Brian Hunt

Ask Brian Hunt the most fundamental of question - why beer? - and his answer is surprisingly succinct: “Beer is real,” he says. “It’s an everyday beverage. It’s always relevant.” Hunt has been brewing commercially since before there was a craft brewing industry, and since 1992, his little Santa Rosa brewery Moonlight Brewing Company has been churning out small batches of ales and lagers that are uniquely rooted in Northern California. “I strive to honor the sacred trust a beer drinker gives a brewer,” Hunt says. “I don’t just send a beer out there, into the marketplace. I sell a pint of—hopefully—delight to individual thirsty people.”

Brian Hunt first tried his hand at fermentation as teenager after reading an article about mead in Scientific American. He hated the taste of that first batch of mead, but he loved the applied biology and chemistry of yeast at work making alcohol. He considered becoming a biochemist, then shelved that plan a year later in favor of fermentation studies at the University of California, Davis. Initially, he thought he wanted a career in winemaking, but he related better to brewing culture. “The people in the brewing lab were normal people. They were down to earth, and I really appreciated that.”

Hunt started his professional career in 1980, before there was a craft brewing industry to speak of. A potential job with New Albion, the Sonoma County brewery that helped launch American craft brewing, offered him $120 per week, when there was cash to make payroll. So he signed on with Schlitz, but the Milwaukee giant closed its doors not long after. Years of being buffeted around an industry in its infancy, Hunt says, prompted a change. “I got tired of not getting the fair return for my efforts,” he says. “I concluded that I needed to either make it, or lose it, on my own.”

Moonlight Brewing opened in Sonoma County in 1992. “This has always been a haven for nonconformity,” Hunt argues. And Moonlight’s very existence was a mark of rebellion against corporate brewing. “I was incapable of working for the large breweries, due to my personality or theirs,” he says. “[Opening Moonlight] wasn’t some investment that could come or go, nor was it just money; this was an expression of myself, and feeding my family. And I hope that difference in motivation is something you can taste in the beer.”

Text above is excerpted from the full article in BeerAdvocate, June 2016, Issue 113, by Paul McMorrow.  Photo by Jesse Irizary.