HOPPED UP

WASILLA — Fans of locally produced beer will no longer have to settle, as they have for the past couple years, for suds brewed in Anchorage.

Open in the old Great Bear Brewing Co. space just off the Parks Highway as of Super Bowl Sunday, the Last Frontier Brewery is selling 22-ounce bottles of beer at reasonable rates — $3.75 each or $3.25 per bottle if you by a case of a dozen.

“We have the first bottling plant to bottle beer in Wasilla,” Randy Martin said.

Martin’s jewelry store, Alaskan Gold Rush Jewelers, has been in business for 30 and located in the building — which he owns — since the early ’90s. Which is why all the beers — Garnet IPA, Black Diamond Dark Lager, 24-karat Gold Lager — are references to precious metals and gems.

The Great Bear had been his tenant, as had the chicken wings place that came in after Great Bear collapsed amid a flurry of lawsuits. Great Bear left behind its equipment, which Martin said he wound up buying from the financial institution that seized it.

But he really had to talk himself into jumping into the restaurant game. He wanted someone else to do it. His reticence is understandable though, considering the string of failed restaurants that left him picking up the pieces.

“Every time I’d end up with a mess,” he said of his former tenants.

Having finally decided he’d give the restaurant business a go, Martin had a lot of work to do. For one thing, the equipment was in disarray.

“There were a lot of repairs that had to be made,” he said.

For another, the whole space was in need of a remodel. Martin, with help from family and friends, did that work starting last February. They took it slow.

He said that a number of things set the Last Frontier Brewery apart. All of the food there is homemade — even the hamburger buns, which use spent grains from the brewery tanks. The brewery is producing lagers, something Martin says is rare for an Alaska brewery.

“Not many people make lagers because they take a long time to make,” he said.

The beer isn’t the type of thing that can be mass-produced and sold in liquor stores. Ray Hodge, Last Frontier’s master brewer, explains that the beers are all unfiltered.

“It certainly means we’re never going to ship them across the country,” Hodge said. But what the brews lack in portability they make up for in quality. “Our beer’s always going to taste full and good.”

Hodge said that a lot of people think bigger is better.

“We just think better is better,” he said.

Martin said that in some ways smaller is actually better.

Traditional brew-pub growlers are fine, but there’s a lot of beer in a half-gallon growler and it all has to be consumed once the cap comes off. A 22-ounce bottle is a more reasonable amount of beer for someone to drink in one sitting. And the same volume of beer can be kept in the fridge in multiple bottles.

Hodge said that with those smaller bottles, a customer could toss out the Budweiser in favor of locally produced suds.

“You can get in the habit of buying your beer here,” he said. “We have this totally unique beer that you can only get here.”

Hodge has a long resume when it comes to building and resurrecting breweries. He’s had stints at a number of Anchorage breweries and helped launch Great Bear back in the day.

Martin said that when he went looking for someone to rehabilitate the old equipment he started asking around and found Hodge in the Lower 48. He asked the brewer if he’d like to come back to the state and Hodge took him up on it.

The gig is temporary. Hodge is teaching Martin’s son Robert how to run the equipment and make the beer, with the idea that Robert will eventually take over.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.