The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (34 page)

Soon enough, the Gore-Perot debate would recede into memory, and the manufacturing sector's ills would be overshadowed by the go-go economic optimism spurred by what was about to become one of the most bullish stock markets in American history. Dozens of stocks from a new technology were about to become the surest things. As odd as it seemed, this boat would lift craft beer, too.

S
am Calagione kept going.
He had sterilized two dozen twenty-two-ounce bomber bottles by heating them in his apartment oven for twenty minutes
—and they had promptly stuck to the rug he placed them on. No time to stop, though; bacteria could wrest the better of his first five-gallon batch of homebrew and sour everything. He poured the beer, a pale ale infused with cherries, into the bottles; capped them; and then dragged them and the rug they were stuck to toward a dark corner to age. A week later, he cut the bottles loose from the rug, melted remains sticking to the bottoms of each, and put them in the refrigerator. A tasting party shortly thereafter proved the so-dubbed Cherry Brew a success and straightened Calagione's circuitous route toward craft beer.

It was one that commenced as these things sometimes do: with copious amounts of Big Beer poured down teenage throats. Calagione was a wild child growing up in the north-central Massachusetts town of Greenfield. For one thing, he had a side gig at his tony prep school selling to classmates beer that he had finagled from what he would remember as “sympathetic western Massachusetts libertarian hippies.” Such endeavors—and others that included naked ice hockey and sitting cross-legged atop a Winnebago going sixty on its way to crash the prom—got him kicked out of school weeks shy of graduation. His father, an oral surgeon who made wine at home, was not amused. Still, Calagione managed an English degree from Muhlenberg College in Allen-town, Pennsylvania, and went to New York City in 1992 to study writing at Columbia, with some acting on the side (muscular and tall, with a square jaw and thick, dark-brown hair, Calagione had done some postcollegiate modeling, too).

It was in Gotham that he graduated from Big Beer to craft. He got a job waiting tables at a Mexican restaurant a couple of blocks from the gates of Columbia in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of upper Manhattan. While the restaurant could morph into one of the neighborhood's rowdier college bars by nightfall, not everyone was clamoring for Corona: the restaurant was one of the few in the city then with a menu, albeit small, of fine beers, including craft brands like Sierra Nevada Bigfoot Barleywine and Anchor Liberty Ale as well as choicer imports like Chimay Red, brewed in a Trappist monastery in southern Belgium. Calagione befriended the restaurant owner behind the menu, Joshua Mandel, and that led not only to the Cherry Brew but also to an encyclopedic knowledge of craft beer. He became blissfully insufferable on the subject; the Cherry Brew tasting provided him one such soapbox:

The beer was the hit of the party. More than that I had created something unique that people enjoyed. I had given people something that, at that moment, they really needed. That evening I spent as much
time as my friends could stand talking about all the different beers in the world, the ingredients used in making them, and all of the small breweries that were popping up around the country.

Later in the evening, as the Cherry Brew flowed and Calagione settled from his soapbox, thoughts crept across his young mind. He likely would never write the Great American Novel. He could, however, produce an interesting beer that others might enjoy. That was artistry in itself, one that could reward risk taking and coloring outside the lines as much as any other medium of expression. Yes, of course it could! Calagione stood up and declared to those still in his apartment: he would become a brewer.

The next day, head foggy but memory clear, he walked several blocks from his apartment in Chelsea to the main New York Public Library in Midtown, its stone lions standing stern guard against ignorance on either side of the entrance, and began reading up on brewing. Crucially for the craft beer movement and for himself, Calagione had little idea what he was doing, both business- and brewing-wise. He knew enough about the ingredients of beer to lay down a basic formula for a little zing to walk on (in the case of his first batch, which he made with Mandel, cherries).

Calagione was not nearly far enough removed from his restless youth, however, to sit intellectually still for strict recipes. It was the Winnebago and the naked hockey and the underage-beer-selling racket all over again—rule-breaking time.

P
ete Slosberg had not counted on the cop.
One of the executives who ran the ad agency that Pete's Brewing had hired, Goodby, Silverstein, and Partners, had told him to show up at a red-draped table that was set up on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco and stick a radio piece in his ear. Slosberg did what he was told and sat down at the table beneath a sign that read, in blocky letters,
PICTURE WITH THE REAL PETE
$1.00. Two rows of bottles of Pete's Wicked Ale stood to his right. Slosberg, never a natural salesman, was wearing a dark
short-sleeved shirt in breezy, cool weather, adding to the discomfort of the odd setup. The executive from the ad agency began talking in his ear, telling him what to call out to unsuspecting passers-by as the cameras rolled.

“Morning! How'd you like a picture taken with the actual Pete, maker of Pete's Wicked Ale?”

Nothing. Just an awkward shake of the head.

“How would you like your picture with the real Pete?”

“No.” “No!” “Nah.”

The conceit of the commercial was clear: you might be able to recognize a Clydesdale at quick glance or identify a Miller commercial blindfolded just by its opening banter, but the namesake and cofounder of one of the fastest-growing companies in the United States—beer or otherwise—was practically invisible.
*

If there was any doubt, enter the cop. Or that's what Slosberg thought. Unbeknownst to him, it was an actor dressed as a cop. He stood over Slosberg and asked him if he was serving anyone the beer. Did he have a permit for the table? How long was he going to be in the middle of the sidewalk anyway? Slosberg stammered some explanations as the earpiece fell stone silent. The commercial ended with the actor/cop sauntering away, wishing Slosberg a good day and swinging two bottles of Wicked Ale next to his holster.

The ads—which also included one where Slosberg, again at a red-draped table on a sidewalk, autographed photos that were then hastily crumpled and tossed by their takers—aired in 1994 in major markets like Seattle, Boston, San Francisco, and Minneapolis during prime-time hits like
Seinfeld, Northern Exposure,
and
Melrose Place.
They were watersheds for craft beer: the movement's first national television advertising campaign. And though relatively low-budget—Pete's account with Goodby, Silverstein was $1 million and Anheuser-Busch eventually hired them away with a $31 million offer—they were impactful, both financially and creatively. Stuart Elliott, the longtime advertising reporter for the
New York Times,
named the Pete's campaign as one of the year's top ten, right up there with pushes for Nike, Ikea, Bud Light, and McDonald's; the same article also listed campaigns for Budweiser and Bud Dry as among the ten worst. Financially, the spots were helping lift Pete's to $44 million in profits in 1994. The company, which was now led day-to-day out of Palo Alto by former Seagram marketer Mark Bozzini, would by the end of the year sell 2.5 million cases of beer in forty-one states, no small feat for an operation that distributed just ten thousand cases in 1988, mostly in the West.

For all the money and the plaudits, the ads' conceit still spoke to fundamental tenets of the American craft movement that went all the way back to Fritz Maytag at Anchor in the 1960s: independent and traditional. Slosberg and Mark Bronder's Pete's Brewing, along with Jim Koch and Rhonda Kallman's Boston Beer, were growing exponentially compared to their competitors; Boston Beer was by now actually America's fourteenth-largest brewer, period. Together, not even ten years after each of their starts, the two companies accounted for well over one-third of all craft beer produced in the United States, and they were the only ones with widespread advertising. But Boston Beer and Pete's always felt the need to pay more than lip service—and gladly so—to the ideas that they were small, independently run operations compared with Big Beer and that they brewed with only classic ingredients as dictated by old-world norms.

The two sometimes competed to seem the most David against the Goliaths. In the run-up to the thirteenth annual Great American Beer Festival in Denver in 1994, Koch and Slosberg argued through the media the merits of medals and debated the reasons for their brands' success. The GABF, which would draw twelve hundred beers from 265 breweries (up from 207 the year before), was prepared to bestow 102 medals in thirty-four categories, a far cry from the consumer preference poll that had stood alone at the earliest festivals. To Koch, whose Boston Lager and Boston Lightship swept four of the final five consumer preference polls, the medals were well and fine (Boston Beer had captured seventeen so far).
*
But the quality alone moved his beers—which meant that his marketing, including radio spots with his voice that had been airing for years, mattered little as well. “Industry writers can't get it out of their heads that it's not marketing that makes you buy a beer,” he told the
Denver Post.
“It's because you like the taste. The people who will survive are the brewers who have the highest-quality standards.” The medals mattered a little more to Slosberg, who noted to the same paper that Koch's indifference to marketing didn't stop him from advertising. “It's the judgment of your peers, it's an accomplishment,” Slosberg said of the GABF medals. “We like to think people are impressed by medals.”

No matter how they moved so much beer in an industry still dominated by the likes of Anheuser-Busch, Miller, and Coors, the sizes of Boston Beer and Pete's were together the single, biggest boost to craft beer since perhaps the legalization of homebrewing at the federal level in 1978. Simply put, the two were able to put craft beer in front of more consumer eyeballs than any other
thing or combination of things. It was not just the radio ads or the national television spots: there were bar and restaurant promotions manifested in thousands of cozies, stickers, coasters, sandwich signs, banners and boards; T-shirts and glassware; stunts like Koch sitting over a dunking booth filled with Boston Lager or Slosberg in a tub of bottles of Wicked Ale; Slosberg presenting Pete Wilson with a Pete's jacket in front of reporters at his inauguration as California's governor; Boston Beer in the White House Mess and on Air Force One (the youthful new president, Bill Clinton, was said to prefer Samuel Adams); holiday tie-ins, like Pete's advice for surviving Valentine's Day through beer (“Skip the fattening desserts and instead indulge in a good beer with your valentine”); and both Slosberg and Koch holding forth to audiences big and small—or to a single reporter—on the nuances of craft beer and the brewing process. They both subscribed to the idea that a rising tide would lift all boats, that greater consumer knowledge about craft beer meant greater sales for everybody in the industry, themselves included. Their efforts were not universally appreciated. “I resent it,” Bill Owens of the now-legendary Buffalo Bill's brewpub in Hayward was known to say. “Those people are just top-notch salesmen.”

Jim Koch in the tasting room of the Boston Beer Company's brewery in Jamaica Plain, Boston.
COURTESY OF THE BOSTON BEER COMPANY

Neither Slosberg nor Koch could get out from under the accusation that contract brewing was not really craft brewing. It was true that they had avoided the capital costs of starting a physical brewery, costs that were prone to rise with each expansion and ones that had already helped fell many a predecessor.
Koch, for his part, had opened a brewery in early 1989 at the old Haffenreffer location in Boston for research and development as well as tours; he placed inside it the cornerstone from the old Louis Koch Brewery that he, his father, and Charlie Papazian had found in St. Louis. The Boston brewery, located as it was just off the region's subway system and with powerful champions like Governor Michael Dukakis, who was at the ribbon-cutting, proved remarkably popular with visitors and helped revitalize a run-down area of the city (one of Boston Beer's earliest neighbors was given to killing cats and mounting their bodies on stakes; it was that bad).

But most of Koch's beer was still brewed elsewhere, and all of Slosberg's had been brewed thousands of miles away from the company's nondescript offices since 1988, near Stanford University, although the company would talk about plans for a brewery, perhaps in Northern California. Still, in the early 1990s, there was absolutely no ignoring the sales success of Boston Beer and Pete's and the impact of that success on the movement. It had upped the game just as more players joined—and more spectators than ever watched.