The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (28 page)

For now, though, exeunt Americans. Let the curtain rise on the Spanish Steps in Rome.

*
The GABF had not entirely escaped organizational flubs. The following year, 1988, several breweries were left out of the program, and the medals did not arrive in time for the awards ceremony. Per Vince Cottone, “Movement in the Right Direction,”
American Brewer,
fall 1987; Maureen Ogle, “First Draft Follies: Early History of the American Homebrewers Association and Brewers Association, Part 8.”

†
Interesting enough, the twelve original categories did not include one for India pale ale, which has become the beer style for which American craft brewers have become most famous for interpreting.

O
n Monday, April 21, 1986,
on the 2,739th anniversary of the founding of Rome by the sons of the God of War, thousands of Italians gathered before the Spanish Steps to receive their heaping plates of penne pasta cooked flawlessly
al dente
in giant skillets. The skillets sizzled near a stage where politicians and celebrities railed against the “degradation of Rome” and the “Americanization” of their country's culture. Many in the crowd in front of the stage wore T-shirts or carried posters with pictures of Clint Eastwood with the message,
CLINT EASTWOOD,
you
SHOULD BE OUR MAYOR,
written underneath. The actor and director, recently elected mayor of the California town of Carmel, had made it a point to crack down on the proliferation of fast-food restaurants. The protesters were trying to do the same. Four weeks earlier, the largest McDonald's in the world had opened a block from the eighteenth-century Spanish Steps; it had 450 seats and was the eighth fast-food restaurant to open in the area in recent months. Worse, it was owned by a Frenchman! Moreover, it replaced a popular local coffee bar and cafe, as perfect a symbol as there could be for the protesters' fears that a certain homogeneity was set to devour Italian cuisine. The city council had entertained the notion of shutting the McDonald's down because of what it called a “degradation of the historic center” of the Eternal City. The fashion designer Valentino sued for the same end, claiming the joint, which abutted his headquarters, caused “significant and constant noise and an unbearable smell of fried food fouling the air.”

The McDonald's survived. It did brisk business, its hundreds of chairs often all filled, its location, the chain's 9,007th worldwide, a hangout for Italian youth in particular, not to mention the ceaseless stream of tourists. The eat-in and the earlier efforts to shutter the restaurant had captured imaginations, however, including that of Carlo Petrini. He was, in that inimitable Italian way, both a left-wing journalist and a noted wine expert from the country's north.
Petrini had been part of the crowd outside the McDonald's on its opening day chanting, “We don't want fast food, we want slow food!” The protests gave him an idea.

S
hortly after mayor Ed Koch
pulled a tap and hoisted a mug on May 13, 1986, to officially mark the opening of the New Amsterdam brewpub, Matthew Reich received three visitors in rapid succession. The first was Jim Koch, who had recently launched Boston Beer Company and its well-received flagship lager; he wanted to talk brewpubs and distribution with Reich. The second and third visitors were Tom Potter and Steve Hindy, who wanted to open a brewery in Brooklyn. Though the idea made historical, almost spiritual sense—before Prohibition the borough had as many or more breweries than Milwaukee or St. Louis—Reich did not welcome the intercity competition and the meeting did not end with wishes of good luck. Still, Potter and Hindy by 1986 were committed to returning brewing to its one-time American capital.

Hindy in particular had taken such a winding route to the idea that turning back no longer seemed an option. A goateed native of an Ohio River town between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati who went to college at Cornell, Hindy worked as a reporter at small newspapers in Upstate New York and northern New Jersey. He figured he'd hit the jackpot financially with a $20,000 salary at the Associated Press bureau in Newark in the late 1970s. But one day on the New York City subway, thinking about a change of scenery, he decided to study Arabic (his surname came from a Lebanese great-grandfather) and eventually put in for a transfer with the AP to covering the Middle East. It was, in its way, invigorating. He lived for two years in Beirut and three in Cairo; he was kidnapped and shot at and along the way covered international crises like the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the Iranian Revolution, and the Iran-Iraq War.

One October day in 1981, he was standing on a grandstand in Cairo next to a colleague from the
Washington Post,
taking in a military parade, another flexing of Cold War-funded muscle by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. French-made Mirage jets streaked overhead; spectators craned their necks to
look. Just then, a truck towing an artillery piece halted before the grandstand and several men from it dressed in military uniforms strode forward, led by a lieutenant. Sadat rose as if to receive his salute—and instead was met with a grenade. The men fired semiautomatic weapons and lobbed more grenades, killing twelve, including Sadat, and wounding several times more. Hindy and his colleague were not among the victims, but the invigoration of the Middle East beat was wearing on him, as he explained years later:

Most correspondents, including me, were rogues and adventurers addicted to the big story. Most were divorced, getting divorced, or getting remarried. Most drank too much, or took drugs, or stopped drinking and became real psychos. We all started out thinking we knew who the good guys were and believing we were on their side…. But the more wars I covered and the more I learned of the roots of conflict, the less sure I became of who the good guys were—and the less sure I was of the nobility of my role.

When the AP offered an assignment in the Philippines covering what would be the last torturous years of Ferdinand Marcos's regime, Hindy said no and returned to the States with his family. He also took with him a curiosity regarding a hobby that had roots going back millennia in the Middle East. A friend of his in Cairo had homebrewed while working in Saudi Arabia, where Western companies might provide employees with instructions for homebrewing to circumvent the kingdom's ban on alcohol, with the ingredients coming through the diplomatic post. Hindy was taken with the dark, rich, and hoppy beer produced.

When he settled back in the United States in 1984—in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, which was far from the fashionably hip enclave it is today but still safer than Beirut—Hindy gave homebrewing a shot. He got a copy of Charlie Papazian's recently published
The Complete Joy of Homebrewing,
studied it, gathered some ingredients, and thought fondly of the beers he had tasted in Europe, the Bavarian lagers in particular. He settled in for the day in his family's two-bedroom apartment on Eighth Street … and promptly brewed himself right into a disaster. To top off the bottles, Hindy used a crude metal gadget called a hammer capper, which was exactly that: a bottle-capper powered by a hammering motion. He ended up smashing thirty of the forty-eight bottles on that first batch, making a terrific mess, even frightening his family into gathering at the other end of the apartment. To his credit, Hindy took a deep breath, recalled Papazian's mantra—”Relax, don't worry, have a
homebrew”—and tried again. He got better and better at homebrewing, sharing his concoctions with his new colleagues at
Newsday,
the Long Island newspaper where he was assistant foreign editor, and with his Park Slope neighbors. One of those neighbors—the thirstiest, in fact—was a mustachioed assistant vice president at Chemical Bank named Tom Potter. Potter had bought the apartment downstairs in 1985; he and Hindy, and their families, became fast friends. The two men would drink Hindy's homebrew in Potter's backyard on summer weekends, watching the Mets on a black-and-white television swing their way improbably to a World Series win in 1986.

All the while, something stuck in the back of Hindy's mind. He had subscribed to
Zymurgy,
and he had learned about Jack McAuliffe's former operation at New Albion and about Fritz Maytag's expanding one at Anchor. He knew, too, of Matthew Reich's successful New Amsterdam launch via F. X. Matt (local media loved it) and of William S. Newman's eponymous brand in Albany. The craft beer movement was real to Hindy, albeit from a distance. He was an ex-foreign correspondent now working the domestic side of the beat. What did he know about starting a brewery? He mentioned the idea to Potter, a recently minted Columbia MBA. That was as far as the planning went.

Then, as was his wont, one rainy day Hindy went for a jog through nearby Prospect Park. He passed another runner wearing an old T-shirt that read, in classic Victorian font,
BREWERIES OF BROOKLYN.
He ran into the guy again on the other side of the park and this time asked him about the shirt.

“Oh, this,” he said. “It's a book I wrote. It's been out of print for ten years.” The guy was Will Anderson, a collector of arcane brewing odds and ends who had taken upon himself to chronicle Brooklyn's beer history just as the last breweries in the borough closed in the mid-1970s.

“I'd like to talk to you,” Hindy said. “I'm starting a brewery in Brooklyn.”

“Yeah,” Anderson said. “You and everybody else.”

The chance encounter with Anderson refocused Hindy on opening what would become the Brooklyn Brewery within two years, with Potter as his partner and the New York City borough of more than two million as both customer base and marketing tool.

J
im Koch wasn't sleeping.
He and Rhonda Kallman were working around the clock growing the Boston Beer Company. They had moved well beyond the thirty original accounts they thought they needed for the business to succeed; their flagship lager was being distributed to around two thousand spots on the East Coast and in West Germany, home to some of the most sacrosanct soil in the beer universe; the three-year-old lager, too, had already captured a handful of plaudits from Charlie Papazian's organization in Boulder. Samuel Adams Boston Lager had topped the consumer preference poll at the Great American Beer Festival in 1985 and 1986 and then won the gold medal in the continental pilsner category in 1987, the first year of the blind-tasting panel of professional critics and brewers. As for the consumer preference poll, Boston Beer nabbed that in 1987 too, this time with what the company cryptically called “Festival Lager” at the GABF and which Koch later unveiled at a press conference as Boston Lightship. Though heavier in texture and taste, it was clearly introduced to compete with light beers as well as thinner-tasting imports like Heineken and Beck's; it marked the craft beer movement's first foray into the hitherto verboten light beer market. Boston Lager was even being distributed to the White House, Camp David, and Air Force One! Koch had arranged the deals himself through an old colleague at the Boston Consulting Group, who knew the head of the White House Mess. Secret Service agents would show up at a distributor, pick several cases at random for security, and be on their way.

Jim Koch outside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The writing on the photo reads, “1986 IN THE WHITE HOUSE FRIDGE!!!”
COURTESY OF THE BOSTON BEER CO
.

Closer to home, Boston Lager was available on draught for the first time in 1987, and Kallman's homemade signs had
been replaced by slicker ones that carried news of the GABF wins along with the beers' availabilities. They even had a warehouse—appropriately enough, the old Haffenreffer facility in Jamaica Plain, the last regional brewery to close in the Boston area in 1964. And a truck! More than one! Koch's Plymouth Reliant station wagon and Kallman's orange Vega with the white interior had become now part of the backstory of a successful start-up. Koch found himself in a position perhaps only ever otherwise occupied by Fritz Maytag at Anchor, and then only intermittently: he was a comfortable commercial success in American craft beer. He had worked off Matthew Reich's idea—via Joseph Owades, who also worked with Koch—and cranked up the production to eleven. Koch should have been sleeping like a log.