Sonoma Pride: 50 breweries join Russian River's fire relief cause

Russian River Brewing Company raises money for Sonoma County fire relief through Sonoma Pride, a fundraising plan involving 50 breweries. Russian River Brewing Company raises money for Sonoma County fire relief through Sonoma Pride, a fundraising plan involving 50 breweries. Photo: Alyssa Pereira / SFGATE Photo: Alyssa Pereira / SFGATE Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Sonoma Pride: 50 breweries join Russian River's fire relief cause 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

For brewers, the week after the Great American Beer Festival in Denver should be one spent recuperating.

For those in Santa Rosa, however, it was spent in a state of anxiety. Over several days, widespread fires threatened lives, homes, and businesses, causing brewers to fear for the future.

But by week's end, the beer community would rally behind Sonoma County by way of a massive collaborative project: Sonoma Pride.

On Sunday, October 8, Third Street AleWorks brewers were coming home to Santa Rosa, expecting to celebrate their bronze medal win at GABF. It's the brewery's 13th honor, but it was Tyler Laverty's first since he became brewmaster in late 2014.

Laverty was to announce the win at work the next day, but instead he woke up to his phone dinging at 1 a.m. Confused by a text asking if he was safe, he peered out the windows. Behind the house, in the distance, he noticed a glowing red hillside. Through the front window, he saw another blaze not far off. "I woke (the family) up and said, let's get going."

Annadel Pale Ale takes Bronze in Classic English Style Pale Ale at the Great American Beer Festival!!! Posted by Third Street Aleworks on Saturday, October 7, 2017

Another Santa Rosa resident, Natalie Cilurzo, kept waking up to the smell of smoke. She had seen on the nightly news earlier that a fire flared near Calistoga, but she wasn't worried about flames reaching the downtown home she shared with her husband and Russian River Brewing Company business partner, Vinnie. They too had returned that day from the Denver festival; they were planning to move into their new house the next day.

At 4 a.m., she was startled awake again by the smoke. Vinnie was already sitting up in bed. "Do you have the remote?" he asked. Switching on the news, as she recalls, summoned reports of "smoke and ash and wind and terror." The fires were now in Santa Rosa.

An hour later, in Sebastopol, Moonlight Brewing Company owner Brian Hunt was woken by a worried call. Groggily, he started the computer. "Oh my God," he thought.

Hunt has fire-fighting training, so he didn't wait around; instead, he headed towards the Tubbs Fire. "I could see in the distance the light of flames," he remembers. "It was pretty obvious where I was needed."

Trying to stay out of the way of fire crews, Hunt used shovels and garden hoses to keep stray embers from starting new blazes. He was worried about the safety of his family and his employees first — much more so than the status of his 25-year-old Santa Rosa brewery. But when everyone was accounted for, Hunt started to reach out to his friends at neighboring brewhouses.

"I think he was trying to make sure his brewery didn't burn down," says Tyler Smith, brewer at the neighboring Cooperage Brewing Company.

With both Cooperage and Moonlight just over a mile from the soon-to-be decimated Coffey Park, Smith and Hunt were concerned about the fates of their businesses. The fire was approaching their breweries from multiple directions. But that day, they were dealt some luck.

"It was headed right to (Moonlight) and then it shifted," Hunt says. "It was a very strange emotion. I don't know what to attribute that to, but I'm very appreciative. I assumed the brewery was going to be lost, but I was there to fight the fire."

Cilurzo was relieved to find that Russian River's employees were also safe. "We didn't know, because we couldn't call and texting wasn't working," she says. "I didn't know anything other than, 'I think our city is burning down.'"

She drove to the couple's popular Russian River brewpub and posted a flyer on the door: "We're closed today due to the fires. Employees, please call us."

They opened the pub on Tuesday, just a day after fires began. It was a scramble and, she says, they "gave away the store." But it didn't matter.

"We thought, if we can get open, people can come and get information, a hot meal and a cold beer and talk to each other — which was really important — and also have access to the television."

On Wednesday, Third Street AleWorks, just a couple blocks away, reopened too. The skeleton crew fed first responders and those displaced, and tried to give locals a place to gather, hydrate, charge their phones and watch the news. Seeing the kids with their parents, the staff switched TV channels to cartoons. To Laverty, it was just the thing to do. After all, he says, "pubs were public meeting places."

Firefighters visiting Aleworks saluted and applauded by Aleworks, Santa Rosa customers!! #beer #sonomastrong #santarosa #sonomavalley #sonomacounty A post shared by Ace It Bike Tours (@aceitbiketours) on Oct 17, 2017 at 8:06pm PDT

Sonoma Pride

By Wednesday night, Vinnie and Natalie Cilurzo at Russian River had devised a two-part plan to raise some "real" money for those affected. The first was something they said they'd never do: hold a $25-per-ticket raffle offering the chance to cut the hours-long line to get the famed once-a-year Pliny the Younger triple IPA at their brewpub. So far, the raffle alone, which will award 14 winners, has raised more than $200,000.

"If there's any time that's appropriate for this," Cilurzo says, "now is the time, because we need to make a lot of money to help our community get back on its feet."

The second part of the plan was a little more complicated. The Cilurzos decided to leverage Russian River's popularity to ask breweries to make a beer of their choice under their existing "Sonoma Pride" label, and donate all the proceeds to benefit a Sonoma County charity. It required some rapid organizing, but they were able to announce a partnership with the King Ridge Foundation on KSRO by Thursday.

"We thought it would just be the local beer community," Natalie Cilurzo says.

But it wasn't. After Rich Norgrove, brewmaster at Bear Republic in Healdsburg, got onboard, calls and emails started rolling in. One came from Third Street AleWorks.

"I got a text from Greg Coll at Fogbelt; he lost his house in the Coffey Park neighborhood," remembers Laverty. "He was asking if we were involved in the Sonoma Pride thing. He said, 'It's Vinnie and Natalie, they're trying to raise money.'"

Dozens of breweries followed thereafter, including major players like Lagunitas, Boston Beer Company and San Diego's Ballast Point. All wanted to craft their own Sonoma Pride beer, but Russian River had to cap it at 50 brewers, Cilurzo says, because they "just didn't have the bandwidth" to get through all the paperwork and divvy up donated ingredients.

"I'm not surprised (brewers) are concerned and generous; that's very typical of this industry," she says. "There's a nice camaraderie and a nice spirit, but I was surprised at how many people wanted to do something fast."

Sonoma Pride didn't stay local; Florida's Cigar City, Oregon's Boneyard Beer and even London's Beavertown Brewery joined the roster. But many others participating, like Petaluma's 101 North, Santa Rosa's Plow Brewing, Sebastopol's Crooked Goat, and Moonlight, are in the North Bay.

"The wind could've blown fire to anyone's brewery," Hunt says. "We all feel it, the whole community feels it. If you're in touch with people then how could you not want to help? You serve the public. I don't own the brewing company, the people who drink the beer own the company."

A post shared by Firestone Walker (@firestonewalker) on Oct 25, 2017 at 9:37am PDT

Now, local brewers are hoping that the people who do drink the beer will help save Sonoma County.

Russian River will release their Sonoma Pride beer, a blonde ale, at their Halloween party on October 31, and many of the others will also be tapping theirs in-house in the next couple weeks to sell at their respective taprooms.

"A lot of these breweries are like family; they're communal spaces," says Smith, who plans to tap Cooperage's Sonoma Pride pale ale at an upcoming beer dinner fundraiser. "Chances are you know someone who was affected, so it's pretty easy to find this as a worthy cause, but this definitely warranted a little more effort from all of us."

Alyssa Pereira is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at apereira@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @alyspereira.

