The Great American Ale Trail - Christian DeBenedetti [26]
By 1981, they were reunited in the Klondike State, Marcy working nights as an auditor in the Department of Revenue, and both dreaming full-time about opening a brewery for the locals, who seemed interested in high-quality imported brews but had no local options. “All the beers people were drinking were really oxidized. Alaska got the remnants,” Marcy says. “But fresh beer—it was like, ‘Yeah! This is great stuff! We need this up here.’” A big Anchorage-based German brewery built during the pipeline years called Prinz Brau had gone under in the late 1970s; the Larsons felt they could succeed with something more, well, Alaskan.
They decided to go for it themselves. With “no experience and no money of our own, nothing whatsoever” as Marcy recalls, and after thirteen stressful months of raising loans from various friends, family, and locals, the Alaskan Brewing Company became the sixty-seventh operating brewery in the United States and the only one in Alaska. It was 1986. The early days were rocky; Alaska’s economy was in the tank, and skeptics said they’d soon go under.
Not so fast. In 1988, Alaskan won the consumer preference poll at the GABF, and sales were rocketing. Today it’s the twelfth largest craft brewery out of some 1,700 in the country (and still employee- and local investor-owned), manufacturing over 100,000 bbl per year. The first brew (now the flagship) was their Amber, based on a 1907 purchase order for altbier ingredients a local collector had preserved from a long lost area brewery. Smooth and full of caramel malt goodness, with a compelling if faint noble hop spiciness, the die was cast.
Today the brewery offers five year-round beers, including the Amber and two seasonals (Summer Ale, a superb Kölsch-style brew, and Winter Ale, spiced with spruce tips, after the brewing methods used by Captain Cook to combat scurvy among his crew). A special edition beer, Alaskan Smoked Porter, is an intense, collectible brew that has spawned scores of imitators among domestic brewers. Lastly, there is the Pilot series of experimental and specialty styles like barley wine and Baltic porter, and occasional Rough Draft brews, small batch riffs from Pilot batches for local distribution. All of them are made from water out of Juneau’s glacier-fed aquifers. The tasting room is a charming affair, with free tours, nine taps, and cool old photos and memorabilia from the early days, all of it thanks to one hot, dusty, inspiring summer in Montana.
PHILOSOPHY
High quality, eco-friendly, and unpretentious. “You have to make the best beer you possibly can for a whole variety of reasons,” says Geoff. The brew house utilizes a number of sustainable practices, such as the country’s first CO2 recovery system (which has become more common these days), a mash filter press (a system common in Belgium which reduces water and grain consumption without compromising beer quality), and a spent-grain dryer to prepare brewery by-products for shipping down to farms to use as feed in the lower 48.
KEY BEER
Alaskan’s 6.5% ABV Smoked Porter, introduced in 1988, is a rauchbier, or traditional German “smoke” beer, made by smoking brewers’ malt over alder wood branches, which is done by hand in small batches in Juneau. True to its name, it’s got all the spice and char of a campfire, with appealing cocoa and chocolate notes. Alaskan’s is one of the first brewed successfully outside of Germany, and is one of the winningest—if not the winningest—beers ever at the GABF.
DETOUR
ALASKA’S BEST