The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (18 page)

When New Albion finally did shut down in late 1982, it closed with none of the attention you might expect would accompany the demise of the first start-up brewery in America since Prohibition. No reporters traipsed to the rural reaches of Sonoma to cover this aspect of the curious business. There would be no more students from UC-Davis, no more pop stars popping in, no more letters addressed to “The Brewery, Northern California,” no more disciples seeking wisdom, Englishmen and Scots paying attention, anyone to note the culinary bridge Jack McAuliffe had thrown up between local food and local beer. It all just went away, the bottles of pale ale, porter, and stout disappearing from Bay Area shelves shortly after the brewery that crafted them disappeared. There were meetings in the old fruit warehouse throughout the year about the money race. No one would remember much of what was said beyond the sad mechanics of going out of business. Everything had to be out; the former New Albion Brewing Company had to vacate the premises. McAuliffe and his crew did that by hand, too.

B
yron Burch knew just about everyone
in the American craft beer movement by the time he climbed aboard the red double-decker bus in Boulder. It
was June of a tumultuous 1982, as some in the movement struggled and others started to soar. He was in Boulder for a concoction of Charlie Papazian's: the first Great American Beer Festival. However, like “the American Homebrewers Association,” the national adjective in the name, as well as “great,” seemed optimistically grandiose—just about everyone who attended the festival could fit on the bus with Burch. That included Michael Jackson.

An expanded version of the English critic's canonical
The World Guide to Beer
would be republished in the United States later in the year, and he was writing regularly now about beer for European publications, as well as acting as an advising editor for
Zymurgy.
Jackson by 1982 was well known to the domestic craft beer movement, an avuncular eccentric given to outlandish sartorial combinations, particularly when it came to his colorful ties, and sonorous descriptions of his favored beer. He was also generous with his time and advice. It could be argued that no one would be sitting on the bus on its way out of Boulder had Papazian not run into Jackson at the Great British Beer Festival in London the year before. He talked to Jackson about the possibility of a similar festival in the United States. Would it work? “That's a great idea, Charlie,” Jackson replied. “Only what will you serve for beer?”

Papazian returned to the States confident despite the odds. He would make two crucial tweaks. First, the Great British Beer Festival was all about cask ale, the unfiltered and unpasteurized beer beloved in British pubs. The Great American Beer Festival would simply be about all and any beers brewed in the United States. Second, while the festival would be full of competitors, Papazian decided they would be asked not to behave as competitors—it was a bit of a departure, to say the least, from the lusty million-dollar marketing wars of Miller and Anheuser-Busch. Papazian hosted organizational meetings in his living room, where ten to fifteen people—mostly volunteers, as well as Daniel Bradford, who would be considered the cofounder of the festival—discussed how they were going to foment a tide that would lift all boats. It would be about talking beer, not talking brands. They settled on June 4 as the festival date, toward the middle of the annual homebrewers conference.

The bus ride out of Boulder, at the end of the festival, was to visit Boulder Brewing, launched in the goat shed three years before by “Stick” Ware, David Hummer, and Al Nelson. Burch spotted Jackson on the bus's lower level and positioned himself behind him. He listened to Jackson talk about how he was then writing a book on British restaurants. Burch couldn't resist.

“Now that you can talk your way into any brewery in the world,” he said, “now comes the book on restaurants; and then about five years it'll be Michael
Jackson's attempt to supplant
The World Atlas of Wine.
And about five years on it'll be
The World Guide to Brothels.”

Jackson grew quiet.

“Actually,” he said in his slow northern England accent, “I wrote a piece called ‘The Consumer's Guide to the Brothels of Amsterdam' some years ago for
Oui
magazine.”

Everyone laughed. Underneath the mirth and camaraderie, however, was something meaningful and financially very serious. The festival—and the homebrewers conference, for that matter—allowed the likes of Burch, who by then co-owned two homebrewing shops and had written
Quality Brewing,
one of the most influential works on the subject, to mingle freely with the world's leading beer writer. Personalities were gelling, alliances were forming, and ideas were being exchanged. The homebrewers could buy the commercial brewers a few rounds at night and pick their brains in service of their own dreams of turning pro. Nascent commercial brewers could learn from brewers and principals at older, more-established companies. Charlie Papazian's confab was a trade show, yes, but also a meeting of what could and would one day be described as a tribe.

Logistically, it wasn't much. Page eleven of the program for “The American Homebrewers' Association's Fourth Annual National Homebrew and Microbrewery Conference National Homebrew Competition and the Great American Beer Festival 1982” listed the schedule for the festival portion on Friday, June 4, as follows: “4:30-9:30
PM.
The Great American Beer Festival 1982—see details on
page 16
.” Page sixteen offered a five-sentence hello introducing the festival and its beers “selected for their quality, unique and special character,” followed by a glossary of beer terms and descriptions of the forty-seven beers available from twenty-four different breweries at twenty-two different spots in the five-thousand-square-foot ballroom of the Hilton Harvest House on Twenty-Eighth Street in Boulder.

We see in these descriptions not only the first inklings of the adjectival redolence that would come to define beer criticism (the program might mark the first time that a beer's aroma was described in print as “flowery”) but also a care and concern for the elements of beer that was rare in America. The descriptions tell of specific ingredients (in Sierra Nevada Pale Ale: “traditional top-fermenting ale yeast, and Cluster, Cascade, and Tettnanger hops”), of history (regarding Boulder Porter: “traditionally a darker, heavier beer popularized in London during the eighteenth century by the porter tradesman who drank porter beer”), and of attention to storage and serving (for Anchor Steam,
the ideal “serving temperature is around forty-five degrees F”). Beer was being accorded respect in a collective way for the first time in a long time.

Each of the approximately 850 attendees could move through the twenty-two tasting points in about an hour, if they cared to, and take the rest of the time to absorb information from exhibits on brewing and from fellow attendees. Sapling craft brands like Sierra Nevada and Boulder rubbed commercial shoulders with surviving regionals like Genesee and F. X. Matt, both out of Upstate New York, and G. Heileman and Jacob Leinenkugel, both from Wisconsin. The oldest brand in attendance was D. G. Yuengling & Son, the Pottsville, Pennsylvania, regional with roots in the 1820s; the largest—and the only sign of Big Beer—might have been Colorado's own Coors. Representatives from these, as well as luminaries of the craft beer movement—Fred Eckhardt, Ken Grossman, Michael Lewis, Papazian, Bradford, Burch, and Jackson—mingled with aficionados, budding and hard-core, from both coasts and from interior places like Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana (the only region from the contiguous United States that appeared to be unrepresented at the first great national beer festival was the South). These attendees could then return to their home ports, confident in the knowledge of a wider, growing movement at their backs—one buoyed by an increasingly professional AHA. For one thing, the association was preparing to move its physical address from Papazian's porches on Nineteenth Street to honest-to-God offices on Pearl Street in downtown Boulder; and there was a full-time marketing director in Bradford (albeit with his roles as office assistant and
Zymurgy
circulation director still voluntary), as well as ambitions to effect legislative change regarding homebrewing and commercial brewing in all fifty states.

There would be stumbles along the early way, some of them nearly fatal. In June 1984, a little more than three thousand people attended the third GABF. A respectable number, sure—but the AHA, in a fit of hubris or simply wishful thinking, had switched venues, from the Hilton Harvest House in Boulder to the much larger Currigan Exhibition Hall in Denver. One attendee remembered that “the cavernous building had all the ambiance of an airplane hangar,” and its vast size seemed to render the attendance paltry. Papazian would pronounce the move “a disaster,” as the forty breweries present, including Big Beer arrivistes like Anheuser-Busch and Stroh's, couldn't really fill out the hall, and the ticket sales weren't enough to cover the rent or the insurance. An embarrassed AHA had to borrow money to cover not only the festival but also its basic operating expenses for a time.

Still, the signs of healthy, sustained progress were unmistakable: The AHA by 1984 had started buying its toilet paper in bulk rather than from a nearby
convenience store. A moment could not be spared as they built a clearinghouse for a movement that rather suddenly found itself in a bicoastal growth spurt.

M
atthew Reich flew to Boston
and pitched his idea for a New York City brewery to Joseph Owades in his apartment. Owades had worked at the last New York brewery to close, Rheingold, which shut its Brooklyn operations in 1976. By the time Reich sought his counsel at the start of the 1980s, Owades was one of the most successful consultants in the brewing industry through his Center for Brewing Studies and his reputation as the biochemist who invented the basis for light beer. He was also a quiet, immensely respected force in the nascent craft beer movement, having advised Fritz Maytag at Anchor.

Reich was a Bronx native who went to the University of Massachusetts and in 1971 cofounded the Boston Food Cooperative, which became the East Coast's largest members-owned food market, with an emphasis on locally grown and organic foodstuffs. He moved back to New York and was a lending officer at Citibank before becoming a top executive on the business side of Hearst Magazines in Midtown. Along the way, after an epiphany about the grape in France, he taught wine-tasting classes at the Harvard Club, the Yale Club, and the New School, where he also taught a brewing course. Reich knew of Maytag's Anchor, and he had read enough stories and heard enough anecdotes to imbibe the notion that a craft brewery could work on the East Coast as well.

It was a notion that seemed oddly radical. The American craft beer movement at that point was just a few operations in the San Francisco Bay Area, some of them about to fold, plus the hive of activity in and around Boulder and a couple of colonies in Oregon and Washington State. For whatever reason, aside from some Anchor beers, it had not really penetrated east of the Mississippi. Coors was novel to New Yorkers and New Jerseyans; Anchor was downright exotic; New Albion and DeBakker would have been stupefying. Still, there was a rich tradition of East Coast brewing, especially in the North, pre-Prohibition. That Rheingold brewery, to take an example, had been
one of nearly fifty operating in Brooklyn by the turn of the twentieth century. Yuengling in eastern Pennsylvania had been in the same family since 1829. Upstate New York once produced more hops than anyplace else in the country. It wasn't so far-fetched, a craft brewery on the East Coast. Why should the Californians and Coloradans have all the fun?

There was the cost. Owades heard out his young visitor—Reich was barely into his thirties—and then heard how much he could raise from friends and family: roughly $350,000. It would not be enough to open a physical brewery, especially not within New York City, which was gradually recovering from its nadir of urban decay and municipal bankruptcy in the early 1970. Its industrial spaces, including the grand, old breweries of Brooklyn, were set on a twenty-year march toward upscale condos and alternative office space.

Owades had a solution, though, one that would reverberate through craft beer, not without controversy, opening up avenues to would-be brewers high on enthusiasm but just short of capital. It was called contract brewing. Reich, Owades explained, should pay an existing brewery for the labor and equipment to brew his beer. He could in the meantime raise money to open that physical brewery in New York City. It was like borrowing someone's kitchen to make one of your recipes, he explained. Owades had a particular kitchen in mind. The F. X. Matt Brewing Company was started as the West End Brewery in Utica, New York, about 240 miles north of Manhattan, by F. X. Matt, who immigrated to the United States in the late nineteenth century after learning the brewery trade in Baden, in southwestern Germany. His grandson, F. X. II, who had served in the US Army in Germany during World War II, was running it by 1980, when it was one of the last great regional breweries (he renamed it for his grandfather). He had a reputation for bluntness but, luckily for Reich and others, also a soft spot for entrepreneurs in the mold of his grandfather. Besides, Matt had already contract-brewed at least one brand: Billy Beer, the short-lived libation of President Carter's kid brother. Reich contacted Matt about a contract to brew his recipe.

“This is the dumbest idea I've ever heard,” Matt told him.

But he was in, the wheels of commerce greased in no small part by Owades, who knew Matt and signed on with Reich as a consulting brewmaster. In the summer of 1982, Matt brewed seven thousand cases of Reich and Owades's amber lager recipe; Reich had to pay for the labels up front and agree to buy all seven thousand, regardless of whether they subsequently sold, at roughly eleven dollars a case. His business plan revealed the modest yet ambitious sales goals of craft brewers then: “To sell four thousand cases per month by the end of the first operating year; six thousand cases per month by the end of the second year; and eight thousand cases by the end of the third year.”