In a land dominated by wineries, there are still a few men who
value the art of brewing a spirit that doesn’t need any grapes.
These men have mastered the technique of turning barley and hops
into beer.
In a land dominated by wineries, there are still a few men who value the art of brewing a spirit that doesn’t need any grapes. These men have mastered the technique of turning barley and hops into beer.
While these three brewmasters – Bill Millar, Peter Licht and Geno Acevedo – all make beer
for a living, none of them started out with that as
a plan.
Bill Millar, San Andreas Brewery in Hollister
Deep in the back of the San Andreas Brewing Co., behind the kitchen, the bar and the fermentation tanks of its brewery, lies a giant pile of boxes filled with items from the colorful past
of beermaking.
“I’m a collector,” Brewmaster Bill Millar said.
“I have about 500 cans.
“I’ll sell ’em to you for the price of the aluminum they’re made with,” he joked. “What is that, about $100?”
Millar opened his boxes to reveal stacks of different cans from the 1950s, all opened and emptied, many of them having pull-off tabs that aren’t allowed on beer cans anymore.
“I have all kinds of other memorabilia, too,” said Millar, who also has old signs and other beer-associated remnants of the past. He also has the original seats from the Baywood Creamery, which occupied his brewery’s site at 737 San Benito St. in Hollister. Those seats are now a part of the bar at the restaurant/brewery his wife runs.
“This is a classical place,” he said.
While many years ago the site may have been the home of an ice cream shop, now it is the home of several unique beers, almost all of which carry the theme associated with the San Andreas Fault Line – beers like Earthquake Pale Ale, Seismic Ale and even October Quake, which was first brewed in August of 1989, just a month before the giant Bay Area earthquake made the label quite prophetic.
“We tell people if they don’t like the beer, it’s not our ‘fault,’ ” joked Millar.
The story of the San Andreas Brewing Co. begins 15 years ago, when Millar and several other partners decided to build a brewery, moving into their current site and building the restaurant brewery. Millar, who also is a chemistry teacher at Cypress Grove High School in Seaside, had no prior brewing experience.
“I had to bring someone in to teach me (how to brew beer),” Millar said.
He said the venture was unplanned.
“We just did it on a lark, and it was a bad idea,” he said. “(The investors) aren’t making money, so they don’t come around too much.”
After being in business since 1988, Millar said he still has $50,000 to go to break even on his investment.
“I’m spinning my wheels,” he said. “I know this is a Budweiser drinking town. It drives me crazy, but that’s the facts of life.” After being in business since 1988, Millar said he still has $50,000 to go to break even on his investment.
“I’m spinning my wheels,” he said. “I know this is a Budweiser drinking town. It drives me crazy, but that’s the facts of life.”
But Millar’s brewery didn’t always only sell its beer to customers of the restaurant. It used to do much more business. At one point, Millar’s operation had led to distribution in 22 states and he was even was having his beer brewed in Minnesota. However, Millar says that Budweiser brewing came down hard on his and other microbreweries when it told its distributors to stop selling micros.
“It was a bummer for all of us,” he said. “That’s what cost us. We didn’t sell or distribute after that.”
Since then, many breweries have had a tough go of it. Millar said the only two northern California breweries really to thrive since then have been Sierra Nevada and Anchor Steam. And, since then his beers have only been available on tap at the restaurant.
“We have had a tough time; Coast Range has had a tough time.” Millar said. “They do contract work to stay in business.”
The chemistry teacher has had more than his share of students hope that he might slip them a six pack, but Millar instead plays with them.
“We make beer in class,” he said. “But right before we ferment it, I pour it down the drain. It drives them crazy.”
Peter Licht, Coast Range Brewery in Gilroy
Peter Licht, masterbrewer for Coast Range Brewery in Gilroy, has a similar background in beer. Licht, 36, originally from New York, went to Columbia University to learn English and literature before ever thinking of brewing beer for a living. Only Licht didn’t go on to use his degree.
“There’s lots of English majors and not a lot of English teachers,” Licht said. “So they must be doing something else.
“I just love beer. I always have, ever since I was a little kid,” Licht joked. “But I do remember taking a sip of my dad’s beer when I was a kid.”
Licht decided to use his love of beer as a stepping stone toward his career when he saw how well microbreweries were doing.
“In the 1990s so many breweries were opening,” he said. “The growth was so fast, no one had any idea when it would level off.”
So Licht went to the University of California at Davis and learned the art of brewing beer. And when he graduated in 1995, he jumped at the opportunity to be a part of Coast Range Brewery.
“(Co-owner) Ron Erskine’s father-in-law owned the building,” he said. “A brewery seemed like a natural fit. He hired me right out of college at UC-Davis, and I’ve been here ever since.”
That was eight years ago, and now Coast Range Brewery has worked to increase its quality and its capacity, within the last 18 months doubling its fermenting capacity with the help of new investors.
More than half of what Coast Range brews is contracted beer it makes for other companies. The brewery makes 1,500 to 2,000 barrels of beer each year. The company’s original creations are available in bottles almost everywhere in South County and on tap at most local pubs.
“Most people that have draft brews have us,” Licht said.
Licht said his brewing techniques come more from concepts than by trial-and-error.
“If you ask that question to different brewers, you’ll get very different answers,” Licht said of the creative process. “For me, pretty much I know that when I want to make a particular brew, I decide how I want it to taste, and I know how to make it.”
Geno Acevedo, El Toro Brewery in Morgan Hill
Brewmaster Geno Acevedo’s story of becoming a brewmaster starts when he was in college at San Jose State University learning aeronautics.
Acevedo received a beer-making kit as a gift while he was in school, and he began to experiment with it.
“I made one batch a week every single week,” he said. “It was a lot of fun. A lot of people are stilling doing it.”
He graduated from college and began working at McDonald-Douglas, helping build airplanes.
“Almost every MD-8 that is in the air, I had some part in making” said Acevedo, who worked on that particular plane from its inception until just months before they stopped making them.
Acevedo worked at McDonald-Douglas from 1986 until 1993, but all the while he was looking for a way to take his hobby of making beer to the next level. That chance came when he was laid off from his job at a time when the company was looking to cut its workforce. The company had learned Acevedo was working on opening his own brewery and used that as an excuse to lay him off, he says.
Then he and his wife, Cindy, came to Morgan Hill and opened El Toro Brewing.
“We looked in town but there wasn’t anything there,” Acevedo said. “We decided to build from scratch.”
And they did just that on a piece of land east of U.S.101 off of Dunne Avenue. Acevedo hoped to build a restaurant/brewery, but he said that Morgan Hill was too small at the time.
“It just wasn’t big enough,” he said.
But it is now, and Acevedo is trying to find space in town for his idea – a restaurant on Monterey Street in Morgan Hill with a small brewery he can use to experiment with different types of beer while offering all of his other concoctions as well.
“Something will pop up somewhere,” he said.
What’s Available
While San Andreas Brews are available only at the Hollister brewery, Coast Range and El Toro are available on tap in South Valley pubs and on the shelves at most supermarkets:
San Andreas Brewing Co.
737 San Benito St.
Hollister, CA 95023
(831) 6337-7074
Beers:
Seismic Ale
Earthquake Pale
Earthquake Porter
October Quake
Survivor Stout – Silver medalist, Great American Beer Festival
Apricot Ale – Bronze medalist, Great American Beer Festival
Woodruff – Silver medalist, Great American Beer Festival
Cranberry Ale
Plum Nuts Amber
Coast Range Brewery
7050 Monterey St.
Gilroy, CA 95020
(408) 842-1000
Beers:
Coast Range Pale Ale
California Blonde Ale
Scotch Ale – Two-time Bronze Medalist, Great American Beer Festival
India Pale Ale
Maduro Porter
El Toro Brewing Company
17370 Hill Road
Morgan Hill, CA 95037
(408) 778-BREW
Beers:
Poppy Jasper Amber Ale – Silver medalist, Great American Beer Festival
EL Toro Golden Ale – Gold medalist, Great American Beer Festival
William Jones Wheat Beer – Gold medalist, Great American Beer Festival
El Toro Negro Oatmeal Stout
El Toro India Pale Ale
