San Diego native Tomme Arthur has become known for producing some of the best Belgian-style beers in the U.S. He was hooked on Belgians by college and had his first brewery job at age 23. Arthur started working with Pizza Port Solana Beach in 1997 and released his first Belgian-style brew that fall: Dubbel Overhead Abbey Ale. Arthur later teamed with Pizza Port owners Vince and Gina Marsaglia on a new brewing facility in San Marcos, producing beers for Port Brewing and The Lost Abbey. Under Arthur’s direction, The Lost Abbey has delivered “inspired beer for saints and sinners alike” since May 5, 2006. He made a rare L.A. appearance at Verdugo Bar on July 30 and discussed his background and approach.
How did you become so interested in beer?
I was in college and had a friend who was really into beer. He and his dad traveled, had gone to Belgium and been to Europe and they said, “If you’re going to drink beer, you need to drink good beer.” They basically took me from being a complete newbie beer drinker at 18. I started out with Canadian beer, then English beer and German beer and got into Belgian beers after that.
Where was your first brewing job?
It was at downtown San Diego at Cervezerias La Cruda, which means “The Hangover Brewery” in Spanish, which is not the most appropriate name for a brewery. I was there for the start of the operation in 1996. They opened in April of 1996 and by March of 1997 they had shut down. Poor management, lack of start-up capital, all the things that typically plague operations. Not a good business model, but we were making really, really good beers. At that point, 1995, 1996, that’s when a lot of breweries got their start: Stone, Ballast Point, AleSmith. All those breweries launched at about the same time. I met all the people in the San Diego brewing scene, including the owners of Pizza Port.
Would you say that you have any brewing mentors?
The gentleman who became my friend, Troy Hojel, who gave me my first brewing job, would be the closest thing to being a mentor. He and I were close in age, so it was more pupil-teacher, but at some point I learned a lot from him. I learned as much as I could from him, then took that on to translate my approach to brewing.
What was the first beer you ever brewed?
The first beer I ever brewed at home was a stout. It was from a bottled extract home brew kit. Commercially, when I got handed the keys to be the head brewer at Pizza Port, the first batch I ever brewed was Shark Bite Red. It wasn’t until about six months after I started working there that they gave me the freedom to brew a seasonal beer. The first beer I ever brewed for them was a Belgian Abbey double style beer. Back in the fall of 1997 when I did that, there weren’t a lot of people making Belgian-style beers in San Diego. It was pretty novel at that point.
What’s your first beer memory?
My dad asked my sister to grab him a beer out of the fridge. It was a can of Coors that landed on her toe and broke her toe. I remember that very vividly. That’s certainly maybe not the first, first one, but certainly an indelible one. I just can’t get away from it, dropping the can on her toe and doing some damage.
What’s the most recent beer that you developed and what was your approach with it?
Over the past weekend we released Duck Duck Gooze, which is a blended sour ale that came from our barrel program. I love the Lambics, the sour beers of Belgium, and I wanted to take some of our beers and age them for one, two and three years and blend a portion of each back together. The inspiration was gueuze Lambic, but with the American spin that it wasn’t spontaneously fermented. It doesn’t have as much unmalted wheat, but it has the same basis of one year old beer, some two year old beer and some three year old beer…By not having spontaneous fermentation, you cannot legally call it gueuze. We spell it gooze as it duck duck goose, so it’s G-O-O-Z-E. We’re calling it an homage to a traditional geuze, but it’s more of a New World interpretation of it.
Who are some other local brewers you respect?
The guys at Craftsman have been doing it for a really long time up in L.A. Those guys have really flown under the proverbial radar because they’re not very big, they’re not very aggressive about marketing, advertising or sales. They have a very organic feel about what they do. They’ve been around about 13 years. They’ve been plugging along for a long time and they’ve made some real unique beers along the way that didn’t really speak to the culture of L.A. drinking. They made things that spoke to the things they wanted to make, even if it meant selling less beer if they had dumbed things down.
Down in San Diego, I really respect what Pat [McIlhenney] has been doing at Alpine. In San Diego there’s a lot of hoppy IPAs, double IPAs. His beers still stand out and really resonate with the consumers. They’re really hard to come by because they really don’t distribute widely. When you do find his beers, they’re always of the highest quality.
What are your impressions of the L.A. beer scene and how have they changed since you started brewing?
For so long I did a lot of brewing on the pub side in San Diego. I never really came up to Los Angeles to investigate and see what was going on here, but there wasn’t much ten years ago in terms of places pouring great beers. There were pockets of places. Lucky Baldwin’s has been pouring great beer for awhile. You’re starting to see some of the same things that have happened in San Diego, invigorating neighborhood bars and city places…In San Diego we don’t have a lot of them in downtown San Diego, but you’re starting to see a density of bars along 30th Street. That’s truly in San Diego proper. When you start to have those connections and have four or five bars in a targeted area, it allows for better beer drinking to be done in a safer environment. You can cab, you can walk, you can bus. In that way you start to get the synergistic effect of everybody being close by. You can say tonight I know Blue Palms is out of this Stone beer, but I know Verdugo got a keg and we can go have it there. That’s pretty impressive. I’m starting to see in L.A., start to connect the dots and have places close together. That’s one of the problems in San Diego. We’ve always had too much distance between places to hit them all the same time. Nothing’s more frustrating as a drinker than to have to get in the car and deal with traffic. You want to go from one great beer bar to the next. Places like San Francisco, Portland, even Seattle and other cities, there is some other close proximity. You can hit three great beer bars in a ten minute area. We’re starting to see more of that in San Diego. Hopefully that will catch on up here a bit more.
Where do you like to drink in San Diego?
My favorite place to drink is certainly O’Brien’s. Toronado too, but it’s quite a ways from my house, so I don’t get to drink there much. Churchill’s is the closest pub to my house, and the Stone beer gardens are right around the corner, but for me, we have so many great beers at the brewery. We typically have 15 great beers on tap, I don’t have to go far, and if I want something a little more eclectic, and if I want to hang out in a bar, I go to O’Brien’s.
If you could only drink one more glass of beer, what would it be?
Probably a glass of our Cuvee. I think our Cuvee for me personally has so many fractions of the timeline in it. It has my love of Belgian beers, it has my discovery of what wild and microbial things can do to beers in barrel aging. It has a fruit component. It has some raisins. It has fractions of a lot of things we do in other beers that all kind of kind of get tied together. If I could get one last beer from us, that would be it because of what that beer stands for, what it means to me. We’ve been making that for 10 years, and when we came out with it, there was nothing like that being brewed, at least in this country. It’s a shockingly bracing beer in the way it’s put together, but at the same time it has a lot of finesse. I like sour beers.
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Great beers, but it’s unfortunate what demand has done to the price of the seasonals, esp. the sours. Bought 375ml of Cuvee for $20 last week.