Hi beer fans, happy Friday! Come in and have a cold one with us!
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I know I used this song recently, but “stick to your old-fashioned beer” is the right intro for this story.
A Truckee brewery took a deep dive into history and re-created California’s first lager, and SFGate wrote a nice long story about the effort.
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In the late 1860s while the transcontinental railroad was being built, a workers camp called Boca grew up in the Sierra near where Truckee is now. After the railroad was finished the town continued to exist, supported by the business of cutting and storing lake ice in the winter and selling it in the summer to the railroad or to consumers in Sacramento and San Francisco. Eventually someone realized that plentiful ice enabled them to brew lager beer.
The Boca Brewing Company opened with a splash. It bottled its first beer in 1876 and quickly grew into an international sensation. Old world-style beers like lagers had never been made in California. Soon after, bars across northern California began running ads crafted around stocking Boca lager, advertised as “the Finest Beer made on the Pacific Coast” and “superior to any articles imported from Europe or the Eastern states.” Boca Brewing Company reportedly employed 80 men and produced 40,000 barrels of lager a year.
Unfortunately the brewery burned down a few years later. The ice business lasted longer, but Boca is now a ghost town. Then in 2021 brewer Matt Petyo heard that there used to be a brewery here and decided to make something happen.
“We put up a Facebook post just kind of sharing information about Boca Brewing Company,” says Good Wolf owner and brewer Matt Petyo. “And a customer brought in a photo album from his grandfather or great-grandfather who had worked there, and he had bottles from the brewery and everything.”
For Petyo and wife Heidi, that was enough to set the beer-making mission in motion — especially because Heidi is an archeologist…
“We know that the brewers were German, and so we were able to surmise ingredients and processes that would’ve been used by German brewers,” says Petyo. “And at that point in time, there were only two or three hop varieties available in the U.S.”
After hours of hiking around the old brewery site they spotted the non-native hop garden from 150 years ago.
From there, Petyo's team had all they needed to recreate California's first lager: water from the Truckee River, locally grown barley malts sourced from northern Nevada, the original hops from the ghost town, and German Augustiner lager yeast. "That yeast has been around for a very long time and predates Boca lager," says Petyo. "So there's a very good chance that strain would be used."
"Boca Ghost, that beer sold out like an IPA,"
It had been intended as a special run, but customers demanded more. Petyo revised the recipe to use similar commercial hops, and Good Wolf Brewing still keeps Boca Gold on tap. Next time I head that way I’ll check it out.
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This video from the “California’s Gold” historical TV series doesn’t mention the brewery, but the first 15 minutes talks about the ice harvesting business at Boca and shows how ice was cut and stored.
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I’ve got Hazy Little Thing. What are you drinking? Anyone brewing?