Beer of the Moment #1: Life Is Helles at Bike Dog Brewing

Exploring a Sacramento lager, brewery culture, and drinking with intention.

After alternating periods of sobriety over the past few years, I’ve settled into a comfortable rhythm of drinking—really enjoying—a beer or two each week. I’ve decided to engage with those few brews even more by writing about them. Part diary, part review, part personal essay—this series is a roundabout exploration of how we connect to the beer we drink.

Following a decade of brewing and a couple years of brewery ownership, I knew it was time to ease up on drinking. For brewers and brewery staff, drinking is always a part of the daily job, and it often dominates our downtime as well. There are so many internal and external pressures pushing us to drink every day. And it doesn’t help that beer can be so damn refreshing.

To be a good brewer, beer-tender, salesperson, or brewery manager means striking a balance: staying sober enough to do your job well, while drinking just enough to keep up with trends, perform quality control, and engage with collaborators and customers. I learned early on that overindulging didn’t exempt me from doing my job—and doing it to the standards of my sober self.

My business partners and I opened our brewery in March 2020—the day California’s governor issued the shelter-in-place order. Over the next few weeks and months, it felt like the world was ending. Like many others during the pandemic, we drank like it was. The only difference being: we owned a brewery full of beer and no one to sell it to. Suffice it to say, I drank a lot of my own product between 2020 and 2022.

In 2023, I had had my fill. My two business partners and I alternated and sometimes overlapped in our sobriety. At least one of us was always sober for periods of a few months to a year.

Sobriety in the craft beer world is always a source of tension. Toxic masculinity and unhealthy drinking culture still permeate our conversations. Choosing moderation or abstinence means enduring goading, peer pressure, and jokes like “What kind of brewer doesn’t drink?” Well, a brewer who’s developed a healthy respect for alcohol, for one. You might also consider brewers who suffer from alcoholism or other serious medical conditions. I don’t condemn heavy drinkers, but in my late 30s, I’ve realized it’s not a sustainable lifestyle for me.

Personally, I’ve developed the ability to enjoy a singular beer each week. I used to meet friends on Tuesdays at the legendary Sante Adairius Rustic Ales—a few minutes from my former house, home to the best beer for miles, and recently staffed by many of my Santa Cruz brewing friends. That tradition kept me connected to the communal feeling I loved about the industry and helped deepen my appreciation for beer itself. When you’re only drinking once a week, you tend to savor it.

That’s still where I find myself today. While I’ve had the occasional three-drink bender, I typically enjoy just one or two beers a week. It’s usually with friends, or solo when a special opportunity arises. Drinking so rarely, I feel compelled to engage with each beer more fully. I’ve been meaning to use writing as a way to fuel that engagement. So I’ve made a rule: if I’m going to drink a beer, I have to write about it.

And with that lengthy exposition out of the way, let’s move on to the beer.

it looked so good I forgot I was going to take a picture

Yesterday, my fiancée suggested we get out of the house and enjoy someone else’s air conditioning for a while. Sacramento, famously considered sweltering to coastal Californians, was living up to its reputation.

We wracked our brains for somewhere we could enjoy the AC with our dog, Jerry. Most restaurants and coffee shops don’t allow dogs indoors due to health codes. Breweries that don’t serve food, on the other hand, usually welcome leashed and well-behaved dogs with open arms and spent grain treats.

In retrospect, the choice was an obvious one: Bike Dog Brewing recently opened up a satellite taproom near our house on the East side of Sacramento. True to its name, the brewery has always been welcoming to our boy Jerry.

We weren’t exactly sure that the old warehouse would have sufficient air conditioning, but we were pleasantly surprised by how cool it was in the taproom compared to the 100-degree heat outside. The bartender happily informed us that they had just re-calibrated the AC to more efficiently cool the space.

This large warehouse space just off the 65th Street Expressway has gone through several incarnations. It was most recently High Water Brewing’s production and taproom space before they shuttered in 2023, and before that, it was home to Tower Brewing. Walking through it now feels like a quiet tribute to an era of craft brewing that’s now long gone. That’s not to say it feels outdated—quite the opposite. The Bike Dog team clearly put in the work to modernize the space while honoring its history. I know this because I once crashed one of their communal renovation sessions with a local brewing friend, and we were treated like family.

The warehouse used to be a mix of production and public drinking spaces, with all of the seating up front and the bar hidden around a corner in what appears to be an old walk-in cooler, or a storage room partitioned off with a large metal door on rails. The old production space now features an event venue, pinball arcade, darts room, and even an indoor vendor space.

I ordered a pint of their Helles, aptly titled “Life is Helles,” the name of which reminded me of my own brewery’s “What Fresh Helles This?” I was excited to see a Helles on the board, because it tends to rank amongst my favorite light beer styles, and this beer did not disappoint. Its pale golden color, brilliant clarity, and bread crust aroma enticed me to take my first swig before remembering that I had wanted to take a picture.

That first taste delivered everything I wanted from a Helles: a hint of malt sweetness, subtle bitterness, a medium-light body, and a crisp, refreshing finish.

My fiancée and I shared the pint while playing rummy and people-watching around the taproom. We laughed about our misadventure on our way to the brewery: a split-second decision to locate a hand-thrown mug hidden by a local ceramicist and social media influencer, and our disappointment as we watched a woman bolt from her car, snatching the prize right before us.

As we sat at our table and cursed our luck, I absentmindedly sipped the beer and remembered an old adage: the best beer is the one that doesn’t interrupt the conversation.

All things considered, Bike Dog is one of our favorite breweries in the Sacramento area—which is saying something in a city packed with great beer. Their beer is high-quality and clearly made with care. The staff always seem genuinely happy. The owner, Sage, is known in town as the “patron saint of the Sacramento beer scene.” From what I’ve seen, he seems like a rare brewery owner making an effort to create a decent work environment.

To be fair, Sacramento proper seems to have a higher-than-average number of ethically run breweries. Urban Roots, Touchstone, and Oak Park Brewing—among others— all appear to be on the right side of the industry’s moral spectrum.

Our first encounters with Bike Dog were at their West Sacramento location, which houses their production facility and a taproom shared with a winery owned by MLB legend Dusty Baker. Each time we visited on our many Sacramento scouting trips, we found the lot buzzing with vendors, food trucks, dogs, and friendly faces.

On one of those many visits, my fiancée was surprised to realize that she’d gone to school with one of the brewers, Iris. Iris has since been a huge help to me in navigating the Sacramento beer scene. She’s generously shared her insights and is always willing to say who makes the best beer, who’s worth talking to, and who to avoid altogether. That kind of honesty is rare in this industry.

The aforementioned owner, Sage, has shown his saintly patience when I’ve requested to talk to him about the Sacramento beer scene over a beer, or while listening to me go on an uncharacteristically buzzed tirade about labor inequality.

This rare combination of community, quality, and thoughtfulness makes Bike Dog Brewing a true gem—not just for Sacramento, but for craft beer at large.

Their AC’s not too bad, either.

Thanks for reading,

Ben

P.S. I was going to call this series “Beer of the Week,” but “Moment” saves me the embarrassment on those rare two-beer weeks.