At noon on July 23, Golden State Brewery opened its doors to a line of beer lovers waiting to try the brewery’s beer flights as well as its highly anticipated new beer, Magnitude 9.9. The beer release kicked off Silicon Valley Beer Week, celebrated from July 22-30. The brewery offers a tasting room that opened to the public in February. The hip and friendly atmosphere allows patrons to sit down to board games, play billiards, throw darts at dartboards, or try their hands at “corn hole” (a game similar to a bean bag toss).
“We’re the first brewery to be here in Santa Clara since prohibition and we’re in a fun industrial area,” says Seth Hendrickson, owner of Golden State Brewery. “Magnitude 9.9 is our highest alcohol percentage beer. It’s geared toward hop heads, so it will have a lot of hops and a lot of bitterness. We use a generous amount of galaxy- a specific hop that has a high amount of alpha acid that makes beer bitter- and Columbus hops, which have a lot of citrus and pine to it.” (Hops are the flowers of the vines used in beer making.)
Hendrickson was a restaurant manager for 12 years and a home brewer for about a decade. Last December, Hendrickson launched a Kickstarter campaign to seek backers to help fund a brewery tasting room. According to the Kickstarter page, 54 backers pledged a total of $22,028. Hendrickson points out that Golden State Brewery had already been in existence long before the Kickstarter campaign launched. The company’s beers are currently in 350 locations- bars, restaurants and bottle shops.
“The company started in March 2015. We got our building in June 2015,” Hendrickson says. “But we’ve been trying to build a brewery tasting room and we didn’t open anything to the public until this year.”
Right now, Hendrickson works with San Jose’s Hermitage Brewing Company to produce his beers. The gigantic tanks and other brewing equipment at Golden State Brewery will be functional in mid-August to produce an additional assortment of beers.
“We’re Golden State Brewery so we’re trying to be California’s official beer even though there are a lot of styles people call ‘West Coast’,” Hendrickson says. “We use a lot of fun ingredients. For example, we use orange blossom honey in one of our beers and we use a 24-hour cold brew coffee in one of our other beers.”
Hendrickson adds that his business is kid-friendly, dog-friendly and that there is plenty of outdoor space for patrons. Food trucks also stop by on Fridays and Saturdays.
On July 30, the last day of Silicon Valley Beer Week, Golden State Brewery will host a Sports Night with the Game Day food truck.
Visit Golden State Brewery at 1252 Memorex Drive and on Facebook and Twitter.
