Local craft beers earn top honors at national competition, including gold for Trademark Brewing

Since opening in Long Beach five years ago, Trademark Brewing has expanded its roster to more than a dozen beers, the taproom now includes pinball games and cofounder Sterling Steffen may soon need to add something else: a trophy case for a growing array of awards.

The craft brewery’s libations won medals earlier this month at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, a competition Steffen said is one of the industry’s two biggest (the other is the World Beer Cup). Trademark’s A La Playa, a Mexican lager with lime and salt, took silver in the American fruit beer category, and its Codebreaker beat out nearly 300 other West Coast IPAs to win gold.

Trademark has competed in about half a dozen contests, and choosing which of their brews to enter is often a process of deciding “what are we most proud of and what are we most invested in,” head brewer Kane Christensen said.

Getting to gold with Codebreaker took about two and a half years of tweaking, but Steffen and Christensen knew early on they had something special.

“The first time we brewed this beer, it was like an ‘aha’ moment,” Steffen said. “We joked, ‘OK, we broke the code, guys.’”

The beer’s branding – including a label depicting a machine covered with meters, switches and dials – was inspired by historical code-breaker Alan Turing. The British mathematician designed an automated machine to help decode the Nazis’ encrypted messages during World War II; the rainbow colors on the beer’s label are a nod to the fact that Turing was gay at a time when same-sex intimacy was illegal.

Christensen said winning awards means following a list of specifications as to a beer’s color, bitterness and percentage of alcohol by volume, and showcasing ingredients associated with the style of beer (such as lager, stout or India Pale Ale).

And just going to competitions offers the opportunity to learn from other brewers, which is essentially how Christensen got started.

As a young adult he took a job at San Clemente brewpub Pizza Port, and within a couple of years had worked his way over to the company’s brewing operation, becoming an assistant brewer in 2012.

“That’s how I got to where I am – all these awesome people sharing their secrets,” Christensen said.

Today, he and other local craft brewers trade tips and cheer each other on at competitions. Long Beach’s own Ambitious Ales and ISM Brewing each claimed medals at the Great American Beer Festival – Ambitious won gold among juicy or hazy IPAs with its Professional Human Being; and ISM took bronze for Plough & Harrow in the classic saison category.

“The Long Beach beer scene, it’s really cool seeing it do so well,” Christensen said.

Steffen sees that striving toward excellence as a key to keeping the industry vital.

Winning medals is unlikely to make him rich, he said, but “the biggest thing that makes craft beer important and viable and successful is that craft beer needs to be the best it can be.”

For anyone interested in becoming a brewer or just learning more about craft beer, Christensen and Steffen suggested tasting many varieties to develop a palate and talking to anyone with knowledge to impart.

“Go to breweries that you love, that make something that you really dig, and get to know their beer,” Christensen said.