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Maytag developed several beers before selling the company in 2010, including Old Foghorn, a viscous, almost brandy-like barley wine; a Christmas ale with a secret yearly-changing recipe; and a light, brightly spiced summer wheat beer, among others. He also added a microdistillery, with house-made gin and rye whisky, and tirelessly publicized America’s craft brewing revolution. One of the best brewery tours in America, it’s not to be missed.

PHILOSOPHY

Old-world sophistication with quiet, unpretentious skill. Let us hope the new owners, the entrepreneurs who created Skyy Vodka, will do right by its proud heritage.

KEY BEER

Liberty Ale (6% ABV) was first brewed in 1975 to commemorate the ride of Paul Revere. It has a Champagne-like dryness and aromatic, crisp finish that goes well with local foods like Dungeness crab and sourdough bread.

DETOUR

BRIAN HUNT, MOONLIGHT BREWING COMPANY

Windsor, Sonoma County • www.moonligh

tbrewing.com (no tours or tasting room at present)

Almost as soon as I’d arrived in the Bay Area I began hearing about a man named Brian Hunt of Sonoma County’s Moonlight Brewery in the hushed, reverential tones normally reserved for exiled Tibetan leaders. He doesn’t allow visitors. He’s like a mad scientist. He brews the best beer in the whole Bay Area. He’s really cranky. No one visits Brian Hunt.

The last statement is basically true. But because I had some help from my friend Sean Paxton, aka the Homebrew Chef, I had the chance to meet the man behind Death & Taxes, a silky 5% ABV black lager on tap in San Francisco’s best beer bars. And while I don’t recommend driving up his dirt road outside the hamlet of Windsor unless he’s expecting you, he’s not the crank some had made him out to be.

No indeed. What I found at Moonlight was sort of everything and nothing I’d been expecting, a crucible of California’s future brewing ingenuity and a potent symbol of its roots. His brewery, founded in 1992, is tiny, packed improbably to the ceiling of a former tractor barn. Steel tanks called grundies precariously crowd around the kettles and tables strewn with tools and parts.

And in the middle of it all, Hunt—a graduate of UC Davis’s fermentation science master’s degree program and a self-described dropout from the industrial brewing world—holds court on his creations with a combination of pride and prejudice (toward those who would classify his beers in rigid styles, mainly). He’s Moonlight’s only full-time employee, and brews about a thousand barrels per year, available in only about seventy-five locations around the Bay Area, which he personally keeps supplied. In any case, we tried his whole repertoire, retiring to a set of Adirondack chairs near some anemic-looking hop trellises. Lambs baa’d in the distance. This was a farm brewery if there ever was one. Hunt’s beers were a revelation: some rock solid classic, others wildly inventive, nearly all delicious.

What Hunt is trying to do, in his own cantankerous way, is shake things up. He bristles at the notion his beers can be classified into set styles, scoffing at what he considers hidebound conventions of acceptable brewing norms. He’s the guy who stands up during brewing conferences of industry types and asks the probing questions everyone’s thinking but don’t quite have the guts to ask.

First came the jet black Death & Taxes, which is as light as an American canned lager like Budweiser but vastly more flavorful, bursting with tangy hops and roasted malts. Then we moved on to a spicy, clean Reality Czech and bready Lunatic Lager, another black lager called Bony Fingers, and an IPA-like offering, Twist of Fate California Style Bitter.

But with the next beers Hunt veered into terra incognita. Hunt is doing something few brewers in America would ever consider: making completely unhopped beers, to test the possibilities of using other plants to spice and balance flavors. It’s a bit like attempting to make gin without juniper, but to the 54-year-old provocateur, such rules mean nothing. We tasted his Artemis, an