Region & History

Where does the American Pale Ale come from? Its most famous ancestor was born in Chico, a university town at the northern end of the Sacramento Valley. There, on November 15, 1980, homebrewer Ken Grossman brewed the first batch of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, hopped with a variety called Cascade.

Hops have an older history here, though. In Mendocino County, L. F. Long established an experimental hop yard roughly two decades before 1891, and that year the town was officially named Hopland. By 1890, hops were already considered the area's most important farm product. Near Wheatland, north of Sacramento, D. P. Durst began growing hops in 1874. On August 3, 1913, a strike by harvest workers there escalated violently, leaving four people dead. From 1915 to 1922, California was the leading hop-growing state in the US, with acreage peaking in 1916.

Then came Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933, followed by decades dominated almost entirely by the mild lagers of big industrial breweries. Hop cultivation shifted north to the Pacific Northwest. The fact that Northern California started hopping boldly again traces back to a federal law passed in 1978: it legalized homebrewing, and homebrewers soon turned professional.

Sierra Nevada was followed in 1983 by Hopland Brewery, later renamed Mendocino Brewing Company. In 1989, Lost Coast opened in Eureka and Mad River in Blue Lake, both in Humboldt County. Tony Magee founded Lagunitas in 1993 in the town of the same name and relocated to Petaluma in 1994. Russian River began in 1997 as a project of the sparkling wine house Korbel with brewer Vinnie Cilurzo; since 2003, he and his wife Natalie have run the operation independently, and their brewpub opened in Santa Rosa in 2004. The brewery in Mendocino County, which moved to Ukiah in 1997, closed in 2018.

There's no protected designation of origin here—Pale Ale and IPA are open style names, free for anyone to use. What counts as "craft" is instead defined by an industry association: the Brewers Association sets the bar at no more than six million US barrels of annual output, around seven million hectoliters, and less than 25 percent ownership by a larger corporation. Sierra Nevada remains family-owned by the Grossmans. Lagunitas sold half to Heineken in 2015 and the rest on May 4, 2017, and no longer meets this definition.