Founders — ACBHOF

Founders / owners

This wing includes the people who established small breweries (they may also be Brewers)

2025 inductee

Jack McAuliffe

McAuliffe was born in Venezuela due to his father’s work with the U.S. Government, but by third grade, the family had moved to Virginia. In 1964, he enlisted in the Navy and was stationed in Dunoon, Scotland, where he discovered Scottish ales. He began homebrewing at the time, which he continued after his discharge in 1968 while attending college on the G.I. Bill. He took a job in engineering in Sunnyvale, California but was already planning to open his own brewery. When San Francisco proved too expensive, he set his sights a little farther north, and relocated to Sonoma, California. There,(comma) he persuaded two friends, Suzy Stern and Jane Zimmerman to become partners in the endeavor. They rented a property in 1976, where he built a 1-bbl brewhouse and began making beer the following year. While the New Albion Brewery was only open for six years, closing in late 1982, it was the first microbrewery built from scratch in the modern era, and became a blueprint for the craft beer revolution that followed. McAuliffe left the industry, but has been welcomed back in recent years, honored for his legacy to American Craft Beer. He’s currently retired and living in Arkansas.

2025 Inductees

Suzy Stern

Originally from the East Coast, and a former employee of the United Nations in New York, Suzy Stern, now Denison, moved to Sonoma County while her son attended Stanford. There she met Jack McAuliffe, who persuaded her to fund his dream of opening a microbrewery, so she contributed $1,500 and began working at the nascent New Albion brewery, learning as she went. She became one of the original brewers, and apart from a 10-day seminar in New York, was self-taught. After Don Barkley and Michael Lovett (who later opened Mendocino Brewery) were hired to brew, Stern took over administrative duties, which she continued until the brewery closed in 1982.

Jane Zimmerman

Zimmerman was a friend of Suzy Stern, and was introduced by her to Jack MacAuliffe, who pitched them the idea of New Albion Brewing Co. She also invested $1,500 to help start New Albion Brewery and worked there at the very start. But Zimmerman left after less than a year, to go back to school at Sonoma State University, and later became a psychotherapist. She remained in Sonoma, California, where she worked at the Center for Healing Arts, but is now retired.

2025 INDUCTEE

Bert Grant

(May 17, 1928 – July 31, 2001)

Grant was born in Dundee, Scotland, but his family emigrated to Toronto, Canada when he was two. At age 16, he began working as a beer taster and went on to work for both Carling-O’Keefe and Stroh Breweries before turning to consulting work, holding several patents involving hop processing. He’s also credited with having built the first hop pelletizer. In 1967, he built two hop processing plants in the Yakima Valley, and made Washington his home from that point on. In 1982, he opened the first brewpub in the United States, officially the Yakima Brewing & Malting Co., but colloquially known simply as Grant’s Brewery Pub. Grant pioneered Imperial Stout and Scottish Ale, and was one of the first since Ballantine to brew an IPA. Grant was the consummate showman, often wearing a kilt and carrying a vial of hop oil to add to whatever beer he was drinking, saying. “All beer should have more hops.” Grant passed away in 2001 at the age of 73.

2025 INDUCTEE

Ken Grossman

Grossman grew up in southern California, where he began homebrewing with his brother at an early age. Attending college in Northern California, at Butte College, and then California State University, Chico, he opened a homebrew shop and began building by hand the brewery that would become Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. When the brewery opened in 1980, one of his first beers was Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, which redefined what was an English style, using native American hops — especially Cascade — as the more hop forward American Pale Ale. As the brewery grew, Grossman paid particular attention to both environmental and social impacts, and continued to innovate, developing the first fresh or wet hop ales, the hop torpedo, and adding a sustainability department to the company. They are currently the third-largest craft brewery, operating facilities in Chico, California and Mills River, North Carolina.

2025 INDUCTEE

Fritz Maytag

Originally from Iowa, a member of the Maytag appliance family, Frederick Louis Maytag III came to California to attend Stanford and never left. After graduation, a favorite lunch spot was the Old Spaghetti Factory in San Francisco, and one day the owner mentioned to him that the brewery that made his favorite beer, Anchor Steam, was about to close. Intrigued, he went to visit it, and bought a controlling interest that day in 1965. Anchor originally opened in 1896, one of many steam beer breweries on the West coast, but the only one remaining at the time. Maytag resurrected steam beer after exhaustive research and experimentation, and remade Anchor into the first craft brewery, introducing for the first time in the craft era, porter, IPA (in the form of Liberty Ale, which relied heavily on the new Cascade hop variety), barleywine, their Christmas Ale, and small beer, along with the Sumerian project recreating an ancient beer following a 4,000-year-old recipe. In 1993, Anchor diversified into distilling, producing whiskey and gin. Maytag sold the brewery in 2010 and retired to his home in northern California wine country. It would be hard to overstate the Father of the Modern Microbreweries’ impact and influence on today’s craft beer landscape.

2025 INDUCTEE

Jim Koch

Born in Cincinnati into a family that for five generations brewed beer, his father initially discouraged him from pursuing it. He initially worked with Outward Bound, before completing his dual MBA/JD from Harvard and joining Boston Consulting Group, where he spent several years counseling business leaders. But he was convinced there was an opportunity for flavorful beer and left consulting to found the Boston Beer Company. Adapting his great-great-grandfather’s recipe for Louis Koch Lager, he launched Samuel Adams Boston Lager in 1985, and today it’s one of the largest beer brands in the country. Koch continued to push the boundaries of beer with such unique beers as Triple Bock, the Barrel Room Collection, and Utopias, one of the strongest beers in the world.