Sante Adairius Rustic Ales
Tim Clifford and Adair Paterno brew saison in a Capitola industrial park on used dairy tanks and a kettle built out of a Lipton machine. Their house culture takes a beer funky in three or four months.
Why go
Paterno and Clifford opened in May 2012 on the back of his homebrew results in BJCP Category 16e, Belgian Specialty Ale, a category the BJCP has since deleted. The kit is the argument. Paterno's own list is a piece of equipment from Lipton that we turned into a kettle and a bunch of used dairy tanks hanging around. We batch sparge, and we use the same hoses and equipment for our 'clean' and 'funky' beers.
That last part is why the porter and the hoppy beers pick up the house character too, and she does not treat it as a problem, because the bar pours those beers out inside about two weeks and nobody is buying them off a shelf three months later. She also refuses the word most breweries would reach for here: It's disingenuous to the folks that have an actual farmhouse brewery, like Shaun out at Hill Farmstead or the guys out at Jester King. We joke that we brew 'rustic industrial park ales.'
Order this / avoid
- Order: the mixed-culture bottles first. Saison Bernice and West Ashley are the two Paterno named in 2015, alongside the 16e series that carries the dead category's name.1
- Avoid: assuming the Capitola room and the Santa Cruz Portal pour the same thing. This address is the brewery, and the Portal and the Oakland Arbor are separate rooms.2
What locals & experts say
- Adair Paterno, on what "rustic" means to them (Good Beer Hunting, Michael Kiser, 10 June 2015):
To us, rustic is more of a style, an idea of what it means to brew beer in the historical or the traditional way. It's about what beer tasted like before everything was industrialized.
1 - Paterno, on the yeast:
It starts with awesome yeast and bugs.
1 - The brewery's own line, still on the homepage in 2026:
Know Your Brewer.
2
Good to know
- Which door: 103 Kennedy Drive, Capitola, the brewery and taproom. The Santa Cruz Portal and the Oakland Arbor are the other two.
- Timing: the mixed-culture bottles rotate and the barrel program is the reason to check what is open before you drive.
- Getting there: Capitola is ten minutes down the coast from Santa Cruz and the brewery sits inland off the highway, not on the water.
Verdict
should-visit — A saison brewery that explains its own flavour in equipment rather than adjectives: a kettle built out of a Lipton machine, used dairy tanks, batch sparging, and one set of hoses for the clean beer and the funky beer alike, which is why the house culture ends up in everything. Adair Paterno and Tim Clifford opened it in May 2012 on the strength of his homebrew record in a BJCP category that no longer exists, and the mixed culture takes a beer funky in three or four months. Paterno will not call it farmhouse, and the phrase she uses instead, rustic industrial park ales, is the most honest self-description in this file. It is a short drive from Santa Cruz and it is the reason the beer end of this day out is worth taking seriously.