Katee McGee suggested her husband Kevin stop his home winemaking attempts and instead try brewing beer in 2007. The home nanobrewery operation became Healdsburg Beer Company — a passion project producing fewer than 1,000 gallons of beer per year, which Kevin hand delivered (sometimes with the help of a skateboard) to North Bay bars and restaurants.
Healdsburg became a local success, and was even praised by celebrity restaurateur Guy Fieri. After a decade of balancing his day job at Jackson Family Wines and cleaning Healdsburg kegs at 3 a.m., McGee sidelined the brand in 2018. In the meantime, he and his family purchased legacy craft brewery, Anderson Valley Brewing Company (AVBC), which he now leads as president and CEO.
Now Healdsburg is making a return — with a bit of an upgrade, thanks to Anderson Valley.
“The idea of being able to take the beers that I had been making on a tiny garage system, 30 gallons at a time, and put it into this beautiful brew house … why wouldn’t I do that?” McGee told Brewbound.
McGee relaunched Healdsburg in April as a sister brand to AVBC. Using original recipes from his garage brewing days, McGee has scaled up production to 3,000 gallon batches, with the help of AVBC’s staff and copper brewhouse equipment.
The company is “intensely personal” to McGee, who associates it with early memories with his wife and daughter. He relaunched the company with three of its core beers: India Pale Ale, Blonde Ale and Robust Porter. For the first time, the brand is available in cans, with packaging designed by Katee McGee.
“It was only in draft before because I didn’t want to wash bottles,” Kevin McGee said with a laugh.
Each brew has a specific story that McGee said connects the brand to him and his family. India Pale Ale was one of the first beers McGee brewed. Blonde Ale was created to impress McGee’s wife. And Robust Porter, a favorite of the brewing staff (who allegedly drank 5-10% of an initial sample batch that was earmarked for canning), was originally created to appeal to McGee’s personal drinking preferences.
“My philosophy was, if I couldn’t sell it, I was gonna have to drink 30 gallons of it,” McGee said about creating the porter.
He added that he does not have specific production goals for Healdsburg, noting that the company isn’t about metrics and growth. He plans to distribute its beers mainly in Northern California for now, with any expansion being slow and calculated.
“Healdsburg has always been something that is its own kind of living, breathing animal,” McGee said. “We’re going to try and take a measured approach to expanding our footprint and expanding our production in ways that are consistent with quality, and consistent with the idea of the brand.
“It’s a sister brewery to Anderson but it’s not critical for Anderson’s operations, so I have the luxury of doing things maybe slower but maybe smarter,” he continued.
Eagle Distributing Co. and Wine Warehouse are the first distribution partners for the relaunch, both of which are “really supportive and very excited about the brand,” according to McGee.
Distributor relationships are key to McGee, who, since purchasing AVBC in December 2019, has spent much of his time adjusting and repairing the larger brewery’s distribution network.
“When I came into Anderson, I kind of inherited a fairly fragmented, very broad and in places shallow distribution platform,” he said. “It’s not something that I would wish for Healdsburg.”
Under McGee’s leadership over the past two years, AVBC ended its Northern California partnership with Reyes Beer Division and partnered with Eagle in Mendocino, Lake, Sonoma and Marin counties, as well Mussetter Distributing in the Sacramento and Tahoe regions. Through a refreshed partnership with Wine Warehouse, distribution expanded throughout San Francisco, San Mateo and Napa counties. Additionally, it has re-entered the eastern half of New York state (excluding New York City) through a partnership with Sarene Craft Beer Distributors, which also handles the company’s New Jersey and Connecticut markets.
This year, it partnered with Vermont’s Beer Shepherd and Maine’s Marine Beverages, and is currently in the middle of transitioning out of Reyes in the Chicago market.
“There’s a lot of breweries that basically think that the distributors are the sales force, and they’re really not,” McGee said when discussing his strategy of “mending” AVBC’s distribution network. “What I want out of the distributor relationship is I want someone that I can work with, so I can fulfill the promise that I’m making to the consumer.”
Another focus since McGee took over two years ago has been refreshing AVBC’s marketing and salesforce. AVBC unveiled a new logo and packaging in April, and used part of its $1.2 million in small business loans — provided through the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program — to hire additional salespeople, according to the Press Democrat.
Additionally, AVBC recently opened a “beer park” at its Boonville, California-based brewery. The 30-acre space originally housed a taproom “visitor center,” which McGee said had “the warmth of an Amtrak waiting room” with a one hour time limit on wifi.
“The whole thing just screamed ‘get off my lawn,’” he said.
In the past year, AVBC expanded its taproom license to extend to the fenceline of the property. The attraction features a 9,000 sq. ft. lawn with free-range seating, an 18-hole disc golf course, as well as an eventual 3,000 sq. ft. pergola seating area. There are also plans to give visitors the option to order beers from their phones or at beer carts outside, which can be delivered to their seats. Further event space and tap stations are currently under construction.
McGee intends to use the beer park to make AVBC a bigger part of the community, which includes hosting the local farmer’s market every Friday, and hosting live music events. He believes such spaces provide an opportunity for breweries to connect with consumers and become a part of their lives — something he said is vital to saving breweries from getting lost among the 8,700 breweries now in operation.
“With only a few exceptions, there [has been] very little consumer marketing going on in craft beer over the last 10 years,” McGee said, likening craft’s possible future to that of wine, which he said currently offers the “worst consumer experience.”
“In the grocery store, it’s rows upon rows of bottles. And unless you’re imprinted on the brands before you land, all you have is label design and price point to make a decision,” he said. “If that’s how you’re approaching it, you’re just going to lose. And beer was starting to look like that.”