John R. McAuliffe (born 1945) is an American brewer best known as the founder of the New Albion Brewing Company in Sonoma, California.
[1] In his cottage in Dunoon, he began homebrewing with equipment and a copy of Dave Line's The Big Book of Brewing purchased from a local hardware store.
[9] In 1975, McAuliffe found a rental property outside of Sonoma, California, and quit his job in order to start a brewery there.
[10] In October 1976, McAuliffe founded the New Albion Brewing Company with business partners Suzy Stern and Jane Zimmerman.
New Albion was also a name given by Sir Francis Drake to an English claim on the Pacific Coast thought to be in modern Northern California.
[12] (Prior legislation signed by Jerry Brown allowed "certain amounts" of such sales, but this legal ambiguity was addressed with the Bates bill.