From a local farm to Seismic Brewing: How Sonoma County's first all-local beer was made

Farther afield, Sierra Nevada came out with its Estate Ale in 2008, made entirely from local Chico hops and barley, but they send their grain more than 300 miles round-trip to Admiral Maltings in Alameda before brewing. A few years ago, co-owner Kevin Smith at Bale Breaker Brewing Co. in Washington planted 20 acres of barley and created the Homegrown beer series. But he sends the grain 360 miles for malting.

When Smith heard about the Sonoma County 12-mile radius from seed to glass, he laughed.

“That’s crazy,” he said. “I thought we were doing pretty well by just keeping it within our state. Just the likelihood of having all those pieces of the puzzle in one area is crazy. I wonder how many places in the nation can say they have that.”

At Sierra Nevada, small brands manager Terence Sullivan also was impressed.

“They’ve taken our Estate idea and taken it to the next level. In the U.S., they’re probably the only ones doing it. I would imagine someone in Germany might be doing it.”

On a smaller scale, Humboldt Regeneration Brewery and Farm owner Jacob Pressey made a 100% homegrown golden ale in 2015, which was malted on the premises, but the total yield was only one barrel of beer.

This harkens back to the early days of beermaking, when everything was done in one region, said Glen Fox, professor of malting and brewing sciences at UC Davis.

“If we go back hundreds and hundreds of years, that’s how it was done everywhere, because they didn’t have big transport systems. You had to work with whatever was local. In Sonoma County, it sounds like they’re going back to that old philosophy. You see archival photos of malthouses next door to breweries. The reality is, this is a paradigm that we need to move back to in many ways,” he said, citing environmental, economic and consumer education benefits.

In 1877, a story in the Russian River Flag newspaper described how German immigrant Carl Muller built a two-story malt house adjoining his Healdsburg Brewery, “which renders the bringing of the malt for brewing purposes from San Francisco unnecessary in the future, and we can have beer made from barley and hops grown in our own neighborhood.”

A 1905 Press Democrat article about Grace Brothers Brewery mentions it used “Sonoma County’s hops and Sonoma barley, combined in soothing decoction with pure Sonoma water by the use of Sonoma brains” to make a beer that rivals Milwaukee’s finest. But it’s unclear where the malting took place.

Jim Grace, grandson of Frank Grace who started the Santa Rosa brewery with his brother Joseph, remembers unloading 100-pound sacks of malt off train cars and into the brewery in 1958. Jim’s brother, Mike, thinks by then the grain was likely sourced from the Central Valley and possibly malted in San Francisco malt houses.

Novelty of local barley

Back in late June, Crane walked through his 15-acre barley field, the knee-high stalks swaying in the afternoon breeze. Pulling a few berries off a spike of Genie barley, he turned them over in his hand. “All we need is a hot day and the right numbers,” he said, looking forward to harvest.

One of the first grains planted by early settlers, barley goes back more than 150 years. But today, local barley is mostly a novelty. In the annual Sonoma County crop report, barley falls under “miscellaneous” field crops, along with alfalfa, wheat, safflower and vetch — all which together yielded only $95,200 in 2019.

Farming in Sonoma County since the 1850s, the Crane family has been raising sheep and growing mostly hay, green oats and silage on the 1,100-acre ranch off Lakeville Highway along the Petaluma River since 1972. A veteran of the second Iraq War, Crane likes taking chances.

“My father thought I was crazy when I said I wanted to plant barley, just like when I wanted to plant hops,” he said. “He doesn’t see why we should deviate from what we’ve done in the past, what is proven to make money.”

In 2020, a test plot of a Tahoe variety of barley failed to reach necessary protein levels, around 10% to 13%, for malting. But on July 2, a few days after lab tests confirmed perfect protein levels of 10.6% protein, Crane got on his Caterpillar combine and harvested around 29 tons of ripe golden barley.

By Aug. 20, the first batch of 4,000 pounds of Crane’s barley was steeping in water, like a grain tea, at Grizzy Malt in Rohnert Park. After spending a decade in New York, photographing for fashion magazines and ad campaigns for Levi’s and Puma, Mahon followed his passion as a home-brewer to study malting and open a craft malt house in 2017. Even more rare than successfully growing hops and barley in the same region is having a local malt house within a few miles of your brewery. In the past decade, dozens of micro-malt houses have sprung up around the country, but there are only two in the Bay Area — Grizzly and Admiral Maltings in Alameda.

The first batch of malted grain will go to Seismic. On this day, Mahon and Hooper scooped a few handfuls of local barley from 1-ton white bags and talked about how it was hitting all the right numbers for plumpness, germination rate, rootlet growth and overall “brewability.” On a catwalk, above a repurposed maple syrup tank filled with wet barley, Hooper compared the smell of steeping grain to sweet pumpkin. During germination, it will take on a fresh cucumber smell. And during the kilning process, as it’s heated low and slow as high as 145 degrees, a yeasty, bready scent will turn the warehouse into a bakery.

Recently taking home a gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival for the Tremor California Light Lager — a craft version of mass-market beers like Bud Light and Coors Light — Hooper wants to make sure the all-local brew doesn’t come off as a gimmick or media stunt.

“It can’t be a trivial pursuit,” he said. “It would be heartbreaking, but if something were to go terribly wrong, we would have to take the walk of shame and dump the beer. We’re not going to push a low-quality anything on the general public and then wave a flag like we did something good.”

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened a few weeks later with the second batch of Crane’s barley intended for Old Caz. A faulty drain valve at Grizzly let water seep out during the steeping process. The grain never fully germinated, and when Edwards went to brew it, optimum sugar levels were never attained and the mash grew “thick like horchata,” he said. They had to throw out the entire batch — all 4,000 pounds.

Fortunately, Old Caz was able to save the fresh-picked Crane Ranch hops and brew another beer with a different batch of grain. It’s why “The Local” Old Caz Sonoma County pale ale will be dry-hopped instead of wet-hopped and will come out later than originally intended.

A week later, while working on a third batch, Mahon experienced further complications and had to throw out another 3,600 pounds of grain. Running a one-man show, he attributed the loss entirely to human error and not to the local grain.

“The fault is squarely on my shoulders,” he said on the same day he started from scratch on a fourth batch, intended again for Old Caz. “The barley is excellent.”

Coming to fruition

Eager for hop harvest on Sept. 2, Hooper arrives at Crane Ranch just after sunrise. He splits open a comet cone, the yellow lupulin almost glowing inside. “It’s loaded,” he said. “That’s really encouraging.”

On the nose, there’s a fresh scent he describes as almost resembling “peach gummy rings.” Two weeks ago, when he took a sample back to the brewery for a dry matter lab test “it smelled like someone cracked open one of those bubbly waters — very fruity.” He’s hoping the citrus notes will go perfectly with his plan to barrel ferment part of the batch in a dozen 2-year-old sauvignon blanc barrels repurposed from Kendall-Jackson winery.

After harvest at Crane Ranch, the Seismic team drives 400 pounds of comet, cashmere, triumph and chinook to Scott Bice’s Capracopia farm outside Sebastopol to separate the hop cones by feeding the bines through “The Wolf,” a 1973 German hop harvester Bice and Crane purchased and imported for $50,000.

Back at Seismic Brewing later that afternoon, Hooper tries something he’s never done before: freezing the hops to minus 320 degrees with liquid nitrogen and “shattering” them to a fine, super-concentrated yellow dust before adding it to the batch. He’s hoping it will more pull more flavor and resin from the hops.

“We’re doing a bunch of stuff that is untested, just for the sake of ‘Why the hell not?’” he said. “It could all go wrong, but it’s more likely it’s all gonna go right. It’s worth taking the chance.”

A few weeks later, on Sept. 20, Hooper pulls a sample for a taste of the young, green festbier that has been maturing in the tank for more than two weeks. Sipping and smelling from a beaker, he likes the delicate floral, citrus and “fresh veggie — more bright celery than asparagus” notes and the crisp finish. The typical festbier style is a very drinkable, not too bitter, light German lager made for Oktoberfest. This Sonoma Estate Festbier has 6% alcohol like an average festbier but more of a bitterness (30-40 IBU) approaching a pilsner.

“I’m pretty excited to finally share this with everyone,” he said, grinning and swirling the light gold beer before taking another taste.

What started as a few guys kicking around a far-fetched idea several years ago has finally come to fruition.

Looking to the future, he said, “It might not be achievable everywhere, by anyone, but in rare conditions like Sonoma County, it might be not only viable, but commercially viable as well. That’s the outcome I want to see — that we find some more farmers like Ron, some more places where barley doesn’t just grow, it thrives. And then we have an ultra-local source — at scale. That would be great.”