14 San Diego Uptown News | Feb. 18-Mar. 3, 2011


WHAT'S UP Meet Normal Height’s resident brewer—and brewery


Lee Chase, owner of Blind Lady Ale


House, opens up about his brewing ‘process,’ plans for ex- pansion and his latest labors of love—growlers


HoptownGirl Lauren Duffy Lastowka


f you go looking for Automatic Brewing Co., you might have a tough time finding it. There’s no sign outside its Adams Avenue location. There’s not even any equipment in sight. But keep an eye and an ear out and, sooner or later, you’ll catch on to the buzz that’s been circulating about this Normal Heights nano-brewery. The buzz leads straight to Blind Lady Ale House located at 3416 Adams Ave., where co-owner Lee Chase quietly debuted his in-house brewery last year. If it wasn’t on your radar, you’d never know. The equipment was hidden, the beers ran out quickly and the only news of new releases came through social media. But with each batch, Automatic Brewing gained a little more recognition and a little more of a following. Since I have a hunch that’s not stopping anytime soon, I decided to catch up with Chase to see what the future holds. First, though, I was dying to


I


Owner of Blind Lady Ale House, Lee Chase, will unveil most recent creation, Will Powered Oatmeal, on Feb.19. (Lauren Duffy Lastowka/SDUN)


learn more about this hidden setup, which Chase describes as a mix of “monster homebrewing and diminutive commercial brewing.” It also happens to be a bit ill-suited to the space. “I shoehorned it in,” Chase said of having equipment spread across the restaurant, tucked anywhere it will fit. Half of it sits in the office—or what used to be the office—the other half is in a back corner of the kitchen. Then there’s pieces such as the


wort chiller, which Chase has af- fixed to a skateboard, for mobility.


On brewing days (Mondays, when Blind Lady is closed), he literally has to transport beer-in-the-making from one end of the restaurant to another. He runs a long length of tubing out of the kitchen, across the bar, into the skateboard wort chiller, and into the fermenter in the office. It may be makeshift, but it works. Well, at least it’s starting to work. Chase describes Automatic’s first beer, Chocolate Rain (named after the eponymous YouTube video), as a disaster.


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he said, remembering how he tried out his “cobbling together of pieces” for the first time. Each time since then, however, the process has become smoother and more controlled.


But this comes as no surprise. Chase is perhaps the most quali- fied person to build a brewery in San Diego, be that a tiny nano- brewery in the corners of his restaurant or the largest brewing facility in San Diego County. Just take a look at his resume, which reads like a who’s who of the San Diego craft-brewing scene. In his


consulting days, he helped build or fine-tuned the brewing set up for Stone Brewing Co., Port Brewing, Alesmith, Lightning Brewery and more.


“I love commercial brewing,” Chase said. He thrives on the problem solving, trouble-shooting, and quality control of large-scale brewing. So it’s no shocker that he’s started tinkering with a setup of his own that he calls “kind of easy.”


Chase, who graduated from University of California, Davis with a degree in brewing science, was the head brewer at Stone Brewing Co. for nearly nine years. He came on board when Stone was just four months old—according to Chase it had only brewed four or five batches at that point. Nine years later, after helping transition the brewery to its current facility in Escondido, he decided it was time for adventure.


“I wanted to be comfortable making a large amount of beer, shipping it long distances, and not having to worry,” Chase said of one of the items on his “mental checklist” in life. One day, something clicked. “I said, I could check it off my list,” he said. “I realized I wanted to go see the world before it turns into Walmart.”


So Chase bid Stone farewell—“It was the hardest decision I’d ever made, ever”— and set out with his wife to see the world. Thankfully for us craft beer fans, his travels returned him to San Diego. In the past year, Chase has


rolled out six diverse batches of Automatic beer, each designed to test his brewing set up and help it evolve.


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He explained that he feels grateful that the brewing industry provides a broad spectrum of influ- ences and ingredients to work with and inspire him. There was Thank You Ma’am Belgian White, a wheat beer that was made to be a pale shade of pink, for Breast Cancer Awareness month, and Chocolate Rain, Too, a repeat of the original oatmeal stout on a fortunately smoother setup, and Sex Panther, a strong pale ale named after the cologne in “Anchor Man.” If you sense a theme of playfulness, you’re not off track. Right now, Chase feels the system is “almost to that point where it’s smooth,” which, for him, means it’s time to shake it up and buy new equipment. In fact, just days after I sat down to talk with him he acquired some second- hand fermenters from Craftsman brewing, which will allow him to produce four times the amount of beer in each batch. As he continues to grow and evolve the brewery, expect more and more beers in the Automatic lineup. And, expect more beer more often, too. Chase estimates that in about six months, Blind Lady will have some of Automatic’s house beers available “fairly regularly.” He’s also working out the details of a growler program, which will allow a very limited—and lucky— group of people purchase growlers of Automatic beer. The plan is to debut the program with the next re- lease—an oak-aged imperial brown ale infused with coffee. “I love oak flavor,” Chase said, “And this beer has oak.” Take note, barrel-aged fans. Chase thinks Automatic Brew-


see Ale, page 21


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