Brew Rebellion

No Longer In Business

Visited February 22, 2014.

I had just gotten back into town and was still sick but since we decided to BBQ and stay local I figured why not sneak a quick brewery trip in. It turned out to not be all that quick as Yucaipa is about a 40 minute drive from Riverside. Live and learn I guess, or at least check the map before heading out. They’re basically in a residential neighborhood and behind a liquor store. There is a sign on the north side of the cinder block wall but you can’t see that if you’re heading north on California St, so look for the big Bud Light banner on the side of the liquor store and drive behind it. The tacos looked good in that liquor store/deli FYI.

These guys are homebrewers. Nothing more, nothing less. Seriously. They ferment everything in 5 gallon plastic buckets that say Deluxe Fermenter on them. Their "bottling line" is a 2x10 propped up on some 2x4s with a piece of pegboard connected on one side. On top of the 2x10 there are two bench cappers and attached to the pegboard is some tubing and connectors for pumping the beer (probably from kegs) into the bottles that they’re capping by hand. The kettles are a couple of 50 gallon stainless steel kettles that they squeeze a lot of beer through (they use two boil kettles). There is equipment laying around that says MoreBeer on it as well. Very (very) amateur.

All that said I was expecting the worst. I had heard some really bad things about these guys but interestingly enough the beer was better than some of the homebrewers with a license to sell their garage-fermented beer. If I had to guess I’d say that because they’re fermenting everything in 5 gallon buckets (while using the half assed ferment-it-in-a-fridge-because-that-will-maintain-the-temperature-as-well-as-a-proper-glycol-system method) the heat generated is low enough that they actually DO have some control over the fermentation. Now, I’m not saying that the beer was amazing, because it wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination, but most of it was at least approaching drinkable. The berry beer was the best. The imperial red was probably the worst.

Being a small brewery they have no choice but to be very friendly, and they were. It was kind of sad though that beerjames and I were the only two customers in the place. Can’t say that I’m excited to ever return but they do have a chili cookoff coming up and I do want to get to Palm Springs so I might stop back in at some point.

On the subject of pricing: they’re doing the typical, which is charging $20 for a specialty bottle. Not surprisingly they don’t have a lot of accounts. Flights aren’t exactly cheap either but they weren’t $20.