4 | Gritty McDuff’s
CELEBRATING SUCCESS
A casual discussion at The Brewers As-
sociation’s annual Craft Brewers Confer-
ence a few years back was the genesis of
the large-scale 25th anniversary fete, in
which similarly-aged brewers at facilities
across the country are traveling to their
contemporaries’ businesses to serve as
“guest brewers.”
Stebbins made a trip to Portland, Ore.
to play the part in early December, and
Gritty McDuff’s hosted a brewer from a
Vermont-based operation earlier in the
year for the same endeavor.
Much of the time in the business’s
fledgling years, Stebbins and Pfeffer re-
call, was spent educating the locals on the
brew pub concept and convincing them of
its legitimacy.
“Beer historians understood that there
had always been local breweries all over
America, and Europeans got it, too, be-
Ed Stebbins and Richard Pfeffer, founders of Gritty McDuff ’s
