Belly Up for Designer Beer : Live Music and Discounts for College Students Make Brew Pubs the Toast of O.C.

Harmon Woldar approached the bar at the Huntington Beach Beer Co. one Wednesday evening like a man who knew what he wanted.

“I’d like a beer that you can sit and drink all night,” Woldar proclaimed.

Woldar had been working all day and was in no mood for light beer. He wanted something he could taste for a while, so he tried a Brickshot Red Ale. After a few sips, Woldar’s taste buds went searching for another flavor.

“This is a little sweet,” said Woldar, eyeing the reddish-brown colored beer as if it were a meal rather than a drink. “Do you have something a little more bitter?”

Within seconds, Woldar was tasting a lighter-colored, but fuller-flavored Pier Pale Ale.

“This is superior beer,” Woldar said. “Drinking good beer is a lot like drinking fine wines, I guess. It takes a lot of time. Really, it’s an art form.”

If so, it’s an art form whose time has come.

After starting in the Pacific Northwest and traveling down the California Coast, the “Fresh Revolution,” as some call it, has hit Orange County. There are three brew pubs--restaurants serving beer brewed on the premises--in Orange County, and by the spring, that number will grow to at least eight.

Much like the coffee house popularity that began in the late 1980s, the brew pub craze has attracted a sophisticated, eclectic, well-informed group of consumers.

People go to bars to drink. People go to brew pubs to enjoy ales, porters, stouts, amber’s red ales, pale ales, wheats, raspberries or whatever style might be on that particular brew pub’s menu. And typically, they don’t just enjoy their beer; they discuss why they enjoy it.

Peter Andriet walked into a place with that sort of crowd, that sort of atmosphere and that sort of beer four years ago in Breckinridge, Colo.

“I just knew the moment I had a beer there that it was my kind of place,” said Andriet, who was in Colorado on a fishing trip. “I had lived in Texas, where brew pubs were illegal at the time, so I had no idea what they were. But I just fell in love with the concept.”

The Breckinridge Brewing Co. became Andriet’s inspiration for the Huntington Beach Beer Co.

After putting together 17 investors and $500,000, Andriet opened the Huntington Beach Beer Co. a block from the pier in October, 1992. Two years and $4 million in gross sales later, Andriet and three new partners are expanding to Laguna Beach on Dec. 14, Newport Beach on March 1 and Anaheim on Aug. 1.

“It’s incredible,” said Andriet, 34. “I envisioned great success and these numbers are that success. Our place has a very social atmosphere. There’s no live music, no pool tables, just good beer.”

Heritage Brewing Co. in Dana Point and Fullerton Hofbrau, the other two brew pubs in Orange County, have also found great success within in a short period.

In May, the 5-year old Heritage Brewing Co., across from the Dana Point Harbor, opened another brewery in Lake Elsinore. The Lake Elsinore site is a microbrewery--a brewery with annual production of fewer than 15,000 barrels that produces beer for consumption off the premises. Heritage is using Coors to distribute its bottles and kegs of beer to bars and stores throughout Southern California.

Hofbrau, less than a mile from Cal State Fullerton, is in its fourth year. Majority owner Gunther Buerk said plans are in the works to go public and to open a medium size, stand-alone microbrewery in the Los Angeles or Orange County area.

“I’m happy that we’ve been able to prosper during the worst economic times in the (recent) history of California,” said Hofbrau general manager Russell Brent. “With a lot of restaurants in this area going out of business due to the decline of the aerospace industry, we’ve had 30% growth over last year.”

The brew pub and microbrewery industry in California and the United States is growing even faster, some estimates say by as much 40%.

Craig Wesley, who writes about the microbrewery industry and the history of beer for several beer publications, said there were about 2,200 breweries in the U.S. before Prohibition, and 400 during the ‘50s. But by the ‘60s, major breweries had bought out most of the small ones and Americans were limited to drinking mostly light, mass-produced beer from national breweries.

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In 1985, there were only 21 microbreweries and eight brew pubs in the U.S. Brew pubs weren’t allowed in California until 1982 when the state legalized consumption of on-premise brewing by passing the “brew pub law.”

A year later, the Mendocino Brewing Co. in Hopland, 90 miles north of San Francisco, became the state’s first brew pub. Michael Laybourn, CEO of Mendocino Brewing Co., said he simply took advantage of a shift in the market.

“We noticed import sales started going up 10% to 20% a year,” said Laybourn, whose trademark beer is Red Tail Ale. “So we thought there might be an interest in heavier beers. We wanted to make English-style ales, a red ale, a black stout and a pale ale. Now, everybody across the country is making ales, reds, stouts or dark ales.”

Although most mass-produced beers--Budweiser, Coors and Miller--are lagers, Laybourn said ales have more history in America.

“The pilgrims landed with ale, and that’s what most people still drink in that part of the country,” he said. “James Madison, George Washington, Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson all brewed ale.”

But Laybourn acknowledges that most beer drinkers in the U.S. still favor lighter lager-style beers.

“Bud sells 87 million barrels of beer a year,” Laybourn said. “Sierra Nevada (one of most popular regional specialty microbreweries) sells 100,000 barrels.”

Microbreweries only have a little more than 1% of the beer market in the U.S., but industry experts expect that figure could grow to 5% by the year 2000.

In 12 years, nearly 100 brew pubs have opened in California. And although brew pubs are still illegal in Mississippi and Georgia because those states have not passed laws that legalize them, there are some 530 brew pubs and microbreweries in the U.S. In the first nine months of 1994, 88 brew pubs have opened their doors.

“The number of brew pubs in the U.S. could double next year,” Wesley said.

Orange County has lagged far behind state and national trends with only three brew pubs, but that is changing with Huntington Beach Co.’s three new sites and the opening of McCormick and Schmick’s brew pub in Irvine and the Sunset Beach Fish House and Brewery in Peter’s Landing.

“I feel the beer industry is where the wine industry was 15 to 20 years ago,” said Hofbrau’s Brent. “Southern California is not as saturated with brew pubs as Portland, Seattle and the Bay Area are. In parts of Portland, there’s a brew pub on almost every corner.”

Brent, like Huntington Beach Beer Co.’s Andriet, saw his opportunity through a pint of beer.

“When I graduated from hotel and restaurant school, I ate and drank from England to Greece and all the countries in between,” Brent said. “I was so impressed with the Bavarian beer, that I made up my mind when I came back here I would open a place like the German brew pubs over here.”

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Gunther Buerk, who grew up near Munich, was just the man Brent was looking for.

“I had been over here 30 years and I always missed the good German Bavarian beer,” said Buerk. “My biggest complaint was that I couldn’t find any good beer here.”

Buerk and Brent invested $450,000 in computer-controlled brewing equipment from Munich. “We brew our beer under the oldest brewing laws in the history of the world, a process called Reinheitsgebot that started in 1516 and has turned into the industry standard,” said Brent. “The computer-controlled brewery allows us to reproduce the same quality beer batch after batch.” The brew pub has won the Southern California Restaurant Writer’s Assn. silver award the past three years.

Buerk and Brent say they have tried to make Hofbrau--a German term meaning “Royal Court Brewery”--attractive to families and college students, who are given discounts on beer by showing student identification and are entertained by alternative music bands on Friday and Saturday nights.

Fullerton Hofbrau’s most popular beer is Kings Lager, which is smooth and full-bodied with a golden color. The second-most popular is Hefe-Weizen, a blend of wheat and barley malt with Hersbrucker hops.

Huntington Beach Beer Co. is most noted for its Pier Pale Ale, which recently won the silver medal in the pale ale category at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver.

Shelly Santilli, who was sharing a pitcher of Brickshot Red Ale with her friend Greg Bunker on a busy Wednesday night, doesn’t have a favorite style.

“The beers here are all different,” said Santilli, 26. “I like experimenting.”

Santilli said she drank a lot of Coors Light, and occasionally still does, before getting hooked on beers such as Blonde Ale and Brickshot Red.

Drew Ciora, the brew pub’s regional manager, said he didn’t know what a treat beer could be until he began working at the Huntington Beach Beer Co.

“I used to have a 12-pack of just about anything in my fridge, but now I’ll have four quality beers in there,” he said.

“For the people who are used to drinking light beers from the major beer companies, the first step might be a lager,” Ciora said. “Then, the next thing you know, they’re drinking porters and stouts.”

Now, Ciora said he considers himself somewhat of a beer snob. He became a recognized beer judge after passing an exam last month in Denver.

“I’ll turn my nose up at most everything now,” he said.

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For snobs or for those who can’t get enough good beer, the Huntington Beach Beer Co. has started beer appreciation night and a beer enthusiasts club.

“On beer appreciation night, the beer master (Alex Puchner) will talk about styles of beer, and people will taste beers from those styles,” he said. “The beer enthusiast club is a more serious group. There’s a lot of beer enthusiasts out there, but we want more of them. One of our main goals is to educate the people of Orange County about beer.”

The Heritage Brewing Co. doesn’t have any clubs that meet regularly, but it does have live music every night.

“We didn’t do much live entertainment when we first opened, but now every night we have somebody playing here,” said Paul Storey, general manager of the Heritage Brewing Co.

Storey said his brew pub’s two bottled beers, Red Fox Pale Ale and Mulligan Lager, have also worked well.

“We can’t keep production for our beer,” he said. “We’re selling it faster than we can make it.”

Said Hofbrau’s Brent, “We’re here to stay. Anybody that tells me this is a fad is crazy.”