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I'm James Beckwith president
and CEO of Five Star bank.
As a community bank we
believe that open dialogue
about the issues affecting
our region is vitally
important.
From the economy,
to the environment to social
issues we look forward to
the conversations and hope
you'll join in.
♪
As the Sacramento region
continues its rediscovery
of our agricultural heritage,
entrepreneurs are creating
products that connect today's
taste with yesterday's
traditions.
Nowhere is that more true
than with beer.
Sacramento was once known
as the Milwaukee of the west,
with the largest brewery
west of the Mississippi.
One brewer Captain
Frank Ruhstaller
learned his trade
at the various breweries
and eventually owned
City Brewery.
Now entrepreneur J-E Paino
has brought that tradition
back with Ruhstaller Brewery.
Ruhstaller is one of the
great local brews putting
Sacramento back
on the beer map.
He's joined today
by Sean McNamara, a local farmer
whose hops give Ruhstaller
its unique flavor.
So gentleman what is
farm to pint?
>> You know for our general
impression of beer is that
beer always has
to be the same.
If you have a Budweiser
say a Bud light in 1985
it's gonna taste the same
as 1995 as in 2005.
But these products are using
natural ingredients and in
almost every other category
of food if you think wine or
cheese or vegetables you
you expect some variation
based on the ingredients.
If the cow eats
some place different
his beef or his milk
is going to taste different.
The wine,
if the grapes are grown
on one side of the mountain
verses another they're
gonna taste different.
And so farm to pint says
it's not just about a
factory where the beer is
brewed but it's actually -
that brewery is a farm.
And we're starting with
natural ingredients and then
we use and actually try to
express those in that
pint glass.
And so it's a partnership.
It's a partnership between
farmer and brewer to make a
beer that is surprising,
is an expression of region,
is unique and distinctive
and is kind of an
experience,
it's not just a beverage
that we need to survive but
it's actually an experience.
>> Anything to add to that,
Sean?
>>For me it's a process of
reaching out to the consumer
and educating them on the
hops in one corner of my
small field will taste
different than the hops in
the other corner
of my small field.
>>Really?
Yeah, absolutely.
And they'll smell different
to me within the same row
and that will be represented
in the bottle
in the end product.
I didn't know that
before I started growing
hops and it was
a revelation to me.
So that embodies
farm to pint for me.
>> So we have some hops here
right?
Uh huh.
>> Tell me what you can tell
about those hops
from smelling them.
They are a bittering hop.
There are aromatic varieties
and bittering varieties
I grow a couple of each.
These are definitely bitter
so they have a high acid content
it's something you'd see
in your IPA's,
your more hoppy beers.
The beer where we might
sample today is more aromatic
because the lines share
of the hops were of
an aromatic variety.
What else?
They've been sitting in J's
cooler for about a year.
We picked..nah
I won't tell you that.
>> No, go on, go on.
Well we picked these two
almost three years ago
at the beginning of kind of
our thinking and really kind of
digging into the heritage
of Ruhstaller and these hops
were actually,
we picked these me and my
two business partners picked
them at Julie Signorotti's
house down in Elk Grove.
And she had thirteen rhy zones
that she had as landscaping.
And those rhy zones she had
picked from her father's ranch
And George and Virginia
Signorotti's hop ranch
in Slough House,
which if you drive out
Highway 16 towards Amador,
Davis farms is on the North
side of the street
and on the South side
are these two wooden silos,
they're actually hop kilns,
and that was the last commercial
hop ranch in California.
And so these are
actually quite historic,
these are California common hops
which is the traditional hop
that made Sacramento really
kind of the epic center
of the hop growing region
of the world.
>> Well,
let's go back to that history,
give us kind of a sense
of how Sacramento got to be
the Milwaukee of the west
and then what happened?
well what happened was
the government came
and took the best thing
Sacramento had,
killed it and replaced it
with itself, prohibition.
So what happened is easy,
how we became it is almost,
is a better story.
>> Well come on with it.
It's really kind of what
we naturally were, you know,
we had hops
and barley grew like weeds.
I mean this naturally grew
along the river beds
of the American River,
river banks of the
American River.
We had a great source
of water,
being the American River
flowing out of the Sierra's
so it was filtered through
the bedrock
all the way down.
As opposed to the Sacramento
River which was full of soap
and sand.
We were Germans,
Austrians and Swiss
so we knew what to do
with these three ingredients,
make beer.
We could easily load barrels of
beer on a barge and it would
float out to sea,
basically downhill.
Down the Sacramento River
on the Delta and then
the train ended here.
The transcontinental railroad
ended in Sacramento
so now we could ship
and distribute beer even farther
And then when the
refrigerator rail car came
it just blew Sacramento up.
Because now we uniquely were
positioned on the entire
west coast to harvest and
store ice in the wintertime,
use it to brew and distribute
fresh beer all
throughout the summer.
And there was no other city
on the entire west coast
that had that trifecta
all those attributes
at the same time.
>> And you tell the story
that the local brewers in
the city at one point
came together and that's how
we really had
the largest brewery.
Well and they kind of skated
to where the puck was.
They saw the opportunity
with the refrigerator rail car
and the railroad
with the hops and the water,
and they also realized that
beer making is kind of
an economies of scale.
You mentioned that Ruhstaller
had a brewery
called City Brewery
well, that was the brewery
when he first moved
to Sacramento he got a job
as a delivery guy,
worked his way up to foreman
ended up buying the brewery
and that was in the 1870's
and then in the 1880's or
late 1870's a lot of the
breweries in town one being
Ruh Staller's City Brewery
and several others.
These guys each had
their own malt house,
bottle washer and keg
cleaning equipment and they
said you know
if we joined forces
if we formed basically today
we would call it a cooperative,
we can be better off.
And so they did that and
that brewery was called
Buffalo Brewery.
And that's on the land
that now the Sacramento Bee
is located on 21st and Q.
Correct.
Those three city blocks
where the Sacramento Bee is
was formally the Buffalo Brewery
and that was Ed Carol
in his book says
that's the largest
brewing facility
west of the
Mississippi River.
Not a big deal but when you
think and you look at a map
and you say St. Louis
home of Anheuser Busch
is west of the Mississippi
River not east west,
you realize we had a larger
facility than anything
even Anheuser Busch did,
unbelievable.
Unbelievable and we didn't
really have to strive for it.
We didn't have to steal for it
we just were natural,
it was natural.
It was what we were.
We were Germans and Austrians
we had the ingredients
we could naturally
distribute it.
>> And doesn't that go a lot
to something you talk about,
hey we've got some
good stuff here it's not about
trying to be something from
someplace else.
Exactly,
well Charlie Munger the co-CEO
of Berkshire Hathaway
mid-westerner,
he said in his biography
that he left Omaha
when he was a young man
and went to Pasadena, California
believe it or not.
And the reason he made the move
was he said Pasadena at the time
was a place you could go to
to become somebody
not a place you had
to be somebody to go to.
And Sacramento was that way,
that's all these it's
why Frank Ruhstaller came here
and it's why people still
come here including myself.
And it's a place you can go
to become somebody.
It's a place where you can go
to move the needle;
it still hasn't reached
its full potential.
And part of it is the resources
we have are so abundant,
they're just everywhere
we just have to kind of
look for them
and celebrate them.
>> Right,
and talk about
the abundant resources,
talk about how one corner of
your field the hops
will be different
than on the other
end of your field,
it almost sounds no offense,
like the way that wine people
talk about wine.
And I mean do people have
a misimpression about beer?
>> I wouldn't say
it's a misimpression,
they lack - we all lack
the understanding;
we haven't been
exposed to it yet.
And per your question, beer,
hops do have the same sense
of terroir that wine do.
I can do a side by side
of the same beer,
same ingredient,
same batch size,
same timing,
same everything and hops
that are from ninety miles apart
and the beers, the same beers
will taste completely different.
And Ruhstaller's doing this
and you can go to your
grocery store and do the
side by side like I do
at home and it's fascinating.
The land I grow on is
an alluvial plain so
for thousands of years
our waterway Puter Creek flooded
into this plain silting it up
creating this hot bed
of nutrients.
And it's natural that I have
a diverse growing field,
growing climate,
growing conditions.
And that will change
year after year
because the 364 days
between one harvest
and another is gonna be
different.
The weather's
gonna be different,
what Sean does or doesn't do
is gonna be different.
And you know,
the Germans and English,
our impression of beer
really comes from the Germans
and the English right.
And their ideal of perfection
is consistency you know.
Think of a German car
they gotta make the distance
between two parts always has
to be the same consistent.
The English
when it comes to accounting
and politics,
consistent generationally.
And that comes out
in their liquid of choice. beer.
Good beer is the same
year after year after year.
But the French,
perfection to them
is variation and expressing,
different moments in time
and that comes out
in their beverage of choice,
wine.
You know the Belgium's
kind of take that
celebration of variation,
romance and put it
in their beer.
>> So which one most
influences you?
Well I think probably
more the French,
the romantic,
celebrating kind of
a moment in time.
You know my family grows grapes
so I've seen what Sean says.
You know a grape on a ten
or fifteen feet apart
will taste different,
you know just because one's,
there's a five foot
elevation change,
one gets five more minutes
of sun every day,
I mean it matters,
that connection between
you know, land, God, Farmer,
there's a connection there
that is worth celebrating.
And you know Vintners and
grape growers work hard
to make great products
and I think that's kind of what
Darrell Corti maybe
we'll talk a little bit
about that, challenged us too.
And I think that's why
Ruhstaller came here
And I think
that's what Sacramento was about
this partnership between
between farmer..
>> What did Corti
challenge you on?
Well what he said to us
was we had sold a fair amount
of beer with him and
so through his store.
>>Corti Brother's in East Sac.
Corti Brother's in East Sac
and so I hadn't met Darrell
although I had heard about him
and I wanted to just kind of
thank him and so
I went to Rick Mindermann
who's his kind of right hand man
Rick said would you like to talk
to Darrell and I said,
I didn't really know
what to say so I said yes.
I went up to Darrell
and said thank you,
you guys have been great
and supportive.
And Darrell said well
you guys are the guys
with the Ruhstaller
on the bottle
and I said yes sir.
You say Sacramento
on the bottle,
I said yes sir.
And he said well
until you are growing local hops
you don't deserve
either one of those names.
>> Wow. Wow!
And it was shortly thereafter
where..
>> How'd you, before you go on,
how'd you react to that?
How'd that feel?
Well I was expecting..
>>Left with your tail
between your legs!
Yeah, I was expecting kind of
a big pat on my back,
ah your beer's great,
you guys are doing
a great job
thanks for bringing in
you know,
making Sacramento proud again
in the beer world.
But you know,
it was a challenge,
and one of the things that
I've learned with Darrell
that makes him great
is he's never satisfied,
that he's always
pushing the envelope
and that's why he's respected
throughout the world as,
you know as a grocer
but as a world renown grocer
who goes out and is always
looking for new products
and trying to push the envelope
but he doesn't do that
in an unnatural way,
he does it in a very well
let's celebrate the best things
from these regions
of the world.
And he knew that hops
was one of the best things
we had and it was a challenge.
And I like challenges,
so does someone else
at the table,
well I think all three of us
may like challenges!
>> This is true, this is true.
Sean I wanted to ask you,
when and this predates you
but when I was growing up
here in the seventies,
we did everything
we could in this town,
in this whole region
to run away from
our agricultural heritage.
If there was a cornfield
somewhere we wanted to put
concrete over the top of it
you know,
'cause we didn't wanna be
known as a "cow town"
and now it's like we're
the epicenter of this
farm to table movement
that you go to other places
in the United States
and they're trying
to copy this region.
What's it like to be at the
forefront of sort of what
was so far out of style
is now back in,
it's kind of like Sinatra
coming back or actually
I shouldn't say that.
Who should I say?
It'd be like
Green Day coming back!
>>Ray Bands >>Ray Bands!
>> Well to be fair I did the
same thing you guys did,
I tried to run away
for a little bit,
I lived on a family farm
for twenty five years and spent
eight years out on the east
coast and doing my own thing
elsewhere,
until I felt the draw
of the land on me
and made my way back.
It feels great to be
at the forefront of this
because for some weird reason
farming is cool again
I think it might be a little bit
stylized or romanticized
because there are many
uncool aspects of farming.
>>It's hard work.
It's hard work, it's stressful,
you know there's a bottom line
to keep up and a loan
to pay off every year.
But I think people
more and more
are seeking a connection
to the land
and there certainly is
connection in land too.
See the process year after year
of things growing
see the actual fruits of
one's labor is powerful.
>> What do you love about it?
Oh, not the hours.
I love the consistency
of plants, to be honest.
I love,
hops are incredibly volatile
they need lots of love and care
and management and oversight
but they are consistent,
they will come up
year after year.
They will grow eighteen feet
year after year
they will die in the fall
and come back in the spring.
And that's just one crop
but I'm surrounded by
two hundred crops all around me
that are doing the same thing.
They have their own timing,
their own beauty,
their own nature and
they are consistent in that,
whereas everything else
in our lives is seemingly
inconsistent.
>>Well,
I'm consistent because
whenever I have folks
on the show
and they have anything
to do with food or wine
we have to taste some of it.
And so I know that we've
got a few things here.
And you've got a bottle
opener on you?
I've got a bottle opener.
>> Alright,
well let's go for it
and while J-E is doing that,
in terms of what did you do
before you came back?
What were you doing when you
went far away?
I was in school for four years
studying history and
urban planning of all things.
>>Really?
Which might be a side
conversation but I think
there's some urban planning
in rural life.
And then I worked
in construction for a year
or two years in Baltimore.
And then I came back here
to continue working
as a design building
and contractor.
>> Okay, alright.
So we've got this,
what is this one called?
This is called Hop Sac.
>> Hop Sac.
It's a 2012 Vintage,
and we call this one
Blue Heron Hop Yard.
>>And Blue Heron is the name
of Sean's farm.
Yes.
>> Okay.
And this is capturing
Sean's hops on a moment
of time.
We picked these on a Friday
morning in August at 5:30
in the morning..?
Yep. We put the call out
the night before on Facebook
and fifteen volunteers showed up
and then we..
>> The rest is magic.
The rest is magic.
>> Alright cheers,
cheers gentleman.
Oh that's good.
That is really good.
Wow.
It must give you a lot
of pride when somebody
tastes your beer
for the first time
and they go
"man, that is really something!"
It does. I mean,
this Ruhstaller 2.0 if you will
is really not,
you know I've chosen because
somebody had to sort of stand up
on a table and talk
on its behalf but there's
an entire team behind it,
starting with Charlie Bamforth
at UC Davis.
>> Now this guy is like the pope
of beer or something?
No, no the Pope of Foam.
>> The Pope of Foam!
The Pope of Foam.
And he's also considered
the brew master general
by Playboy magazine
October of 2010,
I've verified that.
>> That's not a bad title
to have.
Not a bad title to have,
so he's you know UC Davis
is known for its viticulture
and all that and for its wine
program but actually
Charlie is the most renown
brew master in the United States
for sure
>> And we've got him
here locally?
And he's here locally,
so we've lost the title
of kind of beer capitol
of the west coast but we're
the beer educational capitol
of the United States easy.
>>Where is the beer capitol
of the west coast now?
Portland.
>> Portland.
San Diego is probably giving
Portland a run for its money.
Now unlike a number of breweries
you don't have
a physical location right.
>> Not yet.
>> Not yet,
okay is that in the future?
It's a,
we talk about it every
single day and we look at
physical structures
every single day.
But I wanna go back,
you mentioned pride.
You know so Charlie is,
you know he's been a great
advisor he helped us kind of
put the brewing team together.
We have a great
distributor partner
that helps move the product,
gives us a lot of Tony's
Fine Foods also a local
company here that gives us a
lot of latitude and freedom
to be partners with them and
more partners our retailers.
And in our restaurants so
it's those all those guys
kind of help enable us to do
it but the real success in
this whole thing Scott,
for me what gives me and I
haven't yet reached it yet,
is for someone from
Sacramento to take one of
these bottles and take it
down to LA or Portland
or San Diego to their buddies
and say hey I want you
to try my beer.
And when they say my beer
they don't mean J-E's beer
they mean Sacramento's beer.
>>That's right.
>> This is the beer that
really embodies
the ethos of Sacramento.
>> Well actually let's talk
about that for a second
because one of the other
things and I don't know that
it applies to this or not.
But in terms of it
being my beer,
you all have involved a lot
of people in this and so for
instance I read that
Pride Industries,
which helps gives jobs
and training to the disabled,
that you all struck
a partnership with them and
they're actually responsible
at least on some of your
products in wrapping these.
They do it all.
>>They do it all?
On this one too?
On that one too, yeah.
When we first came out
with a beer we,
the purpose for the burlap
is it's really kind of a nod
and homage to the farmer.
Because if you go out to
the Singorotti Ranch in Slough
House there's burlap
everywhere.
Because as they pick the
hops off the vine they would
pack them into burlap sacks
because the hops were still
wet and they needed to breath.
So when we first came out
and in bottles we did maybe
ten cases with burlap,
with a little sliver
of burlap on the top
and ten without.
And we waited to see
what would happen,
and it was me and my buddies
that did the burlap.
Well the rest of the grocery
stores we'd sent the bottles
that had the burlap on them
they called back a lot
faster so we said oh,
oh we have a great thing
but we got a problem.
>> Right.
>> Because we'll be
wrapping these 'til..
>> Until the cows come home!
Until the cows come home,
right.
And so fortunately one of my
friends recommended Pride
and we brought a bottle to
them up in Roseville their
office and said is this
something you'd be
interested in doing and keep
willing to do.
And they jumped on it,
and I've never seen folks
have more fun doing something.
Because the bottles are full
of beer okay,
you have to fill the bottle.
So they're acting like
they're drinking and having
a blast while they're working.
>> So I gotta ask you a
question because it doesn't
surprise me that Pride
because Mike Ziegler is so
entrepreneur that he would
be into something like this.
So how many cases did he
scratch off the top and say
you gotta deliver for him
for this deal?
Well I don't wanna say
that on air Scott, but I'll
tell you later on!
>> We'll talk off air,
we'll talk off air!
Okay, so what's next?
What else is going on?
Just growing more hops?
Is there anything else
you wanna experiment with?
J-E and I were talking
and farmers will grow anything
you know?
I could do that!
So what else would you like
to grow that you haven't
done yet?
A priority for me is to
cultivate and propagate the
original hops that grew here.
So the California common
hops as they were called,
sometimes referred to
as the California clusters.
I've gotta find those,
I don't think there are many
around still and start
building up root systems and
harvesting roots so I can
plant in mass.
>> We will look forward to
that.
In our final minute,
the question that everybody
at home wants to know that's
watching this is this: when
you're not drinking
Ruhstaller okay?
What do you drink?
What do you drink?
So come on guys fess up.
I asked Margaret Mondovi
this question and she was
willing to go for it.
Okay.
>> So you guys have
to step up now.
>> Sierra Nevada.
About every Sierra Nevada beer,
local brew in town Berryessa
Brewing there's usually a
growler of theirs.
I try to support local
as much as possible and I think
Sierra Nevada is a figure
head for brewing especially
in our region and throughout
the country.
>> All right. J-E?
Well last night I had wine,
and over the weekend
I actually had a Miller Lite
so you know that's just
kinda going back.
>> You know what;
it's nice to know you're a
man of the people okay.
So, it's yeah.
>> And there you go.
Well gentleman thank you
very much,
much success to you both and
we'll look forward to
drinking more.
Well that's our show and
thanks to our guests and
thanks to you for watching
Studio Sacramento.
I'm Scott Syphax see you
next time right here on
KVIE.
♪
I'm James Beckwith
president and CEO of Five
Star bank.
As a community bank we
believe that open dialogue
about the issues affecting
our region is vitally
important.
From the economy,
to the environment to social
issues we look forward to
the conversations and hope
you'll join in.