The Craft Beer Revolution: How a Band of Microbrewers Is Transforming the World's Favorite Drink by Hindy Steve

Author:Hindy, Steve [Hindy, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2014-04-21T21:00:00+00:00

Back out West, one of the most quintessentially artisanal craft breweries was getting its start, fittingly, in a winery. Vinnie Cilurzo left college in San Diego to work in his family’s winery in Temecula, California, in 1989. His father, a lighting director working in Hollywood, poured all his extra cash into the winery, which he operated with Cilurzo’s mother. Cilurzo took up homebrewing as a hobby and took some brewing courses at University of California, Davis.

A few years later, in 1994, he and a friend, Dave Stovall, founded the Blind Pig, a microbrewery named for a Prohibition-era speakeasy in Temecula. But it was small and the equipment crude. “We made a lot of mistakes with the Blind Pig,” Cilurzo said. “We were poorly financed, and though our beers were amazing when fresh, they had no shelf life. But all those mistakes helped make our success later at Russian River. You’ve got to learn from your mistakes.”

The Blind Pig was a so-called Frankenbrewery, parts cobbled together from a defunct brewery—old dairy equipment, plastic tanks, and old pumps. The first beer made at the Blind Pig was a strong India pale ale that Cilurzo and Stovall called Inaugural Ale. “In general, I knew what I was doing because of my experience with the winery, but I had never really brewed a commercial batch of beer on my own,” Cilurzo said. “The idea was, we would double the hops to cover up any flaws in the beer. In the end the beer turned out pretty nice.”15

With that plan he invented the first double India pale ale. After struggling at the Blind Pig for three years, he sold his shares and moved on to work on a microbrewery that Korbel Champagne Cellars was starting. “Korbel was expanding, acquiring other wineries, so they left me alone at the microbrewery,” Cilurzo said. “It was at Korbel that some of what are now considered innovative beers were born. I could do anything I wanted, so I got into making Belgian-style beers, aging some beers in wine barrels, and brewed a double IPA again.”

The first version of his famous Pliny the Elder double IPA was sold only on draft. He would not bottle Pliny until 2008. They bottled the 8 percent ABV Pliny in 500ml bottles, with a crown cap. “You have to drink Pliny when it is fresh,” he said. “We use a cork for our Belgian-inspired beers as well as for our sour-barrel-aged beers. In general our crown-finished beers do not age well, while our cork-finished beers can handle some age, particularly the sour-barrel-aged beers.”

He started using the wild yeast Brettanomyces in some of his concoctions in 1999, when he was still at Korbel. “Most winemakers don’t want Brettanomyces in their winery because it can ruin the wine, but I wanted to make sour beers like the Belgians,” Cilurzo said. He said that New Belgium’s brewmaster Peter Boukhart, creator of New Belgium’s famous sour beer La Folie, advised him on the processes. “I would ask Peter a question, and he could only give me a nibble of an answer,” Cilurzo said.

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