The story
Founded by Ken Grossman in 1979.1
Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. was founded in 1980, with founders Ken Grossman and Paul Camusi expanding their homebrewing hobby into a brewery in Chico, California. Along with the brewery's location, Grossman says the company's name comes from his love of hiking in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada. With $50,000 in loans from friends and family, Grossman and Camusi rented a 3,000 sq ft (280 m2) warehouse and pieced together discarded dairy equipment and scrapyard metal to create their brewing equipment. They later were able to acquire second-hand copper brewing kettles from Germany before moving to their larger, current brewing facility in 1989.
The first batch brewed on premises was its Pale Ale, in November 1980. The following year, the brewery introduced Celebration, an IPA, which continues to be released as a winter seasonal. The company sold 950 US beer barrels (1,110 hl) of beer in its first year and doubled that amount in the second.
The company's first employee was Steve Harrison, who was put in charge of marketing and sales. Head brewer Steve Dresler was hired in 1983, when its output was 25 to 30 barrels per week, and retired in 2017.
The company distributed the beer itself in the early 1980s, struggling with financial and marketing problems. A 1982 article in the San Francisco Chronicle highlighting the brewery, as well as having its beer sold in prominent restaurants such as Berkeley's Chez Panisse, helped establish a market for Sierra Nevada's beer.
By 1987, the brewery was distributing to seven states and production had reached 12,000 US beer barrels (14,000 hl) per year, causing the company to pursue building a new brewery. In 1988, the brewery moved into a 100-barrel brewhouse, with four open fermenters, and eleven 200 US bbl (230 hl) secondary fermenters. A year later, Grossman and Camusi added the Sierra Nevada Taproom and Restaurant, which serves lunch and dinner and includes a giftshop. In 2000, the brewery opened "The Big Room", a live-music venue located inside the brewery's facilities, featuring a variety of acts including country, bluegrass, folk, rock, blues, and other musical genres.
Camusi retired in 1998 and sold his share in the company to Grossman.
In 2010, Sierra Nevada Brewing partnered with the Abbey of New Clairvaux, with the monastery beginning production of Trappist-style beers in 2011. The Abbey has not yet been sanctioned by the International Trappist Association, and therefore the monastery will not be brewing official Trappist beer.
The brewery employed about 450 people in 2011.
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In January 2012, Sierra Nevada announced it would build a second brewing facility with an attached restaurant in Mills River, North Carolina. The LEED-Platinum-certified building opened in early 2014 on a forested tract adjacent to Asheville Regional Airport, re-using the cut-down trees as lumber both in the building and for the rainwater cisterns that flush the toilets.
From 2013 to 2022, the company operated the "Torpedo Room" in Berkeley, their first tasting room outside of Chico.
In January 2017, Sierra Nevada issued a voluntary recall of certain 12-ounce bottles of different beers in 36 states due to a manufacturing defect that had possibly introduced chipped pieces of glass into the bottle.
From Wikipedia’s article on Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5