I’ve seen the original Sierra Nevada brewhouse, in operation, in the past year. Dilapidated is the right word for this pieced-together system that looks like a space ship from an 80s B-movie crossed with an oversized water heater. The blueish-white paint isn’t pretty and the whole get-up just seems like a bad idea. Of course, the contraption still makes damn good beer for the current owners, but its worth at Sierra Nevada faded long ago. (As a side note, it is my hope that this piece of history finds its way back to Sierra Nevada someday for the world to see.) With the mental image of this brewhouse still in my head it didn’t take much imagination to realize how far this family-owned brewery in Chico, California had come in the last 29 years when I saw its new digs. I nearly got lost in the beauty of the current brewhouse; its shiny copper reflecting perfectly the world around it.
Original Sierra Nevada Kettle
Current Kettle
I arrived at Sierra Nevada early on a Thursday morning. Just a couple weeks prior I was called by Steve Grossman, brother of Ken who founded Sierra Nevada three decades earlier, with an invitation to join in on something special: Beer Camp. This two-day event was designed by Steve and others to educate some of the brewery’s top accounts from around the world and included an all-access-pass to the brewery (a pass I tested more than once), an exhaustive lesson in sensory evaluation of beer in a lab setting, as well as the chance to formulate and brew a beer of our own. I would be joined from some heavy hitters from Richmond, Atlanta, and Reno. Better yet, I would be the sole member of the media (In fact, I was the first member of the media to get a peek inside Beer Camp).
Steve’s role at Sierra Nevada is Ambassador for the brewery and he was a fantastic host for the six of us, generous with his time and more than happy to answer any questions we had — no matter how obscure. Steve wasn’t alone, however, as we were hosted by employees in two of the Sierra Nevada labs, brewers at the Pilot Brewery, the Operations Manager for the whole facility, Steve Dressler (Brewmaster), and even the iconic founder Ken Grossman. We felt pretty special.
Ken Grossman and Pilot Brewmaster Scott
A light-hearted orientation came first. Steve recalled stories of starting the brewery — including fanciful recollections of the beer he and his brother stole as youths, the man who taught them to brew (so they’d leave his beer alone), and life back then. It was fun seeing pictures of the men from 30 years ago — a young Ken and Steve Grossman as well Steve Dressler and others who were still with the brewery. It was here that we began to realize there was something more to the brewery than just beer. This wasn’t just a corporation; this was a family! To drive that point home we were soon joined by Brian Grossman, Ken’s son. Sierra, Ken’s daughter, also works at the brewery.
Immediately after our orientation we headed out for a tour of the facility, a vast complex with all sorts of fun nooks and crannies. While walking through a long hallway Steve stopped the group and pointed to the tiles on the wall — turns out they were handmade with pictures of beer and brewery-related scenes. It doesn’t sound like much, and in the scheme of it all it isn’t much, but details like this is what separates Sierra Nevada’s brewery and beer from just about every brewery out there. If they care so much about the custom tiles — if these small tokens of art impress the employees — what do you think their brewhouse is like? We’ll get to that soon.
Our first stop was the big brewhouse, the mash tun to be more specific. Many breweries, big and small, have issues with clutter. Not here. At Sierra Nevada the space around the brewing equipment was pristine with nothing on the floor, dangling from the ceiling, or sticking out from the wall. The room contained a big grain mill and a mash tun, that’s it.
Getting back to details, the grain mill at Sierra Nevada needs to be discussed. They use a hydrating grain mill that gets the goods wet before they are ground, a process that sounds simple, but is costly and rare. In fact, it is believed there are only five such grist mills in the United States, and Sierra Nevada has three of them! Hydrating the grains makes them more pliable and reduces dust and waste, allowing for a greater conversion rate of starches to sugars during the mash process. It’s funny, but when you think of a brewery this size brewing five days a week, 24 hours a day, every bit of efficiency realized means something. For Ken Grossman and the SNBC team, it means they’re getting the most of everything they bring in house — a theme that we learned more about as the tour continued.
The next stop was just across the hallway into the kettle room. For me this may be the sight of the tour, simply because the copper kettles are among the most stunning I’ve seen. I neglected to ask about the copper-polishing schedule, but it has to be more than once a week give how bright the behemoths were. The pictures may look good, but they do little to convey their actual beauty. Of course, the beer they’re brewing has a beauty all its own. We were reminded that Sierra Nevada is the country’s largest brewery that uses whole flower hops exclusively in its brewing, and that this sometimes complicates stuff in the brewhouse. For instance, these kettles were brought over from Germany and were originally manufactured for palletized hops. Because the whole flower hop additions, hops were added by hand throughout the boil. In fact, each of those white trash cans is full of pungent, flowery hops. The other complication with whole flower hops is the liquid loss. Dried hops act as a sponge of sorts and tend to hold onto the liquid more so than palletized hops that disintegrate in the wort. Regardless of what kind of hops go into the kettle, the main point is these are absolutely gorgeous to look at.
I thought our next stop would be a cavernous room with bright, fanciful colors, little people, a river of beer, and candies made of wort, but as much as we felt like kids in a candy store, this was not Wonka’s Public House. Instead we were led to a fermentation room that looked similar to what I’d expect NASAs underbelly to look like. In fact, I did feel a bit alien in the room for no other reason than I’d never anything like it — anywhere. Large, steel cones poked through from the tall concrete ceiling and it took me a while to realize what was wrong with this picture. Noticing my bemused expression Steve was quick to point out that there are no legs on these fermentors; they were simply hovering from the ceiling! These aren’t little fermentors, by the way. We were literally walking beneath hundreds of thousands of pounds (maybe millions) of fermenting beer, and on the floor were no obstacles to avoid. Running up the middle of the logic-defying room was their “pipe-fence” that neatly transferred beers to and from the fermentors. I don’t think this has made any TV show about modern marvels, but holy crap! The engineering that took place to make this room work had to be absolutely incredible.
While in the fermentation room we were treated to something special, something we’d soon get used to. Steve had arranged for the lot of us to be the first non-brewery people to sample the 2009 Summerfest, straight from the fermentor (before filtering!). It was roughly 9:00 a.m, so together we hoisted our plastic cups, becoming giddy as the whole experience sunk in. I wasn’t taking tasting notes, so don’t quote me on this, but damn this was a good beer. A lot more hops than I remember, and still pretty damned clear for having not been filtered.
Did someone say filter? One of the purposes of Beer Camp is to educate, and Steve jumped on this opportunity to discuss Sierra Nevada’s filter policy — one that is young and still developing. For years the brewery filtered its beers using diatomaceous earth, but Steve pointed out that this product had a finite supply. Given the mentality that the brewery should be as sustainable as possible, alternative methods were sought for fining and filtering its beer. After much research the crew opted on the centrifuge method that essentially spins fast enough to separate proteins and solids from the beer, leaving it bright and clear. We never did quite get a handle on this method, even though Steve and the brewers did their best to teach us (they even drew us pictures!). In the end we were content knowing it spun the beer really fast, made very loud popping noises when it cleaned itself, and would most likely kill us if we dared open it up for a better look (sadly, I don’t have a photo of the diagram Scott drew up). The point here is that the brewery’s commitment to sustainable practices had led them in a new direction in the filtering process. Sierra Nevada isn’t the only brewery to use centrifuges, but I do know it’s not a very common practice.
The next phase of our tour didn’t officially happen. We muscled our guide out of the way and took a stroll on the catwalk that spanned the space between buildings. We did this not because we needed fresh air (although that was a welcome bonus), but to get a gander at the new solar array they’ve installed up close and personal. Sierra Nevada takes this whole green movement pretty seriously. They may not jump up and down or yell to the world about what they’re doing, but because of a personal commitment to the environment shared by the Grossman’s and the brewery employees, they make crazy financial investments for one reason: it’s the right thing to do. Sure, they’ll make their money back eventually, but currently Sierra Nevada owns the largest privately-owned solar array in the country. From the catwalk we could see them, thousands of them, black and glistening under the morning sun. In peak season (summer) Sierra Nevada can generate more electricity than it requires, allowing them to sell it back to the energy company. In winter months they’re still able to generate approximately 90 percent of the electrical requirements for all brewery operations. There are very few roofs in America worth mentioning, but this certainly deserves more than a few words.
I know I’ve already made the Wonka reference, but what we did next… well, is simply incomparable.
After making our way, safely, back inside from the catwalk we followed Steve to a contraption that seems developed on napkin notes after a few beers in the wee hours of the morning. They called it a “bike”, and while there were pedals on it (and tires) it had the appearance of a bar and the front end of a dune buggy. There were 12 seats, two taps and one steering wheel. Steve did his best to explain what the motivation was for this work of genius, but we were all too bedazzled by it to pay close attention. What we did know was we were expected to take our seats at the bar and pedal if we wanted this tour to continue. Lucky for us, we were rewarded up front for our labor with a fresh keg of Irish Red Ale (don’t worry, it’s not available outside the brewery).
We all sat facing the middle and one person was selected to bartend. Pedaling the big machine was shockingly easy, thanks to the work of 12 legs working in unison. As we pedaled we cruised around the campus, taking in site after site, taking deep gulps of beer, and trying not to smile too big. Yes, all of us on the bike that day were at work — and work just doesn’t get cooler than this.
Our first stop on the magic bike portion of the tour was in the cellaring warehouse. As you likely know, Sierra Nevada bottle conditions its beers. To properly do this the filled bottles of beer need to be aged at least 10 days to make sure the carbonation is spot on before they’re shipped out. Conditioning the beers requires a constant cool temperature, not cold as to allow the yeast to do its thing without stress. The room is huge, seriously. And from wall to wall were cases, loaded on pallets, stacked on more pallets, of Pale Ale and other SN beers. Seemed straightforward enough for us, so we continued on, pedaling to our last stop of the tour.
We had to park the bike outside the bottling line, and then were asked to don our safety glasses and earplugs. We were told before we entered that Sierra Nevada runs two identical bottling lines simultaneously, a somewhat common practice at larger breweries. The reason was pretty simple: if a part ever failed in one line they would not be without production while the part was fixed or replaced (a lesson learned some time ago when a $1 part broke and put bottling to a halt for a day). It was at this point that Steve said something that resonated with me. In a nutshell he admitted that a lot of the equipment and processes Sierra Nevada has are unnecessary, but work to make the best beer they can. Maybe they didn’t need a second bottling line, but it sure looks good.
The room was a series of moving parts with noises that come straight from a Steinbeck novel. They were bottling Pale Ale and the green labels whirled by from one end to the other of this cavernous building. The line pumps out hundreds of bottles per minute, the labeler moving so fast it’s impossible to read any part of the labels being affixed. Once filled and labeled the bottles race down the line till they come to a holding area that collects the bottles in, creating a sea of green and brown. From here bottles are put in six-packs or cases, then taken upstairs by a fantastical spiral escalator. The whole room was pretty awesome to be in, and the warehouse staff was impressive in their hospitality. While trying to get pictures of bottles the line operator even offered to slow the line down for me — a 180-degree response from what I’d expect in any warehouse.
There was so much more that happened along the way, off-stories from years and years of experience, rooms that held even more magic (like the open fermentor room, a first-hand look at the Torpedo — including samples of the beer from the source), but that will have to wait. Our day was only just beginning and we were pretty awestruck by everything we were witnessing. It was impressive for me to see processes and equipment in play that could easily be mistaken for an industrial brewery, but the people and their collective passion for “their” beer to be the best it can be really drove home the craft and enthusiasm we seen in breweries much smaller than this.
Up Next: Stories of Torpedoes, Labs, and more. Stay tuned.
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