|
Bisbee,
Arizona news, reviews, art, events, history, business and entertainment
|
 |
|
Electric Brewing now operates a taproom on its premises in San Jose Square. It's open Thursdays and Fridays at 3:00, Saturdays at 2:00 and Sundays from 2:00 til 6:00. Sometimes, there's even music on Sundays.
Electric Brewing, Bisbee's own, opened on New Years Eve of 2000 in San Jose Square. With a capacity of a couple of thousand gallons a month, it has supplied suds to some of the best places in Southern Arizona: The Grand Hotel, The Stock Exchange, St Elmo's, Old Tymer's and The Copper Queen in Bisbee. Tweeter Mahoney's in Sierra Vista. The Grand in Douglas. Boondocks and The Grill in Tucson. To name a few. Wherever fine beer is drunk, like they used to say. Electric Beer is also bottled and is available at package outlets like Plaza Liquors and Bisbee Beverage. The brewery is the creation of Electric Dave. Twenty-five or thirty years ago in Bisbee nobody on the scene seemed to have a last name. If you had a name like Bob, you were known by some major attribute so as to distinguish you from some other Bob. Hence, there was Walking Bob, Bicycle Bob, Biker Bob, etc. Sort of like the Middle Ages.
Dave, whose last name somewhere in the nineties turned out to be Harvan, was called Electric Dave because he was an electrician in the early days. He also, incidentally, had some experience in refrigeration and cooling. Dave learned how to make beer in the late seventies from his neighbor in South Bisbee, a truly crazy place back then surrounded by hills and mine dumps you had to tunnel through to get to. Even for Bisbee it was extraterrestrial. In those days it became a thing for local hobby brewers to show off their stuff at beer tastings on Brewery Gulch Days. A friend of ours had these god-awful brand names like "Caca Del Gada," "Schkummshvill," and "Uno Momento."
And then there was Dave. He had his beer loaded on a red Radio Flyer he pulled while his girlfriend pushed. And the beer was great. "Electric Dave Beer," it said. This was class. Dave triumphed. Dave got Arizona's first micro-brewery license and he began to sell his brews to local pubs. It was Horation Alger stuff - too good to be true. A few years later, though, Dave's career path took a sudden branch off into a correctional twilight zone: he was convicted of selling marijuana and sentenced to five years. Come to think of it, that's how people used to learn your last name - when you showed up on Police Beat in the Observer. In 1996, 27 months later, corrected, Electric Dave got out of prison - emerged from the zone - and took up welding at Cochise College. Dave, it seems, had a plan. |
