On an early September Saturday, a crowd mills around the office at Halethorpe’s Clipper City Brewing Company, sampling beer while waiting to start a brewery tour. The multipurpose room feels cramped, with desks, cases of beer, shelves stocked with merchandise, and a bar forming a perimeter around the 50 or so people wedged in the center. Still, the group, mostly twentysomethings, happily sip beer out of pint glasses emblazoned with the Heavy Seas logo, an eye-patched skull and crossbones.

Hugh Sisson, the founder and managing general partner of Clipper City, leaps on a chair to get the crowd’s attention. He tells them the 30-minute tour, which he leads one Saturday a month, will commence in five minutes, so they’d best get refills now. A middle-aged blond woman in a pink tank top edges up to the bar, slides her glass forward, and says, half-sheepishly, “I want something light.”

Kevin Ashford, a brewer at Clipper City and the pro tem bartender, glances hesitantly at the taps. His options are limited. Of the six Clipper City Heavy Seas brews on tap, the pale ale is arguably the mildest, especially in comparison with a triple-hopped IPA or a sable-colored stout. One of the offerings on draft is Baltimore’s award-winningest beer, Heavy Seas’ Märzen, which has won medals at the Great American Beer Festival for five years running. An American styling of a German beer traditionally served at Oktoberfest, the amber Märzen may have a smooth texture and a pleasant maltiness, but it’s not “something light.”

“Try the pale ale,” Ashford says.

The blonde’s request reflects a popular taste. Baltimoreans tend to favor a low-flavor, low-priced beer that they can knock back the whole night—which makes for a difficult environment for those selling complex, locally made but pricier brews like Sisson’s. He has grappled with this challenge since the ’80s, when he first started brewing. “Baltimore was much more of a Budweiser-Coors Light town then,” he says. And in some ways, craft brews still aren’t the easiest sell, as Sisson knows all too well.

With more than 20 years of experience making and marketing craft beer in Baltimore, Sisson, 57, is perhaps the city’s most seasoned beer veteran. When he’s not presiding over beer dinners or leading brewery tours, he works the numbers, swiveling around in a chair in the same small office from which the tours start. His desk is in the corner, close to the bar and not a minute’s walk from the 15,000-square-foot warehouse where all the brewing, bottling, and shipping happens. Some time ago, when a gasket blew in the brewery and 6 inches of foam covered the warehouse floor, Sisson was among the first to start sweeping it up. Hard-won success has not gone to his head. “I like to say we blazed a few trails along the way,” he says casually.

Sisson didn’t go into the beer business because he loved the stuff. “In 1974, I was a college student that didn’t like beer,” he says. That’s not entirely shocking if one considers the mass-marketed suds of the day: Old Milwaukee, Budweiser, Pabst Blue Ribbon. Nor was Sisson too taken with the Land of Pleasant Living, despite being a native. He grew up in Roland Park and attended McDonogh School in Owings Mills. After he graduated from University of Virginia with a master’s degree in theater in 1980, he intended to move to New York City. “I was the actor/director type,” he says, though there’s no trace of artsiness in his crisp, businesslike demeanor.

Sisson’s father, Albert, persuaded his son to tarry in Baltimore to tend bar in the new pub he had purchased on Cross Street in then slightly run-down Federal Hill. Young Sisson was not a hard sell. He was enticed by the budding renaissance under way in that part of the city in the early ’80s, as well as the promise of making money. “After grad school, the romance of poverty had worn thin,” he says. And a more lucrative livelihood would enable him to be his father’s “retirement plan,” a factor that sealed Sisson’s decision.

The job turned out to be more than just a waiting gig: “I’d been back in Baltimore for 20 minutes, and I’m in the bar. My father looks up, throws me the keys, and as I catch the keys, he says, ‘OK, don’t fuck up.’ And walks out the door.”

With the catch of the keys and not so much as a business class under his belt, Sisson plunged into the hospitality industry. He taught himself accounting to ensure the pub steadier financial footing, but also learned the nitty-gritty of marketing on the fly. In ’81, he notes, “Every place carried the same booze, every place carried the same beer. We didn’t have a kitchen. The only thing to focus on was beer.” Sisson’s became Baltimore’s beer bar because that niche was available.

Sisson roped in around 120 imported beers by 1982; it was among the first two bars in Maryland to offer Guinness on draft. He started home-brewing in 1984 simply “to know what I was talking about.

“This is what you do, you’re supposed to be knowledgeable,” Sisson says matter-of-factly.

Many of today’s most successful craft brewers were converted via home-brewing. Jim Koch, the founder of Sam Adams, unearthed a lager recipe in his father’s attic and recreated it in his kitchen in 1984. Dogfish Head’s Sam Calagione concocted a sour-cherry ale in his Manhattan apartment in 1992. Sisson describes home-brewing tepidly. “I was adequate, at best,” he concedes. “You’re making beer with kitchen utensils. I’m not a terribly patient individual, and that really was unappealing to me.”

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