The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (45 page)

Then there were confrontations like this one near Boston's Fenway Park. In April 1992, brothers Steve and Joe Slesar invited their parents to the new beer bar they had just opened across the street from the legendary baseball stadium. Another guest showed up uninvited—Jim Koch, who was peeved about the bar's name: Boston Beer Works. The brothers' father overheard the entire heated argument between Koch and the Slesars, which seemed to hinge on whether the two words “Boston” and “Beer” infringed on the trademark held by Koch's company. The two sides would spend the next year and a half—and tens of thousands of dollars—fighting over the words, with Koch losing his last challenge in November 1993.

And speaking of trademarks, Koch had tried to trademark the phrase “The Best Beer in America” for his Samuel Adams Boston Lager after its run of wins in the Great American Beer Festival's consumer preference poll in the late 1980s. In a November 1993 filing with the US Patent and Trademark Office, Koch cited the more than $2 million his company had already spent promoting the beer thusly, as well as a Rolling Rock promotion that invited consumers to sample “the beer that bested ‘The Best Beer in America'” after its bock trumped Samuel Adams in a taste contest. It was, Koch contended, proof that at least one competitor saw Samuel Adams as literally the best beer in America. The trademarks office disagreed—as did a federal court that Koch appealed to—and so did many of his fellow brewers. They were stung enough to have lost the consumer preference poll so many years running (three straight and four in five), but Koch racing to slap the wins on his packaging seemed to them the height of gauche. Such things were simply not done in the American craft beer movement.

Which may have been precisely the problem, as David Geary saw it. The movement had started small and had stayed that way for its first couple of decades, due largely to the challenges faced by the likes of Sam Calagione and Tony Magee in the early 1990s just as they had been faced by the likes of Jack McAuliffe and Tom de Bakker in the early 1980s. Consumers' unfamiliarity with the product, despite the most fervent efforts of Michael Jackson, Fred Eckhardt, Byron Burch, Charlie Papazian, and other evangelists, was one challenge. The capital-intensive start-up costs were a challenge, too, as were the distribution costs and compromises that somewhat cruelly accompanied growth. Finally there was the challenge of finding skilled brewery workers, particularly brewmasters, and controlling quality to produce the same beers consistently.

Then along came Matthew Reich at New Amsterdam and Jim Koch at Boston Beer—and shortly after, Pete Slosberg at Pete's Brewing—with contract brewing, and much of these challenges went by the wayside, freeing revenues for marketing, for educating the public about these newfangled pale ales, India pale ales, porters, stouts, ambers, bitters, extra special bitters, bocks, and wits. That was the triumph of the contract brewers: they brought craft beer to places that had never encountered it and placed it before consumers who may have only read or heard about it secondhand. Suddenly, in a few short years in the late 1980s, craft beer was ubiquitous. To this day, on the web that would in the coming decade help to spread the movement to ever more Americans, stories abound of Pete's Wicked Ale as what we'll call a gateway craft beer. From these first, furtive encounters grew a groundswell of demand as well as an upswing in supply that stood directly crosswise to the trends in American manufacturing in the 1990s.

The grim predictions of Ross Perot in that November 1993 CNN debate with Al Gore appeared to be coming true already—and not just because of NAFTA. That trade agreement was just one part of the relentless march of globalization, which, with its promise of cheaper labor overseas and cheaper goods at home, was upending entire, age-old American industries. Take the furniture industry in central North Carolina. Since the late nineteenth century, it had been a major employer in the region, and by the 1980s, the small city of High Point, near Greensboro, had earned the nickname the Furniture Capital of the World, in no small part because it hosted the world's biggest home-furnishings trade show every year. The furniture its factories produced was a point of local pride and a major economic engine.

But by the mid-1990s, the engine was sputtering; it became clear that employment in High Point's furniture industry was peaking. Overseas competition, particularly from China, where furniture could be made at a fraction of the cost with cheaper materials, was hampering sales. Local politicians and industry executives began talking of greater automation as the key to growth, though that alone could not stem the factory closings and the layoffs. Pretty soon these same pols and executives were talking of the industry's heyday in the past tense and encouraging those laid off to retrain for work in more hightech fields. A Duke University study of the furniture industry's decline put it this way: “The chance of finding a new job in the furniture industry is probably very low for most displaced workers.” Furniture-making in central North Carolina would never be the same, especially when it came to employment.

The same went for manufacturing in general. US Department of Labor statistics were starting to show a looming cliff; the number of factory and other manufacturing jobs had grown since World War II, with muscular peaks in the
1960s and 1970s as Americans created products the world wanted. For those studying such things closely, though, it was clear that the jobs growth was ebbing; entire neighborhoods in major cities like New York, Chicago, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, where factories once belched smoke, were now either abandoned or becoming pricey loft apartments, their manufacturing pasts mere marketing material for real estate brokers. It would be a few years before manufacturing as a sector of the US economy went over the cliff hand in hand with a sizable chunk of the national psyche. But the writing was starting to scrawl across the wall.

Then there was craft beer. The industry was slapping on jobs with its torrid growth in the 1990s. As many as 115 craft operations, including brewpubs, would start up in 1996, nearly ten a month, with most employing at least two people full-time. This was an industry that could not be outsourced, that provided a foodstuff with a long and storied history in the United States, that prized technical know-how and a devotion to accuracy, and that often now served as an economic-development engine on a local level, as most breweries rented space in the less desirable (and therefore cheaper) areas of their communities. Witness the changes wrought by the Brooklyn Brewery in its part of the borough or the Mass. Bay Brewing Company's role in turning the public perception of the South Boston waterfront from an area where Whitey Bulger might've clipped enemies to one that produced that tasty Harpoon IPA. Craft beer was a true port in the manufacturing sector's storm, an industry so burning hot that everybody, including Big Beer and Wall Street, wanted in. It just seemed so … doable.

This was never inevitable. Those brewers who had come and gone could attest to that. David Geary—and others, though they may have not said so out loud in front of thousands of their closest friends and competitors—knew that the movement's ubiquity was due to the efforts of Jim Koch. He and Matthew Reich and Pete Slosberg, and their partners, including brewmaster Joseph Owades, used the advantages they had gained from contract brewing to spread the gospel of craft beer to the far corners of an America increasingly inhospitable to American manufacturing. In doing so, they lifted the smaller boats that might have been sunk by those weighty start-up costs. They provided a context for consumers to think within. Now we have a category, Geary himself thought once Samuel Adams beers reached Maine by 1988, two years after he started selling his own.

But he was booed at the Craft Brewers Conference in Boston. No matter how many fresh consumers that New Amsterdam, Boston Beer, Pete's Brewing, and others had brought to the proverbial table, many in the audience, particularly those from the West Coast, were not prepared to acknowledge any
of them as one of their own. The entire industry, in fact, had begun to fragment psychologically. Charlie Papazian recognized this and all but pleaded with the same Boston crowd. “There is a controversy now about where beer is being made, and people are getting very emotional,” he said. “The issue that really matters is being unique. It's not just about a product, not just about where it's made—but about its spirit.” Such an invocation of the collectivist ethos from the movement's earliest days fell on deaf ears; 1978 was a long time ago.

No hair was too thin to split now. The purveyors of what would come to be called extreme beer were dismissed as faddists by brewers in the mold of more traditional European styles. Geary caught more flack by telling his audience there were too many medals for too many categories of beer. The number of categories at the Great American Beer Festival alone had more than tripled in the ten years since medals were introduced in 1987. Moreover, while the GABF was still the highly regarded standard for judging American beer, other entities had sprung up with dubious credentials and criteria; at least one seemed to be simply pay-to-play, a way for brewers to slap news of a gold medal on their next label.

Sour beers in particular annoyed more traditional brewers. Wasn't a sour taste simply the result of bacterial infection, a sign of failure? Yet some newer brewers—and some who would award them medals—were beginning to see sour as its own animal. Long gone were the days when a tiny college of critics, with Michael Jackson their infallible dean, decided the archetypes of beer style.

On and on the recriminations went as the growth ballooned. The older hands from way back in the 1980s eyed the hundreds of new startups suspiciously, sometimes with contempt. The physical breweries disdained the contract breweries. The solo brewpubs dismissed the chains. The West Coast, keeper of the original flame, distrusted the East Coast, a late arrival at the party. The brewers partially owned by Big Beer were anathema to the independents. No one trusted the next nearest guy to make the case to the consumer as strongly.

The American craft beer movement was an undeniable manufacturing and culinary triumph, but one far adrift from its collegial roots. It was all so shrill now. Litmus tests abounded, particularly for newer entrants and anyone, like Jim Koch, who was
too
successful. One was reminded of the answer British prime minister David Lloyd George gave when asked how he had done at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, when he found himself dealing with the idealistic US president, Woodrow Wilson, on one side and the vengeful French premier, Georges Clemenceau, on the other: “Not badly, considering I was seated between Jesus Christ and Napoleon.”

O
n Sunday, October 13, 1996,
at 7
PM
Eastern time, the sonorously calm voice of television newsman Stone Phillips eased into around eight million American homes: “When it comes to beer, you've never had more choices on tap.”

Colorful images of pull taps and glasses of beer flowed across the screen. An unidentified man at an unidentified bar pronounced his verdict upon a Rhino Chasers Peach Honey Wheat from the William and Scott Company, a contract concern started by Culver City, California, ad execs in 1989 that brewed through the Minnesota Brewing Company in St. Paul and F. X. Matt in Utica, New York: “It's got a hint of berry flavoring.”

Phillips again: “But do you know where some of those exotic and expensive specialty beers are really being made?”

Thus the setup for a segment of that evening's episode of
Dateline,
an hour-long NBC newsmagazine broadcast out of Rockefeller Center in Mid-town Manhattan. It debuted as a Tuesday program in 1992 and had gradually expanded to four nights, including a Sunday edition added only seven months before. That edition was meant as head-to-head competition for CBS's venerable
60 Minutes,
but lately the time slot was barely pulling ahead of the likes of Fox's
When Animals Attack.

Even four years on,
Dateline
dragged around the aftershocks of a disgraceful 1992 segment on General Motors pickup trucks. The program backed up its allegation that the trucks' fuel tanks could easily explode in accidents … by rigging the trucks' fuel tanks to explode in accidents. Still, the show soldiered onward, adding timeslots as it became a franchise for NBC and a beachhead for a new kind of a documentary-like, confrontational news show, a sort of precursor to reality TV—here was how people
really
lived professionally and personally. The roster of talent behind the show, including Tom Brokaw, Jane
Pauley, Katie Couric, Bryant Gumbel, and Maria Shriver, gave
Dateline
gravitas, as did its reach. In the era just before one-thousand-channel cable and satellite packages, not to mention widespread use of the web,
Dateline
could make or break businesses and people.

After the episode's introduction plugged other segments for that evening, including ones on O. J. Simpson's civil trial and the crash of TWA Flight 800 a few months before, it was back to beer. Here was Stone Phillips on-screen now, his chisel-chinned looks and leading-man gaze priming the audience.

Good evening. From the ballpark to the corner bar to your refrigerator, beer is a $50-billion-a-year business in this country, and making the biggest splash these days are those trendy specialty brews, offering new flavors with a mom-and-pop appeal at premium prices. But how much hype is mixed in with the hops and the barley? How much do you really know about your favorite beer? Just how and where it's actually made? Here's Chris Hansen.

To any craft beer aficionado who might've already tuned in, the inclusion of the contract-brewed Rhino Chasers in the introduction would have been a clue to how this segment, titled “Brew-Haha,” was about to go. And on it went.