MICHAEL Bowe leans over a 650-gallon tank, pouring green pellets into boiling wort (pronounced "wert"). That's the sweet extract of barley malt that turns into beer. Right now, it just looks like a lot of insanely boiling latte.
"This will be Abbey Ale, my Belgian-style ale," Bowe says fondly. "The Germans make great beer. The Belgians are like Germans on psychedelics -- they do all sorts of crazy things, like putting special brewing sugar in beer at the end to bump up the gravity [alcohol]."
Those crazy Belgians! At his Angel City Brewing Co. in Torrance, Bowe makes rather classical, perfectionist beers, but at the same time he does have a certain fascination with the wild side. When he was a home brewer, he sometimes made basil-flavored beer or stripped the candy canes off the Christmas tree and put them in a brew just to see what would happen.
It was experience not wasted. "I've tried so many malts and hops and things," he says, "these days I can just taste a beer and tell you how it was made."
But here's a really crazy thing. Bowe's Angel City is one of just eight lonely microbreweries in Los Angeles County. That's well below what you'd expect, given that L.A. is one of the top beer markets in the country. (Orange County has 14.)
A recent start-up, Angel City has begun to have a presence in Southern California. On tap, Bowe's brews have won a foothold in beer-oriented restaurants such as Traxx in Union Station downtown and Spitfire Grill in Santa Monica, and the bottled versions are in some liquor stores and upscale market chains such as Bristol Farms and Whole Foods.
Bowe has been selling beer commercially since 1997, but only in the last 18 months has he graduated to owning a professional brewing facility -- which he bought on EBay. (Yes, you can buy breweries online.)
Owning his own brewery has given him more capacity, up to 10,000 barrels a year. Equally important is the new bottling line he has put in, replacing the small, labor-intensive, "punishingly bad" system that came with the brewery.
"Eighty percent of beer sales is bottles," Bowe says. "An all-draft house misses a large segment of the market."
And for a beer guy, there's the important respect factor. "Some other microbreweries used to think of me as not legitimate," he says, "because I was just a 'contract brewer.' Not the bigger microbreweries, because they knew I was developing a brand."
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