New Santa Cruz brewery focuses on European style lagers
Santa Cruz’s beer scene continues to explode with New Bohemian Brewery, which opened its doors on March 21. Rather than focus on IPAs, stouts and pale ales—though they do that too—their emphasis is on European-style lagers. We talked to Dan Satterthwaite, who co-owns the brewery with Mike Hochleutner, about brewing European-style lagers—something he’s been doing for more than 12 years. New Bohemian Brewery is also having a one-off “Spring Fest” at the Roaring Camp Bret Harte Hall on May 1 with a lot of special beers and foods. Tickets are available at nubobrew.com.
GT: Your website says you offer a new style of beer experience
Satterthwaite: We want to be educational for our customers. Not only do we want people to get to know our products, we want people to come in and see brewing in action: see people sowing the green, adding the hops, smelling the boil, and listening to all the sounds of the brewery. You can actually stand on the balcony on the second floor and look down and you can see everything clear as day.
How are European-style lagers different than American lagers?
A European-style lager focuses on 100 percent barley malts as opposed to corn and rice and other simpler sugar sources. We’re going for a traditional European feel, all natural carbonation, imported German and Czech hops and special yeast strands from the Czech Republic. The other part of it is, we not only make the beer for a quick turnaround, we also have these traditional horizontal aging tanks for the maturation process to occur slowly and naturally. You don’t find that often here in American draft beer. The taste—for example the On Point Czech Lager—has a fresh nuttiness to it, a caramel-y, sweet finish, and the hops are much fresher.
What beers do you have on tap?
Some of our flagship beers are going to be our Czech-style lager, Czech-style pilsner, amber lager, and one version or another of a black lager. Then we’re going to have hefeweizen, either a light, dark, or strong, as well as some hoppy alternatives and some type of porters and stouts. We want to have a nice variety. Right now we have five beers on tap. We want to get up to eight beers in the next couple weeks.
INFO: 1030 41st Ave., Santa Cruz, 350-0253, nubobrew.com. PHOTO: Dave Satterthwaite has been making European-style lagers for more than 12 years. CHIP SCHEUER
