Sierra Nevada Brewing celebrates new brewery with ‘Beer Camp’ road trip across America

Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. has been the Sacramento beer drinker’s gateway craft brew for more than three decades. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard someone tell me that, for some reason, they ordered a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale at a bar instead of a Bud or Coors. And that this seemingly insignificant decision in their life was transcendent. No longer would they settle for watered-down corporate beer. Sierra was their introduction to the world of craft. To the possibility of bitter hop flavors. It was a palate shocker. The proverbial beer awakening.

And now, after 35 years of operating its brewery a stone’s throw north of Sacramento in Chico, Sierra Nevada is moving. OK, calm down. It’s also staying. It’s not complicated. Let me explain.

This Saturday, Sierra Nevada will welcome 110 brewers from across the country to its headquarters for one of the largest beer festivals in the country. The event is a kickoff party for Sierra’s seven-stop, nationwide beer tour. Called Beer Camp Across America, the caravan will end later this summer in North Carolina, to commemorate the opening of Sierra’s new brewery. There’s also a special 12-pack of collaboration beers to mark the occasion.

It might just be the biggest Northern California beer party ever.

The reason Sierra Nevada is expanding is because the nation’s second-largest craft brewery has been running at capacity for a long time. This according to spokesperson Ryan Arnold. “We’re making beer 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” he told SN&R. This means that brewers are working night shifts, and that there’s zero time for things like large-scale maintenance or innovation. Just beer, beer, beer.

The catch is that Sierra Nevada is making so much brew, it’s pushing its limit, which is 1 million barrels a year in production. That’s a lot of brew.

For comparison, one of Sacramento’s largest local breweries, Track 7 Brewing Co.—which announced a forthcoming move into a new 35,000-square-foot facility in Natomas next year—estimates that it will make only 2,300 barrels in 2015. A million barrels of beer; it would take more than 400 Track 7 breweries to hit that number.

Anyway, Sierra had a problem. It needed to ratchet down production in its hometown of Chico without decreasing the amount of brew it would make in a year.

Enter North Carolina: In April 2012, Sierra broke ground on its second brewery location, in Mills River, a smaller town just outside of Asheville. Sierra employees say Mills shares similar characteristics to Chico: fresh water, a nice outdoorsy vibe. This new brewery will celebrate its grand opening on August 3. It’s a big deal in the craft-beer world.

To celebrate, Sierra Nevada co-owner Ken Grossman decided to throw a beer party. “Let’s invite every single craft brewery in the country,” he said. So he did: Sierra sent an invite, accompanied by a special West Coast-style IPA bottle with a custom silk-screened label. “It’s kind of a message in a bottle, if you will,” Arnold said. It read: “Join us to make this the largest craft beer celebration in history.”

Of the 3,000-plus craft breweries in the United States, more than 700 RSVP’d, including 75 here in Northern California and many from Sacramento. I’m not aware of a larger craft-beer blowout.

“The fervor, just the excitement, is quite impressive,” Arnold says.

It doesn’t end with the festival. To promote the tour, founder Grossman invited 12 of the country’s most popular craft breweries to come to Chico (and North Carolina) to brew a collaboration batch. Planning and plane tickets and fermentation all went down in the past year, and this month, the dozen brews hit stores.

The end product comes in a giant orange-and-blue box and features a design that feels like a rock ’n’ roll tour poster. Inside are 10 bottles and two cans—which is unusual, because cans seldom mingle with bottles—all brewed by some of the nation’s best: 3 Floyds Brewing Co. from Indiana, Allagash Brewing Company from Maine, Cigar City Brewing from Florida and others.

Arnold calls the 12-pack an “unprecedented, crazy idea,” and says it speaks to why Grossman founded Sierra Nevada in the first place. “Ken tends to be a pretty humble fellow,” Arnold says. So, he wanted to make the beer tour and new-brewery opening about the beer community. “’How can we make this about the success of craft beer and not our success?’” Arnold says Grossman asked. “’We don’t really get to this point without a lot of great work by other people.’”

Indeed, the 12-pack is like a dozen snapshots of the American craft-beer scene in 2014. It captures the leaders at work. It showcases the nation’s top breweries and their mastery of classic and European beer styles. It celebrates beer’s sense of adventure and experimentation. It’s fun, unexpected and—ultimately—quite tasty.

I cracked open a fresh box of Beer Camp this past weekend (disclosure: It retails for $24.99, but I received my box complimentary from Sierra Nevada). Because there’s 144 ounces of beer inside, I invited SN&R film critic and His & Hers Beer Notes scribe Daniel Barnes to help out.

Russian River Brewing Company, of nearby Santa Rosa, collaborated with Sierra on a Belgian-style blond called Yvan the Great. The beer is an homage to Brasserie De La Senne in Belgium, and this exceedingly light, but delicately spiced and bready brew invoked the styles of the classic Belgium brewery. Both Barnes and I agreed it was the standout of the pack.

Russian River’s impressiveness was not unexpected. We did, however, not anticipate such a strong liking for There and Back, an English-style bitter by Wisconsin-based New Glarus Brewing Company. New Glarus is known mostly for its fruit beers and flagship Berliner Weiss, but this beer’s light touch and gentle, fruity and bitter finish was memorable.

Oregon-based Ninkasi Brewing collaborated on a supreme milk stout with coffee. Michigan’s Bell’s Brewing really nailed its dark ale. And, in a surprise move, 3 Floyds brewed a dead-ringer clone of Sierra’s flagship pale ale: bitter, malty, smooth.

Sierra will distribute 110,000 of these Beer Camp boxes across the country to commemorate its big move. “We all work pretty hard to make great beer, and we want people to see our beer,” Arnold says. Invariably, it will be popular: One of the first shipments, which arrived at Final Gravity Taproom & Bottleshop in Roseville last week, sold out in less than 24 hours.

But when this weekend’s big party in Chico ends and the beer tour winds down in Mills River and the new brewery opens and everything is back to normal, will Sierra Nevada change now that it’s brewing nearly a third of its beer on the other side of the country?

Not really, Arnold says. And if Sierra does evolve, it will be for the good. For instance, the brewery produced 100 different styles of beer in Chico last year, but most consumers don’t get to try these. So the brewers want to expand their barrel-aging and wild-ale programs to meet craft-beer-aficionado demand. Ratcheting down normal production in Chico helps them achieve this goal. “It will give us flexibility to do experimentation,” Arnold says.

Sierra actually just acquired new warehouse space in Chico, for example, and he hinted it might be used to increase Sierra’s aging of beer in whiskey and bourbon barrels. “Barrel-aging is fun. Barrel-aging is exciting. We’re interested in it.”

Considering America’s ever-growing interest in craft beer, it’s probably safe to assume the feeling will be mutual for another 35 years.