Baeltane Brewing Celebrating 1-Year Anniversary This Saturday

Baeltane Brewing, a Novato microbrewery located in Bel Marin Keys, is throwing it down this weekend.

The creation of Alan Atha and Cathy Portje, the business is celebrating its one year anniversary on Saturday with food, music and plenty of brew.

Atha has been brewing for 11 years — as long as he's been living in Novato — and brewing pretty seriously for the past six, mostly out of his Novato home but occasionally with other microbreweries.

He focuses on craft beers that have full body, full flavor and some ingredients that fall well outside the norm. Atha has spent a lot of time in Europe — including most of his youth in England — and is recipes are reflective of his experiences there.

In beer geek parlance, Baeltane is a "nano," sort of a supermicrobrewery, because the products are not produced with a rushed idea of mass distribution.