The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (23 page)

Koch was elated. Back at the office, he called Kallman in California. “I sold an order for twenty-five cases!” he said. “But I told the guy I couldn't deliver him twenty-five cases, so he's going to take five and we'll take it from there!”

The Boston Beer Company had its first account. Bit by bit, Koch and Kallman, eventually full-time yet without an office, sold their way toward the
magic number of thirty. Both dressed smartly—they were occasionally mistaken for IRS or board of health agents. Lugging the ice-packed samples—in Kallman's case, within an oversized Lancôme bag she'd earned—they hit prospect after prospect, sweetening any pitch with the offer to return for free and educate the bar or restaurant's staff about the beer they would be pouring. The pouring was the big thing. Koch and Kallman knew that if they could get the beer in the glass in front of a manager or an owner, they could get the account. That sometimes took two, three, four visits, but the pour worked like a charm.

The flagship brand, Samuel Adams Boston Lager, was, as one contemporary in the craft beer industry put it, “a clean, clean beer. It was gorgeous. [Koch] put it out there: nice color, good head. All of a sudden, it was like, ‘Oh that's good draft beer.'” For Koch, the lightbulb was the control behind that quality. That Samuel Adams Boston Lager was so clean and therefore appealing to a general consumer audience was no accident; it was something Koch, ever the consultant as much as the brewer, sought so as to distinguish his product from the rest of the slowly growing market. Incidents of infections—the brewing process was a five-star hotel for bacteria—had hit other craft breweries, had even helped drive some out of business, like Charles and Nancy Coury's Cartwright Portland, or very near it, like Boulder Brewing (which Koch had visited while planning Boston Beer).

Plus, most craft beers in the United States at the time were ales, which could be cloudier than lagers, with the sort of yeast sediment at the bottom that Tom de Bakker had sought to warn drinkers about on his labels. The cloudiness did not mean the ales were bad or off, just that they were a different creature than their more slowly, more coolly fermented brethren. To an American beer consumer in the mid-1980s, however, when more than eight in ten beers sold were an exactingly clear shade of yellow that would not tolerate even the faintest gossamer of wavy sediment, Samuel Adams Boston Lager was a masterstroke of presentation. It didn't hurt that it tasted good: malty and slightly sweet on the finish, with a crisp bitterness throughout. Koch, with the help of Joseph Owades, had crafted an archetypal beer from his ancestor's recipe, what Michael Jackson would declare “an American classic.”
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And Koch had crafted a seemingly airtight brand to back it. The goofy eighteenth-century man on the label, designed by Boston ad firm Gearon
Hoffman, was the culmination of careful research; Koch showed mocked-up labels to bar patrons, to fellow business travelers on airplanes, to potential investors like his uncle at Goldman Sachs, to just about anyone who would give constructive feedback. He went with “Samuel Adams” over other contenders, like “New World,” because it connected on some level with consumers. Koch knew of Jack McAuliffe's defunct effort, New Albion, though he was not aware of that pioneer's formula for a beer label and name: history plus location can equal authenticity in a drinker's mind, and if you don't legitimately have the former, “you can just make it up.” Koch had both history and location in the Samuel Adams Boston Lager label. “The Boston Beer Company” splashed across the top; the city, redolent as it was of all things Revolutionary in the mind of any American who had passed through grade school, again in the beer's very name; the chisel-chinned patriot smiling knowingly just below, hoisting a frothy tankard of history and cheer. Brewer. Patriot. Clear and clean. Tasty. What wasn't to like? Even if it did cost twenty-five cents more than a bottle of Heineken.

Koch and Kallman delivered the bottles—they couldn't afford to do draft—themselves, having not been able to find a distributor willing to take Boston Beer on. Kallman drove an orange Chevy Vega with a white interior, Koch a yellow Plymouth Reliant station wagon that his kids took to calling the “Beer Mobile” (a rented truck came later, after the magic thirty accounts, and more, provided some revenue). Early promotional materials turned on Kallman's homemade signs—eleven-by-fourteen- or sixteen-by-twenty-inch poster board with six beer labels each, red tape around the edges as a frame, and the name of the establishment followed by the tag, “Proudly serves Samuel Adams Boston Lager.” Here, too, they soon graduated to real tabletop umbrellas, menu boards, even sixty-second radio spots featuring Koch's gravelly baritone talking about the qualities of the beer, a complete refutation of the typical beer spot with its ex-jocks and bikini models. As for the sales and payables that post-St. Patrick's Day computer was supposed to handle, labeled shoeboxes on Koch's kitchen table sufficed for the time being.

Samuel Adams Boston Lager was one of the very few of that type in the craft beer movement (Jim Schlueter's River City in Sacramento had been the first craft brewery to focus on lagers). The overwhelming majority remained ales—porters, stouts, pales, IPAs, seasonals like Anchor's Christmas ale, even some wheat ales, a specialty of Widmer Brothers in Portland, Oregon. Ales could be easier to make. The yeasts were heartier and could ferment at higher temperatures;
that saved craft brewers the trouble and expense of keeping a fermentation kettle cool for days and sometimes weeks.

When it came to Big Beer in most of the United States, however, it was, as Larry Bell put it, “straight lager country.” Bell was a native of the Chicago suburb of Park Forest, a Cubs fan with neatly combed blond hair and a beard that would eventually shrink to a goatee. He had first encountered beer during a bicycle road trip at age sixteen, when he and a friend came upon some unopened Old Milwaukee cans at a campsite. Bell encountered decidedly better-quality beer when his older brother invited him years later to Washington, DC, where they hit the Brickskeller, the bar near DuPont Circle that once held the Guinness world record for largest selection of commercially available beers (1,072). After college in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Bell picked up homebrewing via a coworker at the Sarkozy Bakery in Kalamazoo in 1980. He visited the Real Ale Company shortly after its launch a couple of years later in Chelsea eighty-five miles away and asked the usual questions of Ted Badgerow, who, if you had pressed him later, would not have been able to remember Bell in particular among the many who popped in to talk shop. Bell had an interest in food and might have become a chef or even a farmer, had the Real Ale Company tour not intervened. He, like Ken Grossman at New Albion twenty-three hundred miles away and four years before, took away from this visit to the Midwest's first craft brewery the notion that the distance between homebrewing and a commercial iteration was navigable. Besides, there wasn't that much competition in between the coasts.

Bell incorporated an eponymous brewery with the state of Michigan the week after July 4, 1983; the brewery was actually a homebrew supply shop in Galesburg, east of Kalamazoo. Soon, however, Bell was collecting investors and a fifteen-gallon soup pot for a brewing kettle; and in August 1985, in three rooms of an old plumbing warehouse on East Kalamazoo Avenue, he was brewing test batches of English ales. Sales via secondhand bottles began the following month. By that time, Ted Badgerow's Real Ale Company in Chelsea had closed down, broken by the same financial pressure that had weighted earlier craft breweries, with a dearth of lending sources making expansion all but impossible even as demand stayed relatively high. Bell's operation, called Kalamazoo Brewing Company, had become in its first full year the oldest craft brewery between Colorado and the East Coast.

Reaching this milestone underscored a strange new reality in the craft beer movement. Yes, the Stroh Brewery in Detroit could produce in thirty minutes what Kalamazoo could produce in a year (520 barrels). But just as Bell supplanted Badgerow, there was a flow of new craft entrants that meant
competition was now coming from within the movement, as well as from without, with a breadth no one had seen before. The AHA's Daniel Bradford explained it like this in the summer of 1986: “You can now get more beers in places like Boulder, New York, Madison, and Berkeley than anywhere in Europe. There are about three hundred brands available in some of these cities. Because of that,” he went on, “a market segment is opening up that can't be dealt with by major breweries because it is basically too small. The larger breweries require a certain volume to keep plants going, and they can't handle this.” The American craft beer movement by its third wave in the mid-1980s had its niche marketplace all to itself, which proved a blessing and a curse.

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Jackson's highest accolade was “world classic,” however. According to the critic Stan Hieronymus, Jackson declared only one American craft beer a world classic in all seven editions of his
Pocket Guide to Beer:
Anchor Steam (
http://appellationbeer.com/blog/a-short-history-of-jacksons-world-classics/
).

O
ne September evening in 1985,
on the ground floor of an old hotel off Washington's tony DuPont Circle charging sixty dollars a night, a Bethesda, Maryland, schoolteacher stepped to the microphone and told the fewer than three dozen people assembled about the first beer of the tasting: Tsingtao out of China. Bob Tupper was the MC for the evening at the Brickskeller, the family-owned restaurant dating from 1957. It was owned, as was the Marifex Hotel upstairs, by the Coja family, one of whom, Diane, had married Dave Alexander a few years before; Alexander and his father-in-law, Maurice, set about making the Brickskeller a beer Mecca. It amassed a reputation as the place in the District to find hundreds of brands from across the globe and the place
not
to order a Miller Lite.

When the local wing of the Cornell University alumni association approached Coja about holding a beer tasting, he approached Tupper, who he knew had an encyclopedic collection of tasting notes and, owing to his career as a history teacher at a private school in Maryland, had no fear of public speaking. Tickets were fifteen dollars a pop and included a modest buffet to go with the ten beers, including German and English ones meant more to illustrate the styles than to showcase the brands. It turned out to be the first commercially run sit-down beer tasting with food in the United States, unwittingly sparking a trend that would redefine the parameters of American craft beer.

Other tastings at the Brickskeller followed in the new year, with Tupper adding a dollop of multimedia to the proceedings with slides, some from photos he had taken during brewery visits; and eventually the restaurant drew none other than Michael Jackson as a regular lecturer at the tastings. Anchor beers, too, became a regular in Tupper's tasting lineups, as did other craft brands as they became available in the District (or before they did: Tupper's mother-in-law put three cases of Samuel Adams Boston Lager in a nondescript brown box and paid its Greyhound bus fare from up north). The tastings were as much a way to introduce the curious to good beer as it was to stay one step ahead of the neo-Prohibitionists. The Washington city council was considering requiring that new liquor-license applicants gain the approval of a majority of residents living within sixteen hundred feet. “If we did have to justify our existence,” Dave Alexander figured, “we could say we were here for the education.”

The education of the would-be craft beer consumer was a real thing by the mid-1980s. This was distinct from the education of the homebrewer or of the homebrewer looking to make the leap to small-scale commercial brewing. This was education in the more general and pressing sense: how to draw more consumers. This push, subtle and sporadic as it was with events like the Brickskeller's, chose to position craft beer as part of a well-rounded palate (if not diet). Why not? Fine American wine in the previous decade had grown as a respected accompaniment of fine food. “There is a new gourmet influence,” the brewing consultant Joseph Owades told a reporter in the summer of 1984. “People now are exposed to so many new tastes. They want fresh pasta, more flavorful wine—and richer beer.” The education also offered a crucial marketing peg for the fledgling industry, one that would only grow in leaps and bounds. Call it an aspiration quotient, one summed up beautifully by Matthew Reich, who was fond of saying that his New Amsterdam was “not for the six-pack drinker. It's the beer to have if you're having one. With dinner.” This was very important for the craft beer movement: Wine for a long time had held an exalted place in popular culture, the provenance of elites, worthy of critics empaneled by major publications like the
New York Times;
beer had not. The coverage of it mattered.