ReturnSonoma County, California, is one of the United States’ best wine-producing regions, and it’s quickly becoming one of its best beer-brewing regions, too. Here Vinnie Cilurzo, owner and brewmaster at Russian River Brewing Company in Santa Rosa (one of the area’s best and most unconventional producers), talks to Food & Wine’s Megan Krigbaum about his craft.
Is it true that your parents have a winery? Did you make wine before becoming a brewer?
I grew up in Temecula, in southern California, where there’s a little wine country. There are now about 30 wineries with probably 1,200 acres of grapes. My parents planted the very first vineyard in Temecula in 1968 and started one of the first few wineries. So yes, I grew up growing grapes and making wine.
So what made you venture into beer?
When I was young, my parents had a winemaker who home-brewed, so I tasted home brew then. You know the old adage in the wine industry, “It takes a lot of great beer to make great wine”? It’s true. Then I went off to college in San Diego and started home-brewing with a couple of my roommates. And then my hobby got out of control. My first official job was at a brewery that I started when I was 23, Blind Pig Brewing Company.
It’s funny, one of the reasons I liked brewing more than winemaking was that with wine, you have to wait a year or two before you finish something. With beer, you can make an ale in about a month. At the same time, it’s kind of ironic that we do all of these barrel-aged beers at the brewery, some of which take from a year to two-and-a-half years to make. We’re using brettanomyces—a wild yeast that most winemakers and brewers despise, but we’re actually using it to our benefit—in the barrel-aged beers. We also have some microorganisms that we add, too, like lactobacillus and pediococcus. They add a natural sourness and acidity to the beer.
Do you still make beer at home, or only professionally?
I used to do a lot of experimenting with home-brewed small batches, to get a feel for what our Belgian beer yeast would do. Belgian yeasts are finicky; they’ve got a lot of personality and charm, but they can also be very difficult to deal with. But I don’t feel like I need to experiment anymore; now I can just brew a batch and put it in our brewpub. Our customers will tell us what they like and don’t like. This year, we didn’t have time to brew a beer we call Rejection—it’s our Valentine’s Day beer. We got a lot of flack for that, but that’s the great thing about the brewpub, that direct feedback.
Who chooses the crazy names for your beers?
My wife, Natalie, and I do. There’s Pliny the Elder, for instance, a Roman naturalist who died in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Pompeii, which was in 79 A.D. At some point, he came up with the botanical name for hops, so we thought it fitting to name our double India pale ale after him. His life was chronicled by his nephew Pliny the Younger, and that’s the name of our triple IPA.
Then there are all the “-tion” beers. It’s a tradition in Belgium to name strong golden ales something that’s kind of diabolical or silly and fun, so we came up with Damnation. That was followed by Redemption, Salvation and Temptation, and then it just kind of went from there. Typically, the religious ones are thought up by our friends who go to church or were raised Catholic or something. My friend Tomme Arthur—he’s the head brewer at Port Brewing in San Marcos—obviously had a good Catholic upbringing, because he’s always shooting names off to me.
If you choose to drink something other than your own beer, what do you drink?
For everyday drinking, I’ll have a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale or Orval from Belgium. It’s a beautiful, beautiful beer. In fact, I was just at the monastery where it’s made last week. It’s just a very special, magical place. There are ruins there from the 1100s-ruins from three monasteries ago—and a pretty nice brewery, too. Also, there’s a brewery in San Marcos that I really like, Lost Abbey, and one more on the East Coast called Allagash.
What’s the most disastrous thing that’s ever happened to you while you were brewing?
At Blind Pig, all of our equipment was old dairy equipment, and some of it was from a military base in Arizona. There were these things like giant soup kettles—you know, the ones that can hold a couple hundred gallons of soup in it for the troops, or whatever. Our mash ton was on this swivel, so that you could bring it down to empty it—it could hold 500 pounds of grain. On the side, there was this big peg that locked it and kept it from swiveling. I went to stand up on the crossbar, and the peg wasn’t in, and I dumped 500 pounds of grain and 200 gallons of 150-degree water mixed with malt all over the floor of the brewery. All the drains filled up. There was malt and water soaking into the rug on the office floor, it was going out the roll-up door and into the bathroom. There was this big festival going that day, and we’d closed the tasting room because we needed all of our staff at the festival, so I was the only one at the brewery. There I was. Alone. Cleaning up my mess.
So what’s next for Russian River Brewing Company?
We’re working on getting a new brewery. We’re brewing at 100 percent capacity year-round; we never slow down. We could be selling probably five or 10 times as much beer as we do now if we had more space. The integrity of our product and the quality is what’s most important, but I’d like to get a little bigger to be able to take care of some of the demand that’s out there.
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