The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (13 page)

Papazian and Matzen's American Homebrewers Association had a long way to go if it hoped to be that influential. We find them instead on a December day in Boulder, one foot of snow already covering the ground and more falling. Papazian had driven his 1969 Toyota Corona to pick up the first two thousand copies of
Zymurgy
from the printer. Back at his place, volunteers helped organize and label the first mailing. About eight hundred homebrewers and their partisans in the Boulder area would receive copies; another one hundred would hit those wine-making shops nationwide that Papazian and Matzen had found in the Yellow Pages. Those shops soon would be able to legally sell the homebrewing supplies they had been selling anyway; their inventories of such supplies would grow in volume and quality, touching off a symbiotic role that resonates to this day. President Carter's pen stroke had been good news to the merry band of libationary eccentrics huddled in Papazian's home that would help their dim salvo echo well beyond the muffle of that snowy Colorado day.

*
Interestingly, Carter took up wine making after he left office (per Scott Benjamin, “Life After the White House,” CBS News, February 11, 2009). Still, during the 1976 presidential campaign, the media many times reported that Carter never drank alcohol.

*
This
Amateur Brewer
should not be confused with a later, larger magazine of the same name.

†
Modern Brewery Age
was an exhaustive source for this book. The author would like to take this opportunity to commend it for its statistical thoroughness.

D
on Barkley returned in the spring of 1978
to the warehouse on the outskirts of Sonoma. This time Jack McAuliffe was away, probably down in Davis
doing more research or in San Francisco picking up grains from the city's last malt house, the Bauer & Schweitzer Malting Company. Suzy Stern greeted Barkley in the small office at the warehouse entrance.

He pleaded his case again: he was a student of Michael Lewis at UC-Davis and wanted practical experience this summer in small-scale commercial brewing because he hoped to found his own small brewery someday.

“Sure,” a delighted Stern said, “come back! And you want to work for free, right?”

“Yeah, well, maybe for some free beer.”

Barkley that summer fell into a grueling work rhythm with McAuliffe, Stern, and Zimmerman. Workdays often started around 6
AM
with the milling of about one hundred pounds of malted barley in a wooden mill that McAuliffe had built, working off nineteenth-century designs. They would then mash the barley in hot water piped in from the nearby mountains to release the sugars that the yeast would convert to alcohol. While it mashed, they might sit around the small office, drinking coffee in the heat provided by the sootbelching stove (the local feed store sold stacks of coal, so fire was never a problem during the bitter winter months—warmth might be, but fire wasn't). Then they would boil the mashed barley and add hops, depending on the beer type. New Albion got its hops, mostly the Northern Brewer and Cluster varieties, from the family-owned Signorotti Farm in Sloughhouse, east of Sacramento; one or two bales would last an entire year.
*

After the boil, the wort would be cooled and then left to ferment. Within a few weeks it would be time to bottle. Unlike Big Beer—unlike most commercial beer in the world—New Albion's ales were not pasteurized. Instead the yeast went into the bottles along with everything else, providing a further fermentation punch and a generally more complex beer. The beer was sold in returnable twelve-ounce bottles labeled by a machine built in 1910—”We don't believe in throwing things away,” McAuliffe told a reporter—and packaged in twenty-four-count wooden cases made and silk-screened by McAuliffe himself. New Albion's ales were then sent out to a Bay Area that was apparently quite thirsty for them, no matter the price.

Bottles of New Albion might retail for ninety-five cents to $1.05 each, making them perhaps the most expensive beers produced in the United States. As with Anchor, most of the brewery's accounts were local (New Albion and Anchor occasionally shared shelf space, the first time since Prohibition two craft beers did), though McAuliffe started getting requests from other parts of
the country. He could not deliver. The twelve-hour days were barely keeping up with the beer's popularity locally. McAuliffe had already upped production to pay for Barkley—the curious student became an increasingly masterful employee for $150 a week and all the beer he could drink. And it was not like the company was full of frills: Stern's van still served as the main distribution vessel, as well as the conduit for supply runs; and McAuliffe still lived arachnid-like above the shop. It was just that, perhaps primed by Anchor, the marketplace wanted its craft beer. The company lost $6,000 its first fiscal year and was on its way to falling just short of breaking even in its second. As the
Washington Post
noted in a Sunday story in July 1978:

From the first week New Albion beers were available, the brewery has been unable to meet demand, selling every single bottle every single week despite the fact that the rate of production has already doubled. And some time this summer, McAuliffe will begin distributing kegs to local bars for the first time. As with the bottled product, the keg beer will be fermented in the container, making it America's only noncarbonated draft beer.

Was McAuliffe worried? Nah. “It's real beer,” he assured the
Post.
“All you have to do is make a good beer, and it will sell.” And, like Fritz Maytag down in SoMa, he would not advertise. “We don't really have to. If you make good beer—if you put money into the ingredients of your beer—you don't have to pay for advertising. It's when you get into the mass market that you can't tell your beer from the others except by the difference in advertising.” He then harked back to Alice Waters's operation, also in the Bay Area. “It's just like cosmetics, or bread, in the big mass market. That's why we don't advertise; small, high-quality food places don't have to.”

How such a quote must have gone over in the boardrooms of John Murphy's Miller. “Great Taste, Less Filling,” “It's Miller Time”—these worked on the public. How dare this upstart! Big Beer's trade voice did, in fact, push back a bit. In a letter to his father dated August 1, 1978, McAuliffe recounted with a certain insouciance his run-in with Henry King's USBA for further comments he'd made about ingredient shortcuts. The letter, too, showed a son not yet thirty-five tell his father that he was part of something—something that was growing, that was directly related to the after-school hours at Clay's welding shop back in Fairfax and to the hobby he had dragged from Scotland and that they had engaged in together. Even the media coverage was growing—and its quality, too. Gone was the editorial wonderment of the year before at this
strange thing called small-scale commercial brewing. It was replaced by earnest descriptions, clips from the time brim with explanations of such terms as “bottle fermentation,” “cellaring temperatures,” and “wort.”

Dear Pop—

Here's a clipping from the
Washington Post.
I got my hand slapped by the United States Brewers Association, Augie Busch president, for saying all that stuff about rice & enzymes. I told them I was going to be good from now on.

We're getting new malt storage capacity—15 tons, so I won't have to go to the city [San Francisco] every two weeks to pick it up.

I think we'll show a profit this coming year.

Love,

Jack

*
A hop bale weighed around two hundred pounds.

B
yron Burch listened to
the twenty-three-year-old from Chico, California, go on about his plans to open a small brewery. Burch, the author of
Quality Brewing
and the co-owner by then of a homebrewing shop in San Rafael, was familiar with such a storyline; he knew Jack McAuliffe and Fritz Maytag and had heard of plans for other small breweries, though the idea still seemed novel, even foolhardy. The young man from Chico had written to him because of his book, and the two ran into each other at a wine-making trade show at the Claremont Hotel in the hills of Berkeley. They headed to Burch's place in the nearby Oakland flatlands to get away from the conference for a bit and to shoot the breeze over some of their own homebrews. The homebrews turned into dinner, and the young man ended up crashing there.

For the young man, the trade show in the spring of 1978 was a tipping point in a short life that seemed somehow to have been inexorably aimed toward craft beer. He had grown up in downtown Los Angeles and in the more
suburban Woodland Hills, the middle child of three in a typical middle-class family of 1950s and 1960s America. He had a fascination with taking things apart that started in the cradle—the toaster, electrical outlet covers, even the washing machine, usually with kitchen knives or tweezers, anything in arm's reach and while his mother wasn't looking. Eventually, he came to learn how to put them back together as well, although not always in the same places: a neighbor's lawnmower engine once became the power for a go-cart. By adolescence he could build things from bare-bones ingredients; he would never forget the time he built a screwdriver from scratch in junior high shop class, something much harder than it sounds. He also would never forget the neighbor who homebrewed and made his own wine, the rows of carboys on a side porch with air locks bubbling away, the weekend pop-ins to discover pots of boiling malt and hops on the kitchen stove.

In the summer of 1969, he gave it a go himself. He spent less than twenty-five dollars at John Daume's wine-making shop in Woodland Hills to buy an open-top plastic fermenter (like what McAuliffe bought in Glasgow a few years before, it was a glorified trash can), a five-gallon glass carboy, a hydrometer, a short length of plastic tubing, and a crude bottle capper. The ingredients he bought at the grocery store down the road: canned Blue Ribbon malt extract and a lot of cane sugar. He was aiming for high alcohol content, not high quality. That changed in 1970, when, while at a homebrewing shop, he discovered Fred Eckhardt's
A Treatise on Lager Beers.
Now a high school student who had little use for his classes, he devoured the information and switched to all-grain brewing, the technical know-how building since before he could walk gelling nicely with his newfound passion to produce not-terrible concoctions that he and his friends could enjoy.

Shortly after graduation—he skipped the actual ceremony—our young man, now conspicuously bearded even though not yet eighteen, commenced a couple of seemingly random journeys that in fact turned out to be as life altering as the neighbor who homebrewed. The first trip was a ten-hour drive to Chico, about 175 miles northeast of San Francisco, so a couple of friends could check out the local college there. They ended up in the impossibly seedy La Grande Hotel downtown, with no air-conditioning in the sultry June nighttime, an oddball assortment of permanent residents, and a shared bathroom down the hall spattered with blood. It was not an auspicious welcome to the town of thirty thousand. The young man decided to stay nonetheless; it was as good a redoubt as any to plan his post-Southern California life. He looked in the Yellow Pages for bike shops—he had been working at them on and off since junior high—and landed a job at a local Schwinn store. He and his friends the
next day found a five-bedroom house to rent on the south end of town, and he called his mother to tell her he was moving in two weeks.

The second journey then commenced. He and a friend biked their way roughly ninety miles from Novato to Ukiah, stopping along the way to sample the wares of a burgeoning Northern California wine scene—and to discover, almost by accident, commercially produced craft beer. Our young man had heard of the particular brand, maybe even knew a bit about its recent history as a resurrected example of pre-Prohibition brewing. Regardless of what he knew, the timing was perfect, as the brewery had only a short time before begun distributing bottles, and it was in a small restaurant off Highway 1 that Ken Grossman had his first Anchor Steam.