Our Story
The Beginning
Healdsburg Beer Company was literally started in a residential garage at a time when that kind of thing wasn’t happening. Upon learning that the common wisdom in homebrewing circles was that it wasn’t possible to license and bond a super-small scale brewery HBC’s founder, Kevin McGee, took it as something of a dare. Putting his law degree to good use, Kevin legally licensed and bonded his garage as The Healdsburg Beer Company and unknowingly became one of the first of what would later be called “nano-breweries.”
With the assistance of Gordie, celebrity canine assistant brewer, his daughter as a moral compass and the patience, design skills and razor-sharp palate of Wonderspouse, Kevin proceeded to turn out small batches of craft beer with excessive attention to detail and focus on balance and drinkability.
“This is a ridiculous and terrible idea. I must get started immediately.”
— Kevin, 2007
Scaling Up
Since we started, demand has vastly outstripped our capacity to produce beer. All of Healdsburg Beer Co.’s beers became highly allocated, with most buyers and restaurants making the trip to the garage to pick up their orders. Years of frantic brewing, late nights of keg cleaning and beer-deliveries-by-skateboard made Healdsburg Beer Company a highly sought after limited production artisan brewery. Demand was high, but so were standards. The Nano-scale made sense, and had the unexpected effect of spurring beer-hunters from all over to seek out our beers (and also thus an unseemly number of fictional Untapped check-ins were to follow).
Today
In December of 2019 the McGee family purchased Craft Beer legend Anderson Valley Brewing Company with Kevin as President and CEO. Working with the All-Star brewing team at AVBC, the original recipes for Healdsburg Beer Company beers were scaled up for AVBC’s Bavarian copper brewhouse. Now as sister brewery to AVBC, we’re delighted to be able to bring Healdsburg Beer Company beers to a wider audience than ever before.