How the Sonoma Pride beer campaign has raised millions for fire victims

When Natalie Cilurzo came up with the Sonoma Pride campaign to aid 2017 fire victims, she had no idea she was drawing up a beer fundraising blueprint for an even bigger blaze the next year.

“It’s really about supporting the community and stepping up to help people who stepped up to help us in a time of need,” said Cilurzo, who owns Russian River Brewing Co. with her husband, brewmaster Vinnie Cilurzo.

Before the Tubbs and Nuns fires were extinguished, the Cilurzos formed Sonoma Pride, enlisting breweries around the country, and as far as Europe, to donate profits from specially made batches of beer, eventually raising $1.1 million in much needed fire aid.

“It think it was Day 2 of our fundraising and Day 4 of the fires, when I said, ‘We’re going to raise a million dollars,” Natalie Cilurzo said. “At the time, the consensus was ‘OK, but that’s pretty ambitious.’?”

But the following November, in 2018, an even more destructive fire would inspire an even bigger ask from the tightknit brewing community. As they do every fall, the Cilurzos retreated to the Mendocino Coast for an annual mushroom and beer pairing at the Little River Inn. Their good friends, Ken and Katie Grossman, owners of Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., usually celebrate Ken’s birthday around this time at their vacation home nearby. But this year, as the Camp fire was spreading through Butte County, much of the Grossman clan was evacuating to Mendocino from Chico.

“We talked with Ken early on and he said, ‘I want to do something like you did with Sonoma Pride. How did you set that up? What did you do?’” Cilurzo remembers.

In the spirit of “paying it forward,” she passed on what they had learned, covering everything from the basics of partnering with a nonprofit who would then distribute funds to other nonprofits, to inspiring suppliers of hops, malt and glass to donate ingredients, and even giving advice on the unseen art of collecting the funds from breweries after they’ve sold the beer - something that can be difficult in a tight cash-flow business.

“The question came up - isn’t this illegal?” said Ken Grossman. “So we reached out to the governor’s office and since it was declared a disaster area, the governor gave us permission that we could promote the fundraising efforts of the beer. Then we went to the supplier community - the maltsters and the hop growers and the hop dealers - and asked them to donate the ingredients. And we got a great buy-in from pretty much everyone in the industry.”

In Sonoma County, many of the same local breweries that supported Sonoma Pride jumped on board for what would become Sierra Nevada’s Resilience IPA fundraising program.

“I remember we got a call from the brewmaster at Sierra, checking to see if we wanted to be a part of it, and of course we said, ‘Yes,’” said Richard Norgrove Jr., co-owner of Bear Republic. “When Ken came down for one of the Resilience release parties, I could tell he was very emotionally impacted by the amount of employees that lost their houses. He had people living in trailers on the property.”

During the 2017 fires, seven Bear Republic employees lost their homes. At Sierra Nevada, more than 50 employees lost homes in the Camp fire.

The outpouring of support is more notable when you consider how competitive the craft beer business has grown over the past decade as an increasing number of breweries fight for shelf space in stores and taps at bars around the country.

“In times like this, no one cares,” said Collin McDonnell, CEO at Henhouse Brewing Co., which contributed to the Resilience beer program by repurposing 20 barrels of Short Range Delorean. “The competitive nature of beer right now is that everything is localizing, which means you’re even more dependent on your community. I don’t think there’s anybody in the beer industry that would do anything different than support the community when it needs it.”

Other Sonoma County breweries to hop on board were Moonlight, Cooperage, Grav South, Dempsey’s, Shady Oak Barrel House, Plow and Sonoma Springs. By the last tally, more than 1,400 breweries around the world teamed up for the Resilience IPA effort, raising around ?$9 million in funds for Camp fire victims in Paradise and Butte County.

For Thanksgiving in 2018, the Cilurzos traveled to Sierra Nevada in Chico to help serve a massive Thanksgiving meal to 2,500 homeless fire victims who had nowhere to go. To make mashed potatoes, Grossman boiled 1,500 pounds of spuds in the old brew kettle he built in 1980 to launch Sierra Nevada.

Over the past two years, it’s been very rewarding for the Cilurzos to follow the impact of Sonoma Pride funding, Natalie said. In May, they awarded a $400,000 check to the Council on Aging to replace five manufactured homes that were destroyed when the Tubbs fire leveled most of Journey’s End mobile home park in Santa Rosa. More funding has been allotted to nonprofits such as Boys and Girls Club, Forget Me Not Farm, St. Vincent DePaul, Redwood Empire Food Bank and Community Action Partnership.

In Butte County, the Grossmans are just beginning to see Resilience funding make a difference, whether it’s supporting new building permits or providing bus transportation for displaced victims to get to work.

“Our goal with this fund is really long term,” Ken Grossman said. “We plan on deploying it over the next few years. Sometimes, a couple of years later, when people have forgotten about it and they’re on to the next disaster, quite often that’s when people still need a helping hand. So we’re planning on being around for the long run.”

And he plans to be there to pass on the torch when the next brewery comes knocking.

“The cool part is there’s a model in place now,” Norgrove said. “The unintended consequence, the positive out of the negative, is the fact that you now have a model that can be followed by the next brewery in need.”