A Brewhouse Goes on Tour
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, the company decided to do a tour. Of its original brewhouse that is.
The 10-barrel system, originally hand built by founder Ken Grossman, was mounted on a trailer and took its first road trip; to the Great American Beer Festival in Denver last week where it was on display.
Ken sold the brewhouse in the late 1980’s to the folks at Mad River Brewing near Eureka, California. Mad River brewed on it until a couple of years ago.
“I remember doing some of those welds and building some of those parts and pieces,” Ken says in a Fortune article. “It was all hand-fabricated and tacked together—and it’s worked all these years. So it’s been 40 years that equipment has been making beer.”
The next stop on the ‘original brewhouse tour’ tour stop will be at San Francisco Beer Week in February. It is also scheduled to appear at Homebrew Con in Nashville in June 2020, with more dates to be added soon.
Brewed with that system for 15 years at Mad River. Great to see it make the rounds around.
We bought the original four-roller mill in 1985 that Ken built from scratch. Served us well at Santa Cruz Brewing Co. for fifteen years. Have no idea where it is now. We also had a surplus dairy chiller tank that we bought from Sierra Nevada back in the day. There was no forklift back then at the brewery so we loaded all that stuff on our trailer with manpower, lol. Good memories.