Three weeks into June, Strand Brewing Company co-owner and head of sales Rich Marcello looked through his calendar for the rest of his month’s schedule.
He found L.A. Beer week looming — eight days’ worth of celebrating the best in the Los Angeles craft brewing scene. It’s both a valuable opportunity and a bit of a cure for a man who has been called the Hardest Working Man in L.A. Beer by industry colleagues and onlookers.
With the addition of Beer Week events onto his schedule, Marcello counted out a total of 38 Strand events in June. That’s 38 events where he’s pouring beer, shaking hands, and raising awareness for his company in 30 days.
Despite that, he waves the nickname off. “I feel if someone asked me, ‘Who’s the hardest working man in L.A. Beer?’ The answer is Joel,” he said.
Down the hall, Strand co-owner and brewmaster Joel Elliot is shoveling dirt, clearing a way for drainage in the floor of Strand’s soon-to-open new, 36,000 square foot brewhouse home.
Together, the pair have put together one of the South Bay’s first brewing success stories.
State Assemblyman David Hadley named Strand the South Bay’s 2015 Small Business of the Year, calling the company “an early pioneer in what has now become a craft beer renaissance in the South Bay of Los Angeles.”
Marcello went to Sacramento to receive the award, spending the day in the state capitol with Hadley.
“From starting in 2009, underfunded, over budget, working two jobs, with no craft beer scene to within six years having someone notice our work enough to give us an award? To win that is an honor,” Marcello said. “It shows that people are noticing the work we’re doing, so we’ll keep our heads down and our sleeves up, grinding away at it.”
After nearly six years in business, the brand that started out as two men and a minivan is moving into their new space with an eye on the future and the thought that this may be Strand Brewing Company’s permanent home.
At least, Marcello hopes so — through some cosmic stroke of luck, Marcello and his wife have welcomed a new child into the fold each time Strand’s facilities have grown. “What I don’t want to do is move again,” Marcello said. “I can’t have any more kids.”
Marcello was laughing as we sat on the floor of his office at the new Strand Brewing HQ. He’s yet to put furniture in, he said, because he hadn’t decided whether or not he wanted to keep the carpet.
One could surmise that time crunches have been a factor as well. As Marcello said in a 2012 Easy Reader interview, he and Elliot “will not be outworked.” Three years later, he doubled-down on that thought.
“We work sick, we work injured, we work tired,” he said.
Near-fanatical dedication to their work has become a trademark of Strand Brewing Company. “We’re proud of that. It’s hard to maintain 100 percent ownership,” Marcello said, noting that he still spends days selling beers himself, going up and down the coast in his trademark white buttoned-down shirt.
But that, he feels, is part of Strand’s charm, and its good fortune. Residents of the South Bay, he believes, are people with a taste for the finer things, with an understanding of the difference between handcrafted and mass-produced goods.
The only problem with a passionate following like Strand’s is high demand. Though they’re running at as high a capacity as they can currently manage, Marcello says they’re “running on E” almost daily.
“We have issues with running out; that pull-through is one of the reasons we have some of the freshest beer on the market,” he said. That isn’t just a marketing pitch, either. A trip to a Gelson’s market showed a case of Strand beer that, by Marcello’s estimation, had been sitting in the brewery’s fermentation tanks only two days earlier.
“It’s like someone ordering a salad, and you go out to pick the lettuce,” he said.
Except — with respect to the country’s many skilled lettuce-pickers — there’s a sharp learning curve to brewing that isn’t present in picking produce. It’s a matter of chemistry, and on some levels, a matter of art — and following an acrimonious split with a former partner, it’s an art that Joel Elliot taught himself.
His auto-didactic nature has always been there, Elliot said. It began with his love for pulling apart and rebuilding things, such as an old Polaroid camera. “A really early camera; it probably would be worth a lot of I hadn’t taken it apart,” Elliot said.
When Elliot and Marcello split from their former partner, it was a pivotal time in their nascent history. If they couldn’t recover, they’d sink.
Luckily for them, however, Elliot thrives on pressure. “I feel like I’ve done my best work when I’m drowning,” he said.
He was forced to fall back on what he learned when he was young, taking things to their most basic units and putting them together to work. But in this case, rather than camera parts, he was presented with a box of Legos and no instructions. “Sure, there’s a right way to put it together,” he said, “but who says you can’t put it together some other way?”
So, Elliot went about re-assembling Strand’s beers — not remaking their old partner’s work, but brewing them as his own, making them for himself.
“I think a large percentage of brewing is art, and really, what good is copying art?,” Elliot said.
The key, Elliot said, is in honesty, an ethos that he feels runs throughout Strand as a company.
“Like any art, it comes from life experience. It sounds cheesy, but it’s true — painters, musicians, they all pull from their life. I suppose I’m doing that too,” Elliot said.
He’s doing that in every facet of the business, keeping his hands in everything from constructing brewing equipment, to building tables, to brewing beer — and as Elliot admits, that might make him sound like a control freak.
But that’s part of his philosophy: Having his hands in the process helps him understand a system, helps him build it and helps him fix it.
“I approach beer the same way — it could easily be automated to the push of a button, but I would probably never do that,” he said. “Whether it’s my hands or the hands of the guys that I train, someone’s hands are involved, and that’s important — hands are the things that build things.”
That, along with their propensity for running on a shoestring budget, is one of the reasons why Strand has kept its personnel numbers low (ten employees, including Elliot and Marcello) as its production numbers continue to jump.
With the new brewhouse, Strand hopes to expand on production numbers that jumped nearly ten-fold in five years, from 350 barrels in 2010 to 4,000 in 2014. Their goal for 2015 is to finish with 8,000 barrels produced.
But for Elliot, it’s not about numbers as much as it is about being satisfied with the product. That satisfaction, and the mutual respect between Elliot and Marcello, is what keeps them working.
“As long as you know your teammate is there, that no matter what he’s going to be doing his best, it makes things easier,” Elliot said. “I think that’s where relationships can fall apart — where one person feels they’re working harder than the other. I’ve never felt that way with Rich. I think we’re just trying to keep up with each other.”
Little more than a month out from the new brewhouse’s opening, Marcello is still out there, head down, sleeves rolled up, grinding away on the sales path while Elliot puts the finishing touches on the brewhouse.
Together, the two hardest working guys in L.A. beer look forward to their business’s new home.
The Grand Opening for Strand Brewing Company’s new brewhouse, 2201 Dominguez St., Torrance, falls on Thursday, October 22, with a ribbon cutting at 3 p.m. Strand will run specials throughout the weekend, with food trucks and unique beer releases. For more information, visit strandbrewing.com. ER
