We made another trip on the Spyder from Rolling Hills Casino RV Park to Chico. This time our destination  was Sierra Nevada Brewery. We had a reservation for the 2pm brewery tour. We arrived early and spent some time in the gift shop and looking at old photos and equipment upstairs in what they call “The Big Room.”

The tour began with a short video presentation and the guide told us some of the history of the company while we sipped a two-ounce taster of pale ale. The founder of the company, Ken Grossman, learned about home brewing when he was a kid growing up in southern California. The father of one of his friends was a home brewer.

After taking a bicycle tour in northern California, Ken decided to move to Chico. He opened a home brew supply store there. He sold it after a couple of years and decided to build his own brewery. This is interesting to think about, given the state of the beer industry at the time. Before Prohibition in 1920, small breweries were common – there were reported to be over 4,000 breweries in America. After Prohibition – from 1933 to 1978 – there were 42 breweries in America. There weren’t any small scale commercial breweries.

For Ken Grossman, the first challenge was finding equipment that would allow him to brew on a commercially viable scale, but not the large scale of existing breweries. He ended up finding used dairy equipment and made his own 10-barrel brew system. He started his new venture in the fall of 1980. Another challenge was finding the ingredients he needed in small quantities. He drove to Yakima, Washington and bought whole hop cones from growers, returning with 100 pounds.

His first beer was a stout – the recipe has stayed the same for decades. Then he experimented until he perfected a hop forward pale ale – the signature beer of Sierra Nevada Brewing. He would load cases of the beer in his car and peddle it to local bars and clubs. He would collect the empty bottles and re-use them.

At first, 90% of the people that tried his pale ale didn’t like it. Hop forward beer is an acquired taste and at that time, light lagers were popular. But the 10% that liked the pale ale really liked it and a loyal following was born. His beer started to become known in the San Francisco Bay area. He met a guy that worked for Safeway – he liked the beer and wanted to get it in the store.

Ken knew he would have to ramp up production if he would ever be able to sell in grocery stores. He found a used 100-barrel copper brewing system for sale in Germany for the price of scrap metal. The catch was – he had to go to Germany to disassemble it and ship back to California.

In 1987, he bought property on 20th Street in Chico to build a brewery to house the 100-barrel system. This is the brewery we visited. His 100-barrel system is still there, but today he has much larger equipment.

Sierra Nevada was at the sharp end of the micro-brew movement and today they are one of the largest craft brewers in the country. The tour took us through the production area and started in a hop storage room. The aroma was incredible – large quantities of whole hops – predominately cascade and magnum hops with their piney-citrusy scent.

Many of the tuns – the vats where the beer is processed in various stages of brewing – extend 20 feet into the ground below the floor.

Stainless lauter tun

The lauter tun is where the mash is separated from the wort – the liquid full of sugars and flavors from the grain mash. We tasted samples of the wort. Because the sugars haven’t been fermented and converted to alcohol, the wort is sweet and tastes like cereal.

Copper fermenter tun

The wort is pumped to the fermenter where yeast is introduced and hops are added. The yeast consumes the sugars converting them to alcohol and carbon dioxide (CO2). The yeast eventually becomes spent when the alcohol and CO2 levels are high enough to slow or stop fermentation.

The fermentation for most of their beers takes seven days. It takes another seven days to clarify the beer and flavor it with more hops. They have two bottling lines that are mirror images of each other – we were told that each line caps about 625 bottles per minute – more than a million bottles per day. They also have a smaller canning operation and a keg line.

Bottling line

The other bottling line

The company is very green with more than 10,700 solar panels producing 1.5 megawatts of electricity. They recycle and haul the spent mash to farms for use as feed.

We finished the tour with a flight of seven tasters. We started with the lightest style and worked our way up to Torpedo IPA and finished with Hoptimum – an Imperial IPA.

As we exited the tasting bar, we had company waiting for us. Darrell and Lorna Bartlett met up with us. Lorna follows this blog and also Donna’s blog. They full-time in a Roadtrek 210 – a 21-foot class B RV. We went to the Sierra Nevada Taproom for another beer and food. We enjoyed talking with them and had pretzels with beer cheese and Donna also ordered lamb meatballs.

Darrell and Lorna own a house in Chico, but they’ve been on the road since December. They plan to sell the house and continue their travels. Being smaller and more maneuverable than us, they rarely book ahead and just go with the flow.

The ride back to Corning was hot – the temperature topped out at 102 degrees yesterday. Today the forecast calls for more of the same. I’ll roast a whole chicken on the Traeger for lunch – we were too spent from the heat to grill last night – so we’ll have that in the refrigerator for our travels. Then I’ll get the trailer packed. Tomorrow I’ll load the Spyder, dump and flush our tanks and we hope to hit the road fairly early to beat the heat.

Our plan is to go to Klamath Falls, Oregon. I’ll get fuel there – the diesel fuel price in Oregon is more than 40 cents less per gallon than California. Then we’ll find a place to boondock. We’ll have two nights out before we check in at Sun River near Bend, Oregon.