Both Gill and Houck spent many of their formative years in the beer industry in San Francisco, Gill selling for Oskar Blues and Houck brewing at 21st Amendment and Drake’s. These first placements reflect their deep personal connections to the city; it’s not part of the Golden Road agenda to aggressively move into NorCal any time soon.  Each of the initial placements has been hand-selected and hand-sold by Gill, and Golden Road is working closely with the distribution team at Matagrano to keep their Bay Area presence close-knit and personal.

Says Houck, “Will we still have much work to do in Southern California to fulfill our goals, and our intention with these placements is to give back to the bars and people that gave us our start. The Bay Area is where I cultivated my love for beer and my palate, and it’s great to be able to come back in some small way.”

Adds Gill, “Selling in San Francisco is a romantic endeavor for us; Jesse, Tony, and I all met at different times but all in the SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco when I was first finding my footing in the beer world. We are literally retracing our roots and ideas that have built Golden Road.”

One of the featured placements will be at City Beer in SoMa, where Gill worked to introduce Oskar Blues cans into their renowned stock of craft beers. To celebrate this professional reunion, City Beer will be hosting a tap-takeover on April 11th from 8-10PM, featuring Point the Way IPA, Wolf Among Weeds, Get Up Offa That Brown and many more.

Golden Road will also be hosting a beer dinner on May 5 at Abbott’s Cellar, which is another personal touchstone for Gill, as she hosted her first-ever beer dinner at their sister restaurant, Monk’s Kettle back in 2008. Both Gill and Houck will be in attendance for the meal, which will feature a four-course meal, paired with Golden Road brews for $75 per person including beer pairings ($55 without). A limited number of seats will be released for the brewer’s table for $95, where diners will have the opportunity to chat in-depth with Gill and Houck and learn more about Golden Road.

Following this event, Whole Foods Market Potrero will be hosting the Golden Road team for a tasting on May 6th from 5-7 p.m., which will feature 10 Golden Road beers on draft, and all three canned selections (Point the Way IPA, Wolf Among Weeds and Get Up Offa That Brown).

City Beer, Toronado, Whole Foods Market Portero, Abbott’s Cellar, Monk’s Kettle and Dark Horse will all be carrying Golden Road’s (newly reformulated) flagship Point the Way IPA, with other limited edition brews scattered throughout, including Wolf Among Weeds, Golden Road Berliner Weisse, and It’s Not Always Sunny in LA.

Meg Gill and Jon Carpenter of Golden Road Brewing

(Editor’s Note: This is part of a series in which we scoured the country to find 30 innovative brewers and beer professionals under 30 years old, each of whom hopes to further the scope and breadth of the American craft beer scene.)

Meg Gill (27, President) and Jon Carpenter (30, Brewmaster)

Golden Road Brewing

Los Angeles, CA

All About Beer: Tell us about your brewery.

Meg Gill: It is the largest craft brewery in Los Angeles founded by myself and Tony Yanow, perhaps the smartest businessman and most passionate beer dude I’ve met.

How did you first get into brewing?

Jon Carpenter: I first began home-brewing in college in 2000 (age 18), with Scott Vaccaro, who’s now the owner of Capt. Lawrence Brewing Co. Later on, I pursued Bachelor of Science in Brewing Science at the University of California, Davis.

Gill: I do not brew beer. I first got into the business of beer at Oskar Blues Brewery (OBB) when I was 22. I managed an events series and OBB was my sponsor. Working with OBB Founder Dale [Katechis] was so fun that I dropped everything to be a part of a new revolution, of the canned kind, that I gave up everything. Including a salary.

What was the first beer you ever brewed and where did you do it?

Carpenter: Not sure what it was, but it was home-brewed in the garage in college with Scott [Vaccaro]. My first professional batch was created when I was an intern with Drakes Brewing Co. I believe it was Drakes IPA.

Gill: I helped brew a Dale’s Pale Ale at Oskar Blues right when Dale built a new brewery in Longmont, Colo.

What’s your favorite beer style?

Carpenter: Hard to say. To  me, the beautiful thing about beer is the immense variety and the ability to have such different amazing beers for any mood or occasion.

Gill: California IPAs. Anything Cantillon.

Do you have a mentor in the brewing world?

Carpenter: Charlie Bamforth of UC Davis and Floris Delée.

Gill: Kim Jordan of New Belgium Brewing Co.

What inspires you when you’re brewing?

Carpenter: Just about everything. Brewing can be such a sublime mix of art and science. It inspires new challenges at every turn and is growing is such amazing ways, especially in the US, that boundaries are always being pushed and there seems to be no limit to our collective creativity. The brewing community is very much a collective power and team focused on improving our craft rather than competing for market share against one another. The family we build within and outside our brewery walls cant be matched in almost any other industry I know of.

Gill: I’m inspired to create flavorful beer and foster beer culture in Los Angeles—the largest beer market in the world without a well-known local brewery. Great local beer you can get at a grocery store. We are trying to give people in LA what they have been missing and what they’re demanding!

What do you attribute to your success?

Gill: Focus, blind ambition, and having amazing mentors.

Carpenter: The people around me. Sure, there’s a vast amount of commitment, effort and aptitude that are necessary to continue to improve, but really the team we have here at Golden Road is responsible as a whole for any of our success. And certainly the community in the craft brewing world that pushes each other to improve and also continually helps one another further our success every year and every day.

What do you think drives the popularity of craft beer?

Carpenter: In a sentence, craft beer is great! I think with any artisanal outlet, once the general public begins to appreciate the quality of something created out of love, hard work and creativity, it’s hard to go back.

In general, how do you think the next generation of brewers will shake up the craft beer world?

Gill: The craft beer world is getting smarter and more competitive. The big three and regional will get stronger; the ones with sub-par beer won’t make it. This new competition will help grow the segment.

In particular, how will you contribute to that shake up?

We will not contribute nationally. We will start to show up in regional data and hope to grow the segment in LA. We are not a high-priced, exploration beer. We hope we are inviting people into the category, broadening the category as well as creating loyalty within the craft space as a consistent local brewer. Local brewers play by a different set of rules. Our consumer is everything from the guy wanting to support local who doesn’t know what IPA means, to the beer geeks taking their freshest local beer camping with them in 16oz cans. In this way, we hope that by taking a philosophical local approach, we are contributing to the craft segment and greater global beer industry in a positive way.

Last one: Cascadian Dark Ale or Black IPA?

Gill: I don’t tend toward either. It’s too hot in LA. I’ve been savoring Burning Bush, our smoked IPA. That’s the closest to a malt-forward IPA that I tend toward.

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