Proclamation Ale Company’s origin story is simple: Dave Witham thought his beers were tasty, and his friends thought they were tasty, so he founded a brewery.
At Orpheus Brewing Jason Pellett acts as an evangelist for beers that push drinkers’ palates, and helps carve out a local market for sour and funky flavors among more casual beer drinkers.
Ben Low chose a career in brewing as an alternative to a life as an academic specializing in classics. That one decision point resonates through Low’s approach to brewing at Baxter Brewing Company, the Lewiston, Maine-based beermaker where he serves as director of brewing operations.
A Harvard biological anthropology major turned law school grad, Bailey Spaulding and friend Robyn Virball assembled thousands of pounds of stainless steel equipment into a brewhouse. Jackalope has since become a cornerstone of Nashville’s burgeoning craft beer scene.
Troy Casey, the founder and brewer of Casey Brewing and Blending, operates out of a barrel room on the edge of the Colorado Rockies, from which he turns out limited quantities of Brettanomyces-spiked Saison and Belgian-inspired wild ale.
Aaren Simoncini launched the Beer’d Brewing Company as a vehicle for delivering fresh, creative, and locally brewed beers to his corner of southeastern Connecticut. Exponential growth has led to Beer’d growing deeper, not wider.
Jonathan Buford launched Arizona Wilderness Brewing Company as a strictly local venture. He wanted to help advance Arizona’s beer-drinking culture, and give Phoenix-area craft enthusiasts something to call their own.
Nick VanCourt brews beer in Michigan, which means his peers are some of the best the US has to offer. He’s stood out by keeping his beers grounded in a sensibility that’s more European than brawling American.
As a homebrewer, Nathan Zeender made his bones propagating the dregs of wild and sour beers he enjoyed, aged batches in wine and spirit barrels, and blended the results. Right Proper, the DC brewpub Zeender helped launch, is also far outside the brewing mainstream.
Over the past eight years the setup of this column hasn’t changed much: Why beer? Why brewing? Why do you do what you do? But the common theme, from Oregon to Kansas to the Carolinas, is the way that a passion for beer builds and rolls forward on its own momentum.
The Rhinegeist Brewery was founded by Bob Bonder, the owner of a local coffee shop, and Bryant Goulding, a brewing industry sales and marketing veteran. To put recipes to their vision, they turned to Jim Matt, a longtime homebrewer who was brewing professionally only because his day job as a chemist had ended.
Trevor Brown is part of a rapidly expanding group of brewers redefining Texas beer. His brewery, The Lone Pint, has turned Magnolia, a tiny town an hour outside Houston, into a destination for brawny, hoppy ales.
Jeff Gill started Tallgrass Brewing in the college town of Manhattan, Kan. To make his business work, Gill had to brew with the ambitions of a much larger brewery, targeting casual drinkers and hopheads alike, and carving out a wide distribution footprint that stretches from the Gulf of Mexico to North Dakota.
The old brick factory in Stratford, Conn., where Phil Markowski launched Two Roads Brewing Company is a symbol of breathing new life into an old manufacturing facility. But it’s also a metaphor for their approach to brewing.
A massive IPA put Albuquerque, New Mexico’s La Cumbre Brewing on the map. But Jeff Erway, La Cumbre’s founder and brewer, likes to focus as much on fine-tuned classic styles (a Hefeweizen, a Pilsner, a foreign-style Stout) as he does on show-stopping hop bombs.
Jim McCabe founded the Milwaukee Ale House in 1997, after getting hooked on brewpubs out West. He added a production brewery, the Milwaukee Brewing Company, a decade later. What unites them is a push to connect the craft movement with Milwaukee’s beermaking tradition.
When Good People first launched in Birmingham, Ala., in 2008, the brewery was somewhat constrained—by Alabama’s legal restrictions on brewing, and by what they thought the market could handle. But things are changing.
Green Man is one of Asheville, North Carolina’s old-line breweries—a legendary name in a legendary beer town. And under Stuart and his crew, it’s been growing faster than ever, delivering unique takes on English Ale standbys plus an array of sought-after American IPAs, Stouts and American Wild Ales.
At The Rare Barrel, a tiny, sours-only brewery in Berkeley, Calif., American sours push the boundaries of what Brettanomyces, Lactobacillus, Pedioccocus, oak and time can do.
The Oxbow brewery sits on 18 acres in mid-coast Maine and the brewhouse is housed in an old barn. Tim Adams, Oxbow’s co-founder and head brewer, brews for a living because he believes beer is an amazing culinary creative outlet.
Josh Bischoff, Indeed’s head brewer, is hustling to keep up with exploding demand because he starts from a baseline of challenging his customers. The brewery is built around two canned, hop-forward flagship ales, which Bischoff combines with a rotating set of specialty beers and one-offs.
Tim Clifford thinks of Sante Adairius Rustic Ales—the Capitola, Calif., brewery that he and his wife, Adair Paterno, founded two years ago—as a homebrewery that happens to be open to the public. Sante Adairius sells nearly all the beer it makes through its taproom.
