There's beer in them there hills

The establishment of the Gold Rush Brewery in Skagway, Alaska’s newest suds factory, adds one more place to grab a delicious pint of locally produced beer as you explore our vast state. As number sixteen in our increasingly impressive lineup of licensed, operating brewing establishments, it’s also testimony of craft beer’s growing popularity here.

Gold Rush joins Skagway Brewing Company, Haines Brewing Company, Kodiak Island Brewing Company, Easy Hooker Brewing Company and Alaskan Brewing Company in manufacturing beer in Alaska’s southeastern region. Unlike Skagway Brewing Company in the same town, however, Gold Rush’s market is the lively tourist industry and will only be open in the summer, at least for now.

That’s just fine for brewer Jim Webb, who relocated from Sacramento, California, to water the hoards. With a background in homebrewing but no commercial experience, he hit the planks with his feet moving. “I’d been a retail manager my entire life. I grew up in Reno. I ended up going to Oktoberfest one year and came back and couldn’t drink another domestic beer,” he says of his foray into the world of good beer. Webb tromped around California relishing in the riches of the early pioneers in craft brewing such as the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, then chased down others including Devil Mountain Brewery, San Francisco Brewing Company and the Pacific Coast Brewing Company, all of which refined his taste buds and got him seriously into homebrewing. He started picking up awards at local homebrew competitions and had aspirations of brewing professionally, but never chased the dream.

He’s always liked the outdoors and during his most recent stint as a grocery buyer for 14 retail stores in Yosemite, he felt the wanderlust and started poking around online for a brewer’s job. “I looked on coolworks.com and found a brewmaster’s job. I sent my resume and got a call the very next day,” he says.

He never dreamed he’d end up in Skagway, but the owners of the surrounding Klondike Gold Fields attraction in the historic little town liked what they saw on his resume and he found himself picking his way north in January to start the brewery. “It’s been a match made in heaven. I’m having the time of my life. I just turned 50 and never thought this would happen to me,” he explains enthusiastically.

The brewery is part of a much bigger operation that’s centered around the relocation of a 1937 gold dredge where it laid to rest on a working gold claim in the Klondike gold fields of the Yukon. Owners Tom and Judy Hall also own the Denali Winery here in Anchorage, so a little brewing operation was a logical extension of the full service restaurant on the refurbished and smartly appointed dredge and surrounding grounds.

The brewery operates by using an eight-barrel and a six-barrel fermenter that chug away to keep the six main beers flowing. Rather than using the more traditional method of brewing that includes the mashing and sparging of brewing malt and grains, Gold Rush uses all-grain beer kits that are imported from Vancouver, BC. Although it’s too far away for me to jog down there and run a couple of pints through the paces, either the stuff must be good or the tourists are dang thirsty because in the first ten days of operation, over 1,200 pints were slurped up, causing Webb to worry about his ability to keep up. “I tell you what, the beer is coming out really good. I haven’t had one person say anything but good things about the beer,” he says.

The legally separate restaurant peddles the beer that by law has to be kegged up and delivered to it, but after short tours of the brewery, guests are ushered into a separate tasting room with ten taps. “The brewery tours have been a real blast,” says Webb. “We spend about ten to twelve minutes in the brewery where I explain the process and show them fermenting beer that’s in carboys so they can see what’s going on in the bigger tanks, and it’s off to the tasting room.” Right now, guests can enjoy the brewery’s Red Ale, Honey Blonde Ale, Munich Dark Lager, Canadian Light Lager, and an IPA and Pilsner are in the tanks right now waiting to mature. Webb also augments the bigger batches with specialty smaller batches, which right now include a stout, a pale ale and a wheat ale. “I’m kegging up a double batch of cream ale today,” he says.

He’s already had requests from people and retailers interested in packaged product, but he’s still just getting his feet wet in the new digs, so it’s too early to tell what the next steps might be. “First and foremost, we have to take care of the guests that have paid for the experience. At this time we’re just starting out and we’ll only produce about 9,000 gallons or so this year,” he says. As if he’s not busy enough, Webb helps bartend in between tours and when he’s not busy scrambling to keep the tanks full.

Doubtless Webb will be busy until the last tour ship drags anchor and steams out of port, but what happens after that, I wondered. “I signed a three-year contract,” he says, “but I hope to be here longer than that. During the winter I’ll be doing maintenance work on the brewery and some marketing work for the company.”

Webb’s finally living his dream. A brewery on a gold dredge is kind of ironic. I’m sure those thirsty miners of yesteryear that toiled in the dirt would have appreciated a brewery on board, but they had to settle for provisions that were brought to them and scarcely included beer. Now, curious tourists can look back on the lifestyle with a cold, comforting pint in hand.

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