Yavapai College Student Newspaper » Blog Archive

From bombs to beer

Written by: Elizabeth Zieche | 1 May 2009

Its skin is 1,400 coasters from breweries across the world. Its blood is Liquid Amber and Petrified Porter, along with the six other tap beers brewed in-house.

Inside, on a Friday or Saturday night, it is coursing with life: with the locals of Prescott, AZ, with tourists and with staff.

This is the Prescott Brewing Company (PBC) and after fifteen years it is very much alive and growing stronger every day.

The Beginning

When John Nielsen set out to give Prescott a taste of the “real beer” that he learned to love while stationed in Germany with the U.S. Army, instead of America’s “fizzy water” beer, he could hardly have known that he and his wife Roxane Nielsen were giving birth to their own piece of “Everybody’s Hometown.”

It all became reality on the way home from an A’s game, at a place called Buffalo Bill’s Brewhouse. “You know I don’t drink [American] beer,” said Nielsen to his friends, who pushed him into trying one of Bill’s hand-crafted beers. That moment was one of many revelations that led to the creation of PBC, or as locals call it, simply “The Pub.”

After a close call in his career of disarming explosives for Lockheed Martin, a global security company, he realized he needed a change.

This and the taste of Buffalo Bill’s beer was all he needed to push his already awarded home brewing from hobby to career.

From hobby to career

“I’m going to open one of these,” thought Nielsen, looking around the small brewery and restaurant. Not that any of it came as easily as these realizations; there were many lessons along the way. Even home brewing had its bumps in the road. In 1988 Nielsen finished his first batch of home-brewed Amber and “it was terrible,” but then he learned the lesson of maturation of home brew. He experienced a “huge boil-over” all over Roxane’s kitchen and ended up spending more time cleaning than brewing, but then he built his own three vessel aluminium home brew system.

Before long, brewing as a career and opening The Pub were all but inevitable.

“Roxane and I sat down having coffee and named the beers.” They used a tree theme, such as Willow Wheat and Ponderosa IPA. Roxane bought a book with trees which Nielsen still keeps in his office. “What started as a sheet of paper…” remembers Nielsen with a smile, grew into fifty-two types of beers and still counting.

This year, the brewery celebrated its fifteenth anniversary. Although Nielsen is the owner, he is there nearly every day, helping his bartenders, servers, cooks and brewers.

A brewer

His business has grown to be so successful that people like John Luca Ahern, 30, are willing to move across the country to join the PBC team. Ahern, the assistant brewer for PBC, moved from upstate New York for his chance to brew at this award winning brewery.

“It’s hard to get experience [as a brewer],” says Ahern, who has a BA in English, but found his
passion at culinary school.

Ahern explains the process of becoming a brewer as similar to an apprenticeship. “I worked at a brew pub for six months without getting paid…I lived with my parents at that time,” says Ahern with a laugh.

“It’s really great to make a tangible product that you can see people enjoy.”

Ahern also spent time in Germany, where he developed his love for good beer and the “community around it.” His move from upstate New York was the result of a job posting he found on a brewer’s job search website, where he received the job at Prescott Brewing Company despite stiff competition.

Ahern is proud to tell people he is a brewer and see their reaction of, “Really? Cool.”

Part chemist, part maid

A good brewer is part chemist and mostly maid, says Ahern, who describes the brewing process as “85 percent cleaning.” Starting at 7:45 a.m. Ahern brews for six and a half to seven hours and in that time just some of the cleaning he does includes cleaning spent grain, cleaning brewing equipment such as the mesh tun, sanitizing the hoses at least three times in the process and “cleaning anything else that’s dirty.”

Despite the dirty side of his job, Ahern loves it. “It’s really great to make a tangible product that you can see people enjoy.”

Ahern gets to “quality control” the fruits of his labor after the 14-15 days it takes to brew a batch of beer. Ahern and his fellow brewer, Jan Brown, create an end product of about seven barrels a day, at 31 gallons a piece.

Ahern has nothing but good things to say about his workplace and his job. “It’s organized, structured and dynamic…I love it.”

Ahern is just one of the workers who breathes life into Nielsen’s thriving business. “We’re extremely lucky,” says Nielsen. “We had the idea and the dream, but it’s taken everyone to bring it to fruition.”

“We’re keeping our thumb on the pulse, we want to know how to do it better…we’re always growing.”

Photos by Frances Karl