San Diego’s multitude of high-quality breweries have served as proving grounds for brewing professionals. While many make America’s Finest City home for their entire careers, others spread their wings and fly off to pursue opportunities elsewhere. Today, we’re catching up with one such individual, Adrian Lau, a brewer best known for his years of faithful service at Kearny Mesa’s Societe Brewing. There, he learned to produce immaculate IPAs, Belgian-style ales and wine-barrel-aged sours, which just so happens to be the lock, stock and trade of Northern California’s legendary Russian River Brewing…which just so happens to be where he works now. He’s been there for nearly a year, so it seemed a good time to catch up with this good-spirited, much-missed member of the San Diego brewing community.
What inspired you to leave San Diego and do you miss about it?
It was definitely a tough decision to leave so many good San Diego friends and an area of such high beer quality. In the end, my wife, Sydney, and I moved up to Northern California, where we both are originally from, to work on building our personal lives in closer proximity to friends and family. In San Diego, Sydney and I enjoyed that our lives revolved around sharing good food with good friends all over the county. There was always a multitude of things to do, from enjoying gelato while walking our dog in La Jolla, hiking Mission Trails and barbecuing with close friends while opening bottles. Many of our best friends, both in and out of the beer industry, are still in San Diego. Our Societe family—past, present and future—will always have a soft spot in our hearts. I was also very lucky to work so close to all of the quality Asian food on Convoy Street, and will always miss the late-night, post-Toronado / Hamilton’s / O’Brien’s burrito.
What are your responsibilities in your new role and how do you spend a typical day?
I am one of a small core team of brewers at Russian River. Within that team, there are a handful of us that move between the two locations, which, personally, is a nice balance between running both a small and big system. When I’m at the pub—the original Fourth Street location in the heart of Santa Rosa—I get to help make wort on a manual 20-barrel, two-vessel system, the same equipment that (former Societe co-founder and Brewmaster) Travis Smith originally worked on. Some of the days there, our brewers are also taking care of cellar work, running the smaller of our two non-funky centrifuges, dry-hopping beers and turning over tanks, while making sure the brewery is as clean as possible. When I’m at our 85,000-square-foot brewery in Windsor, things are a little different. A brew shift there can consist of taking care of multiple batches passing through our 75-barrel system. You’re tracking your batches of worth through a four-vessel brewhouse to make sure things are progressing smoothly and moving on-time while loading up the malt you need and making any necessary hot-side additions. Any spare time you have is dedicated to taking care of the tank you’re knocking out into and weighing out what feels like an awesome mountain of whole-cone hops to pass wort through in our hop back. A dedicated cellar shift there is either gently racking beer from one of our six stunning open-top fermenters or centrifuging up to 375 barrels of finished beer out of our 12 closed-top conicals. At the end of the shift, you’re setting up the next guy as best as possible and making sure all the beers are progressing properly and tasting great.
Did your time at Societe, working and learning under Smith, help prepare you for your current job?
The things I learned at Societe will always be my foundation as a brewer. Building a strong commitment to making quality beer is only possible with the right brewer’s mindset. Being able to take something intangible and learning how to feel it out and ascribe a value to it, whether it be really pinpointing a specific sensory flavor or judging the ideal movement in a whirlpool in minute detail, is a skill that a brewer can always strengthen. That intuition, in conjunction with using whatever physical tools and metrics are at-hand, is how a brewer judges how to make multiple adjustments in something as crucial as a mash-in, whether it be on their system or on their friend’s. Societe taught me how to always look for ways to be efficient and multitask, to truly manage my time and run several processes within spec at critical points of creating a great product. Societe gave me all of this and instilled in me everything I need to be a successful part of Vinnie and Natalie Cilurzo’s experienced team at Russian River.
What adjustments have you had to make at Russian River?
Working at scale took a short while to get used to, but what took me longer was how to internalize the thinking at volume, to really feel out processes and let it become an intuition guiding my hand when it turns a valve or initiates a process. It’s awesome to get to work with a big volume of harvesting yeast int our yeast-prop tanks and to get to cut in hundreds of pounds of dry hops into a 300-barrel tank. At Societe, nor before that at 32 North Brewing, I never ran a centrifuge, but with a bit of time, it has become natural. Multitasking at a larger scale is critical to getting out at a reasonable hour and it really feels good when you can run multiple big processes—like a fuge run and yeast harvest—at once, and put the next guy in a really good spot.
What sort of beers do you regularly brew at the pub?
Pliny. From The Pupil all the time to Pliny…ha! It’s a fantastic beer that I love to brew. It’s always great being able to brew our other year-round brands like Blind Pig, Happy Hops and Row 2 Hill 56. I love when I’m having fun and it feels like I’m not working while brewing something like Hop2It, our single-hop ale series, or something with a complex simplicity like Damnation or STS Pils. At Russian River, just like at Societe, we are very detail-oriented. Really, any chance any small change or minute adjustment at any step in the process is an opportunity to make better beer that someone will end up enjoying in his or her glass.
What do you think the future holds for you?
One can never be sure, but it will always involve experience great moments with genuine, honest people getting fat over quality beer and food. That’s what I think life should really be about. Just like anyone homebrewing for the first time, I once told myself I was going to have my own brewery one day. I knew that I wanted “big brewery” experience after leaving the 20-barrel system at Societe and am very fortunate to have landed at a place where I get the best of both pub and production volumes. As long as I am currently learning and working hard to make a quality product that people can truly care about and appreciate, I will be happy, no matter the scale.