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| Beer and peanuts, MacLeod Ale |
The best
place to have a pint in Los Angeles is…in a garage.
Tourists
may flock to the Sunset Strip, the newly super-gentrified downtown, or the
perpetually gentrifying Hollywood, but if you really want to have a great beer
in an even greater atmosphere, there’s only one place: MacLeod Ale.
Make sure you look carefully. MacLeod is shoehorned
into a totally industrial neighborhood in Van Nuys, sandwiched between a body
shop and another body shop on a block with 12 more body shops (we counted).
Can’t find it? MacLeod’s Website
cheerily tells you to “Look for the lime-green bike rack!”
Once you find it, you’ve found a place that’s so
damn down-home, you’d swear you just warped out of L.A. MacLeod sports a bare
concrete floor, a plain concrete bar top, and stools straight out of an 8th
grade shop class. It’s also the micro-est of micro-breweries, specializing in
cask-conditioned ales served at 54 degrees. And they’ll give you a discount if
you come in wearing a kilt, or with your dog, or with a pig. Really.
MacLeod
is the brainchild of Jennifer Febre Boase. Her unlikely
road to brewmistress of Van Nuys started a few years ago when she and her
husband decided to learn some new musical instruments. She took up the bagpipes
and really loved it. He took up the cello and really loved…his cello teacher.
The two split, but Jennifer quickly found Alastair Boase, and remarried.
Jennifer
saw the change as a chance to reinvent herself, and set up a new status quo.
The pipers she knew were all beer lovers—stereotypes have to come from
somewhere, right?—and Jen started touring local microbreweries with her pipe
band. She drank, she learned, and she rolled the dice, selling her house and
cashing in her IRA early, penalties be damned. And since Alastair’s grandfather
was named Roland MacLeod, well…everything fit. MacLeod Ale was born. And she
wouldn’t change a thing.
“Initially,
I just thought about starting a company that could make money,” Jen laughs
today. “I really didn’t think about the community-building aspect. I was just
thinking about myself. But as I’ve
seen this community grow, it’s dawned on me that we’ve really got something
here, and that’s really exciting.”
MacLeod
has become a crazy-eclectic neighborhood gathering spot. On a random Wednesday
night at 6:30, 35 customers fill the taproom. Then again, it’s the monthly stop
for the Yarnover truck. Ladies come by to buy yarn, knit, and have an ale.
Bartender Nicole Geletka approves. “What I didn’t know is that women who knit
like to drink,” she says. “So maybe that’s a hobby for me.”
A
yarn truck is just the tip of the iceberg for MacLeod. Alastair flexes his
brain cells on promotions, and comes up with some interesting ones. The Burns
Supper salutes famed Scottish poet Robert Burns (with haggis, of course) on his
birthday, and MacLeod celebrates the end of prohibition on Dec. 5, giving its
customers period costumes and “We Want Beer” picket signs to march down the
street with. But the crown jewel of MacLeod promos is the simple “Buy a Friend
a Beer” board.
Customers
can pre-buy a beer for someone, and the staff writes the name on a chalkboard.
The board is periodically shared on social media, and if you see your name,
hey—free beer waiting for you.
The
board has taken on an amazing communal spirit. People have bough beers for “any
teacher,” “Guy with a Duff tattoo,” and “Willie the forklift driver.” Just
before Veteran’s Day, the board was littered with squares that simply said
“Veteran.” Harrison Ford was on the board, now gone (presumably, he claimed his
beer). Nury Martinez, who represents Van Nuys on L.A.’s City Council in the 6th
district, has been on the board. “She’s come in a few times,” Jen says
matter-of-factly.
And
Martinez has company. Cindy Montanez, who’s running against Martinez in an
attempt to unseat her, recently scheduled a meet-and-greet at MacLeod on Feb.
13. We’ll let you know how the election goes on March 3.
But
politics aside, the big star at MacLeod is Rosie, a micro-pig
owned by a local resident who pops in from time to time. The pig drives
business. “Rosie is so popular. If I
put on Instagram that Rosie’s here, people come in immediately,” Jen says. “She doesn’t bother anyone. She likes to
stay among the peanut shells.”
By
8 p.m., the Wednesday night knitting crowd is up to about 50 people. One of
them is Grant Paulis, a 30-year-old camera operator from Van Nuys. Paulis hit
the MacLeod taproom on the day it opened in 2014, and came back every day (“I
had perfect citizenship!” he exclaims) for two months until he finally had to
go out of town for a bachelor party and missed a day. But that’s nothing. His
twin brother, Sean, made it 90 days straight form the opening. “Then his
girlfriend finally got mad, and she would no longer accept any explanation of
why he had to go to the brewery every day,” he says.
Paulis
knows his beer. He loves MacLeod’s offerings, but hates beerier-than-thou
attitude. He tried to bring his dad into the world, but a tap-pulling snob at
another brewery shot dad down.
“My
dad said ‘I like amber lagers. You have anything like that?’ And the guy told
him ‘Amber is not a style of beer, it’s a color.’
He was that total craft beer douchebag,” Paulis says. “But you get none of that
here. You get, ‘Hey, would you like a pint?’ That’s the way it should be.”
Boase
knows regulars like Paulis are getting MacLeod off the ground, with both bent
elbows and word-of-mouth. “Craft beer” may be booming everywhere, but a startup
is still a startup, and up-front costs can be staggering. “You can’t survive
without a taproom initially,” Boase says. “It takes a while to build retail.
We’re just getting there now.”
MacLeod is providing about 14 barrels a week, approximately 450 gallons, to 22 bars in the L.A.
area, and just secured a distributor that will expand their reach from San
Diego to Santa Barbara. That’s good news for Boase. She’d love to be a bigger
microbrewery, but never lose her roots.
“I
like the idea of doing something right here at home, boosting Van Nuys,” she
says. “We’re thumbing our nose at Hollywood. They can have the hipsters. We’re
happy with the forklift drivers.”
Paulis
agrees. “Anyone who’s ever pulled a tap here is very personable. I’ve hung out
with most of them off the clock, whether it’s at another bar, or at my house
for ‘extra innings,’” he says. “There aren’t TVs, so you have to talk to
people, and I think we’ve forgot as a society that that’s how you make new
friends. I’ve made lots of friends here. I know most of the regulars by name.
It’s a comfortable, homey place. It’s like my own personal ‘Cheers.’”
—MacLeod Ale is located at 14741
Calvert St. in tragically unhip Van Nuys in Los Angeles. Look for the lime-green
bike rack!
