Drinking local
Beer has also become tied to the eat-local mentality.
“I have often said, and I really do believe, that it’s part of a larger movement of people knowing where their food comes from and wanting to know what goes into their food,” says Mike Mallozzi, who opened Borderlands Brewing Co., 119 E. Toole Ave., with Myles Stone in 2011. “I think that is a huge part of craft brewing, it’s something that people make with quality being the first thing in mind, and ingredients being the first thing in mind makes it a superior product.”
Mallozzi would know. He came to Tucson after finishing a doctorate in microbiology at Loyola University in Chicago. Before that, he “grew up drinking microbrews in college” at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, home of legendary craft brewers including New Belgium, famous for its flagship Fat Tire amber ale. But there is also an Anheuser-Busch facility where Mallozzi spent his last year of college working in quality assurance for Budweiser.
For Hilderbrand, the IPAs and other ales largely available from craft brewers in the late ‘90s didn’t scratch the itch he had developed for European-style beers like hefeweizens or dunkels, a dark, malty, German brew. His decision to open Sentinel Peak with co-founder Matt Gordon in 2014 and offer more of the Euro-brews is indicative of the broadening tastes in production and consumption of craft beer nationwide.
Chris Squires, co-owner with JP Vyborny of Ten-Fifty Five Brewing, 3810 E. 44th St., says the once-separate breed of “craft beer drinkers” is going away, opening the genre to all beer drinkers for any number of reasons.
“I think a more sophisticated consumer can drink beer the way they maybe would’ve drunk wine a few years ago, but I think there’s also another side that I wouldn’t even call a ‘craft beer drinker’,” Squires says. “They just want to support local businesses. They’re not ‘craft beer drinkers,’ they just like us and like what we’re doing and that’s what they’re into.”
For Ten-Fifty Five, the support of the Tucson drinking community has meant they’ve been able to get serious about opening a second, much larger location. This year, they issued a call for investors to raise $2 million to open in an 11,000-square-foot facility at 127 S. Fourth Ave., around the corner from Thunder Canyon’s downtown location.
Squires also links the foodie culture and use of local ingredients to the innovation and collaboration that many say sets the Tucson beer scene apart.
“You’ve got Dragoon putting out Daisy for example, Borderlands just did that collaboration with Ermano’s,” he says of the Pima County Stout, which won gold at the Arizona Strong Beer Festival.
“Not to toot our own horn but you’ve got us putting out Valentine from all Arizona ingredients, so I mean, the level of innovation in Tucson breweries I think is leading the charge in the Southwestern U.S.” Squires says.
“So many of us are focused on being sustainable and being local. That’s a thing that’s a huge theme for our beers, using local ingredients,” Mallozzi says. “BKW Farms has now produced a brewers’ malt that some of us are using in our beers, and that’s a huge step forward because until that, there was no local malt. And vineyards are growing hops down in Sonoita.”
Among its beers, Borderlands is currently featuring a Munich-style dunkel with local dates harvested by the Iskashitaa Refugee Network, a Tucson-based non-profit that gleans produce and donates it to refugee communities.
Such charitable partnerships are not uncommon. Mallozzi estimates Borderlands alone hosts 25-30 charity events a year and gave $5,400 in cash contributions and donated about $1500 worth of beer to local charities in 2015.
