It was during a visit to Marine Corps Air Station Miramar that Nicco Denton and Tony Adli struck up a conversation about the F-14 Tomcat. Denton’s father and Adli’s brother had both piloted that model of fighter jet. The pair kept talking and found out they had even more in common, namely an entrepreneurial spirit. Fast forward to present day and they are business partners, co-founders of Shams Brewing, the mission of which is to engage with Iranian-American beer drinkers.
“There’s evidence found in the Zagros Mountains, an area located in Western Iran, that beer dates to 3,500 BC. With this long history of beermaking, it allowed Iran to have a thriving beer industry in the 1960s and ‘70s. Shams beer was the oldest and most popular brand of beer that was produced in Iran and consumed throughout the region until it was forced out of business by the Iranian revolution in 1978,” says Denton, a U.S. Navy veteran who now works in the IT industry. “We discussed the fact that there were no Persian brands available in the United States, and with such a long history of Persian beermaking, we decided to revive the classic brand.”
Following the revolution, the original Shams (which means “sun”) was reestablished in Iran in 2018. With production of alcoholic beverages having been legally prohibited since 1979, the company now exclusively produces non-alcoholic beers. Despite that and decades of inactivity, nostalgia for the brand persists among Iranians. This is Shams’ target audience. Denton says there are currently one million Iranian Americans living in the U.S. and that the highest concentration reside in Southern California.
In April of last year, Denton and Adli established their business, teaming with Los Angeles-based Absolution Brewing (the owners of which opened short-lived CAVU Brewing in La Jolla before shuttering it last year) to brew a singular flagship lager, Shams Gold. Though still in its infancy, Shams has racked up restaurant and grocery-store accounts across the Golden State, while selling the beer online for shipment throughout California.
“Shams Gold is an artisan, 5% alcohol-by-volume craft beer with a clean and refreshing taste. It will appeal to beer-drinkers across the board with earthy and citrus notes balanced with a delicate grain bill of pilsner malt,” says Denton. “We’re a very small operation, but we’ve managed to produce and sell about 72 barrels since we started, which equates to about 1,000 cases of beer,” says Denton. “By next year, we plan to have scaled and doubled the operation.”