A love of beer transformed Jack McAuliffe\u2019s life, and likely yours too. In the 1960s, while serving in the navy in Scotland, McAuliffe cultivated a taste for British ales, especially porters and stouts. Back in California he began homebrewing, his hobby kindling a then-outlandish notion: Why not open a brewery?<\/p>\n
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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nNo new American breweries had opened since Prohibition, and the 1970s brought closures and light lagers. McAuliffe saw not insurmountable hurdles but rather an opportunity to brew against the grain. In 1976, he partnered with Jane Zimmerman and Suzy Stern, pooled together a few thousand bucks, rented a shabby Sonoma, Calif., warehouse, and transformed former dairy equipment and 55-gallon Coca-Cola syrup drums into New Albion Brewing Company<\/a>.<\/p>\n It became proof that a pint-size brewery\u2014and outsize idea\u2014could chart a flavorful new course for American beer. New Albion only produced its porter, stout, and pale ale for a half decade, closing in 1982, but the brewery\u2019s resourcefulness, rule-breaking verve, and impactful ingredient choices remain bedrock principles of modern craft brewing.<\/p>\n \u201cJack was truly an American original,\u201d says Jim Koch, founder and chief executive officer of Boston Beer Company<\/a>, which began producing Samuel Adams Boston Lager in 1984. \u201cBefore him, starting a brewery from scratch was thought impossible. After him, 10,000 people have done it.\u201d<\/p>\n McAuliffe, who died in July at age 80, created a lasting road map to opening a craft brewery, proving that a basement passion could become a viable profession. \u201cHe showed a path from homebrewing to commercial brewing,\u201d says Ken Grossman, who toured New Albion in the late 1970s prior to opening Sierra Nevada Brewing<\/a> in Chico, Calif., in 1980.\u00a0<\/p>\n New Albion\u2019s embrace of floral, piney, and grapefruit-like Cascade hops, a novel American cultivar disregarded by industrial lager brewers, helped \u201copen the floodgates of hoppy, aromatic, bitter, but also very flavorful styles of beer,\u201d Grossman says. Cascade hops took a starring role in Sierra Nevada\u2019s landmark Pale Ale, first brewed in 1980 and still a standard-bearer today.\u00a0<\/p>\n New Albion\u2019s past created a precedent for the present. The brewery repurposed a former agricultural warehouse on Sonoma\u2019s outskirts, and adaptive reuse of former factories, churches, banks, schools, and more remains at craft brewing\u2019s brick-and-mortar core. After New Albion shut down, the founders of Hopland Brewery (later Mendocino Brewing Company) purchased the equipment to create California\u2019s first brewpub. So began a long lineage of craft breweries buying old tanks and brew kettles to ferment fresh new recipes, showing no creative end to what\u2019s feasible with malt, hops, yeast, and a desire to upend matters of taste.\u00a0<\/p>\n There\u2019s one last lesson to learn from McAuliffe. Craft brewing\u2019s founders\u2019 circle includes no lack of iconoclasts, self-promoters, fermentation savants, and contrarians. McAuliffe set a status quo-smashing standard. Maureen Ogle<\/a>, historian and author of Ambitious Brew<\/em><\/a>, has fond memories of sharing cold beers and warm conversations with McAuliffe.<\/p>\n \u201cI roared with laughter at Jack\u2019s razor-sharp takedown of this, that, and the other thing,\u201d Ogle says. \u201cHe did not suffer fools gladly, if at all. And to the end, Jack was Jack: intelligent, a wicked ability to build anything, socially awkward, mostly bored by people, oozing sarcasm. Hilarious. And according to him, everything was a Communist plot. He was a joy to know.\u201d<\/p>\n To celebrate the life and legacy of McAuliffe and New Albion, we have a simple suggestion: Grab some friends and go tip back pints at a local craft brewery. Hold tight what you hold dear.<\/p>\n