The beer often credited as the first American amber ale also came from California’s first modern brewpub.
Mendocino’s Red Tail Ale debuted in 1983. Its name celebrated a hawk—and a locally popular song about that hawk—as much as it did a color. In composition, the beer was a descendant of the Mendocino founders’ own homebrews as well as the legendary New Albion Ale.
While at the quasi-legendary New Albion, which he cofounded in 1976, brewer Jack McAuliffe joined Anchor owner Fritz Maytag in pushing for a new California law—one that would allow breweries to serve their own beers. It passed in 1983—too late for New Albion, which shut the year before. But the founders of Mendocino Brewing hired McAuliffe, bought his kit, and in a town called Hopland opened the state’s first brewpub—and the country’s second, after Bert Grant’s in Yakima, Washington.
Brewed with Cascade and Cluster hops, the ale’s colorfully painted hawk label and distinctively carved tap handles marked it as something local—it had no overt pretensions of being anything other than Northern Californian.
Red Tail and its stronger sibling, Eye of the Hawk, would influence many brewers over the years. Mendocino’s ups and downs included selling shares to the public, in 1997, to keep the company going; Indian billionaire Vijay Mallya of United Breweries, looking for a U.S. foothold, scooped up most of them. Mendocino moved to a larger facility in Ukiah, but the brewery eventually closed in 2018.
Yet the local attachment to Red Tail remains strong—and the most recent effort to revive it is gaining real traction. Based in Santa Rosa, California, Fogbelt Brewing licensed the brands and began brewing and canning Red Tail Ale—with brightened-up labels that celebrate the original—in April 2025.
“So far, everybody seems to be really excited about it,” says Fogbelt cofounder and brewer Remy Martin. “I think we’ve stayed pretty true to the branding and the flavor profiles of the beer. We’re just going to keep trying to do our best to keep the brand alive and grow it.”
Besides working from the original recipe, Martin has talked to former Mendocino brewers Don Barkley and Michael Lovett about how they brewed Red Tail back in the 1980s. Lovett’s son Kevin, now owner and master brewer at Wolf House in Cloverdale, California, also is a friend. “He had a lot of really great input,” Martin says. A key piece of advice: “You’ve got to use lots of Cluster hops.” (When Kevin did so for a previous revivalist batch, he told Martin that the smell “took me back to my childhood.”)
For all of Red Tail’s importance—locally, and to American craft beer more widely—there is a certain division in people’s memories of the beer. “About half of the people that I talked to before we started making Red Tail were like, ‘Don’t change a thing! It’s too valuable, it’s too important, you can’t change anything.’ And the other half were like, ‘Yeah, but you’re going to make it good, though, right?’”
Martin’s tricky job has been to do both—to be true to the original recipe and process while using today’s fresh ingredients and a tight approach to quality. “We’re spoiled here, because Red Tail was one of the only craft beers we had available.,” Martin says. “I would like to think we’ve done a pretty great job of walking that line and keeping to the original style, but also just keeping it really fresh, and really clean, and really approachable—even for a craft-brew connoisseur or aficionado.”
There’s no magic to the recipe. “The grain bill is pretty unremarkable,” Martin says. Like many microbrews back then, it was just “two-row, a little bit of caramel malt for some color and flavor … and whatever hops you had access to. So, the actual ingredients aren’t necessarily groundbreaking, but I think that we’ve done a good job of taking new processes and new equipment and making it something that’s a little bit more relevant for today’s craft-beer market. It’s more than just two-row base malt with a little bit of caramel, and it just happens to be local and fresh.”
Besides Red Tail, Fogbelt also relaunched Eye of the Hawk—Mendocino’s strong ale that was something like a double IPA before anyone used that term. The Fogbelt team is finding that California retailers get it immediately. “Every batch of Eye of the Hawk we’ve brewed so far has gone out the door,” says sales director Jake Croghan. “Usually, you get some pushback from retail accounts. Zero pushback, which has been great.”
Now, the brewery is adding tanks—not too common, these days—and volume-wise Red Tail is surpassing Fogbelt’s own core brands, such as Stardust hazy IPA and Del Norte West Coast IPA. Eye of the Hawk has similar potential.
Red Tail Ale, Croghan says, “is the beer that I stole from my dad when I was a kid. I mean, a 15-, 16-year-old, it was my gateway craft beer, right? That and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. … You could have said 12 years ago when I got into beer, ‘Hey, you’re going to sell Red Tail,’ I’d be like, ‘Yeah right, dude.’ But here I am.”
Those who want to pay their respects to the historic brand can find it on tap at Fogbelt’s taproom in Santa Rosa or its Fogbelt Station beer garden in Healdsburg, built next to a caboose. They can also return to where the beer began—Hopland—to find it at the Stock Farm hotel-restaurant, bang next to Mendocino’s original location. Its owner is Gary Breen, the same local entrepreneur who bought the brands with an eye toward reviving them.
Now, the Fogbelt team is receiving emails from people around the United States who are excited about Red Tail’s return—sending them photos of the original hawk-shaped tap handles and asking if they can send some of the nostalgia-infused red ale across the country. (They can’t—not yet, anyway.)
“I always tell people,” Croghan says, “old shit’s cool again, man.”
