Video: A tour of Gordon Biersch in San Jose

It’s International Brewers Day. Jay Brooks, who writes the brookston beer bulletin blog started this. It’s a great idea to honor brewers, the men and women who make the elixirs we love (and some we don’t love so much.}

My contribution is the column I wrote this week in the San Jose Mercury News, I wrote about Dan Gordon and Gordon Biersch,

Photos: Top, left, Dan Gordon, Dean Biersch in archive photo from the brewery Web site.

Middle: Dan Gordon in recent photo at the brewery.He’s is surrounded by cases of beer which, some, will be shipped out of California as part of their nationwide expansion plans. The cold storage room at the micro-brewery houses 10,000 cases of beer, according to Gordon. They will be shipping to the Pacific Northwest, Georgia and Tennessee. Photo by Eugene H. Louie , San Jose Mercury-News.

Hometown brew: The beer that grew up with Silicon Valley

By William Brand
Media News Staff Writer

Dan Gordon pushed a lever that opens a tiny, clear plastic line extending from a gigantic fermenter, two stories high, at the Gordon Biersch brewery in San Jose and drew off a few ounces of amber beer into two glasses.

“It’s unfiltered,” Gordon says with a broad grin. “I wish we could sell it this way.”

The Märzen beer is crisp, malty with a fine, spicy finish and, even though it’s 10:30 in the morning, absolutely delicious.

That is no surprise. Gordon, flanked by a long row of fermenters, soaring to the ceiling at the four-acre, 100,000-square-foot San Jose brewery, has been at this for awhile, even altering the water to mimic Munich’s.

This month, Gordon Biersch brewery restaurants celebrate the 20th anniversary of the start of their brewpubs, born in the Silicon Valley at a time when putting a brewery in a restaurant was a novel idea.

Dan Gordon and Dean Biersch, two guys, still in their 20s, opened the first one in the former Bijou Theater at 640 Emerson St. in Palo Alto when there were only a handful of brewpubs in the country.

Now there are 28 Gordon Biersch brewery-restaurants across the United States and one in Taiwan, (probably as famous for their garlic fries as their beer) bearing the founders’ names even if the two no longer own them.

A mutual friend introduced the men in 1987.
The San Jose-born Gordon had just graduated from the prestigious, five-year brewing engineering program at the Technical University of Munich at Weihenstephan, Germany, a fact reflected in the German-style beers he still brews in his San Jose brewery.

Biersch, who was born in San Francisco and grew up in Southern California, had a background in restaurants and another important attribute: He loved beer.

They opened the Palo Alto brewery-restaurant with $720,000 raised mostly from young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, including Robert Miner, the co-founder of Oracle, who has since died.

Soon after the opening, Biersch recalls, Michael Jackson, an English beer critic, came to Palo Alto, tried their first beer, an unfiltered Dunkelweizen - a dark, unusual German-style wheat beer - and loved it. “He wrote this phenomenal story, and the business took off,” Biersch says.
They opened their second brewery-restaurant in San Jose in 1990, then a third in San Francisco. By 1999, they had 12, with Gordon handling the beer, Biersch supervising the food and restaurant design.

In 1997, they opened a separate brewery on East Taylor Street in San Jose to produce bottled and keg beer for retail sales.
Business boomed, then they hit a legal wall.

“A quirk in state law changed everything,” Gordon explains. The new law put a 60,000-barrel limit on beer that could be produced by companies that owned more than six brewpubs. (A barrel of beer each contains 31 gallons.)

“We had eight brewpubs in California and were producing 60,000 barrels,” Gordon says. Since they had opened their San Jose brewery two years earlier, they had to stop brewing beer or get out of the restaurant or brewery business.

“People were banging on the door to buy our restaurants, so selling them was an easy decision.”
In 1999, they sold the restaurants to Big River, a Chattanooga, Tenn., company, now the Gordon-Biersch Restaurant group. They previously sold majority interest in their brewing company,but not the brewpubs, to Lorenzo Fertitta’s Export Limited of Las Vegas. The Fertitta family runs casinos and owns the Ultimate Fighting Championship network.

Gordon remains director of brewing and also supervises beer quality at the restaurants. The companies do promotions together.

Biersch left the business in 2006 and recently opened Hopmonk, a European-style pub, beer garden and music hall in Sebastopol.

Gordon, who still has partial interest in the Gordon Biersch brewery, brews Hopmonk’s signature beer - a German-style, rich, malty pilsner - and continues to make beer in the German style in a former Continental Can Co. cannery. The cannery is across the street from the company where Gordon worked at one summer while attending University of California-Berkeley, long before a brand of beers carried his name.

Contact William Brand at whatsontap@sbcglobal.net, (510) 915-1180, or What’s On Tap, Box 3676, Walnut Creek, Calif. 94598. Read more by Brand at www.ibabuzz.com/beer. Can’t find a beer? E-mail, call or write Brand and ask for his 2008 Retail Beer Store List.