Sierra Nevada

Sierra Nevada is one of the founding brands of American craft beer. Started in Chico, California in 1980 by homebrewers Ken Grossman and Paul Camusi, its flagship Pale Ale — built around whole-cone Cascade hops — effectively wrote the template for the American pale ale and, by extension, the hop-forward West Coast style that followed.

The origins were scrappy: Grossman had run a Chico homebrew shop since 1976, and the pair assembled their first brewhouse largely from converted dairy equipment in a rented warehouse. They brewed the first batch of Pale Ale in November 1980, and famously took eleven attempts before the recipe — piney, citrusy Cascade over a firm caramel-malt base — met their standard.

Sierra Nevada grew into a national brewery without selling out, opening a second production brewery in Mills River, North Carolina in 2014 to supply the East Coast. It remains 100 percent family-owned, with Grossman's children in the business — an independence that, alongside the Pale Ale itself, anchors its standing in American brewing.

Bright pine and grapefruit from whole-cone Cascade hops over a firm caramel-malt backbone, finishing with the assertive, resinous bitterness that defined the American pale ale.