Michael Kiser

This was around the time when I was in college, that hop farms started opening in Michigan, and people were setting up shop—the Michigan government was giving subsidies to growers to start hop farms. It actually seemed easier to me, at that point, to come up with a project concept, apply for this Fulbright, move to Slovenia for a year, work with people for whom English is hopefully their second language, and then try to get a job working in the hop industry in the Pacific Northwest. In the Bay Area, it seems like there’s a better understanding of what’s great about craft malts than in other places, due in part to Admiral Maltings. People in the beer industry right now are excited to talk about flavor and nuance with hops, and the interplay of different ingredients like biotransformation.

By the end of this year, Watson projects on-site sales could reach 1% of total beer sales—a volume equivalent to the production of Boston Beer’s Sam Adams line of beer."If it's getting more competitive to get your beer on tap out there," Watson says, referring to the influx of breweries trying to sell kegs to local businesses, "the best way to get on tap is to control your own. The rise of "own premise" sales is here.“We get hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people coming to visit us, and I can’t believe it’s happening,” says JC Tetreault, co-owner of Boston’s Trillium Brewing Co. The owners are making more money in the process, but Alex Wallash, co-founder and director of sales and marketing, noted that selling almost 99% of beer on-site was the only way to fully control the experience they want customers to have with their barrel-aged, sour beers.“You can quality-control the beer regularly to make sure it’s up to standard, you know exactly how it’s being poured, and, if something is off, you take it off the tap and customers would never know it was there, Schmitt says the sampler is a popular choice to get a sense of what San Diego’s brewery scene has to offer, with servers handing out 20-30 most Saturdays and Sundays.“There are awesome craft beer bars in San Diego, but there wasn’t a craft beer bar wholly dedicated to San Diego,” Schmitt says.