The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (38 page)

The overcoat-clad men wanted to wet their beaks through unionized construction jobs. They leaned on the brewery for a sit-down, and Hindy obliged them for what turned out to be a solo meeting with the boss of the Brooklyn building trades union and several of his associates. Hindy kicked things off by telling them his life story, emphasizing his experience covering wars in the Middle East. He then suggested going somewhere for lunch. The boss suggested they go to the brewery's warehouse. The warehouse didn't have enough chairs for the boss and his associates, so Hindy said he would fetch more.

“No,” the boss said, “at our meetings, the old men sit and the young men stand.”

Fair enough. The boss, Hindy, and a union secretary sat down. Hindy began to weave his life story into the brewery's story, highlighting the challenges he and Potter had confronted: the self-distribution, the skeptical investors. He found himself talking about his foreign-correspondent days again. The union treasurer, a plump guy with a shaved head who was standing while Hindy talked, interrupted.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've heard enough of this bullshit. We're here for one thing: J-O-B-S, jobs. You built this brewery without us. The first brewery in Brooklyn in a long time. That's an insult.”

The boss cut him off and let Hindy continue. Finally, the boss looked him in the eye. “Look, we don't want to hurt you.”

The blood drained from Hindy's face.

“I don't mean physical stuff,” the boss said. The blood crept back. “We don't do that. We have lawyers. If we put a picket around your project, no one will come near it. If we put the word out in Brooklyn, no one will unload your products.”

“My project is almost complete,” Hindy replied. “I'm on a very tight budget and I think you would be destroying a company that will bring jobs and goodwill to Brooklyn.”

That set the treasurer with the shaved head off again. He demanded a meeting behind some nearby pallets stacked with beer—without Hindy. Which was fine with him. His shirt was soaked in sweat; fresh doubts about the brewery galloped through his mind, now alongside what the boss might make him do. No-show jobs? What would he say to that? What
could
he say to that?

The union members reemerged. The boss walked up to Hindy, still in his chair, and grabbed the inside of his right thigh, his face inches from Hindy's. “We're going to have to hurt you.”

Hindy stared back, trying not to show fear. Then the boss grabbed his shoulders and shook with laughter. “Just kidding!” Everyone else laughed.

“Look, we're going to leave you alone. But if you expand this brewery, or build anything new, we have to be in on it.”

Hindy nodded.

“And,” the boss went on, “we want you to come to our Christmas party; bring your wife, and take an ad in our journal.”

Hindy could live with that.
*
The Brooklyn Brewery was back on, about to ride—as both a driver and a passenger—not only the American craft beer boom but also the renaissance of the nation's largest city and consumer market.

*
It turned out the brewery had, in fact, been employing union construction workers; it was just that the unions did not have enough work for them, so they took the brewery job on the side. (Per Hindy and Potter,
Beer School,
171-72.)

M
ore people than ever,
from the mob to the media, were paying attention to the American craft beer movement, and that included Big Beer. The wider industry had spent a generation ignoring it or, at best, treating it as a fad. The number of barrels produced by the largest breweries only grew, after all, through the 1980s as the number of breweries shrank dramatically. With market share increasing and competition decreasing, why fret some dreamers in sneakers in their rented warehouse space and glorified speakeasies? It wasn't arrogance on the part of Big Beer; it was charts and graphs that showed clear trends through decades now—no matter how clever, creative, or just genuinely better tasting the craft start-ups were. For all the Sturm und Drang of the already storied sector, it still accounted for less than 3 percent of US beer sales by the 1990s.

Then 1992 rolled around. The productivity levels of Big Beer rolled back; the charts and graphs were no longer going inexorably upward. There were different causes, not least of which was the recession of the early 1990s and renewed competition from imports. It was around this time, too, that Big Beer turned to more aggressive marketing overseas, including in the recently liberated
nations of Eastern Europe no longer behind the Iron Curtain. More than anything, it appears Big Beer simply overdid it with the domestic marketing and advertising and in the end ceded ground or lost it. Top industry analyst Bob Weinberg called the period from 1991 to 1995 “the brewing industry's Vietnam,” when Big Beer could have enticed more consumers but instead stuck to what seemed tried-and-true measures. “I don't know why the industry doesn't aggressively campaign for intelligent drinking,” Weinberg told a reporter. “Less than half of the people who can drink legally, do. None of the brewers do this, however. They go after the twenty-one-to-twenty-four-year-olds instead, and that's just preaching to the choir.” The advertising, so potently effective in the 1970s and 1980s, seemed to have run its course, and the overseas market was not going to pick up all of the slack. Where to next?

The name conjured up something ruggedly American: a wild, untamable animal; mountains meant to hold possibilities; a way away from cities and toward something new. In the spring of 1994, Anheuser-Busch debuted its Elk Mountain Ale, a red ale intended to compete, at least according to reports, with Coors's Killian's Irish Red, unveiled at the first Great American Beer Festival in 1982, and Miller's Leinenkugel Red, spun from the Wisconsin regional that it had taken over in 1988.
*
But there was something about the earnestness with which Anheuser-Busch hawked Elk Mountain: its debut was pushed up several months, moving from the back burner at the St. Louis headquarters to “priority” status. Some in the industry said it was because August Busch IV, great-great-grandson of the brewery's cofounder, had recently ascended to the top marketing spot. “This one is his,” one insider whispered. “As August has moved up, so has this idea.” Others pointed to something more prosaic: Sales of craft beer had taken off, as had sales of specialty lines by other Big Beer brands. Killian's sales were up 60 percent in 1993 and trending upward again for the new year. Miller took note, too: its Leinenkugel and the Coors brand were going head-to-head in national advertising campaigns, competing to convince consumers which was “the better red.”

This new competition was no fad. Coors debuted in March 1994 its first-ever line of seasonal beers, including a wheat and an Oktoberfest; ripping a page from craft beer, the giant was doing little to no advertising for it, instead emphasizing in media coverage the styles themselves and what set them apart from the usual watery lagers. Anheuser-Busch, as it introduced Elk Mountain, was also raising Red Wolf, its first-ever red lager, set for release that fall; according to marketing, it got its color from specially roasted barley malt that
added a “subtle, sweet taste.” Miller had already rolled out what it primly called its Reserve Amber Ale and Reserve Velvet Stout. There was even a Rolling Rock Bock. It was all a far cry from “Head for the Mountains,” Rodney Dangerfield bowling, and “Great Taste, Less Filling.”

Craft brewers noticed this furtive imitation. After being ignored or dismissed for so many years, it appeared that Big Beer was trying to elbow in on their consumers by mimicking their styles and techniques—and by charging a premium: the new beers were priced slightly higher than Big Beer's traditional fare. And they weren't bad, either, richer in taste than the usual bastardized pilsners. “The big breweries are quite capable of making excellent beers,” said Bert Grant, founder of the nation's oldest brewpub and a former brewer at Stroh's, at one of the Great American Beer Festivals at the time. “They
did
make excellent beers,” he clarified. Others were not so sanguine, seeing what came to be called “phantom micros” or “phantom crafts” as a particularly insidious—and ingenious—threat in the marketplace. “It definitely makes it more competitive out there,” noted an ever-diplomatic Charlie Papazian at the same GABF. Ken Allen, a chiropractor who cofounded the Anderson Valley Brewing Company in Mendocino County, California, in 1986, pushed it a little further when a reporter from San Diego broached the subject: “We're much smaller than David—and they're much larger than Goliath. ‘The King of Beers'? They want to be the despot of beers.” The whole situation was a tad ironic: by ignoring it for so long, Big Beer had allowed craft beer to develop without undue influence or downward pressure; now, during its biggest growth spurt, the largest breweries sought to co-opt craft beer by pretending to be what craft beer had been when they were ignoring it.

Phantom crafts were not initially big sellers for Big Beer. They did succeed, however, in muddying things enough to take a bite out of craft brewers' market share. Simply put, consumers didn't know what they were drinking unless they read the fine print on the packaging. The phantom crafts followed tried-and-true formulas, including homespun labels, names that evoked some sort of back-to-the-earth ethos, an emphasis on ingredients, a painstaking care in the brewing process—in other words, everything but the reality of craft brewers. Given their dominance in distribution already, Big Beer was able to also plant these labels in front of more consumers, especially on retail shelves. While light beer remained the sales leader for Big Beer in the 1990s, it was only a matter of time before one of these phantom-craft brands did break out. That brand was Coors's Blue Moon.

Blue Moon was born in a brewpub behind the right-field stands at Coors Field in Denver, home of the Colorado Rockies. It was there that brewmaster
Keith Villa, who studied brewing at UC-Davis and then earned a PhD in brewing and fermentation biochemistry in Brussels, devised the recipes for a string of beers that Coors broke off into what it called the Blue Moon Brewery—as in “once in a blue moon,” a nod to how unique the Big Beer operation knew Villa's efforts were. Coors saw to it that Villa's beers got a wider audience. The first Blue Moon beers, rolled out in the fall of 1995, included a Belgian-style wheat ale spiced with coriander and orange peel, as well as what the company called Honey Blonde, Nut Brown Ale, and Harvest Pumpkin Ale, meant to be a seasonal. While the earliest incarnations were served at the Coors Field brewpub, the 1995 rollout involved twenty-two states; six-packs of Blue Moon showed up virtually overnight in grocery stores from New York to Colorado. It was a flexing of distribution muscle that no craft brewery—not even Pete's Brewing and Boston Beer—could hope to compete with in terms of scope and speed.

The beers were an immediate consumer hit, and distribution spread within two years to all fifty states. “Coors” did not appear anywhere on the packaging; for all a prospective consumer knew, here was another entry in that burgeoning craft beer field he or she had heard or read so much about lately. The label for the wheat ale, the most ubiquitous of the new line, showed a big, bright moon looming above a bucolic forest and, beneath it,
BLUE MOON BREWING COMPANY.
The beer from inside the bottle was not bad, either. One guide noted, “It's heartening that American drinkers have taken to Blue Moon, since it decidedly does not taste like typical American beer offerings. A moderately soapy coriander nose with slight sour notes wafts from the glass, and the palate is floral, gently malty, with light bitterness.” (The same guide's verdict on Coors's flagship pale lager: “A light, sweet nose smells vaguely of white wine, but who swirls and sniffs Coors?”) Blue Moon seemed to have it all from the get-go: widespread distribution, consumer enthusiasm, and critical praise. Taken at face value, the Blue Moon Brewing Company could be considered to have overtaken Pete's Brewing as the number two craft operation in the United States by the end of the decade, second only to Boston Beer.

Its success with consumers sent purists like Bert Grant into paroxysms of frustration, though what really drove them nuts was that, for all its success, Blue Moon, like any of the other phantom crafts from any other Big Beer operation, was not really important to Coors's bottom line. The critical and consumer attention was all well and fine, but no one was going to close up shop if a Belgian-style wheat or an ale infused with pumpkin flavor didn't succeed in the marketplace. Pete Coors, the brewery's CEO and great-grandson of its founder, sat down with
Modern Brewery Age
for a long interview in the fall
of 1997, two years after Blue Moon's debut. Here was how he saw things visà-vis “the specialty arena” of American beer: “We will continue to play in the areas where there is industry growth, and where we see opportunity. Frankly, in the specialty market, when you take out Sam Adams and Pete's, it's pretty small potatoes. It's difficult for a company our size, that puts out twenty million barrels, to get too excited about fifty thousand or one hundred thousand or even three hundred thousand barrels of product.” But get excited they would.