This summer, Vallejo welcomed Napa Smith Brewery to its growing list of great local craft beer breweries. Brewmaster Stein Servick and legendary Brewmaster Emeritus, Don Barkley, sat down with Zakk to talk about their life’s work: crafting the perfect beer for every moment in life.
Stein takes this approach to heart and compounds the brewery’s traditional beers with hyper-seasonal brews. This attention to detail is what these Brewmasters like the best – Stein says he enjoys to spend his time in the malt room perfecting each blend. Then, every six weeks, the Napa Smith team puts their heads together to plan out the perfect beer for the upcoming season.
“We’re more concerned with the balance of a beer,” says Stein. “There’s been sort of a movement to put as many hops into a beer that you can possibly stuff in there. I really want the malt to shine as well. There’s a time and a place for incredible hop flavor and bitterness, but at the same time I want some delicate things.”
Stein’s mentor Don Barkley praised the versatility that Stein has brought to the company.
“With Stein on board, not only do we have these good tradition beers, but we got his nutty stuff too!”
That’s high praise coming from one of the founders of craft beer in California. Barkley started his career at the first craft beer brewery in America, New Albion Brewing Company, and later went on to open the Mendocino Brewing Company. He ultimately opened Napa Smith Brewery in 1997 after 15 years with Mendocino.
As the name suggests, newly transplanted Napa Smith Brewery started in Napa Valley, but the company soon found that it needed to build beyond its roots and start with a clean slate.
“We look at Napa (as) our home…but the facility that we were in didn’t allow us to actually expand and grow in the way that we wanted to do,” says Barkley. “We came down to Vallejo and we found this lovely spot here where we could actually walk into a warehouse that was a blank sheet of paper.”
On the production side, the new space features top-of-the-line Krones filler that pumps out 201 bottles per minute (bpm). But the brewery still pays homage by aging some small barrel projects in Napa wine barrels, adding an extra dimension to the batch.
Easily accessible from the Vallejo Ferry on the Napa River, the brand new taproom offers 14 craft beers on tap with a myriad of beer hall games from pinball to shuffleboard.
“Napa Smith Brewery has always been driven by the technology of beer, and we’re enlightened by (the Brewmasters’) creativity,” says Barkley.
The Napa Smith Brewery taproom is open from 12 pm – 9 pm every day. Watch the interview with the Brewmasters themselves below.