Alvarado Street Brewery
Mai Tai PA took gold at the 2015 Great American Beer Festival in the international-style pale ale category, against a field of about 6,000 beers. The ten-barrel system it came off is behind glass at the back of this room.
Why go
The Hill family opened this brewpub on Alvarado Street in 2014 and the company now runs three brewhouses of different sizes, which is the part a drinker can use. Ten barrels here, five in a Carmel-by-the-Sea room used for R&D, twenty at the production plant in Salinas, and when a recipe works small the brewers scale it to around 1,800 gallons in Salinas and can it. When the Salinas plant was announced in 2015, brewmaster and co-owner J.C. Hill said the downtown ten-barrel system would go over to experimental batches and one-offs, and that is still what the About page describes it doing. So the list on this bar is the odd one in the group by design. On the medal, Hill's line was We were shocked, there are so many amazing beers entered into GABF and for us to win a gold medal is extremely humbling.
1
Order this / avoid
- Order: Mai Tai PA if it is pouring, and then whatever the house ten-barrel has on, because that is the one the other doors do not get.2
- Avoid: treating this as interchangeable with the other four locations. The Carmel room is a five-barrel R&D brewhouse and Salinas is the production plant, and the lists differ.
What locals & experts say
- Monterey County Weekly (Mark C. Anderson, 29 September 2015), on the field:
more than 1,500 breweries put some 6,000 beers on the judges' palates and a comparatively tiny 242 take medals.
1 - J.C. Hill, brewmaster and co-owner, on the gold:
It feels amazing to bring this home for our area.
1 - Awards, scoped: the 2015 GABF gold belongs to the beer. The brewery's own About page counts thirteen GABF medals and two World Beer Cup medals across ten years and all three of its breweries, which is a company total and is not this door's.2
Good to know
- Which door: 426 Alvarado Street, the original downtown Monterey brewpub. There are five in the group.
- Outside: a 55-seat beer garden replaced the back parking lot after the 2015 announcement, with its own beer lines and to-go sales.
- Food: the kitchens cook from scratch and buy out of the Salinas Valley, which is a few miles inland.
- Getting there: Alvarado Street runs a block up from the harbour, so this is a walk from the wharf.
Verdict
could-visit — Mai Tai PA took gold at the 2015 Great American Beer Festival in international-style pale ale, and the ten-barrel system it came off is behind glass at the back of this room. Since Salinas took over production, this brewhouse is where the group tries things, so the downtown list runs to one-offs the cans never see. The Hill family started here in 2014 and the company now counts thirteen GABF medals by its own reckoning. On Jeff's own Monterey list, and the easiest good drink on Alvarado Street.