Sante Adairius Rustic Ales Voted Top Ten In The World
Capitola is now home to one of the best breweries in the world after Sante Adairius Rustic Ales earned the number 10 spot on RateBeer’s Top 100 Breweries of 2018 list. The list, released annually, draws from millions of online reviews and includes more than 36,000 breweries around the world.
Sante, still a humble micro-brewery, beat out countless industry titans including Sierra Nevada Brewing Company and Lagunitas Brewing Company, which landed the number 100 spot on the list.
Sante is no stranger to international accolades. In 2015, its tart and alluring mixed-fermentation Saison Bernice was named one of Time magazine’s top twenty beers in the world, and nabbed the number one spot for Rate Beer’s Best Belgian Style Ale list.
Still, if we can trust the tap room’s friendly, rustic decor made up of recycled Lipton tea barrels and old dairy equipment, co-owners Tim Clifford and Adair Paterno haven’t let the attention go to their heads.
“We started out scrappy,” Paterno told the San Francisco Chronicle – their Aptos brewery cost less than $10,000 to equip in 2012 – and scrappy they have stayed.
While Sante has expanded, opening a second tap room in midtown Santa Cruz last year and increasing production from 150 barrels in 2012 to over 1,500 by 2018, its strong local roots keep it tethered to a sense of authenticity and community that it is in no rush to escape.
Sante’s inviting nature extends to every corner of its taprooms. It is palpable the second you walk into the industrial yet impossibly cozy brewery, always filled with a diverse crowd of Santa Cruz locals and traveling beer-connoisseurs alike, united by their love of great beer.
This friendly, accommodating style even extends to its yeast. The label of the famous Saison Bernice proudly carries an open-source message: “The beer in this bottle is alive. So is the yeast. Grow it, keep it, use it. We encourage you to brew your own.” This is a far cry from other breweries, many of which protect their proprietary strains of yeast by taking defensive measures such as adding champagne yeast moments before bottling.
But that’s Sante – in an ever-rising sea of microbreweries, it remains one-of-a-kind. To see what the buzz is about, visit its Capitola or Santa Cruz locations and taste one of the best beers in the world, without even leaving the zip code.
