EDIBLE NOTABLES

EDIBLE NOTABLES BETTER TOGETHER

Why collaboration and not competition is the mantra of local craft breweries

BY LILY STOICHEFF

Celebration: Brewers Tim Clifford and J.C. Hill (bottom right) and their crews from Sante Adairius and Alvarado Street breweries toast the second batch of their collaboration beer, 38 Miles.

Cold hands wrapped around hot mugs of coffee as brewers from 12 craft breweries from Santa Cruz, Monterey and San Benito counties crowded around the towering steel mash tuns and fermenters at Discretion Brewing in Soquel. Smiles easily thawed the chill as malted grain was crushed, water boiled, temperatures tracked. ese beer folks hadn’t seen each other in a while and were happy to take a rare break from their own breweries to work collectively to create a beer that would represent the Monterey Bay area.

Inspired by local waves and boardwalk treats like salt water taffy and candy apples, members of the new Monterey Bay Brewers Guild decided to make a salted caramel stout. Discretion hosted the event, Alec Stefansky from Uncommon Brewers offered homemade caramel, J.C. Hill from Alvarado Street Brewing contributed barrels to age it in and everyone lent a hand, enjoying the festive atmosphere and company of like minds. is collaboration brew was one of five made in the region to mark the San Francisco Brewers Guild’s creation of five new geo-

graphically defined chapters—San Francisco, East Bay, North Bay, South Bay and Santa Cruz/Monterey Bay. To celebrate, each of the new guilds created a beer to represent itself at the 2018 SF Beer Week opening gala in February. e gathering at Discretion was not the first time brewers in our area have come together there for a large collaboration brew. Last summer, eleven Santa Cruz County breweries and Venus Spirits cooperated on the “Brewers Unite for David” session IPA. Sales of the beer raised more than $10,000 for brewer David Purgason’s medical treatments after he suffered a serious work accident.

Despite increasing competition, the craft beer industry, seemingly tethered to its homebrewing roots, has embraced the spirit of cooperation, and breweries frequently and willingly share knowledge and equipment in a remarkably supportive environment. Collaboration brews—the result of two or more breweries working together to create, brew and release a beer together—are the drinkable manifestation of this fraternal spirit.

While large-scale collaborations allow brewers to share information, discuss process and equipment and learn from each other, one of the biggest benefits is just getting everyone together. “It seems like a pain to coordinate, but when people are here, it’s really fun to talk to all these brewery owners and brewers. We all like each other and are all so busy trying to run our own breweries that we don’t see each other that often,” says Dustin Vereker, co-owner of Discretion Brewing.

To Discretion’s head brewer Michael Demers, sharing knowledge and even ingredients is the industry norm. He says, “In a way, we have an ongoing collaboration, because I got calls today from two breweries and a distillery asking to borrow ingredients, and we do that too. ey say, ‘I’m short on this, do you have any extra?’ We’re doing that all the time.”

While the growing number of local breweries is competing for tap handles, customers and shelf space, it doesn’t yet appear to have damaged this sense of fellowship. Says Vereker, “So far it seems like we can continue to add new breweries and it’s okay. ere’s still a feeling of respect and that you can actually love your competitor.”

More craft breweries exist in America today than at any other time in history, and California—with more than 900—has the most. Like the rest of the state, the Monterey Bay area has seen a precipitous rise in craft brewing in the last 10 years, with at least 20 breweries now in operation and a couple more due to open this year.

Surprisingly, the impetus for the first collaboration beer wasn’t friendship—it was coincidence. In 2006, Santa Rosa’s Russian River Brewing and Boulder’s Avery Brewing realized they both had beers called Salvation. Rather than duke it out over naming rights, they blended their respective beers and Collaboration not Litigation Ale was born. Since then, the number of collaboration brews has skyrocketed nationally, and our area is no exception.

What is the allure of this process? Consumer popularity is certainly one factor. In an industry where the exclusivity of the product is almost as important to the consumer as taste, the desirability among craft beer aficionados for these rarer mind-melds is high. But according to local brewers, the true value of this process lies in the ability to nurture relationships, share knowledge and engender creativity while creating a product that is, ideally, greater than what each brewery could come up with on its own.

For head brewer Hill of Alvarado Street Brewery in Monterey, teaming up with the brewers of Capitola-based Sante Adairius Rustic Ales, whom he had long admired, was a “pinch me” moment. At Hill’s invitation, Sante Adairius and Alvarado made two beers together in 2016 and named them after the distance between the two breweries: 38 Miles, a hoppy, hazy IPA released in a can; and 64 Kilometers, a barrel-aged mixed fermentation saison. e Sante Adairius team joined the Alvarado brewers at their facility in Salinas for a full day of brewing—an experience that Hill feels solidified their friendship and made them want to brew a second batch of 38 Miles in 2017, to coincide with the release of 64 Kilometers. “Brewing is such a passion-driven industry. We all benefit from that synergy of putting our heads together and seeing what will happen,” says Hill. “It’s so cool to see how someone approaches a beer from inception to creation.” Business partners Tim Clifford and Adair Paterno of Sante Adairius have fond memories of that brew as well, which they say was born out of mutual respect for the others’ skills and a willingness to share information. “Trading ideas, sharing ideas, challenging each other based on those ideas—all of those are opportunities for growth,” says Clifford. Beer drinkers went nuts to try the brainchild of nationally acclaimed Sante Adairius and up-and-coming Alvarado, and 38 Miles sold out in a few hours. While both breweries were understandably pleased, they emphasize that the true measure of success is non-material.

“Marketing should never be the purpose. It’s an indirect effect, but we’ll never do one solely for that purpose,” says Hill, who has also collaborated with Santa Cruz’s Humble Sea Brewing Co. “Collaboration brews are a really personal experience.”

Clifford agrees. “e goal is to make something in which we learn collectively, and hopefully we make something in a Voltron kind of sense, bigger than each of ourselves. As long as that’s the intention, then it’s great.”

Paterno says that even as it has grown, craft beer is still the most collaborative industry she’s ever been involved in. “ere aren’t that many industries where people are willing to literally share their secrets with their competitors.”

She believes one reason for this is that craft breweries share a common foe—macrobreweries, the largest being Anheuser-Busch InBev, which owns more than 200 national and international brands including Budweiser, Corona and Michelob. “e smaller breweries have always banded against that, and that’s been common throughout our industry. It’s us against them,” says Hill.

As a result, craft brewing has become very “open book.” “Everything that we’ve done is something that I’ve learned from another brewery along the way. e reason we’re here is because of that collaborative nature. Bud and Miller have so much power. It’s easy to see why the little guys banded together,” he says.

Without the support and advice of Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing co-owners Emily omas and Chad Brill, Brewery Twenty Five in San Juan Bautista might have remained a twinkle in the eyes of owners Fran and Sean Fitzharris. Over the years the couple became good friends with omas and Brill, and eventually consulted with them about how to open a brewery of their own. When the time came for SCMB to upgrade its brewing system, it sold its used equipment to the Fitzharrises to help get Brewery Twenty Five off the ground.

“We had already decided that if and when we do a collaboration, it has to be with Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing,” says Fran. “In my experience, collaborations are either the celebration of a friendship or the launch of a future friendship. is one is definitely the celebration of a longtime friendship.”

For their collaboration, the two breweries decided to embark on a yeast-driven experiment, dividing a jointly brewed batch of Flanders red ale into four barrels. Each person added a different yeast of their choosing into one barrel, and waited, aging the beer for two years.

“e results were great,” says omas. “Each beer was unique and wonderful, and we were able to document the subtle and sometimes not so subtle nuances among the beers.” All self-proclaimed “dog people,” the four brewers gave their beers the names of their beloved pups—Max, Jake, Charlie and Pete.

In addition to celebrating a supportive friendship, releasing the beer with the established SCMB exposed Brewery Twenty Five to many new potential customers.

Looking back, omas says she believes brewing has always been a very cooperative industry. “We aren’t competitive with each other because our true competition is the monolithic beer producers and their intent to control independent craft brewers. For 13 years, I can’t remember a single time where a brewer didn’t share resources or information with SCMB. Likewise, I always want to pay it forward.”

Lily Stoicheff is an eater and writer living in Santa Cruz. A craft beer and fermentation hobbyist, her house is overflowing with jars of things that look gross but she swears are delicious.

EDIBLE NOTABLES CANNABIS MEETS CAPITALISM

Legalization has brought boom and bust for local artisan producers of edible marijuana products

BY WALLACE BAINE PHOTOGRAPHY BY REBECCA GOUREVITCH AND JAKE THOMAS

Maybe one day in the near or distant future, when Taylor Swift is running for president and California joins the United Nations, your marijuana dispensary will look a lot like your local Safeway, only with better in-store music.

Maybe then cannabis edibles will finally achieve full market penetration and you’ll be able to buy dosed versions of everything from breakfast cereal to crab dip, or choose between 36 varieties of pot brownies. But that paradise of consumer choice is not here yet. It did not suddenly materialize with the passage of Proposition 64 in 2016— which allowed for the legal use of marijuana for adults in California— nor with its implementation on New Year’s Day 2018.

If future growth in cannabis consumption is in food products— as opposed to smoking or vape products—then today we are witnessing a baby-steps stage in a market that may soon be unrecognizable. ere are edibles available now, but the quality and variety are necessarily limited by the brave new world of legalization. Everyone in the cannabis industry—growers, manufacturers, entrepreneurs, consumers—is learning about the emerging norms and standards where weed meets capitalism.

Today, you can buy, through licensed dispensaries, a number of cannabis-infused foods including chocolates, candies, cookies, gummies, juices and truffles. Many such products have been around for years, serving the medical marijuana market first established by Proposition 215 in 1996. But the new recreational market is much more heavily taxed and regulated than the medical market was. As a practical matter, that means many products available to medical users are no longer on the market. Others are still available, but more expensive.

“ere’s not a lot of things available,” says journalist Christopher Carr who has been chronicling the Santa Cruz cannabis industry on his KSCO radio show e Cannabis Connection. “e majority of edible operators are not licensed. Only the most successful and established companies were able to get that paperwork prior to January 1.”

One of those established companies is Santa Cruz-based Big Pete’s Treats, which makes and sells cannabis-infused cookies—chocolate chip, peanut butter, cinnamon sugar and lemon. According to CEO Pete Feurtado Jr. (son of the company’s namesake founder), Big Pete’s cookies are available in close to 200 outlets all over California.

Big Pete’s operates from a small industrial kitchen on the east side of Santa Cruz, a stone’s throw away from perpetually clogged Highway 1, with about a dozen employees including bakers, distributors and office personnel. Since January 1, business has been brisk, says Pete Jr. (aka “Little Pete”). “At the first of the year, orders came in so fast, we had to add a second shift.” e company’s ambition is to become something like the Famous Amos of the cannabis cookie business. Its creation story centers on Pete Feurtado Sr. and his early experiments in baking with weed back in 1979, when legalization was a distant dream. It was a couple of decades later, after the passage of Prop. 215, that Pete Sr. resharpened his baking skills and attended Oaksterdam University, the Oakland-based institution that calls itself “America’s first cannabis college.” Soon, he had perfected a recipe for cannabis-infused butter that is still the special sauce in Big Pete’s cookies.

But the company still had to figure out the dosing issue. Pete Jr. remembers that first attempt at making snickerdoodles with his dad’s infused butter. “at was the strongest batch of cookies we ever made,” he says. “We were watching a football game or something, and we all ate a cookie. Two hours later, we were all napping on the couch. We had no idea what the right dose was.” e body absorbs cannabis through digestion differently than it does through the lungs and, as a result, the psychoactive properties are also different. Typically, the high is slower to arrive and often lasts longer. In the new world of legal weed, edibles producers and consumers are having to learn about how to eat cannabis.

Big Pete’s Treats soon figured out the optimum dosage and now sells its mini cookies with 10 milligrams of THC per cookie, which Pete Jr. likens to smoking a single joint. (I tried one of Big Pete’s peanut butter cookies—only in the interests of professionalism, mind you— and found it packed a punch. Individuals will have different tolerances; some people won’t feel a blip at 10 mg, but my own constitution has now taught me not to have more than one in a single sitting.) us far, Big Pete’s is a success story in the cannabis edibles market, but many other would-be edibles producers are finding the new regulations, fees and taxes prohibitive. Soquel-based Friend in Cheeses Jam Co. has built a strong national brand in artisanal jams—favorite flavors include Salted Watermelon and Pisco Pear. In 2017, the company sold a cannabis-infused line called Toasted Jam Co. in about 100 dispensaries across the state. But the new taxes and regulations imposed by Prop. 64 have effectively pushed Toasted Jam off the market. To continue in the new recreational market, Friend in Cheeses jam maker Tabitha Stroup says her company would have to pay up to 10 times more in production costs for new security measures, kitchen retrofitting, insurance and certification.

Cannabis cooks: pg. 9, Pete Feurtado Jr. and Sr. of Big Pete’s Treats; pg. 10, Tabitha Stroup of Toasted Jam and Friend in Cheese Jam Cos.

“It closes a lot of doors for small producers like myself,” says Stroup, who added that she is interested in selling the Toasted Jam line to someone willing to commit the necessary capital investment. “But that doesn’t mean it can’t change and get better because I’m pretty sure this is the only instance in my lifetime that we’re witnessing a brand new industry in its infancy.”

“Lots and lots of good people who have done nothing wrong are not going to make it and that sucks,” says Santa Cruz attorney Ben Rice, who has been at the center of the legal thicket in the California cannabis movement. But Rice is optimistic that a wider and more diverse market in edibles will emerge in time. Governments are also learning, he says, about the right level of licensing, taxation and regulation needed to keep the black market at bay and allow entrepreneurs to flourish, while protecting the public. Legal weed is very much an unfinished experiment.

“ere will be more options for people as time goes by, and there will be more enthusiasm for those various goods,” says Rice, who sees legal weed’s current status as an uncertain period of experimentation and growing pains. “When people learn to use the appropriate amounts, they’re going to have a lot more fun.”

Wallace Baine was a columnist, critic and arts/culture writer for the Santa Cruz Sentinel for 26 years. He is the author of four books, and the founder and host of the annual Gail Rich Awards for artistic excellence in Santa Cruz County. He is not entirely unfamiliar with cannabis consumption.