It takes a colorful past to make beer the way we do.
In 1928 Great Grandpa Dr. Beau Winston exploited a loophole in the prohibition laws and opened a Roadhouse with his friend Colby “snake” Johnson. For more than 5 years beer and moonshine whiskey were served without cost to people who paid a nightly membership fee to get into the roadhouse. Grandpa Beau made beer in a building on the same property as the roadhouse while Colby brewed corn mash whiskey and bathtub gin at his home a few hundred yards further up the creek from the roadhouse.
The roadhouse did not have a name when it opened. The way we heard it a “revenue man” stopped by a few weeks after it was opened. He refused to pay the voluntary fee to enter, but was offered a beer nonetheless. The revenue man asked each and every one of the dozens of people in the early afternoon crowd how they knew Grandpa Beau. Each of them instinctively lied and said they were either a cousin or that they had known Beau for years and were good friends. Beau asked him, as he was finishing his inspection and his free beer if the roadhouse was legal. “Barely,” He said “it’s barely legal”, the name stuck immediately. What is not clear is whether Grandpa’s love of the Grizzly and other bears which lived in the mountains around him brought about the spelling, or if it was due to Grandpa asking Colby, who had not made it past the fourth grade to paint the sign.
According to Great Grandpa’s reading of the prohibition laws it was legal to make alcohol to be served to family and friends and long as neither he nor Colby had more than a few days’ supply on hand. We still don’t know if Grandpa Beau was right or not. Either he was or, more likely the law mostly looked the other way, in any case we do know that Bearly Legal Roadhouse Beer was brewed in very small batches while the roadhouse was open and continued to do so until the roadhouse burned mysteriously to the ground just months before prohibition finally came to an end.
Grandpa and Colby did not rebuild the roadhouse, and they both quit producing alcohol. After prohibition ended Local demand for the beer that was served at the roadhouse and nagging from Great Grandma Ethel convinced Grandpa to begin brewing again as Bearly Legal Brewing. It has been lost what style that first beer was, but we have been told that it could be ordered regular or leaded. The Leaded variety was fortified after brewing by Snake Bite, the rye whiskey that snake now distilled legally and distributed throughout the area. Snake never could make much of a go at legal whiskey and eventually sold to Grandpa. Beau Winton never di have much taste for Whiskey nor time to make both beer and Whiskey, so Bearly Legal Rye Whiskey, though almost as popular as the beer was short lived.
Great Grandpa Beau ran the brewery for another twenty years before passing control to Grandpa Clyde. During that time Beau experimented and developed new styles of beer based, all brewed with water from that same cold water mountain creek, using ingredients as local as he could get. When Clyde took over, the Brewery turned out three styles of beer on a regular basis and one seasonal. Clyde expanded to more styles. All of the brewed in small batches from recipes perfected by years of the brewers craft, rather than become just another city beer and it was Clyde who began giving our beers the unforgettable names they have today. Great Grandpa Beau continued to deliver beer to local stores and bar in his model A truck almost until the day he died just a month sort of his 92nd birthday.
Bearly Legal Brewing is still family owned and still brewed in the same place in the mountain on a creek thirty miles from nowhere. We don’t think good beer can be made any other way