The Making of a Classic: Sierra Nevada Pale Ale
All photos courtesy Sierra Nevada Brewing.
The Sierra Nevada story starts in 1980, but let’s fast forward and survey what American craft brewing looked like a decade later. It was an ebullient, chaotic moment, full of promise. What was then called microbrewing was a decade old and many American beer drinkers had encountered it. Fans had good reason to think things were changing.
Still, the small breweries’ beers were hard to find, and few people understood what all the different styles were. The little breweries didn’t make the same kind of beer, which confused people. Rather than create similar beers that together would have made sense to drinkers searching for mass market alternatives, breweries planted flags in different styles as if they were unclaimed land in an open landscape. For example, here were some of the nation’s best-sellers in 1990:
Boston Beer went traditional with an amber lager.
Redhook thought Seattleites might enjoy an ESB.
Pete’s Wicked had remarkable (and remarkably surprising) success with brown ale.
In Oregon, Widmer Brothers made an American wheat, and Full Sail an amber ale.
Dark ales were a staple in brewpubs (quite likely thanks to Guinness’s enduring popularity) and a few breweries were selling sizable amounts of stouts and, especially, porters.
Although it wasn’t a true craft brewery, Anchor was also sitting proudly on its steam beer, a piece of land Fritz Maytag thought was so valuable he trademarked it.
And in California, Sierra Nevada was selling a pale ale.
An American tradition wouldn’t emerge for at least another decade, and in that span, more styles—remember fruit ales and witbier?—would enjoy the spotlight. The further we move from that land rush period, the more its chaos recedes. We think of the later coherence, when Americans did create a recognizable national tradition, as inevitable.
Of course, it wasn’t. Microbreweries might have mostly died out in the late 1990s. Jim Koch’s venture might have merely widened the lane of lagers available in the US. Americans might have developed a different palate altogether—for twenty years, for example, malts seemed a lot more popular than hops. Yet here we are. And while little in history has a single origin, we can credit Sierra Nevada’s Pale Ale for playing an outsized role in how America found its tradition.
California, Late-1970s
America’s brewing resurgence got started in San Francisco and points north thanks to a confluence of factors: Anchor’s presence and Fritz Maytag’s helpful nature; a burgeoning homebrew scene; the increasing availability of imports; a brewing school at UC-Davis; and the growing dissatisfaction with mass market lagers. It’s hard to remove more than a couple of those factors and imagine craft brewing (a term I’ll use henceforth for brevity) starting there. Add the fact that Northern California was a region that welcomed successive generations of dreamers and pioneers, and you have the perfect breeding ground for aspiring homebrewers willing to buy some 55-gallon drums and dairy equipment and go pro.
Ken Grossman was one of those creative entrepreneurs. By the time he started Sierra Nevada at 25, he’d already owned one other business—a homebrew supply shop. One of this father’s friends homebrewed, and he taught Ken, then a teenager, how to brew himself. A deliberative young man, he absorbed as much information as he could about brewing. He visited Anchor and spent a lot of time at New Albion before putting together what would become, by the standards of the day, a rather sophisticated and substantial brewery. He described the background in an interview with me several years ago:
“The year or so around when I started—I started my business plan in 1978—at that point I think there was New Albion and maybe one other (I think maybe Tom de Bakker was in business at that time—and both of those went out of business a little after that). And so we were the first wave of craft brewers in the US. I think in 1981 there were six small brewers in existence. We started brewing at the end of ’80. That was really the genesis of it.”
The early breweries suffered from a lack of scale. Tom de Bakker (whose brewery, curiously, was spelled “DeBakker”) was a full time firefighter who ran his brewery on the side. New Albion, with a system of not quite two barrels, kept brewers Jack McAullife and Suzy Stern (now Denison) working long days and making little money. All three of the little California breweries reportedly made great beer, but DeBakker and New Albion weren’t big enough to make it.
Sierra Nevada, on the other hand, was a proper brewery and gave Grossman and his partner Paul Camusi a platform to launch the first successful California brewery after Anchor. They studied area breweries and built a ten-barrel system that was big enough to reach 1,500 barrels of production by year two. It helped that they had a more sustainable business plan, but the beer was their biggest asset. The first product they made was a pale ale Grossman had been refining for years as a homebrewer, and they dumped a number of batches before producing one they were ready to sell.
The Beer
In the 1970s, beer was a thoroughly debased product. Two trends conspired to make crisp, flavorful lagers flavorless and insipid. The sweetening of the American palate led beer companies to slowly drain hop character from their beer, and the advent of light beer further emaciated the malt. It was a dismal time for drinkers craving flavor. This was the important context for understanding what a nuclear bomb Sierra Nevada Pale seemed like when it detonated inside drinkers’ mouths in the 1980s.
Several things were at play. Most Americans had never tasted an ale, with its fuller, fruity flavor. Crystal malt, which lager brewers never used, added a rich burst of toffee. But mostly, the shock of intense citrus, as if brewers added grapefruit juice (on possibly pine boughs), left drinkers with mouths agape.
Drinkers didn’t have a deep sense of why those hops were unusual, but they certainly had never encountered anything like them. The flavors and aromas they produced, of course, were purely American, unlike anything grown in Europe, and they imprinted a new generation of drinkers with a different set of expectations about what beer should taste like.
Cascade Hops
Cascade hops weren’t bred for their flavor impact—quite the opposite. As I wrote in a recent article at Craft Beer and Brewing, researchers originally developed Cascades because they imagined them to be a domestic substitute for European hops.
That story starts in 1956 in Corvallis, Oregon, where a plant researcher working for the USDA had planted 7,000 seedlings of new hop crosses, hoping to find a variety resistant to downy mildew. Developing new varieties of hops is a slow business. Eventually, over the next 12 years, one of those little seedlings—No. 56013—worked its way through successive rounds of eliminations and field trials.
In 1968, the first commercial crop of the new hop—now called Cascade—came off two acres of Don Weathers’s farm near Salem, Oregon. Writing in Brewers Digest in 1972, the researchers noted that it was the first American hop with measurable farnesene—an aromatic compound found in classic Nobles such as Saaz and Tettnanger. They continued optimistically, “The aroma of Cascade is delicate, slightly spicy.... Aroma notes associated with Cluster, Brewers Gold, Bullion, and Talisman and described as ‘American aroma’ are absent or very subdued in Cascade.”
That assessment turned out to be hilariously wrong. Big breweries actually tried making beer with Cascades, but in an era when breweries considered any hop character unacceptable, Cascades were out of the question. Fortunately, homebrewers loved them. Ken Grossman describes how he first encountered them.
“Again, as a homebrew shop owner, I pretty much bought everything that I could get my hands on that was grown in the US and I imported a lot of European aroma hops too, so I was aware of the Cascade hop when it got launched and popularized. I brewed with it as a homebrewer from pretty early on.
As Sierra Nevada went from homebrewer daydream to commercial reality, Grossman and Camusi had to think about what kind of beer they wanted to make and how to distinguish themselves. Ken continues, describing Cascade hops’ defining role.
“I think as far as style goes, the craft brewers from early on wanted to do something different but also something that really had some flavor impacts. So malts and hops are what you have to work with and the Cascade character being quite a bit different from the noble hop aroma. The Cascade was actually around for a number of years and was spurned by the big brewers as being too distinctive and not noble aroma-ish. Most of the major brewers had German influence and Cascade was an oddball compared to what they were used to with more subtle aromas from Saaz and Hallertau and some of the other varieties. The fear was that they didn’t want to have a lot of pronounced hop character and aroma in their beer and the Cascade had a lot of that, so. It floundered for a number of years after Al Haunold developed it and I think Stroh used a little bit of it and Henry Weinhard used a little bit of it in that brand out of Blitz.
“It was my familiarity with that hop and the distinctive nature of the aroma—the piney citrus—that I appreciated and enjoyed and wanted to incorporate into our pale ale.”
And, if you’re going to start a new brewery to compete with the beer of the day, it makes sense to draw contrasts. Rather than trying to conceal their character, Sierra leaned into the intensity of Cascades.
“When we were thinking about starting the brewery I wanted to do something that was not British, that was American, and wanted to feature American ingredients wherever possible and so chose the Cascade hop as about the only signature American aroma hop at the time. I blended a little bit of brewing technology and history from England with my homebrewing and some US ingredients and came up with Pale Ale.”
According to Ken, it’s “essentially the same recipe we started with,” with adjustments to account for changes in malts over the decades. The brewery lists Pale as having 38 IBUs, and that doesn’t account for what were at the time incredible aromatics and that startling citrus flavor. It was such a tour de force that few breweries imitated it in the early days. Pale ales became American standards, but they were more sedate affairs, more English, with an equal emphasis on malt. Harpoon IPA, to use one example, had only 42 IBUs when it debuted 13 years later, the malt was more pronounced, and the hops less aromatic and flavorful. That was typical. Sierra’s Pale went where few other breweries dared take theirs.
Malt and Yeast
Cascade hops were the star, but the other ingredients were important in the composition of the beer as well. Crystal malt was the most important element, an ingredient that functioned as an American touchstone for the next thirty years. I can find no record of DeBakker’s pale ale recipe, but Jack McAullife used only two-row pale in his New Albion Ale. In Sierra Nevada Pale, Grossman used crystal malt to accent the fruitiness of the hops, pulling out their sweetness, which helped balance the (then) sharp level of bitterness. For consumers who found the entire experience of craft beer bewildering, the caramel note offered one point of familiarity, too, even if it wasn’t a familiar beer flavor.
These early American pub ales were modeled on British beer, where crystal malt is commonly used. In Sierra’s Pale, however, the balance of flavors was unusual. English base malts are prepared to produce distinctive bready or nutty flavors and crystal malts float a dollop of treacle on top of them. In the US, lager breweries didn’t want characterful base malts, and maltsters produced pale malts with little flavor at all. As a consequence, in the crystal malt pales of the day, it was hard to perceive the base malts underneath—all tasters noticed was the smack of sweet caramel. A caramel profile became a hallmark of American brewing and persisted as the pales evolved into IPAs, falling away only in the past decade.
Yeast was the final element, and in its mildness, an important one as well. English ales are characterized by yeasts almost as expressive as Belgian strains. They are often intensely fruity. Sierra Nevada chose an old American strain (purportedly Ballantine’s, though a fair amount of mystery surrounds its origins) that had a neutral profile and fermented well. It left beers with a touch of fruitiness, but as ale strains go, “Chico” yeast gets out of way and lets the malt and hops shine. American brewers prized that clean profile until the hazy IPA phenomenon took root, and probably half the breweries before 2015 used it as their house strain. Even today, it is almost certainly the most popular ale strain used in the US.
Brewing has moved on from crystal malt, which now barely accents pale ales and IPAs, if brewers use it at all. The clean yeast profile is more durable. Even among breweries making hazies (which is to say most breweries), brewers still make some ales with Sierra’s clean, low-ester profile. For many Americans, that’s what ales are supposed to taste like.
Legacy and Importance
When Grossman and Camusi started Sierra Nevada, the US had no native tradition. Nineteenth-century German immigrants built the American beer industry, which remained German until craft breweries arrived. When little breweries started dabbling around 1980, they made a broader range of European styles, but created no cohesive sense of tradition until the 2000s, when hoppy ales found their footing. Now the craft segment is healthy and a lot larger (though still less than a fifth of the whole industry), and that tradition has developed. It’s predicated on expressive American hops and owes a massive debt to the first brewery to make a popular example—Sierra’s Pale.
It’s too simplistic to give credit for any style to a single brewery, and many other breweries helped build the road that led to 2020. (One of them, incidentally, was not Anchor, in case you’re thinking of Liberty Ale.) Yet Sierra Nevada Pale was an incredibly bold beer built around expressive American hops, and because it sold well, sparked a thousand imitators. It was hardly a one-off, either. A year later, Sierra Nevada introduced the first IPA in Celebration, a 65-IBU American-hopped ale has even more in common with modern beers. The brewery was innately “American” in a way we wouldn’t understand for another generation.
This is a good time to tip our hat to this incredibly important beer. Sierra Nevada is now the oldest survivor of the pioneer class of American craft breweries. Forty years ago this November, Grossman and Camusi brewed the first batch of this beer. Remarkably, it remains in production and brewed to basically the same formulation as it was that day. Very few beers can claim that—even many of the venerable classics made in Europe. It was built around the brewers’ vision for the way American hops could express themselves, and forty years later, millions across the world have come around to their way of thinking.