A little history of how this whole thing started.
Noble Ale Works is the brainchild of Steve Miles and Jerry Kolbly.
I (Jerry) use to run the Newport Beach Brewing Company for many years and had an outstanding brewmaster "Kirk Roberts" there with me. We always felt that Kirk's beers were good enough to stand up to the growing market of craft beers. Our type 75 license didn't allow us to produce and distribute the way a type 23 license does.
A few years back NBBC went through a laborious legal issue with the city of Newport Beach (too much to talk about on this blog but if your real interested in it I can talk about it over a beer). But the good thing that happened is that I hired one of the brightest and most fair attorneys to assist with the NB issue...Steve Miles. Not only is he a great attorney, his passion for some of the finer things in life is sometimes staggering. He has homebrewed some great beers, has a collection of fine wine of over 500 bottles and added on to his house to include a homebrew area.
OK back to NAW birth...So, along with my partner (the actual brains in the group), Steve, we decided to explore which avenue we could take to get Kirk's beers out into the world. The more we thought about it, the more we thought about breaking away from the (very) expensive real estate of Newport Beach and look at commercial properties which would welcome a brewery. We started casually looking at various areas in and around Orange County back in December 2008...Silverado Canyon, Santa Ana, Inland Empire, San Juan Capistrano, Orange, Fullerton. As time went on Kirk became uneasy with the idea of our goal. He decided to stay at NBBC to continue to make his awesome brews at the brewpub there. We knew we had to find another brewer and heard that Tracy Simmons had just left Omaha Jack's in Rancho Cucamonga. I have always liked Tracy's brews and his detail, organization and contacts in the industry are amazing.
In March of this year (2009) we had a meeting with the Mayor of Anaheim, Curt Pringle (who happens to be one hell of a guy). He asked us if we had time to cruise around and check out some properties with him. He proceeded to drive us around the city for over 2 hours, looking at various locations. He took us to the Platinum Triangle area and into the Stadium Plaza Business Park. We liked what he had seen around the area so Mayor Pringle got us in touch with CBRE who listened to what we needed and showed us our (now) new home...1621 S. Sinclair St. Ste B. The process of obtaining the lease was a chore in itself but we feel that it is well worth it. It took us from the beginning of April until the end of August to get the keys to the building.
While we were looking at buildings and dealing with the lease, we had heard that Sacramento Brewing Company was selling a system. We headed up to Sacramento in late February to check it out.
We liked what we saw, 15bbl Liquid Assets brewhouse, 3-15bbl fermenters, 2-30bbl fermenters, 6-15bbl single wall brite tanks (we'll keep those in our walk-in), a 12 oz bottling line, 16K pound silo, boiler, glycol chiller, DE filter. It also had 2-60bbl fermenters in the initial sale but Rogue bought those, so the price came down. After getting George a deposit check, he was so kind to hold the system in storage (which it already was) until we could get our building. The system is set to ship down this coming week (the 1st of September).
We are now in the TTB, ABC, City of Anaheim CUP, BOE, OCHA etc process...wow lots of letters.
Anyways it has been lots of work but so exciting. Our building and location are unbelievable (we can walk to Anaheim Stadium...go Angels).
Stay tuned for more posts here, on our twitter page: twitter/noblebrew, our facebook page, and our website (well soon there).
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