Sierra Nevada's Ken Grossman on the State of the Beer Industry: "The Drinker Has Changed..."

Vito Delucchi

Hey, everyone. Vito from MoreBeer! here. We're in Chico, California, outside Sierra Nevada brewing. We're going to go inside and talk to the founder, Ken Grossman, one of the most pivotal people in the beer industry about Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. What's happening in the beer industry and all kinds of other good stuff. Check it out by Ken. Hey, thanks for having us.

Vito Delucchi

On behalf of more beer, I want to say thank you. And I think on behalf of the entire homebrewing and brewing industry, thank you for the amazing brewery and product that you've created over the years.

Ken Grossman

Well, thank you. Thanks for all the support. And we've actually bought some stuff from you guys over the years as well.

Vito Delucchi

Yeah, Yeah. I've seen I seen some of our products around here. So it's it's really cool to see that. So thank you again. All right. So let's jump in. So the first thing I want to do is kind of talk about your history and history of Sierra Nevada. So I did an interview at Oak Barrel Wine Craft with with Homer in Berkeley.

So it's a Homebrew store, one of the oldest homebrew stores in the Bay Area. And he had mentioned that you had bought ingredients from him back in, I think in the 60s or in the 70s. So can you tell me a little bit about that story or your interaction with with Oak Barrel?

Ken Grossman

Sure. Actually, a game goes back before Oak barrels. So I grew up in Southern California and I lived in San Fernando Valley and that's where I one of the very first homebrew clubs and I think the first Olympic Club in the U.S. Altos Falcons started. And they started a couple of years after I was homebrewing and I had moved to Chico in 1972, but I started homebrewing in the late sixties and went to the home wine shop down there and bought supplies and started making beer in my closet, hidden from my mom, and then got a bit more advanced and started a green brewing pretty early on and then moved up to Chico in 1972 and continued my homebrewing. I'm 17, continued my homebrewing and attended Butte Junior College, then Chemistry and then Chico State and continued to brew and decided I would open up a home supply store myself. And Chico's, you know, was a very small town back then, actually, I think under 40,000 population. And when the students came, it's wild a little bit, but it was hard to to buy in the quantities to supply my homebrew supply store.

So I started leaning on some other homebrew shops that were more established, Oak Barrel being one of them, one of the people being another one. Byron Birch was down there back then and so I would buy 20 airlocks at a time from them and they give me a good break. So that was my go to as far as getting supplies that I couldn't afford to buy on my own as a really small homebrew player.

Vito Delucchi

That's awesome. That was it was it was cool. We were going over that to have have mentioned your name and your my eyes lit up and it was amazing. Tell me a little bit about so because homebrewing didn't become legal until 1978. Right. Right. So what was the scene like back then or was it kind of like, you know, you could use this, but it's not like distilling is today kind of or.

Ken Grossman

No, actually, it was more accepted than that. The scene was, although it was illegal, we'd never heard of anybody getting arrested. And so most home wine shops did have a beer section. And even in Chico, back when I moved here in 72, you could get a little bit of homebrew supplying supplies at one of the downtown local drugstores.

They had a little homebrew corner in the drug store and they had, you know, malt extract and cans and and old crummy hops and, you know, packages that wasn't very good. But so when I opened my own version, Bishop, it was really to further the the craft and art of homebrewing. So I was hooked up with with hop suppliers.

I would go up to Yakima every year. I drove my station wagon up there, would load it up with 1 pound bricks of hop samples. So the samples that normally would go to brewers for selection, you could well, they sold me, you know, 101 pound bricks of every variety being grown at the time, which wasn't that many.

Vito Delucchi

It was, it was a whole cone at a time. Or was it 1080 pellets?

Ken Grossman

Whole cone.

Vito Delucchi

All whole cone.

Ken Grossman

And we got brewers cuts and then I made some friends in the industry and and hooked up with a European supplier so I was able to bring in European hops and then the UK had a pretty vibrant homebrew scene although more catering to making cheap beer at home rather than them making great beer at home. You know, today it's completely different.

There's all sorts of stuff available and, you know, way more knowledge on really the science and art to brewing than I had available to me. But I got pretty serious as a home brewer. And you know, we were culture on yeast and I built a pretty good sized cooler so I could make lagers. And so I was fairly advanced and went to my first conference.

I think it was the first conference of of Homebrew and wine suppliers down in Oakland. And I attended that and met people I'd known from the industry, Frederick Court being probably the lead one and you know, been corresponding the old way back there. No email back in that area. So I was writing letters back and forth about, you know, different beer things and he was writing articles and he had a some publication.

So we chatted and I arranged a tour of the Anchor brewery at the time with Fritz Maytag giving us the tour. This was the old brewery. This was underneath the freeway the previous term before our portrayal and met him and was pretty inspired and then arranged a visit to Albion, which had just recently opened. So it's like around 70, late 77, 78 when I went, visited him the first time and saw what he had built, which was, you know, pretty high end glorified homebrew set up for the time.

Certainly it was way more advanced than what anybody else that I was aware of was doing. And he was brewing a barrel and a half, you know, 45 gallons per batch. And it was him. And he had a partner, Suzi Stern, and saw what they were doing. I'm like, Yeah, I can do this. And came back home. I think after her first or second trip there, I decided to put my homebrew shop up for sale and start writing the business plan to open a brewery.

So that was '78.

Vito Delucchi

'78 when you I know knowing your history, cobbling together a system, I wanted to, as someone who built a brewery myself and cobbling it together on a budget. Tell me a little bit about that, because I think at the time there wasn't as many brewing supplier commercial brewing supplies. There weren't any. Yeah.

Ken Grossman

Weren't any in the US making small equipment anyway. You know, we you mean if we knew better, if we knew we could have gone to Europe probably. And found something to make a small brewhouse that had experience. But in the US there was really just a handful of large equipment suppliers and I think they're mostly all gone now.

But there was a couple that were servicing, you know, Manager Bush and Miller and all that, but the US brewing industry back in 1978, 1980, I mean, it was down to about 40 total brewing companies in America. That's all of them, you know. And I saw Bush down to the smallest and, you know, the small, small brewers back then were, you know, regional family breweries that had survived prohibition in some fashion and were they're trying to eke out a living, living and competing against the big brewers.

And it wasn't a very healthy part of the industry back then. Brewers were closing at a pretty rapid rate and then in the U.S. and you know, it hit its low point around 1980 when we started. And I think there were I can't remember there was 34 or 43, but there was around that many total brewing companies. So everything was cobbled together from dairy equipment and.

Vito Delucchi

Dairy equipment.

Ken Grossman

And other food processing equipment. And Jack McAuliffe, you know, he had sort of shown that you can be pretty primitive and simple and and make good beer. And he was using the 55 gallon stainless steel drums that had been used for soda syrup, Coke or Pepsi or something. And he had converted all those into, you know, mash tun and kettle.

And I can't remember what he used for fermenters, but pretty primitive, I think maybe was 55 billion barrels for everything. And so when when I was looking at what what he was doing, realized that his business plan was pretty flawed, to try to, you know, support two people on a barrel and a half a day. And he was, you know, doing it all himself, the two of them, they would, you know, brew and bottle and he'd load it in his van and drive around and try to sell it.

Vito Delucchi

It's not even taproom. It was just no taproom.

Ken Grossman

No, taprooms were not a thing then. There was no brewpubs at that point. But for us, you know, on paper anyway, we thought, you know, ten barrel batches, that's a nice round number, three or gallons or ten gallons and you know that at least on paper look like that could be a business that would support my partner myself.

I had a I had joined up with one of my homebrew shop customers, Paul Camozzi, and and we thought we could make a go of it at that kind of volume if we could sell. I think our business plan called for us to sell 2500 barrels a year and expansion plans to grow to 3500 barrels a year, 3500 barrels a year at least on paper, we'd be doing well enough to support us.

So that was the plan and we started to build equipment. And I had been a welder when I was in college or actually when when I was in high school and junior high, even. I started welding and I went back to Butte College, which had been the school. I started out up in Chico, so in Chemistry, and I went back and rolled in welding and fabrication.

I enrolled in every class that they offered that had shop access. So it was farm mechanics and and ag ag repair and all these classes that gave me access to the shop with, you know, later than drop outs and welders and.

Vito Delucchi

Great skills to have knowing, you know, having gone through commercial brewing is like you're a chemist, you're an engineer, you're a janitor. Like, so these are all great skills that are transferable into that.

So speaking of that, Chris Graham, our president, said make sure to ask you this so I want to ask you, this was your very first batch.

He said you told him a story about how you got the grain for that batch. And could you share that story with us?

Ken Grossman

Yeah. So thankfully, I had a good relationship. And Fritz Maytag in the crew there at anchor were were quite helpful. I got to know Mark Carpenter and Gordon McDermott pretty well and Fritz and and so I leaned on them a fair amount to just sort of understand, you know, how they made beer and you know, how they got equipment and how they got the ingredients.

And so they said, okay, Bauer, Schweitzer, Maltings. So there was a Malthouse in downtown San Francisco right by Fisherman's Wharf that had been around. Actually, the building had been damaged during the San Francisco earthquakes. We've been around pre pre earthquake and and actually I have a door of one of the malting drums hanging in the hallway out here.

Oh that's cool. But they had this old drum Malthouse And I'd never been to a commercial Malthouse before and so I got it to where the Malthouse was totally cool. And again, this is a really old malt house. I think the the malting drums were from right around the turn of the century. So big cast iron drums and they would malt sort of small batches in these drums and they got bought by Flashman in malting at some point.

But that's where Fritz got his malt from. That's where New Albion got their malt from. And so it was like the logical place. So I drove my 57 Chevy down with two bins on the back, drove to the malt house and they were used to loading rail cars. So the, the area that you would drive a rail car through the got tracks, you could pull your truck and wheel and the chute was, you know, two feet in diameter and there the guy opens a shoot up and fills both bins up and and they drive you over the scale, you know, anyway, way on the way in and the way and the way out.

And I had just under 10,000 pounds on the truck. But what's.

Vito Delucchi

What was it rated at?

Ken Grossman

Not that. That it was a one ton truck so you know I got four tons of weight on it and single, single axle, single tires and so the track is like that. So you got to take half that off. They're like, no way with yours. We're never we're not taking that back. We can't do that. It's you are so like shit, so drive and I can only go about 35 miles an hour going up the freeway on ramp to get out of San Francisco.

And the mach speed, I think was a little over 40 is all I could go and I'm sliding on the road. I mean, the whole rear end is just chilling.

Vito Delucchi

Yeah, because your steering is up front. Yeah.

Ken Grossman

And I got pulled over, finally got pulled over by a patrol, but I was almost home and the guy felt sorry for my and didn't take him and then let me go. But I got back to Chico's, like, okay, next time one one bin, not two bins, and, you know, cut the load in half. But anyway, that was our first load of malt from Bower.

Schweitzer and I brewed November 15th, 1985. Barrels of stout of brew number one. And we knew we weren't going to sell it. And we figured, you know, Stout would hide our sins. It was pretty strong flavors. Yeah. So we that was brewed number one. And then went into Pale Ale Brewing two days later. And pale Ale number one was pretty good.

And that okay, you know, we're close. We made some tweaks to the recipe and Pale Ale two was a little different. Didn't have quite as good of a fermentation and wasn't quite right. And we re propagated. So we were doing all of our own yeast propagation back then. We always, always had and propagated up more yeast from another slant and Pale Ale three was pretty good and I was good enough that we bottle a little bit of it and we were like, okay, you gave it to family and friends.

This is sort of what we're planning on producing. And then after that we were serial cropping, so we were harvesting yeast and repackaging.

Vito Delucchi

Speaking of yeast, you said, you know, so I know it as Chico, 001 Was it referred to as that?

Ken Grossman

No. You know, we had our own yeast library. Okay. You know, as, as home brewers. So this was back in the late seventies and you couldn't really buy, you know, it was no yeast labs that were certainly catering to a craft brewery because you know, really wasn't such a thing. So we got these from all the different collections around the globe, some from the British collection and some from wine stuff and Davis had some yeast and Siebel was was a fairly it was about the last of the American Commercial Brewing Labs.

Right When we started Build the Brewery, I think Wallerstein had just gone out of business and that was another lab. I mean, brewers back in that era, small commercial brewers, a lot of em didn't have really much in the way of labs. And again, these are, you know, historic brewers, you know, the younglings and the the outer shelves and those kinds of historic family breweries.

They didn't have, you know, really dedicated lab staff. And so they couldn't do a lot of the analysis themselves. And so the industry really had a handful of commercial labs with, you know, master brewers and chemists and all that. So you would send your samples off. That was pretty standard, you know, to do most of the analysis that was, you know, above, you know, a specific gravity or, you know, alcohol or CO2 and maybe, you know, D0 those things.

Most brewers had some way of testing nothing like we have today. So most brewers relied on these laboratories that were feeding around the country to do a lot of that analysis. Well as the industry sort of was on its way down, a lot of those labs went out of business because the big brewers had labs and they didn't really need to send out their samples anymore.

Vito Delucchi

Yeah, 40 breweries out there. There's not much business right now.

Ken Grossman

So Siebel was the last. And so anyway, we got all these different yeast and we, we were brewing every week during the year and a half, almost two year construction phase of the brewery. So every week we'd make a batch of pale ale and try a different yeast, try, you know, different hops, try different water treatment, all those kinds of things that a brewer would do.

And we finally, you know, realized we were going to be a bottle conditioned brewery. We didn't have pressurized tanks. We didn't have any way to carbonate naturally or artificially. And and so we just figured we'll bottle conditioned just like we've been doing this home brewers and we needed a yeast that was ferment fast attenuate well fall out and stick to the bottom of the bottle and leave a you know very firm yeast sediment for about.

Vito Delucchi

In the bottle, not in the glass.

Ken Grossman

Right. So the yeast that is now Chico yeast was one that we thought had all those qualities that, that we really needed for commercial and bottle conditioned production. It was pretty, you know, robust. We were very fortunate that UC Davis was not too far away. And so as part of our learning, I spent a lot of time with the Davis Library and talking to grad students and and Dr. Michael Lewis, who was the ran the program back then.

And you know, they were like, you know, you probably shouldn't try to do lager brewing with this primitive because your brewery is, you know, definitely use a top fermenting yeast. And and so, you know, we had realized that was, you know, the direction we had to start out with. And then so we tried to optimize what we thought we needed in a politician yeast and are used to tame yeast.

We're still using today.

Vito Delucchi

Well, again, on behalf of the entire homebrewing and brewing industry, thank you for developing one of the workhorses of the brewing industry and one of my favorite yeast drinks. All right, so let's talk about my favorite beer, Sierra Nevada, Pale Ale. I call it my desert island beer style. So meaning if I could only have one beer for the rest of my life, I would pick this one.

What is one beer? That. That. That would be your desert island beer style.

Ken Grossman

Well, certainly Pale Ale would be would be in there if I only had one beer. It probably pale ale. But the other one which we're brewing in packaging the first batch this year next week, celebration ale. And so I mean, it's one that I brewed our first full year of production, brewed back 96 cases celebration Ale in 1981 and it was, you know, something I'd been to Europe at that point a couple of times UK and Belgium and Germany, and we were aware that, you know, Fritz was doing his Christmas beer and he was doing Liberty Ale and we really wanted to do a dry hopped beer.

So pale ale wasn't dry up just due to our inability to do that initially. So we were like, okay, we want to make a dry beer. We want to make a holiday beer and back, you know, in the forties and fifties there were a lot of breweries that produced Christmas beers and I've still got some old bottles of some of them around from us Brewing Company that sort of went away and, and Fritz had revived that for with his Christmas ale so we wanted to do you know a holiday ale and actually our first, the first one is that white label right there, the long neck celebration all up there.

And that was when I brewed the last 100 cases. And I remember going to Yakima and actually picking the field of hops. We we wanted it was actually a baby field of cascades, but they were just, you know, really nice small cones, but just loaded with little blood and I remember thinking this would be great for dry humping with and so brewed that beer and it was, you know, amazing and really left, you know, a huge impression that we need to do more of this and, you know, more dry hopping.

And so that beer's definitely got a fondness and fun place for me, as well as our Pale Ale.

Vito Delucchi

Celebration. Delicious. I love that one, too.

So speaking of Sierra Nevada, pale ale, one of the cool things that you mentioned a minute ago, too, in the bottle conditions. So now you guys are doing cans. So it is it can conditioned as well.

Ken Grossman

It is. So there's yeast in the can and same as in the bottle, same pitcher, same beer.

Vito Delucchi

Same pitch rate, so same yeast. Uh, everything, sugar, everything. All exactly exact same here.

Ken Grossman

The beer is the same when it heads out the packaging and whether it goes in the bottle again.

Vito Delucchi

And I think the the benefit of of bottle conditioning and conditioning too, is it helps with the shelf life. Right. With it does yeast uptake the oxygen. Yeah.

Ken Grossman

So and you know yeast keeps the beer in a reduced state. So it does provide some protection certainly from, you know, some oxygen ingress that happens during packaging. But, you know, I think many brewers are aware that the oxygen actually in is continually into a bottle and less so into a can. But there is a small amount of oxygen that migrates through the seams of a of a can lid or a bottle cap, more so in the bottle cap because of the porosity of the plastic they use in the liner.

And so there's a small amount of oxygen ingress that's continually happening as the beer sits on the shelf. Corks are the worst. And then you can go through a whole range of bottle caps and the next worst is a puff. PVC So the PVC is we the fact it's got a lubricant in it, but it's, it's used in a twist off bottle cap.

But it's puffed meaning it's got oxygen in that and it's more porous and it's got here and it when they puff it and so that porosity makes the transmission rate of oxygen higher and we did a lot of research around bottle cap liner material and we're actually still looking at at that and we've, you know, picked ones that have, you know, the lowest amount of oxygen transmission.

And then there some, you know, antioxidants that are ascorbic acid that are added to some of the liner materials to, you know, address some of that oxygen ingress. The can is got a much tighter seam. It still does have a sealant material in the in the can seal itself for the liners and not the liner itself. But actually when this is cramped inside there there's a little bit of of a sealant in there as well.

So there's a little bit of oxygen transmission, but it's a much tighter seal than a bottle cap. And the amount of surface area is smaller.

Vito Delucchi

With your kegs too. Would you condition those as well?

Ken Grossman

We we do keg condition some beers we don't keg condition all of our beer so our pale ale on draft is actually a slightly different version. We did use the keg condition and we still do some. The issue is you've got a much larger volume. You've got to talk keg and you've got your yeast, which settles to the bottom and the amount of surface area that the yeast has to react with the volume of beer is much less.

And so keg condition beer takes a lot longer to condition and a bottle or can does just because of the surface to volume ratio in a keg. And so keg condition beers would take a month sometimes to to fully condition so our pale ale is conditioned naturally in a tank but it still undergoes a secondary fermentation in the tank.

We bung it in and allow it to build CO2. Naturally.

Vito Delucchi

Back on Sierra Nevada, Pale Ale. I think there should be the interesting one because it's been around forever. How many gallons or barrels have you guys brewed so far? This one and.

Ken Grossman

I don't have an exact number, but it's many, many, millions

Vito Delucchi

Millions. Millions? Yes.

You know, what's your favorite Sierra Nevada beer, past or present?

Ken Grossman

I get asked this question pretty regularly now. I never give a straight answer. So really, it's like, you know, having a favorite kid, you're not publicly state that. But yeah, you know, my my go to changes a bit during the year.

Vito Delucchi

Depending on the season.

Ken Grossman

Beginning of the season like I'll switch to celebration ale next week so as soon as we hear the week after, as soon as we package and condition it, I'll drink celebration preferentially for most of the season and then switch back to Pale Ale and but we you know, we produce quite a range of beers and I have been known to, you know, have a, a nitro stout or or in one of our lagers or something on a on a regular occasion so I don't stick with just one beer hard every day.

Vito Delucchi

I could hear that.

All right what makes you passionate about beer and brewing? You know, is it an ingredient? It is the process, the science. What is your you mean major? Maybe it's kind of like the the other question, you know, there's somebody aspect, but if you could narrow in on one, what makes you passionate about it?

Ken Grossman

You know, I think for me, I still do enjoy the science. I do still spend a bit of time involved in in, I guess, the research and scientific pursuit of improving beers. You know, I've I've had a saying or around the brewery for years that good is never good enough. There's always places you can tweak and make improvements, whether it's, you know, oxygen control, whether it's, you know, brewhouse process, whether it's the lower thermal stress and boiling.

I mean, there there are so many areas to explore and the science is not done brewing. Science is constantly evolving. And there's, you know, things we learn all the time that can, you know, do some very small tweaks in many cases. But you add up ten small tweaks and there's a noticeable improvement. So just paying att