The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (4 page)

Maytag had no idea how many Americans would want him to be right.

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Some states, such as Pennsylvania, even inserted themselves into the three-tier system as retailers.

T
he tugboat dragged the nuclear submarine
alongside Jack McAuliffe and his fellow technicians aboard the Navy's first nuclear submarine tender, the USS
Simon Lake.
They were in Holy Loch, an inlet of the River Clyde on the Scottish coast, about thirty-five miles northwest of Glasgow. The technicians
had had their breakfast chow, shaken off their hangovers from tippling in pubs in the nearby town of Dunoon, and were setting about another workday amid a typically damp, foggy morning in the mid-1960s, repairing the tubular champions of US Cold War policy in action: the Polaris subs.

Launched in 1960 and eventually numbering forty-five, the subs were each equipped with sixteen nuclear missiles and the capacity to cruise underwater for up to three years, though the typical deployment was a still-onerous sixty days beneath the surface. Usually that surface bobbed within twelve hundred miles of major cities in the Soviet Union, the Polaris having been designed as a fast-strike force, each capable of unloading the nuclear-arsenal equivalent of either Britain or France in quick rounds. It was within this Cold War bubble, with its daily shadow of Armageddon, where McAuliffe, then barely out of his teens, plied his skillful trade. For, while the one-hundred-man Polaris crews were among the most trained and disciplined of the Navy's sailors, the maintenance crews aboard the
Simon Lake
were arguably the branch's most technically blessed. The submarines' “effectiveness will depend on precise maintenance,” according to a
Time
magazine profile of the launch of the first two Polaris subs, the George Washington and the Patrick Henry, the week of Thanksgiving 1960.

Heady responsibilities for a kid from Fairfax County, Virginia. But McAuliffe knew his stuff. The Navy had trained him for thirty-eight weeks on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. There McAuliffe finished second in his electronics class, and the Navy let him pick what he wanted to do. He chose what he called the antennae shop at Holy Loch, repairing and refitting Polaris subs for those sixty-day deployments with fresh crews. He and his fellow mechanics were not necessarily sure how the subs ran, but they knew how to fix them.

Before the Navy, McAuliffe had led a bit of a peripatetic life, thanks to a father in the federal government and a boyhood fascination with how things got put together. He was born in 1945, two years after his father, John, was drafted into the FBI because he had just completed a master's degree in German and the United States was two years into World War II. Also fluent in Spanish, John McAuliffe was first stationed in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas, where Jack was born, serving as an interpreter at the American embassy at a time before the CIA existed, when the FBI engaged in international espionage. The McAuliffe family moved after the end of the war, when Jack was six months old, to another South American assignment, this one with the State Department in Medellín, Colombia, where John ran a State Department center that advised Colombians who wanted to study in the United States. It was while doing this that the elder McAuliffe began to help develop the textbooks
and the methodology that would become the English as a Second Language programs, opening further career opportunities. He moved his family once more, to Fairfax County, Virginia, for an ESL-related job through American University in Washington, DC, when his oldest child was in the third grade.

By the time the McAuliffes moved in, Fairfax was much more country than city—barely one hundred thousand people spread over 395 square miles, its population set to quadruple between 1950 and 1970. It was there young Jack developed an avocation that would reverberate down through the next quarter-century, into every homebrewer's kitchen and craft brewer's bottling line, into the very cuisine of the country: he started tinkering with things.

Perhaps it was when his mother taught him to sew when he was only three years old—in part to keep him busy—though wherever it came from, it was in full bloom by his teen years. McAuliffe was particularly fascinated with the joining of metals. So in the tenth grade, he apprenticed himself to a local welder. He would jump off the school bus in the late afternoons, tool around the shop for no pay, doing the grunt work, absorbing systematically how welding happened, and sometimes getting to go out on jobs. It was Jack's responsibility to get everything set up while the welder, Clay, chatted with the customer. Perhaps most important, this included coaxing forth the acetylene pressure from torpedo-shaped tanks—he had his own oxygen acetylene kit—and when everything was set, calling out, “Clay, we're ready to go!” Then the razor-like spit of red-blue flame would work its magic before the apprentice's goggled eyes. Chemistry, physics, mathematics—it was all there, joining together some things to make
something.

After high school, McAuliffe tried college for a year, didn't like it, and, in 1964, followed his father into the service, volunteering for the Navy. After the thirty-eight weeks of technical training on Treasure Island, he was assigned to the USS
Simon Lake,
which, after loading up on weapons during a six-month docking in Charleston, South Carolina, headed across the Atlantic to Holy Loch and the Polaris subs. It took eleven days at fifteen knots.

We do not know—and McAuliffe does not remember—whether he, while in training in San Francisco, ever visited the pre-Fritz Maytag Anchor Brewery at Eighth and Brannan Streets, or tasted any of its drafts in local haunts like Fred Kuh's Old Spaghetti Factory. We shouldn't be surprised if he didn't. Though it wasn't bad by the standards of the time, Anchor's steam beer in 1964 was still American-made beer, and American-made beer was by and large still very much haunted by Prohibition, the ghosts of its storied past disquieting smaller breweries across the land as the likes of Anheuser-Busch and Miller got bigger and bigger and developments like the pull-tab for aluminum cans
(first introduced by Pittsburgh's Iron City Brewing Company in 1963) and the Interstate Highway System drove consumers farther and farther from where the beer they drank was produced. So neither San Francisco transplant—not the restless heir of the home-appliance empire nor the precocious child of the trilingual G-man—would have had cause, really, to care about locally produced beer in that last full year before the American craft beer movement began. Their paths would finally cross a few years later, in the same city, though under much different circumstances and with far-echoing effects on that very movement.

In the four years between his departure from and return to San Francisco, in the free time he had away from repairing the Polaris subs, inside a little gray stone cottage in the town of Dunoon, in a move both prosaic in that men had been doing what he did for millennia and profound in that what he did would alter the American palate, Jack McAuliffe began to brew his own beer. He did it more from necessity than anything else, and he was confident from the get-go that he could do it. The confidence sprang from a young life working with his hands as dictated by his brains, whether toward the joining of metals or the repairing of nuclear armaments. It also sprang from a legal sea change in Great Britain around the time McAuliffe sailed into Holy Loch.

In April 1963, Reginald Maudling, the chancellor of the exchequer (the British equivalent of treasury secretary), did away with an eighty-three-year-old law that required a license—and a concomitant small fee—for homebrewing any amount of beer. Suddenly, the English, the Welsh, (some of) the Irish, and the Scots could brew what they wanted and however much they wanted; and, not surprisingly, as would happen in the United States twenty years later, a retail industry arose to service them. At first, the enthusiasm for homebrewing far outweighed the quality of the end results. Not that it mattered too much. It's unlikely anyone was ever prosecuted for not paying the shillings; and homebrewing was rare in a Britain still feeling the effects of wartime austerity. Sugar was rationed from 1940, after the start of World War II, until 1954, and other homebrewing ingredients were supremely difficult to come by. Hops were usually sold at wine-making stores in large, open-topped buckets, and they were unnamed, dry, and flavorless. Malt extracts came in tins. Nobody really knew what they were doing: any how-to books were highly technical, and institutional knowledge barely existed. Britain, after all, had no old-timers who could tell you about the bathtub beer they had made during Prohibition. Instead, homebrewing on the isles often made a mockery of the kingdom's grand tradition of fine ales and lagers. “Many times I added lemonade to improve the taste of a thin, high-alcohol beer due to high rates of granulated sugar,” Bill Lowe remembered. He was in the Royal Navy then,
serving mostly on submarines. Decades later he would be a judge at beer festivals and a founder of the Northern Craft Brewers Craft Brewing Association in England. “It was impossible to obtain named varieties of hops, grains, and yeasts until around 1980.”

McAuliffe got the idea to homebrew while running errands in a Boots drug store in Glasgow in late 1966. It had occurred to him that once he returned to the States, the beer he'd discovered in Scotland would be almost wholly unavailable. Oh, man, what am I going to do? he thought. His eyes surveyed the store's shelves and settled upon another echo of Maudling's legal change:
The Big Book of Brewing
by Dave Line. Line was an electrical engineer and one of the first to explain homebrewing in plain English. While most books that touched on homebrewing were heavy on mechanical jargon, aimed more at commercial brewers than amateurs, Line wrote simple, step-by-step instructions for creating clones of classic English styles right in your kitchen. The equipment would today seem dated and many of the recipes laughingly basic—no grains, just malted barley and hop syrups, with dry, somewhat listless yeast—but in the early 1960s they were revelatory.
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Bang! McAuliffe thought. That's how I'm going to do it—I'm going to make my own beer like the beer I have here! He bought Line's book and a homebrewing kit for a pale ale from a display underneath it. He also bought a plastic trash can.

Back at the cottage in Dunoon, McAuliffe stoked the kitchen's coal-burning fireplace (gas or electric heat were not options) and got to work boiling the admixture of water and syrups to create what brewers call “wort,” or unfer-mented beer. He then let the wort cool, tossed in the yeast, aerated it by wiggling the pot, and cleaned out the trash can. Able to hold five gallons, it would serve as the fermentation vessel for this first new batch of the American craft beer movement. McAuliffe at first left the can open at the top (what brewers call “open fermentation”). For the later stages, he capped it with a plastic airlock to let out carbon dioxide, a by-product of fermentation, and to keep out oxygen, which could doom the wort to bacterial infection. The brewing took a few hours. After a couple of weeks of fermentation, McAuliffe bottled what could now be called beer in used swing-top bottles and aged it a further two weeks.

The beer disappeared, as did subsequent batches—McAuliffe remembers no complaints. In fact, not only were his fellow American servicemen delighted
by the reproduction of the ales they'd enjoyed in Dunoon's pubs, but the Scots themselves also liked McAuliffe's kit-driven concoction; the neighbors put it away as thirstily as the compatriots. It was likely the first time since Prohibition that American-crafted beer had influenced foreigners. An old trajectory had begun to reverse itself.

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Line's book would not be published in the United States until 1974, and it may not have been published commercially in the United Kingdom until around that time. But both McAuliffe and others in the craft beer movement recall seeing copies of the book before then. Line died in 1979.