A little bit of local beer history happens today as Post No Bills in Sand City closes escrow after a very long wait.
Or as longtime manager and new co-owner Kye Ricks puts it: "Finally."
A celebratory mood will dominate the day, and an ownership changeover party happens 6pm until close Saturday, March 25, with PigWizard grub, cake and "all the best beers we can get our hands on," as Ricks says.
“Should just be a good time,” he adds.
Here appear more details from the January report on how the sale went down and what it means for local beer lovers:
Way back in 2010, long before Barack Obama's hair turned gray or anyone had heard of sour beer, four of us sat cross-legged in a circle on an endless cement surface in Sand City.
We were ants on the expansive ground floor of the Independent building at 600 Ortiz Ave., pouring Stone and Lagunitas 22s into little cups and trying to picture what was coming.
It required some imagination.
Some 12,000 square feet of empty space stretched around us, interrupted only by structural columns and elevator shafts.
Largely incomplete—and almost totally empty—apartments and lofts occupied the levels above.
Local poet and publisher Dan Linehan was there. So was former Offset Project operations chief/home brewer Abbie Beane.
"I'll never forget, even though I was drinking a lot of beer," Beane says. "The whole space was barren. Did we even have a table?"
Also present was Jeff Moses, who started Monterey Beer Festival and consulted his brother Mark Moses on the creation and curation of the place.
"It was a raw space that needed life," Jeff says.
That life would become cult hit Post No Bills (324-4667).
They had tried to get their craft beer concept approved for the City Center in Seaside, but City Council members thought it would be more Shadowbox than upmarket bottle shop.
Contemporary beer lovers didn't need help with the concept, citing Bay Area spots like Beer Revolution (Oakland) or City Beer (San Francisco), which the Moseses scouted closely in advance.
They also didn't have to look that far, with Ol' Factory Cafe earning a loyal following via good concrete-and-steel ambiance and small-production suds just down Ortiz Street.
Before OFC closed, that is.
"That left a hole," Jeff Moses says.
Speaking of holes, after PNB got a beautiful stainless steel bar and the start to its signature graffiti look in a 1,400-square-foot corner of the ground floor, a gaping hole remained, leading to the still-wide-open neighboring areas, and public restrooms, for a number of PNB's early years.
(Post No Bills would go onto anchor the remarkable Independent Marketplace farmers market/block party/art explosions in the adjacent space too.)
But the bigger hole had vanished for Sand City—and Monterey County, really—thanks to a tap house designed to cultivate conversation through the table arrangement and a vast and well-curated selection of beers.
PNB started with more than a dozen smaller brands on draft, including some highly allocated finds born of Moses' relationship with brewers, plus a 200-bottle-deep cache of different format beers in the fridge, available for take-home or in-house (for a $1 tapping fee).
The first peek came with a piece by David Schmalz called "Hops From Heaven: The Moses brothers lead locals to a frothy promised land with Post No Bills."
The urban/industrial feel of the place consciously reflected the craft beer it peddled and the wider culture.
The idea: graffiti, like the burgeoning industry, is driven by independent, celebratory and artistic instincts.
The name of the place itself evokes the spray-painted warning on many big-city buildings, as in no "bills," or concert/promotional/personal posters here.
By now about five dozen bills plaster the west wall of the high-ceiling space.
PNB's birth and growth coincided with the craft beer explosion in California and its ever-increasing visibility countrywide.
"Post No Bills grew into its maturity as did craft beer," Moses adds.
Smaller-batch breweries have grown exponentially, from 620 to upwards of 2,400 microbreweries since 2010, according to the Brewers Association.
Santa Cruz seems to introduce a new quality operation every few weeks, with more on the way.
If craft beer contributed $55.7 billion to the U.S. economy in 2014, imagine what it'll do in 2017.
Meanwhile PNB has developed into an anchor for a thriving residential building and a beer community.
That means the sign in the window, announcing new ownership and an updated title (Post No Bills Craft Beer House and Tasting Bar) might make craft beer lovers nervous.
Only it's great news.
•••
Popular longtime manager Kye Ricks started as a beertender commuting an hour from Greenfield to do what he loved (in addition to two other jobs).
He helped usher in PNB's ongoing golden age as GM (after a move to Marina).
Now he has teamed with his wife, Sarah, and with another couple to complete a sale that has been in the works for more than six months.
Ricks is the primary architect behind the current roster of tap takeovers, food-truck nights and the ever-rotating selection that includes current gems like Founders Azacca IPA, a rich Alesmith 12-percent Belgian Christmas-style ale and a Firestone-Walker Agrestic wild red ale (aka "feral ale") from their lauded Barrelworks series.
"I want it to be a welcoming place, comfortable like a local bar, with good recommendations from the bartender," he says. "It's nice that we can make it really locally owned."
At that junction, he nods to the camera Mark Moses uses to monitor things from Denver when he can't visit as much as he'd like. Jeff left Sand City for L.A. two years ago.
Ricks later adds the main reason they made an offer was to make sure any potential sales didn't threaten PNB's DNA, which includes freedom to bring in food or order in directly.
"We're upgrading some of what's in place, like signage," he says. "We're not going to do food, we're not going to serve Budweiser. We want it stay Post No Bills."
Regulars will recognize the other two investors in Amber and Michael Kohler of Seaside.
They were early-and-often adopters of the place.
Other locals may remember them as the resourceful—and atypical—brains behind Cards Against Humanity parody Crabs Adjust Humidity, which helped fund their craft coup.
"Our big motivation: We love Post No Bills how it is," Amber says, "and want it to be here a long time."