One day early in 2009, Rich Marcello picked up the phone to find his old friend Joel Elliot on the other end. Elliot, as is his way, was short and to the point.
“Hey,” he said. “Do you want to do a brewery?”
“Sure,” Marcello replied. “I’ll be there.”
Marcello was working for a small winery in Paso Robles at the time and Elliot as a photographer’s assistant. They had little money and scant knowledge of brewing. Marcello knew the craft wine and the restaurant industry – he’d started as a teenager washing dishes at the Chart House in 1984. Elliot had homebrewed a bit. Mainly, they liked to surf, and they liked to drink beer. This was the nexus of their friendship, which had begun 20 years earlier when both were regulars at 24th Street in Hermosa Beach, and continued later when both happened to move to Hawaii at the same time.
Neither, however, was prone to idle words or pipe dreams. Marcello wasted no time in moving back to the South Bay. Within a few months, they cobbled together $85,000 in loans from friends and family, rented a 1,000 sq. ft. warehouse in Torrance, and purchased a small fermenter, capable of producing seven barrels of beer per batch, or about 200 gallons. They called themselves Strand Brewing Company and set themselves a simple mission – to sell beer everywhere the physical Strand reached, from the South Bay to Malibu. Their business plan was likewise elemental.
“We will not be outworked,” Marcello said. “That’s not a motto. It’s a necessity. Everybody has a different path. Some have more money, some have a better work space. You get the cards you are dealt with, and the cards we had meant we had to roll up our sleeves and get to work.”
By the third week of October that year, they had produced their first batch. They called it Genesis, borrowed three kegs, and took their first beer to Naja’s, the South Bay’s original beer mecca on the Redondo Beach pier boardwalk.
“We went through three full kegs in about 10 hours that first day,” Marcello said. “Then we were off and running. But we had to give those kegs back.”
In the next few months, they perfected a brew called 24th Street Pale Ale and decided they would live or die by it. Pale ales are ubiquitous and accessible; they are relatively light, by craft brew standards, and therefore crowd-pleasing. One of the first craft beers to gain wide distribution was the Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.
“It’s a style that appeals to people,” Marcello said. “They know a pale ale. I really think by going into that market, you put yourself on the map if you make a good one. You are going to be judged on something people already know. If I made you a double imperial stout with coffee, okay, it’s pretty good, but you are not really judging against other double imperial stouts with coffee you had once.”
Elliot, who is Strand’s brew master, said the pale ale was in keeping with his ethos: keep it simple.
“It’s just a simple style that we think is done very well, and that is kind of my style,” he said. “It’s a classic pale ale, slightly forward, slightly fruity, with a big finish.”
And, in keeping with its name, the 24th Street Pale Ale goes well with surfing.
“You can still taste it after you’ve been drinking saltwater all day,” Elliot said.
What happened next is the stuff of buddy movies and, strangely enough, business pages. The company sold 400 barrels of beer in 2010 and did about $100,000 in sales, barely enough to survive. In 2011, things took off. They sold 1,200 barrels and expanded their warehouse. They’d already grown accustomed, as a two-man company, to working 100-hour weeks. As the business took off, Elliot and Marcello literally worked without cease.
“In 2011, I was off New Year’s Day,” Marcello said. “My next day off was the Fourth of July.”
This year they will sell 4,000 barrels of beer. They still sell primarily to beer houses and restaurants and have been picked up by one of the largest distributors in the field, Wine Warehouse. Strand beer is now sold in more than 200 establishments, ranging from LA Live to Father’s Office and nearly every local venue that sells craft beer. Their estimated sales this year are $750,000. The Los Angles Times has called Strand Brewing “the fastest growing brewery in Southern California.”
Strand has expanded in every way a brewery can – distributing more and more widely, adding a tap room and many more styles of brews, and even adding employees (well, one employee, unless you count the 35 sales reps now selling Strand on behalf of distributor Wine Warehouse). Plans are in the works to bottle the beer. Marcello notes that the company’s timing could not have been better, riding the wave of craft beer drinking that has overtaken Southern California and much of the nation over the last two years. Eagle Rock Brewery preceded Strand in 2009, barely, as the first brewery to open in LA County in a half-century. Now seven standalone breweries are operating in LA County, three of which are located in the South Bay (two more are about to begin brewing here). Likewise, dozens of new beer houses have opened whose focus is on craft beer.
“It’s grown so much in three years,” Marcello said. “The timing we’ve had is amazing.”
“And also,” Elliot added, “not to sound like a dick – but maybe we had something to do with it.”
The mini-van
Much of Strand Brewing’s success has depended on a 1998 Chrysler Town & Country mini-van.
Marcello’s beat-up old van has only recently been restored to its original purpose, carrying surfboards. For most of the early life of the fledgling brewery, the Town & Country was Strand’s sales and delivery fleet. Marcello reckons he delivered more than 70,000 gallons of beer in the van. Elliot recalls realizing at one point in 2010 that the brewery’s fate was dependent on a Chrysler not breaking down.
The van, as it turned out, was as indefatigable as its driver. During 2010, Marcello broke his “golden rule” and took a corporate PR job to make ends meet. He worked that job mornings, then from noon ‘til late at night he and his trusty van made the rounds selling and delivering beer.
“I could count every time over two years I ate lunch without a window shade,” Marcello said. “I ate in the car. It’s a windshield, and I’m driving.”
Elliot, meanwhile, often arrived at the brewery at 5 a.m. and stayed ‘til midnight. He saw very little sun for two years. “I was here when it’s light, but when I left my house, it was dark, and when I came home, it was dark,” Elliot said. “I don’t get out. And I get that, like, vitamin d deficiency – it’ll be sunny, and I’ll be out there for two minutes and I’ll be like, ‘Agh! Agh!’ I live in a weird world. I am locked in a cave.”
The two worked out a well-wrought division of labor. Elliot is a hands-on, technical kind of guy – from a young age, he loved to take things apart and put them back together. “When people ask when I started brewing, the best answer I can give is when I was like four I started taking things apart,” Elliot said. “That is actually the most useful experience I have…That is kind of how I live. Life isn’t complicated. If things are broken, then I will fix them. The thing is, there are either problems or there are traps. If you can’t solve it, it’s not a problem, that’s just complicated B.S. So yeah, just fix it.”
He’s also a loner, happy to spend 19 hours at a time immersed the machinery and minutiae of beer-making.
“He’s my carpenter, my plumber, my electrician, brewer, and art department,” Marcello said. “The one thing he can’t do, lucky for me, is sell beer.”
Marcello can sell beer. He was, until the brewery gained outside distribution, a one-man sales army. He made himself instantly recognizable to restaurant managers, chefs, doormen, bartenders, and servers throughout Southern California. Go into any place in a hundred mile radius that takes its beer seriously and say his name, and it’s very likely somebody on the premises will know “The Strand Guy.” He wears a white shirt and jeans every day and is never, ever less than utterly buoyant.
“I wear the same thing every day so everyone knows who I am,” Marcello said. “I am a cartoon character that is Strand Brewing…like kids knew who Popeye was. This is my uniform – you will never see me in anything other than this. ‘The Strand guy is here.’ They might not know my name, but The Strand Guy is good. I’ve answered to a lot worse.”
At one early sales stop, he walked into a local establishment at the very same time 100 customers had just arrived. He’d spent the better part of 20 years working in bars and restaurants, so he took one look at the frazzled bartender and understood the situation. Even if the guy didn’t buy beer, Marcello thought, he wasn’t about to let him wallow in this mess.
“Are you okay?” Marcello asked.
“No, I am not,” the bartender replied.
“Permission to come aboard?”
“Please.”
He got the man ice and served as bar back for the next 45 minutes, until the rush had subsided. At the end, he shook the bartender’s hand, introduced himself, and said he was there to place Strand beer on one of the place’s taps.
“I got a parking ticket,” Marcello said. “But he’s been one of my best accounts ever since.”
“Every single account I have, I am the sales guy, the delivery guy, the line-cleaning guy, the PR guy, and the account payable guy,” he added. “You better like who you are dealing with, because you are going to deal with these guys potentially five or six times in one week. So I have a relation with every single person. Name any one of my accounts, and I can tell you everyone in the place: general manager, owner, bartender, hostess, chef…I have to know them.”
The craft beer movement goes hand-in-hand with the emerging “slow food” or “foodie” culture that is emerging, one that values artisan goods, the more local the better. When Marcello first started making sales calls locally, he could legitimately call Strand the only local beer. He remembers his first call to his first account after Naja’s, Simzy’s in Manhattan Beach.
“They had zero local beer – the local beer was from San Diego,” Marcello said. “Then I went in a month ago and they had seven handles form within 30 miles. Just amazing.”
Even though Strand Brewing appears to have firmly established itself as a beer force to be reckoned with locally and increasingly regionally, Marcello is not taking anything for granted.
“Every time someone tells me we’ve succeeded, all I hear is I better go work harder,” he said. “So if you ever hear me say we’ve made it, that means I’ve retired. Until that day, I work harder.”
Both Elliot and Marcello say if they knew then what they know now, they may not have gotten into the brewery business. But both are grateful they did.
“Of course, we are totally insane,” Elliot said. “There is that.”
“It’s so much more than two people,” Marcello said. “We’ve had incredible support from the community, everyone from bartenders to managers to bar servers to people that go out and support us by drinking Strand. It doesn’t matter how good our beer is, or our t-shirt, people have to be out there drinking. Hats off to people who are drinking better beer.”
And, Elliot said, hats off to the power of good beer. He says he loves beer more now than he ever has.
“I respect it a lot more,” he said. “And I respect brewers who can make excellent beer a lot, not only because of their talent as brewers, but because running a brewery is not easy.”
It reminds him, unsurprisingly, of surfing.
“It’s kind of like the ocean,” Elliot said. “You learn to respect it, or it will kick your ass. Don’t turn your back on beer.”
Strand Brewery, 23520 Telo Ave., Torrance. 310-517-0900. See strandbrewing.com for more info and taproom hours.
