Knee Deep Brewery, 13395 New Airport Road Suite H, Auburn, California
Moonraker Brewing Company, 12970 Earhart Avenue Suite 100, Auburn, California
Auburn Alehouse, 289 Washington Street, Auburn, California
On my California trip in May and June, Mistah Rick and I visited the city of Auburn, up in Placer County on the west side of the Sierra Nevadas. I never knew the city existed, but I was looking forward to our visit.
Located about 30 minutes from Sacramento, near the confluence of the North and Middle Forks of the American River, Auburn is rich in Gold Rush history. It's also a really pretty place surrounded by forests and mountain trails. It's popular with visitors who come here for whitewater rafting, hiking, mountain biking, and horseback riding. And for those who enjoy less athletic activities, more wineries have been popping up in recent years as a result of what's often referred to as the Placer County "Gold Crush". And as Rick told me, it's a "mecca" for breweries. I don't often use quotation marks in my reviews, but Auburn is just such a gorgeous, cool place I can't "help myself"..
After a gruelling drive up from Bakersfield, where we crawled through bad traffic all the way from below Sacramento, we finally pulled into Auburn and continued on to the venue for our first well-anticipated pint, the Knee Deep Brewery. It's a big barn of a place located in an industrial park; but in Auburn that means an industrial park surrounded by greenery and scenic views.
Inside the huge tasting room, TV screens listed a wealth of current selections of beers, especially plenty of IPAs. Unfortunately there was no way to distinguish between all of the IPAs or the other styles by, perhaps, mentioning anything like hops, malts, tasting notes, etc. The only information listed with each beer was its IBU bitterness units. So it was pretty much a lottery what we ordered.
We decided on a flight of four 4-ounce beers. Our first taster was Breaking Bud (6.5% ABV) with, for what it's worth, 50 IBUs. This American IPA was clear and light copper in colour, with a nice sharp bitter refresher of a taste, a good reviver after being stuck in nightmare traffic for two hours. When we looked the beer up online, we learned that it's hopped with Mosaic, Simcoe, and the wonderful CTZ hops (which is a combination of Columbus, Tomahawk, and Zeus hops) and with a hops agenda like that, it certainly made me feel like committing crimes. This was definitely the best leg of our flight.
The second beer was Deep Clarity (6.5% ABV,) an American IPA. Golden in colour, this was biscuity with deep bitterness. Third up was Caribou Lupin (7.2% ABV). With 51 IBU, this hazy Imperial IPA contains coconut, obviously. Whoo-hoo! Iko iko! This is a beer to do the limbo by. And finally we had a taster of Deep Haze (6.5% ABV), which is a New England IPA with a mere 25 IBU. It was calm and humble, which one certainly doesn't expect a hazy beer to be.
It was frustrating that we had to guess what hops were in these beers, and the barman wouldn't comment. If he did know, he didn't seem willing to tell us. It was all quite mysterious.
Knee Deep started brewing in Lincoln, California in 2011 and moved into its current building in 2020. Specialising in West Coast-style IPAs, the brewery is dog and kid friendly, and there are a number of tables outside.
Our next stop for the evening, Moonraker Brewing Company, was a short walk around the corner. And this was a most friendly place. When we walked in, Rick explained to the man behind the bar that he'd been here before ,and that I was a good friend visiting from England who wrote about beer. Suddenly we had no less than seven tasters in front of us, of both clear and hazy IPA, with the barman speedily describing each one as he set it down. Although I was trying to take notes as fast as I could, I'm afraid I lost track completely of what was what. But I believe Rick and I did decide that the best of the stronger IPAs, with no sweetness, was Honorable Villain (8.5% ABV), which is a West Coast DIPA with Strata, Enigma, Citra, and Mosaic hops, so we ordered one pint of that to share. Our other pint was Outrigger West Coast IPA (7.0% ABV), with Citra, Mosaic, and Simcoe hops. We decided that this was the go-to IPA out of all of them. It was very drinkable indeed.
Moonraker is truly a great place, with a lot going on there. By this time we were hungry and had just missed the food truck of the day, so the bar staff offered us a full bag of tortilla chips (good proper tortilla chips) and a big container of habañero sauce. (This was also proper salsa, and I really wished I could take all this back to Sheffield with me where, I'm afraid, decent and authentic Mexican food is but a dream.)
We took our pints and nibbles outside in the large covered garden, where we sat at a table near the roaring fire. The music playing inside was piped outside as well, at a civilised volume over which conversation could be conducted. As we sipped, nibbled, and talked, our background included the dulcet sounds of Bruce Springsteen, Thin Lizzy, and "Kung Fu Fighting". When we finished our pints and decided to leave, we quickly browsed through the t-shirts for sale over by the entrance, and I bought one for Andrew back in Sheffield.
Having opened on Earth Day in 2016, Moonraker is mostly known for its Northeast-style IPAS, although they also have a wide range of West Coast IPAs, sours, and stouts. The brewery is run on solar power, and just a month before we visited, they opened a craft kitchen down in Cameron Park that specialises in locally sourced food prepared with a CO2 recapture system. So it's a pretty cool brewery overall.
In the evening, we headed over to Old Town Auburn to find somewhere for a meal and a pint. Walking around we stumbled upon the Auburn Alehouse, which was brightly lit and looked very inviting. Once we were inside it looked even better, as there are so many things to look at, all over the place.
Although it was a Tuesday night, the bar side of the alehouse was packed with drinkers, but we found a table over on the other side where we seated ourselves. Despite our appetiser of tortilla chips and salsa, we were looking forward to having a meal. We first tried a taste of the cask ale that was on, My Friday Hazy IPA (6.5% ABV), which was quite fruity but not super hopped. So we both went for pints of Gold Digger IPA (6.3% ABV), with 80 IBU. This very satisfying brew was a Great American Beer Festival Silver Medal winner back in 2017, and it offered that pine and tropical hops character that I always like. For dinner we split an order of Mahi Mahi Tacos which were quite good.
In 2007 the Auburn Alehouse started producing craft beer, reviving a brewing tradition in the area that had been pretty much nonexistent for a century. Back in 1848, eight years after gold was discovered in the Auburn Ravine, the community's first lasting brewery, Kaiser, was established close to where today's Auburn Alehouse is located, and that brewery operated as the Auburn Brewery for a while. Due to the brewery's system of tapping high-quality water from a nearby spring, the street leading into today's Old Town became known as Brewery Lane.
And there's more interesting history. In 1904 the Placer County Bank of Auburn was robbed in the daytime by a lone gunman who got away with $5,000. Six months later Julius Weber, who had sold the Auburn Brewery to Ferdinand Rechenmacher nine years earlier, discovered a pile of cash in his barn. He confronted his 22-year-old son Adolph, who ended up killing both his parents and his two siblings, as well as setting the house on fire to try to cover up his crime. The following court case attracted global attention as California's first mass murder, and although Adolph was finally hung at Folsom Prison in 1906, as the sole survivor of his family he had inherited all of his father's property which was valued at $70,000, and he sold all of his father's land to Rechenmacher. Needless to say, this prompted California legislators to enact a patricide law that made such inheritances illegal.
I wish Rick and I had known about this story when we visited, because it would have made our meal and pints at the Auburn Alehouse just that much more special. As we were leaving the Auburn when the pub was closing up for the night, we spotted a great t-shirt displayed on a female manikin. I graciously asked a staff member if they had one in my size, and she checked in the stock drawer but couldn't find any size XS. But then, at the last minute, she discovered the manikin was wearing that size.
So we walked out, happy and content, having thoroughly enjoyed what was the ultimate result of a mass murder, and also leaving a naked manikin behind. And on the walk back to our motel we were serenaded by invisible frogs. I mean, what more could you ask for in one evening?
Related Links
- All about the city of Auburn (Wikipedia)
- The reported story of the Auburn mass murders (SF Gate)