Santa Barbara — DARK, chocolaty porter made the nearly forgotten 19th century way, by blending new and aged beers. Summery pale ale with a note of buckwheat honey. Belgian-style wheat beer spiked with lemongrass.
Thanks to a small but dedicated group of craft brewers, serious beer is making news in Santa Barbara County.
Two new brewpubs opened here on the same day last month, making a total of seven places, most of them recent arrivals, where you can taste fresh local beer in Santa Barbara County.
That's quite a few breweries for a place this size. Are we talking serious beer in wine country?
We sure are. Here's a dirty little secret: Beer is the everyday drink of winemakers. There's even a saying, "It takes a lot of beer to make wine."
The whole country is enjoying a craft beer renaissance, no question, but it's not equally distributed. Local breweries are commonplace in Northern California, and there are a fair number in San Diego County, which has a dozen breweries on top of a score of brewpubs. Los Angeles County lags behind, especially given its larger population.
Most Santa Barbara breweries are brewpub-size operations that make small seven-barrel (about 108-gallon) to 15-barrel (about 230-gallon) batches. As a result, most do not bottle their beer, though they will sell you a "growler" -- a half-gallon jug -- to go. Some places give a discount on your next half-gallon if you bring in an empty growler.
The only moderately big operation is the well-known Firestone Walker Brewing, which distributes bottled beer throughout Central and Southern California. (Bowing to local custom, it also sells growlers at its Buellton taproom.) Nevertheless, a couple of the smaller fry -- Telegraph Brewing and Island Brewing -- bottle their beer for sale in local liquor stores, and their brews show up on Central Coast restaurant beer lists.
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Aged in wooden barrels
THE wine country milieu seems to color Santa Barbara beer. Three of the breweries -- Telegraph, Hollister and Walker Firestone -- age or even ferment some of their beer in wooden barrels. Most of the brewers say their beer is designed, like wine, to go with food. Typically, Santa Barbara's brewers (by contrast with certain outfits in San Diego, notably Stone Brewing) do not like a lot of hop bitterness in their beer, even when they're going for a strong hop aroma.
