Bartender Andrew Calisterio on why Sacramento should be proud to be a “cow town”

Words by Anthony Giannotti

Sacramento has been labeled by many in larger metropolitan areas in California as a “cow town.” While this may or may not be true on many levels, the fact that we are surrounded by some of the best and richest farmland in the country is undeniable. Andrew Calisterio, bartender at Grange Restaurant and Bar, thinks we should embrace this “cow town” label.

“I grew up in rural Elk Grove before the whole tract home thing,” he says. “We had cows in my back yard. My family always had a garden and fresh food. Farm to table has always been a part of my life.” Growing up with a garden has definitely helped him know exactly what to do with the amazing produce we have around here. Calisterio continues, “We have tons of fresh ingredients. Look at all the citrus here. Don’t just put it on the side of the glass to make it look pretty, put booze in it and shake it up!”

Not only has Calisterio devoted his life to Sacramento and the fine local produce, but he is a big advocate of knowing what to do with it. He is one of the founding members of the Sacramento chapter of the U.S. Bartenders’ Guild–a national organization “of beverage service professionals dedicated to the continued refinement of [their] craft,” according to a mission statement on the USBG website. Calisterio makes no illusions of how important he thinks keeping up and furthering industry people’s knowledge is, “The education is what helps create and expand our creativity.”

It’s not just cocktails and shakers for Calisterio. He is also one of the key members in the resurrection of the Sacramento brewery Ruhstaller. “Ruhstaller was a brewery in Sacramento 130 years ago, started by Captain Frank Ruhstaller. I get to sell a really good beer to people in the industry, my friends.”

I got to catch up with the local advocate over a glass of whiskey, which of course he blended, to talk more about Sacramento and cocktails.

How did you start bartending?
I started this whole thing with coffee. I really enjoyed making things. I was 16 working at Starbucks. I liked making the things they had set for us, but I always wanted to make something different, something special. The guests wanted the same thing every single day, and to me that was just insane. I would try to work something in that was around what they liked, but pulling them toward something new or different. Eventually I got picked up by Java City, worked my way up the ladder there and came to a point where I could do anything I wanted with coffee. I really wanted to get into spirits. I’ve always been a fan of nice food and cocktails and experiencing flavors. I pride myself on having a good palate.

How did you start at Grange?
I went in applying for a bartending position, and they looked at me like I was crazy because I had no experience. So I asked what was available and they let me be a bus boy. There was no bar-back program there, so I would go behind the bar every chance I could to help, polish glassware, anything I could do to get in. I’d ask way too many questions and bother Ryan Seng, interrupt his conversations with guests to find out what he was doing and how he made that drink. I basically declared myself a bar-back position. One day a bartender didn’t show up. Since I knew how to make all the drinks–I even had two of my own drinks on the menu, and I was familiar with our wine list–I finally got to start bartending.

Grange is known for its affiliation with the slow food movement. Do you try to incorporate any of those principles into your cocktails?
Absolutely. I grew up in rural Elk Grove on four acres. I was in FFA [Future Farmers of America] as a kid, which ended up being beneficial for me when applying at Grange because I had this agricultural background. I knew the farmers that the food at Grange was coming from. When it came to building my cocktails, I wanted to represent the local Sacramento area.

You recently won a couple of cocktail contests. Can you tell us about that?
The big one was put on by Hangar One Vodka. It was a California-wide cocktail competition. I was already familiar with the brand because it is a farm to bottle spirit–right up my alley. A rep came in to ask me to join the competition but said they weren’t stopping in Sacramento. They were going to be in different major cities around California–Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose. I was a little offended that they weren’t going to be representing the capital city of California, where so much of California’s produce and agriculture comes from. So I came up with my cocktail and started networking, using social media to let my friends and peers know what I was working on and trying to represent Sacramento.

You are one of the co-founders of the Sacramento Bartenders’ Guild. What is that and what do you guys do?
As bartenders, we go visit other bars or bartenders that we respect and like to see what they are doing and learn from them. It started as this kind of informal gathering and eventually some of us decided to get together and make it formal and official. We wanted the education of bartending to be brought forward. It’s $100 a year, and if you go to just a couple meetings, you’ve already gotten your money back in products and education. We have tastings and training with brands that share their products but also teach us about spirits and what the differences are and help us learn how to use them to our best ability. We are using our connections to gather and share brands and ideas with our coworkers in town. Bar owners and workers get a chance to meet, so whether someone is looking for a job or needs a bartender, it’s just a great way to communicate. All of us are career bartenders, not just some guy who pours shots. We are trying to raise the bar around Sacramento. We have a great cocktail scene here; we just want to always see more out of it and let it shine.

So you think it’s important for bartenders to have extra education, to be able to do more than just give a shot or a beer?
Well even with that, there is a proper shot and a beer pairing, it has value. Sometimes you don’t want a cocktail. Sometimes you just want a shot or a beer. Dickel is a whiskey brand that has become really popular as a shot. Someone decided that that was a good shot to pair with a beer. And the beers aren’t Budweiser anymore. North Coast Company Blue Star is the inexpensive beer on tap now. So the bar is being raised even for just a shot and a beer. Having a vast knowledge of spirits and cocktail ingredients helps you to attract more guests and give them that experience they are looking for when they go out to eat or have a drink. I love when someone comes in and says “Make me something.” My next question is what do you usually like? And I will try to avoid that.

You’re not just a cocktail guy. You are also involved with Ruhstaller Beer…
I was brought on early with this company. I am honored to be able to help with the resurrection of the old Sacramento brand… They asked me to help build the brand because they know I am a social guy. I lug around kegs and talk to people and help with sales. I’m doing the same thing I do every day, but on the other side of the bar. I’m getting the bartenders to try this beer, telling them how good it is and then they buy it for their bars. The company has grown a lot and I help when I can, mostly with social networking or helping pour at events.

Do you ever try to combine your knowledge of beer and cocktails to make a beer cocktail?
For beer week, we had a beer pairing dinner at Grange with some big names from Sacramento. I put together a cocktail that was in the fashion of a shot and a beer, with a twist. I took [Ruhstaller] 1881 and made syrup out of it and made an Old Fashioned using Woodford Reserve. I even used local Sacramento oranges in it. I served it with a shot of beer on the side to help represent the beer. Darell Corti [gourmand and co-owner of Corti Brothers] said it was the best aperitif he’d had in Sacramento. I was so happy, I couldn’t stop smiling. It was a great boost.

What’s involved in a great cocktail?
Balance, first and foremost. I try to balance where the flavors hit on your palate. I generally start with a great spirit or an end result flavor. Or I try to pick out flavors that will work well in the cocktail and pair with the food. Sometimes it’s hard when I really like a certain spirit that has so much great flavor on its own because I’d rather just drink it neat.

Midtown Cocktail Week is coming up. What sort of blowout is Grange doing this year?
Blowout is a good word. Last year was such a success that it was too busy to accommodate everyone in the hall. So this year we will be using the dining room. Grange’s dinner service will come to a screeching halt and be replaced with amazing cocktails and appetizers. The band The Silent Comedy will play. The theme this year is Sacramento, so a little politically driven. At Grange, we are doing the anti-prohibition act. We want people to come out and vote for the cocktails. We are also going to have hometown hero Jayson Wilde come back and guest bartend the event.

Is there anything you’d like to see out of the Sacramento food and cocktail scene?
Sacramento has had a lot of successful people start here and make names for themselves, but they always end up leaving. It’s great when they come back around and visit, but Sacramento needs some talent to stick around. If Sacramento is going to grow or be more successful, we need these people to stay and be a part of this city. I would like to see some of the people from Sacramento that have been successful elsewhere be successful in Sacramento. I enjoy other cities and traveling, but this is my home. I have a lot of friends and inspiration here. We are the capital city in the largest state.

Midtown Cocktail Week will take place at various venues from Aug. 19 through 26, 2012. See what Andrew Calisterio comes up with at the “Repeal Prohibition – High Styled 1920’s Political Rally” event at Grange on Aug. 24, 2012. The event will run from 5 p.m. to midnight. To keep track of other Cocktail Week happenings, go to http://midtowncocktailweek.org/.

Words by Adam Saake

J-E Paino, a Sacramento native by way of San Francisco, is the proprietor of Ruhstaller Beer, an up and coming Sacramento beer company whose name and history date back to the 1800s when Sacramento was a true Wild West beer town. While studying at UC Davis, Paino fell in the love with the rich and bountiful story of the Sacramento beer industry and how west of the Mississippi, we were home to the largest brewing facility–Buffalo Brewery where the present day Sacramento Bee is located–larger in fact than Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis, Mo. To add, Sacramento had numerous brewing facilities that were in full production, brewing and shipping out beer to thirsty Americans.

“Sacramento’s never done anything better than make beer,” says Paino. “We were made to make beer.”

That we were–and still are today. It all makes sense, really. Consider that Sacramento has dark, nutrient-rich Delta soil, two rivers intersecting the city, trains constantly whistling and crisscrossing the streets and, until a while back, acres and acres of hops and barley growing all throughout our surrounding areas. There’s farmland, transportation and the climate for key ingredients. This isn’t breaking news to your grandparents because they remember some of this stuff, but the younger generations haven’t been exposed to this very important piece of Sacramento’s history because there isn’t much record of it and the schools sure as hell aren’t assigning home brewing as class projects.

“And there’s absolutely no remnant of it. No one talks about it, you read history books–gone,” says Paino with fervor.

Paino seems to be on a personal mission to change that, and he’s doing it in the best way he sees fit; by making beer that pays homage to this time and place.

While Paino was a student at UC Davis, he began a project that consisted of researching the history of Sacramento. He realized that there was this lack of information and he kept coming up with the same results.

“They all went the same way,” says Paino. “John Sutter lands, some Indians, lots of flooding, tomatoes, cows and all of a sudden there’s a governor’s mansion built and we’re the capital of California.”

And hell! Throw in the trains and trees and that’s a great history, something that many of us pride ourselves on and more often than not becomes the talking point of what makes Sacramento what it is. But Paino kept poking his nose around and eventually he struck upon a different version of what Sacramento’s history once was.

“Somehow I stumbled on a book by Ed Carrol. He was doing his thesis at Sacramento State. He wrote about the history of Sacramento, the beer industry in Sacramento,” explains Paino.

The Sacramento History Foundation ended up publishing a portion of Carrol’s thesis, which Paino read and was inspired by.

“It was phenomenal,” exclaims Paino.

Photo by Carolyn Jaime

The figurehead that continued to pop up was a gentleman by the name of Captain Frank Ruhstaller. He left home with his brother to flee the constraints of family duties and commitment. According to Paino’s research, the brothers left Switzerland because they didn’t want to be priests like their father had envisioned; they were set on brewing beer. Frank bounced from his homeland to the East Coast of the United States and eventually ended up in Sacramento, where he was part of Buffalo Brewery. He eventually broke off from Buffalo and started his own craft brewery called Ruhstaller where his “flagship beer was called Gilt Edge Lager.” The focus was on premium beer and making it the beer of Sacramento.

From there, Paino’s direction moved toward actually making a beer. It all began with Charlie Bamforth, the guru of fermentation sciences at Sacramento State, who is responsible for more than a few brewers’ careers. To even begin to touch on his influence and/or career attributes, well, that’s an entirely different article. Paino came to Bamforth looking for guidance and Bamforth lent him some of his literature–some science and some history–and Paino read both. But Paino is no brewer and the history was more to his liking. “Well you’re going to have trouble making beer,” Bamforth said to Paino. He then recommended a few candidates, and suddenly Paino was on the path to turning his love of Sacramento beer history into an actual drinkable product.

One was a gentleman by the name of Peter Hoey and the other was a woman by the name of Lindsay Guerdrum, a star student of Bamforth, who at the time was being offered a position at New Belgium Brewing Company. Yes, the New Belgium as in Fat Tire. Paino wasn’t in the position to match that offer, nor was he going to hold her back.

“We said, we’re the little guy. You can always work for the little guy, you only get one shot working for the big guy,” says Paino.

So Hoey was the man for the job. He and Paino got along well in the first place, and so began production of Ruhstaller Beer. Paino’s philosophy was focused on keeping the product locally produced, something not too common in the Sacramento brewing community. And with this, the expression of place could speak for itself.

“Let’s go find the best ingredients we can, source them locally as possible and let’s go make a beer that isn’t just a one liner but it’s more sophisticated. It kind of has a nose and kind of has a beginning middle and end, and when you’re done with it you want to read the book over again,” says Paino.

Paino is passionately telling me all of this as he sits across from me at a high top table in the corner of a very crowded and noisy Grange Restaurant, tucked underneath the elegant and very boutique Citizen Hotel. He’s a clean-cut guy, tightly buttoned collared shirt tucked into his jeans and he’s sipping tea not beer. I later figured out that he knew he was going to talk my ear off for an hour about his beer and Sacramento’s beer history. He was sort of warming up like a vocalist might do before a concert. “He looks like the guy from Cash Cab but with darker features,” said a few bartenders at Grange, joking lightly when I asked what he looked like. Paino was just about the only guy I hadn’t met or spoken to that was involved with Ruhstsaller. I was already greatly familiar with their PR and social media aficionado, Andrew Calisterio, as well as the aforementioned brewer, Peter Hoey, who seems to have his fingers in every kettle around town these days. I tried to contact him for this story, and he seemed apologetic for being out of touch, being what he called “a moving target these days.” Hoey stopped consulting for Ruhstaller in November, he told Submerge in an email, but all of the recipes for their current lineup of beers are still his.

The current lineup consists of their 1881 California red ale, the Captain California Black IPA and the wet hopped beer, Hop Sac, which is a seasonal beer.

Rushstaller is still a fledgling beer company, having been in business for roughly two and a half years and actually making beer for nine months. Their product is solid but the future is wild like the history off which they feed. Their crudely spray-painted logo that dons their wooden mobile taps and kegs is indicative of the rustic vibe they seek to portray. Even the bottles that can be found on the shelves of Whole Foods, Nugget Market, Pangaea and Corti Brothers are draped in burlap, a material that Paino says “holds California together” and is “the working man’s fabric.” This is a beer that is meant to speak to the people. Listen up Sacramento, this is your beer.

Look out for Ruhstaller events during Sacramento Beer Week including collaborations with Grange and Charlie Bamforth, Magpie Catering, Mulvaney’s Building and Loan and the infamous Rex Bikes. For a full list of events, go to Sacramentobeerweek.com or Ruhstallerbeer.com/events