The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (2 page)

It was a curious thing: American influence on another country's beer. I knew enough about the topic already to know that that was not a small thing: America had never been anyone's influence on beer … unless it was to mimic the engineering behind the watery lagers of what I'll call Big Beer: Budweiser, Coors, Miller, and others. These were admirable engineering triumphs, with millions of bottles and cans tasting the same no matter where they were made or how far they were shipped. But these beers did not influence the ones at Slow Food. Those beers were American craft beers—and American craft beers had never been bigger. Nor had the beer culture that had grown up around them.

That same European trip, I discovered what's considered the best beer store in Paris. Here, in the capital of another traditional wine country, the store's owner told me in frank English that he would be willing to trade bottle for bottle his European beers for any American ones I might be able to bring over on subsequent visits. He knew plenty about American craft beer, including the popular styles and the brewers themselves, but couldn't readily get them in France. He motioned resignedly to a far corner of the store where, in and around wooden crates, rested several bottles of only one American craft brand. There was, he explained, demand for so many more.

The year before my trip, all of America was enveloped in a heated debate surrounding beer: the White House Beer Summit. It sprang from the arrest of Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his home by Cambridge, Massachusetts, police sergeant James Crowley. President Obama had commented on the arrest in Gates's favor, and the commentariat demanded a sit-down between the parties, plus vice president Joe Biden. The president chose to hold the meeting over that most sacred of national drinks, beer, and the debate soon pivoted to not only what the parties would say when they sat down at the White House but also what they would drink. They had so many choices.

It is impossible to overstate how far beer in America has come in just the last two generations. The nation's five biggest breweries by 1970 together produced nearly half of all of America's commercially available beer. That number would crest 85 percent by the 1990s, though the number of breweries in the market share would actually shrink. Big Beer's brew was deliberately insipid and inoffensive, what one craft brewer explained as “alcoholic soda pop.” It was engineered, to wallop and not to wow, in gigantic factories: Anheuser-Busch's headquarters in St. Louis grew to cover the equivalent of sixty city blocks, or roughly 125 acres. It was also phenomenally popular. By the middle
of the twentieth century, Americans were drinking an average of twenty-one gallons of beer per person per year, up from around eighteen gallons before Prohibition. A sizable part of this success was not only the engineering but other technological advances such as the Interstate Highway System, the aluminum can, and the television. It was also, though, due to a largely no-fault divorce between consumers and foodstuffs. Beer had once been an intensely local thing: hundreds of breweries in dozens of cities dotting the landscape before Prohibition in 1920, shipping their fare not that far from where it was brewed. These regional breweries, and even smaller local ones, died off one by one as beer, like other American industries after World War II (accounting, snack foods, media, computer manufacturing, soda, you name it), experienced a convulsion of consolidation.

By 1965, there was one craft brewery in the entire United States: Anchor Brewery in San Francisco. The reach of its beers, though, did not extend beyond California. It would have no company, either, for years—a veritable culinary freak show in an increasingly homogenized American food landscape. Then, within thirty years, the number of American craft breweries increased more than 500 percent. Not only that, but these breweries were widely acknowledged—even by the Northern Europeans, who were the heirs to just about every beer style we know—as the most innovative, if not the best, in the world. Simply put, within two generations, America came to dominate the way we think, drink, talk, and write about beer.

This book will explain how that happened. It will not only tell the history of the American craft beer movement from 1965 to the present; it will also place the movement within larger social and business contexts, including ones that it took a lead in developing. It will show the very development of the term “craft beer,” which is the product of a “craft brewery.” (This type of brewery includes any small, independently owned brewery that adheres to traditional brewing practices and ingredients. Craft breweries are distinct from larger regional and national breweries, which often use nontraditional ingredients and brew on a much vaster scale.)

This book is not a tasting or style guide nor a guide to breweries (there were more than two thousand in the United States by June 2012, more than at any time since the 1880s), and it is not a history of American beer before the craft beer movement arose. Instead, it is a book on how this movement, with the odds stacked against it, survived and thrived to dominate the world's conception of beer and to change the American palate forever.

It is a story populated by quintessential American characters: heroes and villains, hippies and yuppies, oenophiles and teetotalers, gangsters and G-men,
men in kilts and men in suits. It is a story of advances and retreats, long nights of the soul and giddy moments of triumph. Further, the story's scope demands that each chapter be delineated by geography. America's a big place, and its craft brewers have done big things.

Note: The reader does not have to be intimately familiar with the brewing process. Here it is in a nutshell: cracked grains that have been roasted (or, in the brewing lingo, “malted”) are boiled to bring out their sugars; during the boil, other ingredients, including hops and spices, are added; then, after the product of this boiling (called “wort”) has cooled, yeast is added, which eats through the sugars during fermentation, converting them to ethyl alcohol, the intoxicating element of beer. There are perhaps thousands of brewing yeast strains, and they give different beers different flavors. Yeast strains also, more often than not, dictate a beer's style. There are dozens of styles, though the reader does not have to be familiar with those, either. They are explained in the book when necessary.

O
n a breezy, warm day in
August 1965, Fritz Maytag walked into the Old Spaghetti Factory on Green Street in San Francisco's trendy North Beach neighborhood and ordered his usual beer: an Anchor Steam. Fred Kuh, the restaurant's owner, ambled over.

Kuh was a bit of a local eccentric in a city increasingly full of them amid the trippy 1960s counterculture. He was a Chicago stockbroker's son and World War II veteran whom legendary San Francisco newspaper columnist Herb Caen would label “the father of funk” Kuh rented a small flat in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood, crammed with Victorian baubles and knickknacks, and called himself “a bohemian businessman.” The Old Spaghetti Factory Cafe and Excelsior Coffee House was his greatest triumph. He opened it in 1956, converting a defunct pasta factory into what the
San Francisco Chronicle
described as the city's “first camp-decor cabaret restaurant,” complete with chairs hanging from the ceiling, beaded lampshades, and secondhand furniture from brothels. Kuh plucked a fortuitous moment: his factory became among the few venues in town that San Francisco's beatniks—and later hippies—would frequent, a reliable lefty redoubt that even became the unofficial local headquarters of Adlai Stevenson's doomed 1956 presidential campaign against the staid Dwight Eisenhower.

Fritz Maytag was no beatnik, though it was difficult to pin a label on him just yet. A trim Midwestern transplant with wire-rimmed glasses, close-cropped brown hair, and pointed eyebrows that gave him the appearance of either perpetual bemusement or skepticism, he had come westward originally to attend Stanford, where he earned an American literature degree. He then spent a few years doing graduate work in Japanese through the university, even living a year in the Far East. After president John F. Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, he told himself he had to move on, that what he was doing in
grad school “was very minor.” He dropped out and moved to San Francisco to collect his thoughts. He was twenty-five—in the midst of what would one day be called a quarter-life crisis. Maytag knew only that whatever path his life was supposed to take ran through the West rather than through any place on the Rockies' other side. He was just in San Francisco to figure it all out.

And he was just in the Spaghetti Factory for what had become his favorite beer—he tasted his first Anchor Steam five years before in the Oasis bar near campus in Palo Alto. It was the only beer Kuh ever had on draft. He loved the idea of a local brewery.

“Fritz, have you ever been to the brewery?” Kuh asked, nodding to the beer that was the color of dried honey and that spawned a head like lightly packed snow. Kuh was a fan of the beer; he liked to patronize local goods made by other San Franciscans.

“No.”

“You ought to see it” Kuh said. “It's closing in a day or two, and you ought to see it. You'd like it.”

The next day, Maytag walked the mile and a half from his apartment to the brewery at Eighth and Brannan Streets and, after about an hour of poking around, bought a 51 percent stake. When the deal closed on September 24, he controlled what had been about to become America's last craft brewery. It was a risky business move, but Maytag could make it. His great-grandfather and namesake, Frederick Louis Maytag, the eldest of ten children born to German immigrants in central Iowa, had founded the Maytag Washing Machine Company more than sixty years before. Frederick Louis's son E. H., moreover, had bought a herd of Holstein cows to raise on the family farm in Newton, about thirty-five miles east of Des Moines.
His
son, Frederick Louis II, used those Holsteins—and some help from the dairy science department at Iowa State—to churn out a notable blue cheese brand modeled after the Roquefort style in France. And, like the French, Frederick Louis II aged the blue cheese in caves: two 110-foot-deep ones dug into the family farm in 1941. His eldest son, Fritz, grew up surrounded by the cheese business; in fact, he would inherit it in 1962, when Frederick Louis II died. Before that, he'd been sent east, to the elite Deerfield Academy in rural Massachusetts, for boarding school and then west to Stanford. The blue cheese of his father, though, would play a pivotal role not only in Maytag's life but in the culinary life of the United States. It was one of those seemingly uniquely American intersections of moxie and chance.

Maytag bought control of the Anchor Brewing Company for what he later described as “less than the price of a used car” in 1965. Like many a used car, it was in sad shape: cramped, the equipment run down, only one employee with
not all that much to do. Maytag could cover the purchase and early operating costs with his inheritance. What of his business acumen, though? What would a literature degree and three years of Japanese studies cover? More important, while Maytag was an unabashed fan of Anchor's signature steam beer, he himself knew nothing about brewing, much less
craft
brewing—a term that had all but disappeared from the national lexicon.

The signature beer that Maytag made his own was perhaps unique in the world. Steam beer has no one agreed-upon genesis, no creation story (or even myth), though just about all who've looked into it, including Maytag, agree it was developed in California. After that, take your pick. The brewery itself has said, “Anchor Steam derives its unusual name from the nineteenth century, when ‘steam' seems to have been a nickname for beer brewed on the West Coast of America under primitive conditions and without ice.” The
Journal of Gastronomy
said the “steam” referred to the “volatile, foamy” behavior of beer from San Francisco when it was warm. Some said it was the additional yeast called for in original steam beer recipes—thus more foam from more fermentation. Others said the inventor was named Pete Steam; others contended steam actually used to rise from a freshly popped bottle top; still others dismissed it all as a mere marketing ploy because of the nineteenth century's fascination with newfangled steam power or as an incongruous by-product of the Gold Rush (Anchor was originally founded in 1896 and had gone through several owners before Maytag). What was definitively known was that Anchor Steam was amber colored and produced a thick, creamy head when poured properly. Its alcohol content ran to nearly 5 percent per volume. The beer had a slightly bitter taste and a smooth, almost citrusy finish. And, despite its heavier ale-like mouthfeel, it was a lager.

That was important. Maytag's brewery was part of a centuries-old continuum that had found its place in America only a few generations before. Lager yeast, by sinking to the bottom of vats during fermentation, birthed a lighter, clearer type of beer that did not spoil as easily as what had become by the early 1800s the world's most popular type: ale. Ale, its yeasts hearty and virtually invulnerable to temperature, could be brewed and fermented just about anywhere. Lager, on the other hand, derived from the German verb meaning “to store,” could be brewed only at cooler temperatures—thus its development at the tail end of the Middle Ages in the Bavarian Alps. Lager did not take hold in America until the late 1800s, with the advent of industrial refrigeration, pasteurization to goose its shelf life, and faster ships to transport its mercurial yeast across the Atlantic before spoilage. Once it did, lager, lighter on the palate and less complex in taste than ale, was off to the entrepreneurial
and dynastic races. American beer production, driven by lighter and longer-lasting lagers, particularly pilsners, spiked.

Competition was fierce, financial reward relatively fast and immense. Brewing became a feature of the landscape of Big Business in the same baronial age as Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller. From the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the First World War forty-nine years later, America's domestic commercial production of beer increased sixteenfold, from 3.7 million barrels annually to 59.8 million (one barrel equals thirty-one gallons, or roughly 320 twelve-ounce bottles). More revealingly, even though the nation's population grew during this half-century, the per-person rate of beer consumption grew as well. Beer became the de facto national drink, displacing whiskey, rum, and other liquors atop the tippling totem poll—thanks again in no small part to the central European immigrants, who not only eschewed the heavier ales born in Britain, Ireland, and especially Belgium, but who also incorporated lagers into their daily lives, oftentimes drinking on the job without taboo. By 1915, the average American adult was consuming 18.7 gallons of beer a year, up from barely 3 gallons in 1865.