Mountain People’s Wine Warehouse adds us to their line-up! Mountain People’s distributes all organic beers and wines in California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington. While Chad battled the flu, Nick and Dan bottled ferociously and Beth (my mom) Mark (my dad) and I, labeled crazily into the night trying to fill our first order for Mtn. People. We made and have been filling (and growing) orders ever since.
Holiday Party, 2005
With tamales up to our ears, we rang in the holidays with a party at the brewery. White lights, candles and music transformed the brewhouse floor into a wintery fiesta, filled with friends, beer and food.
Winter, 2006
Kelly Vaillancourt, beer angel, takes over the tasting bar!
January, 2006
New Beer Release Party
Sunset Magazine comes out and we are in it!
February, 2006
First Ever Homebrew to ProBrew Contest
American Hefeweizen announced as the beer to brew. The winner, Dave Bossie was
decided on St. Patrick’s Day. Both Dave Bossie and runner-up, Chris Baugh brewed up the first batch of Hefeweizen with Chad and Nick on May Day and it is on tap at the brewery now! Organic Hefeweizen! Delicious.March, 2006
Whole Life Times comes out to interview us. Their organic beer story that features us, makes front page."Emily Thomas, who owns Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing with husband Chad Brill and brother Nick Thomas, can’t imagine using conventional hops in their beer. “We don’t have to use organic hops, but they’re so much more fragrant,” she says. If there’s such a thing as organic beer-brewing royalty, Emily Thomas might be it. Raised in the redwood-shaded Santa Cruz Mountains by a hippie mom with a catering business, she naturally gravitated toward natural food stores when she moved to San Diego for college and met Brill. Her uncle, Pat Logan, is one of the founders of Seven Bridges Cooperative Micro Brewery in Santa Cruz, a 10-year-old source of organic supplies for homebrewers. Logan taught Thomas how to brew, and she, in turn, showed Brill, who promptly developed an obsession and a talent. The couple recently confessed that they’re stunned by their success in the scant 10 months since they sold their first beer out of an industrial park on Santa Cruz’s west side. They didn’t even have labels, just letters on the caps in magic marker: A for amber and so on..."
ExpoWest
On a soupy Mid-March evening in Southern California, the brewers from five major organic breweries gathered in a circle, arms out
stretched, fists together, and on queue, shouted, “Beat Bud” in a loud triumphant boom. It was the Mountain People’s Organic Wine and Beer tasting reception, and the buzz around the room, “Anhueser Busch brewed themselves up a couple of organic beers.”The Natural Products Expo takes place each spring in Anaheim, California and it has clearly become the ‘must attend’ event for any new, natural or organic product that is fighting its way into the marketplace. Armed with clever packaging, abundant samples, creative take-aways and sales people with a story to tell, hundreds of new companies hope to catch the interest of every bar, restaurant, natural foods store, and distributor in the natural food business.
Beth (my mom) and I slipped into the event through an unattended exit door to soak in the events and determine if the steep registration fee for floor space would be worth it next year. Sick from sampling too much organic chocolate, organic vodka, organic tea, organic chips, organic mint flavored water, (you get the picture), we lumbered back across the street to get ready for the Mountain People's Beer and Wine tasting event.
April, 2006
Craft Brewers picks us up saturating our distribution in Northern California.
Whole Foods, Southern Pacific tastes our beers and announces that they want to carry our line in their southern California stores.
Production picks up in the brewery!!!
