Of all the Sonoma brewers, no one can stake a claim to “Renaissance man” quite like Richard Norgrove Jr. at the Bear Republic Brewing Co.

His resumé: U.S. Army veteran, firefighter, race car driver, bike builder, graphic designer (creator of all the Bear labels), Healdsburg Parks and Recreation commissioner, Little League coach and, in his free time, brewmaster.

“Today they might diagnose a kid like that as having ADHD, but back then they just called you ‘hyperactive,’ ” he said.

“I guess if I wasn’t doing all this, I’d go crazy. I just have to be going 110 mph.”

Back in 1995, when he and his father, CEO Richard Norgrove Sr., founded Bear Republic Brewing and Restaurant with $1 million, “Ricardo” had already paid his dues as an amateur home brewer and builder of custom home-brew kits for sale at The Beverage People in Santa Rosa. He used his welding experience with Salsa Cycles to construct the brewery. He had also taken classes in the brewing program at Seibel Institute of Technology in Chicago and apprenticed for free with Brandon Moylan at Moylan’s Brewing in Marin.

Norgrove, 46, still laughs at how he stumbled onto the Bear’s flagship Racer 5 India Pale ale), which today accounts for more than 80 percent of sales.

“It came out of a mistake,” he said. In 1998, when he was the solo brewer and working on a batch of the house pale ale, he accidentally threw in the hops for Red Rocket IPA. “All of a sudden you’ve got something that’s crazily unbalanced. But I made a rule with myself years ago that I would call it what it is. So we put it out to the public as Springtime Strong ale and about five versions later, it became Racer 5.”

Bear Republic would eventually expand with distribution in 35 states. But over the past four years, the company has scaled back to 22 states, producing around 70,000 barrels annually. Now, with 14 brewers underneath him, Ricardo is more interested in the motto, “Let’s be stronger in our backyard.”

Outgrowing the brewpub in Healdsburg six years ago, the Norgroves opened an additional production facility in Cloverdale.

“We’re not the little fish anymore and we’re not the big fish. We’re in the middle, so we’re getting eaten from both sides,” Norgrove Jr. said. “The little guys are eating at us and the big guys are chomping on us. So my long-term goal has always been to be that brewery that when somebody thinks of Sonoma County long term, they think of that family brewery as Bear Republic.”

It took Collin McDonnell about 15 minutes to decide. He was living in Oakland in 2009, when he brewed an amber ale straight out of Randy Mosher’s “Mastering Homebrew” book.

“I was like, that’s it, I’m gonna open a brewery,” McDonnell said. “That process took me about 15 minutes. The concept that you made it and it tasted so delicious, just struck me like a freight train.”

Never mind that he dumped out the second batch because it was “undrinkable.” Ditching his job as a communications consultant (he’s still not sure what that means), he signed on as an apprentice to Ron Silberstein at the ThirstyBear Brewing Co. in San Francisco. Brewing gigs followed at Beach Chalet, 21st Amendment and Drake’s Brewing, until he finally sat down one day in 2011 with Petaluma weekend brew buddies Shane Goepel and Scott Goynes and they decided, “This isn’t a home brew operation at all anymore. We should license this.”

Holing up in an after-hours space at Rogue Research in Petaluma, they did “the nano-brewing thing” for two years, making around 80 barrels a year in 2012 and 2013 as HenHouse Brewing Co. early beers included an oyster stout, made from Hog Island oyster shells, which sparked rave reviews and put them on the map.

In 2014, after scraping together funding from family and friends, they shot up to 1,000 barrels, eventually moving into a new space shared with Petaluma Hills Brewing Co.

“I like to say we’ve gone from comically small to small,” said McDonnell, 29, a home-schooled Petaluma native who enrolled at Santa Rosa Junior College at 14 and went on to compete for the speech-and-debate team at Bradley university in Peoria, Ill.

Today Goepel does a lot of the day-to-day brewing and McDonnell handles delivery and outreach, spending valuable time talking to sellers and customers.

“I can’t deal with stale beer, so going out and making sure that people are treating the beer well is really, really important to me,” he said. “It’s an area that doesn’t get a lot of attention. There’s a lot that can happen after it goes into the keg.”

Midway through their fourth year, it’s still very much “nose to the grindstone,” McDonnell said. “every once in a while you get to have these moments of, how cool is it that we make beer for a living? Then you realize we don’t have any employees, nobody gets any vacation time. … We’re still very much in start-up mode.”

But no matter how big HenHouse may grow, the philosophy remains decidedly unphilosophical: “We want to make beers that you can think about, but you don’t have to.”

While other kids were playing baseball and learning to drive, Brian Hunt was busy brewing mead in his bedroom at age 15, inspired by an article in Scientific American Magazine.

It didn’t matter that the ancient libation of fermented honey tasted “disgusting:” The seed was planted. years later, when Hunt abandoned pre-med studies and enrolled at UC Davis, that same thirst for experimentation would lead him to beer.

Since founding Moonlight Brewing Co. in 1992 in rural Santa Rosa, Hunt has never stopped pushing the edge, whether it’s inventing the California dark lager that would become his flagship Death & Taxes brew, or dropping redwood tips from a tree in his backyard into the “hopless” Working For Tips ale.

“I fail at mainstream,” Hunt said. “If everybody likes the beers that I make, then I have failed.”

Always off-center in the beer revolution that has thrived in Sonoma for more than three decades, Hunt is a maverick among mavericks.

“Death & Taxes was not a beer that was copied from somewhere else in the world,” he said. “One day, I had in my mind a beer that I wanted and it didn’t exist: not in the store where I could buy it, not on the planet.”

It was a hot day in Napa and he wanted a beer that was “refreshing and crisp and black and tannic. I wanted it to have that iced-coffee zippiness to it but not the caffeine.”

It didn’t take long for beer connoisseurs to discover the dark molasses lager goes well with “tacos, sushi and 100-degree weather.” Or for Budweiser and Guinness to come out with their own black lagers.

Over the years, while brewing with unusual ingredients such as mugwort, yarrow, bee balm and Labrador tea, Hunt has always tried to walk the balance between innovation and gimmickry.

“I call those novelty beers,” he said. “You take a sip and say, ‘Wow that’s interesting,’ and then you probably don’t finish the glass.”

These days, at 57, he has five employees who help him brew approximately 2,300 barrels a year. Despite rave reviews and widespread distribution in pubs, he’s never been interested in rampant growth, or even bottling, for that matter. Moonlight Brewing beers are sold only in kegs. While working for Joseph Schlitz Brewing Co. in Milwaukee in the early 1980s, Hunt learned “what happens to a company when you cheapen a product.”

He recently relocated his “Abbey de St. Humulus” brewery from his backyard to Coffey Lane in Santa Rosa. He had dreamed of opening a taproom, but is now working on a growler fill station to open later this year, where fans can fill glass jugs with Moonlight ales and take them home.

More important than growth, Hunt said, is his beer philosophy: “I like it when people try something I make and I see their face wince,” he said. “not wince and spit it out, but if they wince and then have this look of curiosity, then I don’t care if they don’t like it. If I put a crack in their preconceived notions of what beer can be, then I’ve succeeded with that person.”