The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (42 page)

Though neither Miller or Coors, the other two of the big three, was enforcing any policy similar to 100 percent share of mind (Miller, in fact, distributed Flying Monkey in Missouri), Anheuser-Busch hewed to the party line that its campaign was merely a reminder to distributors, albeit one weighted by bottom lines. In Johnson County, Missouri, for instance, on the Missouri-Kansas border and a major suburban area of Kansas City, Flying Monkey lost its distributor after Anheuser-Busch's reminder, which little surprised Eilert. “Anheuser-Busch has 58 percent of the market share of Johnson County,” he explained at the time. “In Johnson County, the bread is buttered on one side with Bud and Bud Light on the other.”

It wasn't just smaller, younger craft-brewing concerns impacted by 100 percent share of mind. Anheuser-Busch also targeted the movement's larger companies in its larger markets. Whereas craft beer might claim under 5 percent of the market share nationally or in regional markets like Kansas City, craft brewers might be hoovering around 15 to 20 percent of beer sales in older markets like San Francisco; Seattle; Portland, Oregon; and the state of Vermont. “They want more attention that the craft beers are taking away,” according to one distribution consultant. “A-B distributors carry some regionals, some waters and imports, but that's never seemed to concern Saint Louis as much as the whole craft phenomenon.”

None other than Ken Grossman's consistently growing Sierra Nevada in the Northwest found itself facing pressure on two fronts. First, as they did with smaller and younger competitors, some distributors dropped Sierra Nevada under pressure from 100 percent share of mind. The second front grew from the anemic sales of Anheuser-Busch's phantom crafts. The company was on its way to its twentieth consecutive year of record sales in 1996, giving it a market share of more than 45 percent. But the preponderance of the 91.1 million barrels
that would be sold, a 4.1 percent increase over 1995, was of the standard bearers like Bud Light; that brand was still enjoying double-digit growth, even as it closed in on its fifteenth birthday. Beyond these core brands, things were so-so, as the drinking public failed to respond to Elk Mountain and Red Wolf as well as to the American Originals series that Anheuser-Busch began introducing at the end of 1995 (supposedly based on old recipes and with names like Faust, Muenchener, and Black and Tan), or even to the Michelob hefewiezen and amber bock. Things had gotten so worrisome on that front that Anheuser-Busch was considering launching a new ad campaign touting Budweiser as the “classic American lager,” an implicit admission that its recent commercials, including a 1995 one with talking frogs, had trivialized things a bit too much.

In response to these flaccid phantom craft sales, Anheuser-Busch introduced another phantom craft. This time, it was aimed squarely at the consumers of the hoppier West Coast-style brands, and none at this point embodied the style more than Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. The brewery, eight years into its new downtown Chico facility, was selling 150,000 barrels annually, much of it the signature brand that Grossman and Paul Camusi had cooked up fifteen years earlier by trial and error. The fresh phantom craft that Anheuser-Busch rolled out of its Fairfield, California, plant in late 1996 was very nearly a mirror image of it. The packaging was dominated by a pastoral green, just like Sierra Nevada's, with a body of water amid a forest backed by soaring mountains—again, just like Sierra Nevada's. The brand's name was crowned by the tag “Brewed in Northern California,” just like Sierra Nevada was brewed in Northern California. Finally, the name itself, Pacific Ridge Pale Ale, and the ingredients, including the game-changing Cascade hops native to the Northwest, were unmistakable imitations.

As with previous phantom crafts—and with its 100-percent-share-of-mind campaign—Anheuser-Busch's official line was that it was not targeting any specific competitor with Pacific Ridge, though it was slated for distribution only in Northern California. The tactic was clear, though: it was another attempt to muddy the craft beer waters enough to grab a slice of what was still the overall industry's fastest-growing sector. The biggest brewer in history, which had turned brewing into a feat of borderless engineering, even adopted the locavore movement in its marketing for Pacific Ridge. Billboards popped up in Northern California exhorting consumers to “Think Globally, Drink Locally.” It was enough to make Steve Harrison, Sierra Nevada's marketing director and very first employee, laugh. But the Pacific Ridge line, coupled with the 100-percent-share-of-mind campaign, was cause for additional worry in a craft beer movement that seemed ever more frothy—and not in the good way.

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Boulevard would cleverly call itself “Missouri's second-largest brewery”

O
n May 28, 1996,
New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani cut the ribbon on the North Eleventh Street space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that Steve Hindy and Tom Potter had battled finances, the unions, and self-doubt to open (it ultimately cost $2 million to build out the space and fill it with top-notch equipment). It was a beautiful, open interior—His Honor quickly hopped behind the tastings bar and began pulling taps, explaining that his family had once owned a saloon—designed as much to foment interest from the community as it was to produce Brooklyn Brewery beers. The brewery would become the site of concerts, art shows, innumerable tours and tastings, and just generally a stop on the literal and psychological route of the renaissance that the borough of two million was about to undergo.

A big part of the physical reality of the new Brooklyn Brewery was due to its brewmaster since 1994, Garrett Oliver. He found the equipment via a Canadian fabricator and, along with the cofounders, conceived of the brewery as less of a simple production plant than as a neighborhood nexus. It was Oliver's second go-around with a New York City brewery since 1989, though his experience with beer in Gotham stretched back much further. He and Hindy had met, actually, on a cold winter's evening in December 1987 at a bar on Manhattan's Lower East Side. The New York City Homebrewers Guild had invited Hindy to talk about this idea he had for a brewery across the Hudson River; he mingled with the members before he spoke, encountering myriad professionals—lawyers, engineers, professors, journalists like him—who asked if he had met Garrett Oliver, one of the guild's founders. No, he had not.

Then, shortly after 8 o'clock, the bar door swung open and heads swung with it: Oliver wore knee-high buckled black boots, with a nineteenth-century French lieutenant's great coat draped over his shoulders. He introduced the crowd to Hindy, who soon realized after talking to him that Oliver's sartorial eccentricities equaled his passion for homebrewing and his knowledge of beer. At the end of the night, he presented the guild's guest speaker with a
bottle of homemade raspberry stout, Oliver's Christmas ale that year. Hindy had never seen a more elegant bottle of beer; the parchment label depicted the guild's baroque label, complete with the Statue of Liberty's laurel as a crown, and across the cap a wax seal held in place a scarlet ribbon.

Garrett Oliver inside the Brooklyn Brewery.
COURTESY OF THE BROOKLYN BREWERY

Oliver grew up in eastern Queens in a family that prized good food and drink. His father, a Manhattan ad man, bred, trained, and hunted with German short-haired pointers, taking the family on horseback hunts for Long Island pheasant and quail. Oliver's father would then prepare the food with the right herbs and the right white wine to go with it. His son studied filmmaking at Boston University in the late 1970s and early 1980s; there he organized concerts for bands like R.E.M. and the Ramones (he took his fellow Queens natives bowling afterward in the basement of the student union). After graduation, he split for a year in the United Kingdom to stage-manage bands at the University of London. Like many Americans of the era who traveled to Europe, he had his beer epiphany quickly—his first day overseas—and completely. After the year in London, Oliver made it a point to travel to West Germany, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia to sample the other beers Europe had to offer. When he returned to the States in 1983, he found it very difficult, if not impossible, to drink domestic brands.

Oliver worked for HBO and later, at the time he met Hindy, for a prominent New York law firm as its operations manager. By then, he had acquired a reputation as a masterful homebrewer. He and Hindy met a second time in 1988 when a partner at Oliver's law firm, an old college friend of Hindy's, suggested the Brooklyn Brewery do a tasting there; everyone again insisted Hindy meet this beer guy Garrett Oliver. By 1989, Oliver was an apprentice at the Manhattan Brewing Company in the Soho neighborhood, working under Mark Witty, who had been a brewer at Samuel Smith's, the Yorkshire brewery beloved by critic Michael Jackson.

Ever since Manchester, England, transplant Richard Wrigley opened it in the fall of 1984 as the city's first brewpub, Manhattan Brewing had struggled. It had shuttered and reopened by 1990, the ownership shifting away from Wrigley; it suffered a second closure in 1991, only to reopen in 1993 under different owners, a real estate investor and his CPA cousin. By the time of that third opening, Oliver was the brewmaster, capping a ten-year trek from his return to New York following his first encounter with fine beer in Europe. All the while, he and Hindy had been running into each other, hanging out, getting into late-night, boozy arguments over brewing and the craft beer movement. It was clear to Hindy that Oliver would be a perfect fit as brewmaster at the Brooklyn Brewery, especially as it pivoted toward a physical presence in the city. Oliver joined in 1994, just as the build-out on the Williamsburg brewery got under way.

The Manhattan Brewing Company went out of business again a year later, and another brewpub then took over its space. The Nacho Mama Brewery was
started, interestingly enough, by a pair of investors that included Joshua Mandel, the man who had introduced Sam Calagione to fine beer in the Morningside Heights restaurant of the same name. By the mid-1990s, the nation's largest city served as a microcosm of the larger craft beer movement as a whole. It had its pioneer in Matthew Reich's New Amsterdam and an array of successors, including early stumbles like Manhattan Brewing; finally, it had a boom that mostly consisted of brewpubs. The list was long by mid-1996, barely twelve years after Reich first sat down with Joseph Owades in Boston to plot New Amsterdam: A. J. Gordon's Brewing Company, Bayamo, the Brooklyn Brewery, the Carnegie Hill Brewing Company, the Chelsea Brewing Company, the Commonwealth Brewing Company, Hansen's Times Square Brewery, Heartland Brewery, Nacho Mama, the Park Slope Brewing Company, and the Neptune Brewery. More would follow.

The second annual New York City Brewpub Crawl Marathon in July 1996, just as Atlanta hosted the Olympics, covered twelve brewpubs and seventy-two beers for those who might finish. It seemed Oliver, Hindy, Potter, and the others could not have picked a better time to open their physical brewery. Everyone, it appeared, was into craft beer or at least familiar with it, especially in heavily populated places that counted the most when it came to potential consumers, New York City chief among them. Big Beer's hegemony had been irredeemably broken, and the innovation of newer arrivals seemed poised, along with the capital infusions of the IPOs, to pull the movement to new heights. For a brewmaster like Oliver, the biggest challenge now was an enviable one: How could you stand out?

M
ariah Calagione readied
the disposable camera. Her husband, Sam, drove their old pickup truck onto the sidewalk next to the building in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, that housed their soon-to-open brewpub, Dogfish Head Brewings & Eats. Sam got out of the cab and stood proudly in the bed with the brewpub's new sign. First, he would have to remove the sign of the last business that had occupied the building, a failed restaurant. Mariah
snapped a picture as Sam removed that old sign … only to find another old sign from another failed business beneath it. He asked Mariah not to shoot him removing that one. They are not you, Sam thought, psyching himself up—again—as entrepreneurs had done since time immemorial. Their ideas were not your ideas.