Firestone Walker: The Oak-Barrel Brewery

On the outskirts of Paso Robles, in California's Central Coast wine country, sits one of the most decorated craft breweries in America. Firestone Walker was born in nineteen ninety-six, not from a grand industrial plan, but from a family shed on a vineyard in Los Olivos, about an hour south of here.

The co-founders were brothers-in-law: Adam Firestone, from the family behind the tire dynasty, and David Walker, a British expatriate who had married into that family. Walker brought an obsession with old English brewing traditions, and together they hatched a strange experiment: fermenting beer in oak barrels the way certain English breweries had done since the eighteen hundreds.

The system they adapted is called the Burton Union, a network of sixty-gallon oak casks linked together during fermentation, allowing yeast to work inside the wood and cycle back through the beer. The result was their flagship Double Barrel Ale, or DBA, which is among the very few American beers partially fermented in a union of oak barrels. It tastes like nothing else made on this continent: smooth, slightly woody, with a British ale character that the American craft world had never really seen before.

The brewery outgrew the vineyard and moved its main operations to Paso Robles in two thousand one. From that base, Firestone Walker built one of the most extensive barrel-aging programs in the country, called Barrelworks, based in nearby Buellton, producing sought-after wild ales and blended sour beers. The brewing team went on to win the Mid-Size Brewery of the Year award at the Great American Beer Festival multiple times.

Paso Robles, long famous for its Zinfandels and Cabernets, turned out to be an ideal home. The limestone-laced soil and warm inland climate that makes wine grapes thrive here also makes for an extraordinarily food-oriented culture. And a brewery that thinks like a winemaker, patient with barrels and obsessed with terroir, fit right in.