So You Want to Start a Brewery?: The Lagunitas Story
Author: Tony Magee
Rating: â 3/5
Date Read: 2016/01/28
Pages: 224
I live dangerously close to Lagunitas. Itâs pretty easy to head up to Petaluma after work, grab a beer tasting and a huge pretzel, fill up a growler of whatever I liked the most, then bring that baby home on a short, lovely drive through vineyards. A lot of my friends live dangerously close as well, and the beer sanctuary has live music and lots of picnic tables and everyone is super friendly. An early afternoon visit can turn into a late night pretty easily there. Youâve been warned.
Of course, I also live dangerously close to Fieldwork, Russian River, Racer 5, Marin Brewing, and a number of local spots I donât want to name drop because I donât want you creepers driving around the Bay Area trying to find me. Itâs a pretty good life.
This is the story of Lagunitas, and itâs pretty interesting if you enjoy geeking out about adult beverages (which I do, thatâs one of my very favorite activities). Everythingâs in here: creating the recipe for the IPA, moving from West Marin to Petaluma, coming up with the copy on the labels, opening the sanctuary and starting the brewery in Chicago. And, in case you were wondering, the undercover investigation shutdown is well documented, and (as you would expect) not that exciting, because the fact that people in Northern California smoke weed is not exactly brand new information.
That said, this might be hard to follow for a casual reader whoâs only nominally interested in craft beer. Magee assumes some level of background knowledge, and a reader who doesnât know about the systemic issues around growth and distribution of craft beer in the US during the first waves of the scene will not understand how real the struggle was. Magee alludes to the fact that growth was a double-edged sword, but heâs humble enough to downplay it. It is important to know, though, that breweries would often grow too rapidly, but would still be unable to obtain bank funding to manage that growth, leading to a lot of closed breweries. If youâre interested in those sorts of issues, [b:The Audacity of Hops: The History of Americaâs Craft Beer Revolution|16115194|The Audacity of Hops The History of Americaâs Craft Beer Revolution|Tom Acitelli|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1352351487s/16115194.jpg|21932663] is more relevant (and, while youâre at it, read [b:Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition|7324357|Last Call The Rise and Fall of Prohibition|Daniel Okrent|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348621646s/7324357.jpg|8912086], which does a great job of explaining why Americansâ relationship with booze is so wonky to begin with, as well as how the big breweries got to be so big in the first place).
