The Great American Ale Trail - Christian DeBenedetti [38]
PHILOSOPHY
Belgian beer, speakeasy style.
KEY BEER
Moonlight’s Reality Czeck, a 4.8% ABV Pilsner, which may not be Belgian style but it’s very rare and very good, like this bar.
WINE COUNTRY
ANDERSON VALLEY BREWING CO.
17700 Hwy. 253 • Boonville, CA 95415 (707) 895-2337 • avbc.com • Established: 1987
SCENE & STORY
By all means if you get the chance, “jape” on down to the verdant farm-country town of Boonville to enjoy one of America’s most distinctive breweries. Jape? Yep. That’s the word for “drive” in Boontling, the folk language of this old farming community, said to have been developed by isolated farmers in the area’s early sheep and hop fields. Few use the dialect now, but you might be able to find some locals to teach some choice phrases over some bahl hornin (“good drinking”) at Anderson Valley Brewing. The partially solar-powered brewery itself is a down-to-earth affair, quaint and unpretentious, located on a farm with its own well, livestock, tasting room, and 18-hole Frisbee golf course. But inside the brewery are some of the most beautiful brewing kettles in the United States, polished to a mirror finish, and tours are a popular primer for the twelve-tap tasting room. In 2011 the brewery celebrated the fifteenth annual Legendary Boonville Beer Fest (held at the Mendocino County Fairgrounds), with over fifty California breweries and thousands of thirsty fans.
PHILOSOPHY
Traditional, unpasteurized brewing using well water rich in bicarbonates, pristine practices in the brew house, and a sense of humor everywhere outside it.
KEY BEER
With the soaring ascent of IPAs and Belgian-style beers over the last few years, an uncommon but essential beer style has slipped off the radar: the humble amber. This is too bad. Unpasteurized and never sterile-filtered, AVBC’s flagship Amber (5.8% ABV and brewed under the watchful eye of respected industry veteran Fal Allen) has a lively kick and caramel-kissed smoothness, not to mention a glowing garnet color that’s as attractive as the copper kettles inside the brewery. And don’t miss the mahogany-hued Brother David’s Double, a rich and malty Belgian-style ale melding cavalcades of malt flavor with a bracing 9% ABV.
DETOUR
THE RUSSIAN (RIVER) REVOLUTION
If there is one brewery that defines the changing American craft beer landscape of late 2011, it is Russian River, led by the affable Vinnie Cilurzo and a lineup stretching the parameters of American tastes for beer.
The son of winemaker parents, Cilurzo could have his own winery by now, a patch of heaven near Temecula, California, where he worked in the cellar during harvests as a boy. “Pretty much all I’ve done in life is fermentation,” he says. But it wasn’t winemaking that got him excited during his college years. It was brewing beer.
By 1997 Cilurzo had brewed enough in his free time to score a job running Korbel Champagne Cellars’ fledgling beer division, Russian River. But soon Korbel, like so many other Johnny-come-latelies, facing a looming industry-wide downturn, planned to drop the line. Cilurzo decided to buy the division out, firm in the belief that beers like Blind Pig, a 6.5% ABV Double IPA he’d come up with in 1994—the nation’s first such concoction—would find its fans. “We didn’t do any market research,” he claims. “We just believed passion would carry us through.” Cilurzo scraped up investors and reopened Russian River in 2004. Good move: Soon the craft beer market had returned to double-digit growth and Cilurzo was dominating prestigious tastings. Today fans of his best-known beer, Pliny the Elder (a resinous double IPA of 8% ABV, brewed once a year) line up—quite literally by the hundreds, for days—to take home a few bottles before it’s gone.
Aside from Pliny, most of Cilurzo’s beers are fermented in French oak barrels for up to two years. They’re fermented using wild yeasts and rogue bacteria (that give the beer funky flavors more