ON a recent Friday night, three collegiate-looking young men strode into the 3rd Stop, a beer and wine bar near the Beverly Center. The first one to the bar was sure of what he wanted.
"Give me a Blue Moon," he told the bartender, referring to the citrus-tinged wheat beer from the Coors Brewing Co.
When he was politely informed that the 3rd Stop didn't carry Blue Moon, he stared blankly at the 30 or so tap handles before him. Staring back was an assortment of beers that will likely never be advertised during an NFL game: Craftsman, Allagash, Green Flash, Pizza Port and Stone Brewing, among others.
The bartender suggested a Craftsman 1903, a beer that pours honey gold with a fluffy, inch-thick white head. A bit of corn, and maybe some nuttiness, comes through in the light, slightly creamy beer. The young man accepted the bartender's suggestion, and before he even set the glass down, he declared, "I'll take two more."
What this patron likely didn't realize is that Craftsman 1903 is brewed here in Los Angeles County -- its kegs often hand-delivered by the company's 46-year-old founder, Mark Jilg. Craftsman is at the forefront of a long-overdue microbrewing renaissance in Los Angeles, where beer appreciation has long played second-class citizen to the region's wine culture. More bars and restaurants than ever are forgoing industrialized suds in favor of artisanal -- read: richer, less fizzy -- beer.
Craftsman, a 13-year-old microbrewery situated in a business park in Pasadena, has doubled its output in the last year alone -- all from its nondescript headquarters in a mini-maze of one-story edifices. There, marked by a beer keg and a 1946 Studebaker truck, operates the three-employee company that hopes to capitalize on a newfound beer awareness in Los Angeles, a city long stereotyped as a beer wasteland overrun by the "big three" -- Anheuser-Busch, the Coors Brewing Co. and the Miller Brewing Co. Angelenos pride themselves on being ahead of the curve, yet the microbrew explosion of the last 15 to 20 years was a trend that seemingly passed by L.A.
"There was a big pop in the '80s with microbrewers," says Sang Yoon, who presides over Santa's Monica's Father's Office. "Then there was a lot of consolidation, and a lot of people failed, and there wasn't enough product in L.A. for people to build a business around. The trend came and left L.A. before it became a restaurant or bar trend here, even as places in the Pacific Northwest were doing fine. It didn't stick here."
