s a huge loss to Austin. It’s like if you had an internationally recognized symphony and no one came to hear it,” said Chip McElroy, co-owner of Live Oak Brewing Co., also in Austin.
New Belgium Brewing Co.
500 Linden, Fort Collins
1991—The Celis Brewery received much more attention when it was built than New Belgium, since Lebesch began brewing on a 5-hectoliter system in his Fort Collins basement. New Belgium has moved twice since, and the brewery now holds two massive Steinecker brew houses, four quality assurance labs, and a wastewater treatment facility. The entire operation is powered by wind. The original brew house won GABF gold medals for three other breweries before New Belgium reacquired it and put it on display just beyond the large glass window that looks from the tasting room onto one of the Steinecker systems.
Samuel Adams Brewery
30 Germania St., Boston
1993—Before “extreme beer” became part of our vocabulary, Boston Beer rattled conventional brewing wisdom by rolling out Sam Adams Triple Bock, a shocking 17 percent brew, at the 1993 Great American Beer Festival. “At the time, everyone was trying to make one new classic style. That’s what was driving innovation,” said Sam Adams founder Jim Koch. “I wanted to step outside of that, to try to expand the boundaries of beer rather than expanding on traditional styles.” Casks containing some of the original Triple Bock, which has been followed by the much stronger Millennium and Utopias, remain on display in the brewery.
Copa, Too!
263 S. 15th, Philadelphia
1995—The first draft beer from a Belgian specialty brewer was poured on June 13 at a beer dinner here. Kwak was soon followed by plenty of others, and by the next April Copa Too! hosted a mini-Belgian festival with 18 Belgian and Dutch specialties. The next year, manager Tom Peters moved on, hooking up with Fergus Carey to open Monk’s Café (also in Philadelphia), which in 2002 became the first beer emporium outside Belgium to put Chimay on tap.
Flying Fish Brewing
1940 Olney, Cherry Hill, NJ
1995—Gene Muller literally founded Flying Fish Brewing Co. on the Internet. Muller said the idea was to make the website “This Old House meets the World Wide Web,” letting visitors see the thousands of details involved in putting a craft brewery together. By the time the first beers went on sale in 1996, site visitors had helped name beers and design T-shirts and labels, volunteered to be taste-testers and even applied for brewery jobs. To keep true to its roots, twice each year the brewery hosts private parties for subscribers to its e-mail newsletter.
Pete’s Place, Krebs
420 SW 8th St., Krebs, OK
1996—The story is that members of the Choctaw Nation taught Italian immigrants to make beer in the early 1900s. One of them, Pete Pritchard, opened a restaurant where he sold his homebrewed Choc beer. He never added a separate bar, preferring to serve the beer to diners at their tables. Pete continued to brew and sell Choc until 1932, when he was arrested for brewing illegally and sent to federal jail in Muskogee. Choc soon returned at Pete’s, continuing after Bill Prichard took over for his dad until 1981, when the illegal homebrew was shutdown. The first legal Choc was served in 1995, after Pete’s, now run by Bill’s son Joe, became a brewpub. In 2000, Choc won a medal at the GABF as an American-style wheat beer. The beer has grown so popular that Pete’s has added brewing capacity and is distributing it in kegs, bottles and cans.
Stone Brewing Co.
155 Mata Way, San Marcos, CA
1996—A year after Vinnie Cilurzo, then at Blind Pig Brewing, made the first commercial Double IPA anybody knows of, he brewed a second. The last drop growler of that batch was sold to Stone Brewing Co. founder Greg Koch. It was an outrageously hoppy beer, but then Stone was about to become known for setting hops standards of its own. Stone opened the same year, but before anything was done to the empty warehouse, Koch and partner Steve Wagner decide to throw a dinner party. Among those in attendance were Cilurzo and his wife, Natalie.
Goose Island Brewing Co.
1800 N. Clybourn, Chicago
1996—The first Real Ale Festival started with 32 beers in tight quarters here. It has grown into the largest cask ale event anywhere outside of England. The festival has always been backed by considerable assistance from the Chicago Beer Society. The idea for an event focusing on a single genre of beer was inspired by the “Spirit of Belgium” weekend put together by the BURP homebrew club in the Washington, DC, area in 1994.
Wynkoop Brewing Co.
1634 18th St., Denver
1997—Jack McDougall of Canford, NJ, won the first Beerdrinker of the Year competition sponsored by Wynkoop. The annual nationwide search serves as a reminder that our beer renaissance is consumer driven. McDougall was an original member of the Bar Tourists of America, a loosely organized group that held its first tour in 1978, consuming exotic beers such as Ballatine Ale, Hacker-Pschorr Dark and Krueger Porter while visiting seven bars.
Lewes Beach
Delaware
1997—To celebrate exporting the first Dogfish Head Brewery beer from Delaware, founder Sam Calagione built a sliding-seat rowboat and rowed a six-pack of Shelter Pale Ale 18 nautical miles to a beach at Cape May, NJ. Calagione left Lewes Beach at 7 a.m. and arrived in New Jersey 6½ hours later. “It was a long, strange trip and pretty disorienting,” Calagione said. “I couldn’t see land for about half the trip.” A party at a Cape May bar followed, with Dogfish Head beer on tap. “But we all took sips from the six-pack that I rowed across the bay,” Calagione said.
Bar stool No. 2
Falling Rock Taphouse
1919 Blake St., Denver
2000—Don Younger and Chris Black, who runs Falling Rock, first met in 1999 when they were on a panel together at the Craft Brewers Conference in Phoenix. They immediately became fast friends, part of an unofficial club of pub owners who keep finding ways to serve up still more interesting beer. Younger had long avoided attending the Great American Beer Festival, but after Black visited Portland, Younger was obligated to make one to Denver. Now Younger is something of a regular at GABF, though you shouldn’t expect to see him at the festival itself. He’ll likely be on the second barstool from the door at Falling Rock. What happens if somebody else sits there? “The bartender will probably say, ‘You know, Don’s going to be in soon. Maybe you should find another seat,’” Black said.
Oskar Blues Grill & Brew
303 Main St., Lyons, CO
2002—Working in an abandoned barn next to the brewery/pub, Oskar Blues employees basically hand-canned the first craft beers to be put in cans where they are brewed. Other breweries have since begun using cans, sales of Dale’s Pale Ale and Old Chubb in cans have boomed, and the brewery has upgraded its canning line. By last November, owner Dale Katechis had handed out two of three $6,000 mountain bikes promised to the first customers to recycle 3,501 cans.
That wraps up a beer tour that is admittedly Colorado and West Coast oriented. Certainly, there’s plenty more history east of the Mississippi if you want to start working on your own itinerary. Try Boscos in Tennessee with its Flaming Stone Beer, McGuire’s Irish Pub in Florida, or the Brickskeller in Washington, DC. This year, it will be 20 years since Kalamazoo Brewing’s Larry Bell sold his first beer. Still another anniversary.
