Last spring, I traveled to Manchester, where I met Track Brewing Co-Founder Sam Dyson. An epic bike trip from Virginia to California inspired Dyson to start a brewery. The six-month cycling trip changed Dyson’s life. “I just kept on going and going,” he shared with me as I sat in his office at the brewery about a twenty-minute walk outside downtown Manchester. Dyson cycled around the entire world from Mexico down through Central America, Colombia down to the bottom of Argentina, around Australia, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia, through the ‘Stans,’ as he called them—Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan—through Georgia, Turkey, and back to Europe. Despite visiting so many countries, one place stood out: Sonoma, CA.
When Dyson returned to Manchester, he started Track Brewing, with the theme of making beers “off the beaten path.” The second beer he brewed, a hazy pale ale on cask, he named Sonoma, an homage to Northern California’s mountains, forests, and vineyards.
“It was just quite magical,” he reminisced. “I could cycle for an entire day and not come across anybody at all, and you’d be above the cloud line, look back down, and you were looking at the beach and everything covered in fog. It felt like being in a totally different world.”
Ironic since people might have no idea where Sonoma is, much less what it’s like. Dyson jokes, especially those in the U.K., often mispronounce and misspell the name all the time.
But it doesn’t matter. As I sat drinking Sonoma on cask, almost 5,200 miles away from home, looking outside at gray clouds that had been a mainstay since landing in the U.K., I felt a little piece of home.
Because Sonoma and Napa Valley are genuinely magical places, inspiring winemakers and brewmasters alike.
When I want to get away, my partner and I pack up the car with our two dogs and head an hour north. Heck, Hop Culture Social Media Manager, who has lived in many cities across the country, now calls Santa Rosa in Sonoma County his home. And one of his favorite places he’s lived.
We can’t quite tell you why, but it’s something about that confluence of that small-town living and just natural beauty—where the mountains meet the skyline meets the ocean. Pair that with a swath of incredible breweries, and you have a new must-stop region on your list.
Hop Culture’s 11 Best Breweries in Sonoma and Napa Valley
Russian River Brewing Company
Santa Rosa: 725 4th Street, Santa Rosa, CA 95404 | (707) 545-BEER
Windsor: 700 Mitchell Lane, Windsor, CA 95492
We cannot write a piece on the best breweries in Sonoma and Napa Valley without mentioning Russian River first. Hands down, this is one of the most important and influential breweries not only in Northern California but in the entire world. There are so many reasons we call Russian River one of “The Most Iconic Breweries in America.”
In 1997, Korbel Champagne Cellars established Russian River Brewing Company. Seven years later, Korbel left the beer business, handing over the brand and recipes to the head brewer—and previously the initial sole employee—Vinnie Cilurzo. Cilurzo and his wife, Natalie Cilurzo, have built Russian River into one of the most revered breweries in the country today.
With only twenty-eight employees, $6,000 in the bank, and their credit cards maxed out, Natalie and Vinnie opened the original Santa Rosa brewpub in 2004.
“No stress!” laughs Natalie in a video the brewery made celebrating its twenty-year history.
Over two decades, Russian River has made so many achievements we can drink to.
Vinnie and Natalie helped pioneer the entire double IPA style, for gosh sake!
According to legend, Vinnie brewed the world’s first commercially available double IPA back in the mid-’90s when he worked at Blind Pig Brewing and brought the recipe with him to Russian River in Santa Rosa.
The list of famous beers at Russian River is long, but it has to start with two: Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger
Pliny the Elder gets its name from Pliny, a man who lived during the first century, 23 to 79 A.D. According to brewing history, Pliny and several others invented the botanical name Lupus Salictarius, aka hops.
Brewed with Amarillo, Centennial, CTZ, and Simcoe hops, Pliny the Elder is a classic double IPA, well balanced with pine, resin, and citrus hop aromas with a lingering, dry finish. This trendsetting imperial IPA is slightly bitter with a bouquet of floral hops, citrus, and pine. Brewed in limited quantities, Pliny the Elder is best enjoyed fresh.
Setting the standard for double IPAs, Pliny the Elder has won countless awards and continues to be the brewery’s most popular beer.
But if you’re ever lucky enough to be in Santa Rosa or Windsor, CA, during the last two weekends in March, you’ll have a chance to try one of the rarest beers in the world: Pliny the Younger.
Last year, the 19th annual Pliny the Younger release brought the area $8.6 million in revenue. And 25,000 visitors. Natalie told me that she and Vinnie personally walk each of the lines at both their Santa Rosa and newer Windsor locations every day during the two-week releases. That’s just the vibe at Russian River: legacy.
To drink at the original brewpub in downtown Santa Rosa is to drink in a piece of history. If you make just one stop during your Sonoma and Napa Valley brewery tour, make it Russian River.
Moonlight Brewing Company
3350 Coffey Ln, Suites A & D, Santa Rosa, CA 95403 | (707) 755-4951
An icon right up there with Russian River, Moonlight Brewing Company has been brewing beer their way since 1992.
And that’s just the way Moonlight Co-Founder Brian Hunt likes it. They take beers through single-step infusion mashes and boil them in a direct-fire copper kettle. With a strong focus on Continental, British, and post-modern American ales and lagers, Moonlight’s twenty-barrel brewhouse includes no computers, meaning they brew beer the old-fashioned way: with people, hands, and quite a few smiles.
It would be poetic of us to say that handcrafted kinsmanship makes its way into the beer…but it does.
Muncie and I had a chance to spend a summer afternoon with Hunt, and he was a hoot. And also a living, walking, breathing encyclopedia of local brewing history. Having lived and eventually thrived through one of the most influential periods in American craft beer, Hunt has stories he could tell us for days.
Without going too deep into it, we’ll let the beer talk for now.
An absolute must-drink at Moonlight, Death & Taxes has become somewhat of an insider icon in the beer community.
Named one of our “27 Best Beers We Drank in 2022,” this “San Francisco-style dark lager,” with dark roast and iced coffee notes, feels infinitely drinkable.
Other standouts include Reality Czeck, Czech pilsner; Wee-Nibble, a Great American Beer Festival gold-winning petite saison; and Black To Reality, a unique black pilsner we named one of the “Top Beers We Drank in August.”
Mad Fritz
By appointment only at 393 La Fata St, St Helena, CA 94574 | (707) 968-5058
Yountville Taproom: 6720 Washington St, Yountville, CA 94599
Mad Fritz is one of Napa Valley’s best-kept secrets.
There is only one way to describe Nile Zacherle, brewer, maltster, roaster, and co-founder of Mad Fritz: mad scientist. When you talk to him about his tiny appointment-only brewery in St. Helena, CA, his eyes gleam with a radiant and infectious energy.
When we visited one beautiful weekend in March, despite being on crutches from a sledding accident, Zacherle didn’t miss a step, spoiling us with taste after taste of his small-batch sensations.
Zacherle started homebrewing with his dad in Hawaii when he was only nineteen. You can still see the proof in a black folder stocked with all his old recipes. Stained, lopsidedly xeroxed, and written with hand-scrawled notes, each page takes you to another part of Zacherle’s life. For instance, you’ll find beers like a High Honey Lager and People’s Pilsner from his time brewing all through college.
“We were infusing ganja into the beers!” exclaims Zacherle, who eventually received his BS in Fermentation Science at UC Davis (where he kept yeast slants in his fridge and set up a ten-barrel brewing system in his apartment) and completed the Masters Brewing Program in 1996 before working at Anderson Valley Brewing Company (AVBC).
“But after about six months, I went into [then-AVBC-Owner] Ken Allen’s office,” says Zacherle. “He had just smoked a joint, and I was hot boxed in there. And I’m like, dude, I got to make, like, $30,000 a year to stay on.”
So the aspiring brewer pivoted, putting all his brewing equipment in storage and traveling the world, from Australia to France, making wine. But Napa Valley called him back, first as the assistant winemaker under Bo Barrett at Chateau Montelena and then as the head winemaker at David Arthur Vineyards, where he’s been for the last seventeen years.
Zacherle could only meet us in the morning the day we visited because he had to take some Mad Fritz beer to Barrett’s seventieth birthday party.
“I’ve got a green pilsner I’m going to be pouring him,” Zacherle shared. “I wouldn’t normally make a green beer, but for Bo, I’ll do it!”
Yes, you’re reading this right. Zacherle is currently still a head winemaker for a significant Napa Valley winery. Mad Fritz? That’s just his side passion project.
One might call Mad Fritz Zacherle’s little crazy laboratory. A place driven by the pursuit of the perfect fruit to use in a kölsch with white fig that’s “the protagonist in the beer without taking over the beer,” says Zacherle.
Or the perfect water source for a single-origin beer focusing on ingredients just from Mendocino County (still in the works as of publication). And hops. “There was no one growing f**king hops in Mendo? Like WTF,” Zacherle shared, who eventually got connected with these two guys growing some after hearing about them through the grapevine at his son Fritzy’s soccer game.
Or a blue corn pale ale with twenty-five percent blue corn milled using old French quartzite stones at the historic Bale Grist Mill, which they malt in the warehouse next door to the tasting room. (Zacherle says they can floor-malt about five hundred pounds of malt at a time!)
‘We’re one of the few breweries in the world that has a hop kiln, a malt house; we’re sourcing waters; we’re taking things to a really extreme source-origin level,” says Zacherle. “You’re drinking something that’s a reflection of just a lot of freaking work.”
Like a dry-hopped pilsner made with the “softest water in Napa Valley,” according to Zacherle, who eagerly wanted us to do a water tasting of the reservoir water he had collected in his beer van. We got too distracted by the beer. “That’s how geeky I get with beer,” he giggled.
Or an alternative-grain IPA that blew Hop Culture Social Media Manager Magic Muncie’s mind—“I’m pretty sure it’s one of the best gluten-free beers I’ve ever had!” he said.
A golden ale with single-hive honey from Rancho Chimiles Honey that Zacherle zips into the hopback to retain the integrity of the honey as much as possible.
Or a roggenbier, a historical Bavarian beer typically made with a predominant grist of rye malt and hefeweizen yeast.
“There are so many damn beers that I like to say I struggle with a condition known as OCBD: obsessive-compulsive brewing disorder,” jokes Zacherle.
These beers have a soul—a sense of being and place—probably why Zacherle calls them “origin beer.”
“When I think about making a new beer for Mad Fritz, it has to be something that’s just kind of a different category; it just touches a different flavor spectrum,” espoused Zacherle. “And this was something that was clearly like that.”
And you can’t just get Mad Fritz beer anywhere. You have to be one of the lucky five hundred members. Not a part of the club? Don’t worry; Zacherle says he opens subscriptions every quarter.
“And that allows us to do whatever we want to do. That allows us not to make hazy juicies. We don’t can, we don’t do off-premise,” he said. “We can do whatever we want. We don’t make pastry stouts. We do whatever we want or subscribe to one style of beer. And that’s the beauty of it.”
Mad Fritz is a brewery that, as Muncie said during our visit, is a “goosebump-type of situation.”
Editor’s Note: You can only visit Mad Fritz’s brewery and malthouse by appointment, so make sure you make one here before you go! You can also visit the newly opened Yountville tap house, open to the public from 12pm to 7pm Thursday to Sunday. We highly recommend you check out the OG brewery and malthouse; it’s something special.
Hanabi Lager
Napa, CA | (206) 458-9097
When Nick Gislason started Hanabi Lager, he chose the name purposefully. He says hana means flowers in Japanese, and bi means fire. “So it’s flowers of fire, which is the mentality of how Japanese culture looks at fireworks,” says the winemaker and brewer who found a passion for making fireworks at a very early age on the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington. “It’s this art form meant to emulate nature, so the fireworks are named after different flowers, trees, and weather patterns. Some symbolize life cycles—being young, growing up, getting old, and finally, finishing.”
Which is precisely how Gislason approaches his grain-forward brewing at Hanabi Lager.
At Hanabi Lager, grain always comes first. Over about ten years, Gislason and his motley crew have made sixteen beers with fourteen unique grains. Whereas most breweries focus on hops, at Hanabi Lager, grain is the rock star.
The boyishly handsome Gislason, whose shaggy hair, mutton chops, and tan overalls make him unmissable, talks about the raw materials like putting together a band—the hops are the backup vocals or the bass, “there for support and richness of sound and complexity, but you don’t want them to dominate,” he says. In contrast, the grains are the lead singer.
Throughout fourteen years as Screaming Eagle’s assistant winemaker, Gislason touched and felt the grapes, all day, tasting the terroir. He finally asked himself, “Wow, wouldn’t it be cool to do that with grain?”
That’s the goal: to find rare, exclusive heritage or landrace grains and, with the utmost respect, bring them to life within the backdrop of a crisp, clean lager.
At the tiny hand-built brewery in a bay of an old sake plant, Hanabi Lager uses one of the world’s most popular beer styles to showcase the flavors, complexities, and textures of grain.
I guarantee you that if you ever have a chance to enjoy Hanabi’s only flagship beer—Haná Pilsner—it won’t taste like any lager you’ve had before.
Unfortunately, Hanabi Lager can be hard to come by. They currently don’t have a taproom and they release their batches of beer only four times yearly. The best way to get your hands on these incredible beers is to shoot the brewery an email ([email protected]) and ask to join their mailing list. As new beers become available, they’ll let you know. Note: They currently only offer shipping anywhere within California and local pickup and delivery.
HenHouse Brewing Company
Santa Rosa: 322 Bellevue Ave, Santa Rosa, CA 95407 | (707) 978-4577
Petaluma: 1333 N McDowell Blvd, Petaluma, CA 94954 | (707) 978-4577
Novato: 1301 Grant Ave, Novato, CA 94945 | (707) 757-7699
We wouldn’t say that all country folk are more genuine than city folk, though we will say that HenHouse Co-Founder Shane Goepel is a pretty nice dude. Although his brewery is off the beaten path compared to some of the more centrally-located Santa Rosa breweries, it’s only a slight detour if you’re coming up the 101 from San Francisco, and it’s definitely worth the drive.
If you get the chance, try Saison, their terrific saison. Or, if you’re looking for something a little funkier, try HenHouse’s Oyster Stout brewed with Tomales Bay-bred Hog Island Oyster Co. oysters for over a decade. Considered one of the brewery’s flagship beers (pretty unusual; in fact, can you name another brewery that counts an oyster stout as one of its core beers?), Oyster Stout is the only beer HenHouse has brewed consistently since 2012.
A tribute to the area’s local waterways, HenHouse’s Oyster Stout also includes Sonoma County-grown barley, Tomales Bay oysters, and San Francisco Bay sea salt.
Talk about terroir! With every sip of its inky blackness, Oyster Stout gives you a taste of Northern California.
Barrel Brothers Brewing Company
9238 Old Redwood Hwy, STE.128, Windsor, CA 95492 | (707) 687-5815
At Barrel Brothers, snag some of Sonoma’s best beer, made by one of the few head brewers we’ve ever met who was born in the ‘90s. Founded in 2015 by brothers-in-law Wesley Deal and Daniel Weber and their father-in-law Tom Sather, the tasting room is a family affair with a relaxed vibe. We recommend their classic Dark Sarcasm porter or any of their in-house barrel-aged selections.
Old Caz Beer
1500 Valley House Dr, STE 110, Rohnert Park, CA 94928 | (707) 665-6668
The first homegrown brewery in Rohnert Park, a city in Sonoma County just south of Santa Rosa, Old Caz is part of the new guard of breweries in Northern California.
Specializing in hoppy ales, crisp pilsners, thick stouts, and surprising sours, Old Caz has already picked up several prestigious awards, including a gold at the Brewers Cup of California for Chismosa, a Mexican amber lager, and Buko Black , an American-style dark lager, and a bronze for Admiral Dunkel.
Old Caz moved into its brand-spanking-new taproom this past June, so now is the perfect time to check out the new digs and phenomenal beers.
Cooperage Brewing Company
981 Airway Ct, STE G, Santa Rosa, CA 95403 | (707) 293-9787
We’re wondering what kind of magic Cooperage Brewing Owner Tyler Smith must possess to turn his small garage operation into one of Santa Rosa’s most dynamic tasting rooms. This is a comfortable, eclectic gem, from the myriad board games to the arcade machine, local art, and a roomy interior. Oh, and the Belgian-inspired beer is pretty good, too.
Armistice Brewing Company – Napa
1040 Clinton St, Napa, CA 94559 | (707) 320-6321
Siblings Alex and Gregory Zobel originally homebrewed out of their family’s barn in Napa, so it made sense for the pair to open up their second location in the town that started it all.
A local favorite in both Richmond (where you’ll find the OG spot) and Napa, CA, Armistice has made a name for itself not only through its beer but also its inclusive atmosphere.
On the beer side, you’ll find their specialty, uber-juicy hazies, alongside crazier creations, such as milkshake IPAs, something they call PiePAs, and fanciful stouts. But don’t be surprised to find some English-style ales on tap. And their Rich City Pils will be a mainstay.
Now, I haven’t been to the Napa location yet, but I live in Richmond, so when I visited a couple of months ago, I loved seeing an English ordinary bitter and oatmeal stout on draft, even in the heat of summer.
Alex and Gregory just do things their way at Armistice. Don’t fight it; just lay back, be at peace, and enjoy an afternoon here without stress and great beer.
Fieldwork® Brewing Company – Napa
1046 McKinstry St, Napa, CA 94559 | (707) 927-3514
Fieldwork has a brilliant model. One they have stuck to since co-founder Barry Braden opened the brewery’s first location in Berkeley, CA, in 2014. Fieldwork has left a huge imprint on the area by expanding to eight locations now, all within Northern California.
It’s trying great renditions of honest-to-goodness beer styles while lounging in taprooms with the perfect blend of California hospitality that has become Fieldwork’s trademark.
A massive beer list at each location offers tons of styles broken out into sections such as Light, Sour, Belgian, West Coast, Northeast, and Dark.
We recommended Solace & Virtue, a German lager, to pair with pizza in our ”5-Minute Guide to Pairing Pizza and Beer.” Mostly because the San Leandro location serves mighty fine pies.
But half the fun at Fieldwork is exploring the menu and choosing your own adventure.
Lagunitas Brewing Company
1280 N McDowell Blvd, Petaluma, CA 94954 | (707) 284-1020
Like Larry Bell, Ken Grossman, Sam Calagione, and many others, Lagunitas’ Founder Tony Magee began brewing in his kitchen on a five-gallon homebrewing kit. In 1995, Magee introduced Lagunitas IPA, a bold, bitter beer that set the tone for West Coast IPAs for years.
Brewed with Cascade, Centennial, Chinook, and Simcoe, Lagunitas IPA balances that hop explosion with a bevy of malts, including English Crystal, Caramel, and Munich Malts.
Beyond his groundbreaking IPA, Magee brewed with a sense of lawlessness, crafting beer made for “all kinds and creeds: punk rockers, misfits, ivy leaguers, weirdos, Waldos, Sparkle Ponies, musicians, and everything in between,” as Magee likes to say.
Phrases like “Beer Speaks,” “Life Is Uncertain,” and “It’s Good To Have Friends” became the backbone of brewing at Lagunitas.
Whether that meant 4:20 parties leading to a twenty-day suspension and the beer Undercover Investigation Shut-Down Ale or a winter seasonal making fun of the brewery’s failings, Lagunitas Sucks.
Lagunitas has always bucked the “norm.” Even today, cannabis-infused Hi-Fi Hops and the hop water Hoppy Refresher continue that “come one, come all, come whoever you are” attitude.
Beer isn’t traditional at Lagunitas, and it never will be. Somehow, the brewery’s bravado has made it a timeless brewery.
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