Hops
- 2013 article on Bay Area home brewers growing hops
- Hops Chart
Yeast
Grain
Botanicals and herbs (for Gruit)
- Gruits in the bay area
- redwood tips, yerba mate, chamomile tea, herbs, honey, chrysanthemum flowers, rose hips, mustard flowers, rhubarb, hibiscus, wild sage, bay laurel, coriander, chamomile and orange peel
East Bay
San Francisco
- "Miners in California used pine trees to flavor their beer when they couldn’t get hops" source
- Gruits and Steam Beers - use local ingredients
- Jack London started drinking in San Francisco in the late 1880s, and mentions steam beer in his 1913 autobiographical novel John Barleycorn:
"The first day I worked in the bowling alley, the barkeeper, according to custom, called us boys up to have a drink after we had been setting up pins for several hours. The others asked for beer. I said I'd take ginger ale. The boys snickered, and I noticed the barkeeper favoured me with a strange, searching scrutiny. Nevertheless, he opened a bottle of ginger ale. Afterward, back in the alleys, in the pauses between games, the boys enlightened me. I had offended the barkeeper. A bottle of ginger ale cost the saloon ever so much more than a glass of steam beer; and it was up to me, if I wanted to hold my job, to drink beer."
- "Craft Brewers Reformulate Beer to Cope With Hop Shortage" 2000 Wired article
- "A High-Tech Beer from Silicon Valley" 1983 NYTimes article
"But in Silicon Valley, where billion- dollar companies such as Apple and Hewlett-Packard have started in living rooms and garages, one new micro-brewer is trying to meld a beer-lover's dream with the careful research and state-of-the-art manufacturing of a high-tech company. And Kenneth Kolance and his son, Jeffrey, know a lot about both fields. The elder Kolance is the co-founder of Bole & Babbage Inc., one of the first successful independent computer software companies and a pioneer in software engineering. Jeffrey is a recent graduate of the California Polytechnical Institute with a major in industrial technology and a minor in engineering management. His senior paper studied the organization of the physical plant of micro-breweries and the errors made by businesses already in the field. Armed with that knowledge, the Kolances decided in 1980 that they could make money in the micro-brewery business where others had failed. The result is a product that they call London Bitter, a draft, English- style beer."
"...$720,000 raised mostly from young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, including Robert Miner, the co-founder of Oracle, who has since died" source
