In November 1982, the New Albion Brewing Company in Sonoma brewed its last batch and shut its doors. Founded by Jack McAuliffe in 1976, New Albion had been the first modern microbrewery in the United States since Prohibition - a one-man rebellion against the bland uniformity of American macrobrewing. McAuliffe proved that small-scale, flavor-driven beer could work, but proving a concept and sustaining a business are different things. New Albion closed broke. A year later, two Mendocino County homebrewers named Michael Laybourn and Norman Franks bought New Albion's brewing equipment and hauled it to the small town of Hopland, seventy miles north along Highway 101. They hired McAuliffe himself along with his former brewer Don Barkley to run the operation. On August 14, 1983, the Hopland Brewery opened its doors as the first brewpub in California and only the second in the United States - a brewery licensed to sell both its own beer and food under one roof.

Every beer Mendocino Brewing made carried the name and image of a bird. Red Tail Ale was the flagship, but the lineup grew to include Peregrine Pale Ale, Black Hawk Stout, Blue Heron Pale Ale, and Eye of the Hawk, a strong pale ale with enough malt backbone to warrant the raptor on its label. The naming convention held a logic beyond branding - Mendocino County sits along the Pacific Flyway, and the birds on the bottles were the same ones circling the oak-studded hills above the brewery. When the company went public in 1994, it did so in a manner fitting its unconventional origins: rather than a traditional stock offering, Mendocino Brewing ran a direct public offering and advertised the chance to buy shares with flyers tucked into its six-packs. Buy a beer, become a shareholder. It was a fundraising strategy no MBA program would have recommended, and it worked.

The brewery's trajectory took an unexpected turn in 1997 when Vijay Mallya, the flamboyant Indian industrialist who controlled the UB Group and its Kingfisher beer brand, purchased a significant portion of Mendocino Brewing's stock. By the time the dust settled, Mallya was the beneficial owner of roughly three-quarters of the company. Under the UB Group's umbrella, Mendocino Brewing acquired Olde Saratoga Brewing Company in Saratoga Springs, New York, and began producing Kingfisher for the American market. The same year, the brewery moved its primary operations from tiny Hopland to a larger facility in Ukiah, twelve miles north. The Hopland brewpub remained open, but the center of gravity had shifted. By 2014, Mendocino Brewing held another unlikely distinction: the Northwest Labor Press identified it as the only unionized craft brewery in the country, its Ukiah workers represented by the Teamsters.

Mendocino Brewing Company ceased operations in January 2018, a casualty of the same financial and legal troubles that were engulfing Vijay Mallya's global empire. The brewery that had salvaged New Albion's equipment and helped launch an industry went dark. But the story did not end there. In March 2019, a group of investors and former employees announced they had restarted operations, brewing Red Tail Ale and Eye of the Hawk for limited distribution in Mendocino County. The revival was modest - local taps and bottle shops rather than nationwide distribution - but the symbolism was unmistakable. The same instinct that had driven Laybourn and Franks to rescue New Albion's brewing gear in 1983 was at work again: the refusal to let a good thing die quietly. Hopland sits in the upper Russian River Valley, surrounded by vineyards and oak grasslands, a place where the craft of fermentation is taken seriously in all its forms.