The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (32 page)

Back home, despite the dire warnings from the president and the generals, the public was enraptured by the grainy images of attack beamed into living rooms, diners, bars, and basements by the relatively new cable news channel CNN. What was coming to be called the Gulf War was almost a moment of national catharsis, the country whipped into a fervor of patriotism that many expected would wipe away lingering doubts of US military might left by Vietnam only sixteen years before. The United States seemed to be winning and winning big, never mind the cautions emanating from the White House and Central Command. It was January 1991, and the country had caught war fever.

For Tony Magee, it was more of a pounding headache. He was just into his thirties, newly married, recently a homeowner (though with a sizable mortgage), and the financial walls had begun to close in. The war had interrupted the accidental business the Chicago native fell into around San Francisco, after a years-long stab at music netted him lots of touring in a reggae band and musical-arrangement credits for Pizza Hut, Bud Light, and Hallmark commercials. The business was a commission-only printing-sales job, an incongruous
fit for Magee, a spectacled multi-instrumentalist more at home with a set list of Slim Harpo and Blind Willie McTell, or discussing Beethoven in terms of Brahms; but it worked handsomely financially. Now, because of the war, his biggest client, a San Francisco bank, decided not to print and mail a Visa card solicitation; not only that, the bank would soon move Magee's projects to Seattle and thus away from him. Everything went from bad to worse. The couple confronted bankruptcy. It brought to Magee's mind that line from Martin Sheen's character, Willard, in
Apocalypse Now,
the one about how “bullshit piled up so fast [that] you needed wings to stay above it.” He would sort through his anxiety only years later:

I went from earning in the strong six figures to the feeble fives overnight and the rebuilding, which would eventually occur, would take years. The repo guy would call nightly about the car, the Amex card went away, the mortgage went into default, planned vacations evaporated, the IRS and the state tax board letters all appeared like new roommates…. The stink of foreclosure, divorce … and dissolution filled the air, and I just didn't want to become one of the bitter, old foreclosed, divorced, and dissipated 65-year-old printing trolls that I'd seen in the afternoon bars of San Francisco's financial district.

Enter craft beer. Magee's younger brother worked at a brewpub in Oregon and bought him a homebrewing kit for Christmas in 1992, when Magee was just then pulling his household back from financial ruin and looking for something else to delve into besides printing. The aesthetics of brewing equipment appealed to him, reminding him in a way of the sensual shapes of musical instruments like guitars and saxophones. The functionality of the tuns and kettles appealed to Magee as well: here was something a man could work with. That quality was in the equipment at the Marin Brewing Company, the oldest brewpub in Marin County, just north of San Francisco, where Magee had become a regular. Marin Brewing was part of the second wave of brewpubs; it was started in April 1989 by Craig Tasley, who worked in restaurants, and Brendan Moylan, who was a buyer for a liquor store and who had his own beery epiphany while visiting Bill Owens's Buffalo Bill's Brewpub in Hayward, California, a few years before. The sessions at Marin Brewing and the home-brewing kit from his brother in the Oregon brewpub business planted a kernel that very nearly drowned in the first batch Magee made: a California common beer mimicking the style popularized by Anchor. The next batch, though—a straight-ahead pale ale—turned out much better, and soon Magee was asking
what he thought were entirely appropriate technical questions of his local homebrew vendor.

“Which yeast strain might convert the most sugars to alcohol?” he wanted to know. He wanted to make stronger beers.

The vendor turned away from him, unimpressed. “That is not a question a brewer would ask.”

We'll see about that, Magee thought—styles were for academics. He read Charlie Papazian's
The Complete Joy of Homebrewing,
Byron Burch's
Quality Brewing,
and newer works like
Brewing Lager Beer
by Greg Noonan, the co-owner of a brewpub in Burlington, Vermont, and brewpub pioneer Bill Owens's 1982 handbook,
How to Build a Small Brewery.
He bought a three-tier homebrewing system and rented 750 square feet in a building nearby. He spent evenings and weekends on his living room floor, guesstimating the startup costs of a commercial brewery, compelled to pursue something he knew could be as risky or more so than the boom-and-bust printing business he was already in. Magee was aware of the wider craft beer movement—how could one not be in Northern California?—and he knew the start-up costs could run quickly into six figures. The numbers didn't necessarily jibe, but he barreled ahead through much of 1993 nonetheless. The need to start a brewery was almost a compulsion, an entrepreneurial infection contracted unwittingly through airborne happenstance.

Magee's big break came when he spied an ad in the back of
New Brewer,
the bimonthly magazine of Papazian's Association of Brewers, posted by a man named John Cross. Cross was one of the main American importers of what had been called the Model T of brewing tanks: the Grundy. They were not much to look at, squat and gray, a far cry from the beautiful copper kettles that occupied postcard places in brewers' hearts. Grundy serving tanks were mass-produced for pubs and restaurants across Europe and could hold up to 210 gallons. They eventually fell out of favor on the Continent and in the United Kingdom as pub owners figured out how to jimmy off the tops and water down their beers. Brewers switched to kegs. Cross and a few others bought up the used Grundy tanks, brought them to the States, fixed them up as needed, and began unloading them to craft brewers like Magee for relatively cheap. In April 1993, he responded to Cross's ad in
New Brewer;
drove five hours south to Porterville, California; and promptly lost hope after talking with Cross. Magee knew he would need more than Grundy tanks to get his brewery going, and he just could not afford the equipment Cross described. He told him as much.

Cross grew quiet. He looked Magee up and down, rubbed his chin. He then told him about a brewhouse that he had built for a Russian brewery that
no longer needed it. It was a fifteen-foot-long rectangular, stainless-steel box with a hot water tank, a mash tun and a two-hundred-gallon kettle—it was all Magee's for $5,000. Deal. Magee took the Russian-made brewhouse and two Grundy tanks back with him to Lagunitas, California, and named his new brewery after the area. He was the only employee, though he kept his day job as a printing salesman. It was going to be all draft, not wedded to conventional styles, and sold only locally.

A line of refitted Grundy tanks, the cheaper surplus vessels from England used by so many American craft brewers.
COURTESY OF TONY MAGEE

By the summer of 1994, Magee had a schedule down. He would mill grains around 9 the night before he knew he would brew, then wake up at 3
AM
to start mashing the grains around 3:30. He would do the boil within a few hours and be cleaned up by 10, ready for his day job in printing sales. The job still paid relatively well, a lot better than a start-up craft brewery in the 750-square-foot space in an unincorporated area of western Marin County, though it often took him on overnight flights to Los Angeles to OK printing runs. Those trips couldn't be allowed to interrupt the brewing, and the schedule, predictably enough, turned brutally exhausting. By June, he was ready to hire some help.

The beer he was producing with the weird, seven-barrel electric brewhouse that was meant for Russia and the two converted Grundy tanks from England was of uneven quality by Magee's own admission: it ranged from vile to barely drinkable to wonderful to elegant to questionable-at-best. The wonderful and elegant batches afforded him enough growth; he was on pace to brew roughly
one thousand barrels that first year, all of it draft via a keg machine he got for $5,000, and all of it personally distributed to around twenty accounts in San Francisco and the tourist-heavy Marin County coastal areas. The pale ales and ambers were stronger than much of what was being produced. Some of Lagunitas's beers would top 7 percent alcohol by volume—a number so high that more than a few retailers (even in the Bay Area, with its sophisticated beer palate) refused to carry them. They were worried about selling too few glasses, as people would get drunk faster.

Lagunitas would eventually stake its claim to market share by being the first California craft brewery to make an India pale ale its signature beer. It was a hoppier homage to what had emerged in the last ten years as the prototype for what the new crop of beer writers was starting to call West Coast style: Ken Grossman's Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. What was West Coast style? It was bitterer beers made so by more hops, especially the Cascade variety first used in craft brewing by Anchor in 1975 for its Liberty Ale (Sierra Nevada also used Cascade in its pale ale). That was West Coast style defined in a nutshell (or hop cone, as it were): bitterer because of more hops. There were West Coast beers that weren't that hoppy, of course—porters and Anchor's Christmas Ale jump to mind—but when people began talking about a “West Coast style,” they meant hoppier beers.

And why the West Coast? No one really knew. One theory was that the East Coast breweries were closer to Europe and its milder English ales and Czech and German pilsners (air travel and the Midwest never seemed to throw doubt on this theory). Another held that the most verdant hop fields in America, including the Washington one that birthed Cascade, were on the West Coast, so craft brewers could perhaps get their hands on fresh ones more cheaply and easily (which wasn't actually the case as, like other commodities, prices were set by a worldwide market and shipping costs were passed on to all brewers by vendors, not just those farther away from the source). In the end, it may have been nothing more than the West leading the way again in another national palatal shift. Just as the region had birthed the entire craft beer movement, it was now working up the thirst of Americans weaned on sugary sodas and sweet juices for a much bitterer libation. Whatever the reason, Magee decided Lagunitas would lead with an IPA. It would be the same hot, wet work to brew as it had been to produce the earlier styles, and for those first months it was Magee with nothing but constant worry as a companion.

It was eerie in a way, déjà vu all over again. Here was Magee in Marin County in the midst of a one-man operation that absorbed all the time he could give it to brew, bottle, and distribute, and it seemed so precarious as to
invite concerns over his professional sanity. It seemed so like what Jack McAuliffe went through just over the county line nearly twenty years ago with New Albion. Why would anyone do this given the failure rate, the debt, the capital-intensive equipment that needed rejiggering, the increasingly crowded shelf space? These were still questions being asked despite the craft beer movement's leaps and bounds over the last few years in sales and production; despite its first cadre of genuine business stars, like Jim Koch, Pete Slosberg, Ken Grossman, and Fritz Maytag, who now received a seemingly obligatory reference in any article about the movement's growth; despite that financial backers had grown exponentially to the point where venture-capital firms and Wall Street traders would want in on pales ales and porters. Somehow it could still be a solitary man and a dream in the relative middle of nowhere. Magee explained it to himself as some kind of compulsion, one you could almost be embarrassed about having: “I didn't really ask anyone if this was a good idea or not. I knew what the answer would be. I read once where the entrepreneurial urge is, in its purest incarnation, a sort of seizure—nearly involuntary, like speaking in tongues or getting married in Vegas. It was like that for me, and this was the moment where reality and finance parted ways.”

Lagunitas would grow, like other craft breweries in the 1990s, in an almost manic fashion, with the growth arrow pointed upward, never mind the financial strains; Magee couldn't find a bank, for instance, to lend him money for more equipment (a new fermenter became as necessary as those first hires). It was a strange, heady experience—to grow so fast while financial ruin seemed to stalk you like Jacob Marley's chains. But that's what was happening for Magee and other start-ups. They might sell $20,000 worth of beer one month and then $30,000 the next; but with production costs running to 65 percent of the sales price for the beer, that meant frequent shortfalls when the money coming in from the sales didn't cover the costs. Bills to vendors—equipment, grains, hops—get pushed back; payroll becomes paramount; the work could be around the clock; debt and angel investors like venture capitalists become ever more tempting. Magee came to call it “the tyranny of fast growth.” Others in the industry saw it more benignly. They saw more beer going out the door and a growing movement as evidenced by more brewing companies, bigger attendance figures at the Great American Beer Festival, more stories, more critics, more pilgrims pounding on the warehouse doors wanting a peek. Like they had wanted a peek at New Albion fifteen years before.