‘Cried the whole way’: Cordova’s Claimstake Brewing finds folk music niche after tragedy
The taproom lives on an industrial backstreet of Rancho Cordova, tucked away three left turns from the suburb’s Costco, flanked on one side by a sewage center and on another by a sprawling Pick-n-Pull auto yard.
There’s nothing flashy about Claimstake Brewing’s facility, no bells or whistles adorning its facade. The space is cozy, but not cramped. The front windows are opaque, but the counter inside is warmly lit.
Owner Brian Palmer’s smile is equally warm, and his friendly disposition seems permanent. His business is doing well, after all, with acclaim coming from users on Yelp, Untappd and the likes. Palmer won Capitol Beer and Taproom’s first homebrewing competition with a stout called Quaker’s Revenge, back when Claimstake was known as Argonaut Brewing Co. and before Palmer’s taproom was conceived.
“We kind of got a bug lit under us at that moment that we could do it.”
More than three years in, Claimstake Brewing maintains humility thanks to the tight-knit family roots that built it and continue to keep it grounded. A banner commemorating its first anniversary hangs from the rafters, proclaiming that the whole endeavor “started from Chicken Scratch and a dream.”
Palmer, a 40-year-old lifelong resident of the Sacramento area, co-owns the place with his father-in-law. In early 2016, they transformed a love for home brewing into what’s now one of the region’s most acclaimed craft beer spots, if still a bit of a hidden gem.
Behind tables and kegs lined up in long rows in the tasting room, huge brewing tanks stand emblazoned with first names — Dave, Shane, Mike — honoring the friends and family who helped Palmer turn a warehouse 20 minutes outside Sacramento into his first professional brewing project.
But there’s an undertone of tragedy beneath it all. In their first year running the business, Palmer and his family faced an unexpected death, but one that brought along a close new connection and opened the door for his warehouse bar to grow into a performance space — one still a bit off-the-grid, but with no shortage of interested artists.
Crow and the Canyon
Austin Quattlebaum loves good beer, sure, but that’s not all that’s brought him through Claimstake’s door five times since 2016, soon to be six.
A native of Savannah, Georgia, Quattlebaum made his way west while working as a river guide.
His official website describes him as a “Southern Gent,” but his tour dates listed for December dot Oregon and California. Quattlebaum got his feet beneath him as a performer in the Sierra Nevada foothills, an hour or so each way from Sacramento and Lake Tahoe.
He’s focused his efforts both solo and with bands. One of Quattlebaum’s first West Coast endeavors wrote its most impactful song before the group had even named itself.
Bandmate Derek Clatterbuck wrote the song “Crow and the Canyon” as “a sad song about a gal that he really liked but couldn’t be with.”
With Quattlebaum describing it as a “slow, beautiful waltz,” it’s not entirely uncharted water for a folk song.
The lyrics begin with a pair of direct metaphors: “If I was a crow and you were a canyon / I’d drink from your rivers and I’d swim through your air.”
The group identified with it, and the title stuck. The name of that track became the name of the band, and it appeared on their only album, “Leaving Soon” (2015).
Crow and the Canyon, the band, has since disbanded, but the legacy of “Crow and the Canyon,” the song, lived on, migrating up north to Montana, then southwest to California’s capital.
Quattlebaum spent the middle of the decade performing solo in tiny venues around the foothills before he and Crow established in Portland. A small coffee shop in Auburn one weekend, a bar in Placerville the next, the occasional journey to Tahoe.
Then, with Crow and the Canyon, one show stood out. The Georgia gent politely refused at first when a group of strangers approached the stage at the Crazy Horse Saloon and Grill in summer 2016, moments before a show, with a song request.
They asked the band to play its namesake song, a solemn tune about unrequited love.
“We told her that we couldn’t,” Quattlebaum remembers, saying it wasn’t a great fit for the “rowdy” Nevada City bar.
“‘Will you please play it for us? We brought a whole group of people here, and we really want to hear that song.’ ”
“Is there any particular reason?” he pressed.
“Crow and the Canyon,” as Marin Smith told Quattlebaum, was the first track on a CD burned by her brother, Ryan Smith, before his recent suicide at sea earlier that year.
‘Songs that will blow your mind’
“Of course, that really hit us in the chest. We weren’t expecting to hear that,” Quattlebaum said. “They all just group-hugged and cried, and was all we could do on stage to not cry … It made for a pretty intense night.”
Some 50 miles away, Palmer was hard at work on his emerging business. But he’d gotten the news a few months earlier, the same week as Claimstake’s soft opening: His cousin Ryan killed himself by paddling a kayak into the ocean and allowing himself to drown.
Some of the details are murky, but Palmer remembered Smith was “going through some tough times emotionally” before he went missing in Mexico sometime in late February 2016. His body was never found, Palmer said.
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Palmer recalls the note Ryan left for his brother, Justin Smith, before his disappearance and presumed death. Labeled “Songs that will blow your mind,” it was a CD burned with just two songs: “Head Full of Doubt,” by the Avett Brothers, and “Crow and the Canyon.”
“That song just completely described my cousin Ryan’s life. Like, that’s exactly how he felt about his life,” Palmer said. “He wanted to become one with earth and become a bird, and fly through the canyons.”
The lyrics continue, in a later verse: “And the mountains would ponder love laid below them / And the rivers would wonder to the ocean again.”
Ryan Smith had worked in Montana as a trailblazer, employed by the U.S. Forest Service, Palmer says. He believed in reincarnation. He was an “earth-spirit” person who spent a lot of spare time out in the mountains.
“It’s still hard on me, but when I hear that song now I actually feel a little bit of peace because I feel that that’s what Ryan wanted to do,” Palmer said.
“After we had a (memorial) ceremony in Montana, I rented a car, strapped in two kegs of beer, drove straight to Montana without stopping, and I was able to get the album of Crow and the Canyon on the way home. And I probably listened to that song the entire way through Idaho. Never turned it off. Cried the whole way.”
‘Hard time saying no’
Palmer sat recently in the spot where Claimstake sets up its small stage a few times a month, welcoming musicians with gradually increasing formality over the years.
He and his family have always been fans of folk and Americana music, but Claimstake hadn’t been built with the intention of becoming a venue. It turned out to be a pretty good one, and Quattlebaum helped show it.
After the show at Crazy Horse, Quattlebaum says Palmer and Smith’s family “continued to show up in different places and support us as a band.”
After learning Crow and the Canyon would perform at that year’s Burning Man festival, Palmer gave a friend who was attending the festival a few growlers of beer, asking him to hand-deliver those jugs to the band as they took the stage.
“Out of nowhere comes this posse of guys on electric scooters carrying growlers of Claimstake beer,” Quattlebaum recalls. “And the same thing happened — a group of Burners crying right in front of the stage.”
Palmer and Quattlebaum had talked via email at that point but never met in person.
Then, one November day in 2016, Quattlebaum made an impromptu stop at Claimstake on a Saturday en route to their next tour stop in Reno, Palmer remembers.
“They had never had any bands play there or anything,” Quattlebaum said. “We just wanted to play a couple happier songs for the staff as kind of a thank you for giving us growlers at Burning Man.”
Quattlebaum returned not long after that, this time touring solo, as Crow and the Canyon was no more.
Palmer set up a makeshift stage using a wood pallet and a couple of kegs. A friend showed him how to use a PA system. Quattlebaum played a song, armed with a banjo and his self-described “gritty and raw” voice. Then he played a few more.
“The rest is history,” Palmer says.
Pretty soon, Quattlebaum had something of a local following, and Claimstake became something of a modest folk-Americana destination, Palmer said.
Quattlebaum will return Friday at 8 p.m. for a $10 ticketed show, for what will be his sixth visit to Claimstake, by his count.
“We never really seek out any musicians, but we’ve gotten a bombardment of emails from really great bands that we just have a really hard time saying no to,” Palmer said last week.
Can Claimstake fill Sacramento’s folk music ‘niche’?
Live music is now a staple for Claimstake. Ben Larsen, also based out of Portland, played there last Saturday, and in January the taproom will welcome Ben Abney of Memphis Americana band Ben Abney and the Hurts.
Sometimes Palmer sets up a stage, puts out a tip jar for a free show during happy hour. Sometimes, he’ll close down the tasting room a few hours early to expand capacity from 50-something to 80-something. That eats into his beer profits, Palmer said, but it’s worth it because he loves the music.
The bond grew with Quattlebaum, even though it was bandmate Clatterbuck who penned “Crow and the Canyon” and would “reclaim it” creatively as he moved out to the East Coast, performing under the stage name “Oil Derek.” But Palmer says he’ll welcome Clatterbuck, if he’s ever back in the area, to come play at his taproom.
Quattlebaum, speaking with The Bee by phone from his Portland office, said Sacramento’s folk music scene has for years lacked what he called “stepladder” venues. After years of grinding his way up in the music scene, Quattlebaum says he finally got to play at Harlow’s in midtown, which can fit over 400 people for a show.
But for indie folk and Americana acts trying to get their feet wet performing for crowds of increasing size, there’s a big jump between playing for two or three dozen people at a coffee shop and playing for hundreds at Harlow’s, with few venues in between serving to bridge that gap.
Quattlebaum says he sees Claimstake as fitting the “niche” needed for small artists based near Sacramento who are want to rise and play bigger stages while staying local.
“You could say that that show kind of started a small little scene here in, I’m not even gonna say Sacramento, I’m gonna say Rancho Cordova ... nowhere in Sacramento is like that.”
If you go
What: Austin Quattlebaum, banjo-playing “Southern Gent,” performs live music
Where: Claimstake Brewing, 11366 Monier Park Place, Rancho Cordova
When: 8 p.m. Friday
Price: $10
This story was originally published December 18, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
