The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (47 page)

Pete Slosberg's company had already sparred at least twice with Anheuser-Busch—the first time over a dog. The bigger brewer felt that Slosberg's black-and-white English bull terrier, Millie, which Pete's used on its early packaging beginning in 1986, was a tad too similar to its own black-and-white English bull terrier, Spuds MacKenzie, which it introduced in 1984. Although Pete's reach then barely extended through the San Francisco Bay Area, Anheuser-Busch threatened legal action, and the smaller brewer stopped using Millie on its packaging in 1989.
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Anheuser-Busch also swooped in and lured away the
ad agency that Pete's used for its national television ad campaign in 1994, the first by a craft beer company.

Otherwise, though, the single, biggest fallout from the Anheuser-Busch ambush—the phantom crafts, the 100 percent share of mind, the ATF petition, the ad campaign, and, especially the
Dateline
segment—was a wavering in consumer confidence in craft beer. An industry already swollen with newcomers, given to in-fighting, and growing at a torrid pace suddenly lost its hard-won authenticity in the eyes of millions of consumers or would-be consumers. Some craft brewers understood that immediately. Dan Kenary, a cofounder of the Mass. Bay Brewing Company—which had never shied from reminding consumers that its Harpoon brand was the first beer to be brewed in Boston since the 1960s, not Samuel Adams—knew he would never forget a closing image of the
Dateline
segment: an ugly-looking smokestack at the Stroh's plant. He knew that the brush used to paint Boston Beer and Pete's Brewing, no matter what others may have thought of them, colored everybody in the industry. It was all a whiff of grapeshot aimed to kill competition, no matter how scattered. The lines now had been clearly drawn: it was not physical brewer versus contract brewer anymore, newbie from the 1990s versus veteran from the 1980s, certainly no longer West Coast versus East Coast. It was Us versus Them—and Them had a lot of resources.

There was an almost visceral reaction among craft brewers as a survival instinct kicked in. John Hickenlooper, cofounder of the first brewpub in Denver and now co-owner of others, pulled all Anheuser-Busch brands in the face of the ad campaign. There were smaller acts of defiance throughout the nation. Don Russell, the Joe Sixpack columnist for the
Philadelphia Daily News,
described the angry reaction in the City of Brotherly Love:

It's been maybe 10 years since Bud last touched Joe Sixpack's tongue. But, now, in the spirit of journalistic accuracy, I find myself on the brink of actually tasting this dreck once more. The occasion is the Budweiser Backlash—a stiff, negative reaction to last year's network television broadside in which Anheuser-Busch claimed the nation's burgeoning microbrewery revolution was a fraud…. About that backlash: It actually goes back a few years before A-B's craft-brew assault. Tom Peters, the manager of Copa Too (263 S. 15th St. in Center City), said he stopped stocking the slop about five years ago when he heard how the company was bullying a tiny Czechoslovakia brewery called Budvar over trademark rights to the Budweiser name.

Across town, Dawson Street Pub (Dawson and Cresson Streets in
Manayunk) also proudly refuses to carry Bud. The pub's only bottle of the gunk is displayed above the bar, with its familiar red label marked up with the international cross-out symbol.

It was, as the beer writer Jack Erickson put it, an unceremonious meeting between the Big Beer-dominated industry and the culture that had grown up around the movement over the last two decades. Every budding aficionado who knew the name Michael Jackson as synonymous with beer and not pop music; every critic, compensated or not; every homebrewer with his or her dog-eared books by Fred Eckhardt, Byron Burch, and Charlie Papazian; every person behind each e-mail address on the earliest online beer and homebrewing newsletters; every regular at every brewpub in nearly every state—they all had skin in this game. “What we have now is a beer culture,” Erickson explained to Russell. “It tends to be young, affluent and opinionated. Beer is an important part of their lifestyle, and they don't like the big boys pushing around little guys…. A-B is just trying to take market share—that's the way they do things. The backlash is the beer industry clashing with the beer culture.”

Finally, in the spring of 1997, Anheuser-Busch ceased the ad campaign. The influential National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus had, at Boston Beer's request, examined the ads. It said that they contained “contextually inaccurate factual statements” that could be “false, misleading, and deceptive.” Both sides claimed victory. Anheuser-Busch could continue to tell consumers that most Boston Beer was brewed outside of its namesake city, if not New England entirely, but it had to stop implying that that fact meant the beers were the same as lower-priced, mass-produced ones made by Anheuser-Busch and its Big Beer brethren. Regardless, the damage had been done. If 1978 was the first undeniably pivotal year in the American craft beer movement, 1996 was the second—though for negative reasons rather than positive. Things would never be the same.

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Both Anheuser-Busch and Boston Beer were able to walk away from the labeling controversy claiming some semblance of victory. Anheuser-Busch began voluntarily placing “Born on” dates on their beers (though not necessarily telling consumers the beer might go bad within several weeks of that date); and Boston Beer voluntarily started saying on labels where particular beers were actually brewed rather than just the Jamaica Plain, Boston, headquarters address.

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Stroh's had them both beat anyway: its commercials featuring Alex, the beer-fetching dog, debuted in 1983.

G
reg Koch certainly remembered
the
Dateline
segment as a tipping point—and he didn't even see it. He was too busy at the time.

Koch, no relation to the segment's main target, Jim Koch, was born in Southern California, and his family moved to Ohio when he was four. He moved back west in 1984 to attend the Guitar Institute of Technology above the Hollywood Wax Museum on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. Koch wanted to be in rock and roll, and he was, for a long while: he worked at one point as a tour photographer for the guitarist Steve Vai and later, after earning a business degree at the University of Southern California, managed bands and owned rehearsal studios in downtown Los Angeles, which musicians could rent by the month.

During his time at USC, Koch frequented a downtown bar at the base of the American Hotel called Al's. It was loud and cramped and still defiantly punk in a new wave world, the sort of place that reveled in being a dive; Thursdays were “No Talent Night,” Koch's favorite time to go. Al's had up to four beers on tap at any one time, serving them in the sorts of waxy paper cups you might get from a fast-food joint. One Thursday night, there was only Lowenbrau Dark and Anchor Steam on tap—and Koch chose Anchor Steam. A light-bulb went off in his young mind, a total epiphany; it was the first craft beer he had ever tried, and from then on that's all he drank, becoming a self-described “beer geek” increasingly familiar with a movement that was about to grow by leaps and bounds, particularly in California.

Though not necessarily in
Southern
California. While Northern California was undeniably the movement's Eden, beginning with Fritz Maytag's 1965 acquisition of Anchor in San Francisco and growing from there into dozens of breweries and brewpubs by the mid-1980s, craft beer in the Golden State's bottom half had developed only in fits and starts. The region might have been, by the time the lightbulb went off in Koch's mind, only really notable in the movement as the birthplace of both the nation's first homebrew club, the Maltose Falcons in Los Angeles, and, in the same city, Ken Grossman, cofounder of Sierra Nevada—which he and Paul Camusi chose to open in Chico, way northward near the Oregon border.

San Diego was an illustrative case. Its history with beer ran just about the entire gamut of the nation at large. Before Prohibition, the city had one brewery for every sixteen thousand residents, and a far narrower pub-to-resident ratio. After Repeal in 1933, three breweries were able to reopen: the Aztec Brewing Company on Main Street, the San Diego Brewing Company at Thirty-Second Street and Bay Front Street, and the Balboa Brewing Company on Imperial Avenue—about one brewery per ninety-seven thousand residents. All would close by 1953. It would be pretty much Big Beer only for about twenty years after that, and then came the imports in a big way, particularly from just due south. Mexican brands like Corona, Dos Equis, and Tecate dominated the
shelves and menus of San Diego by the 1980s because those were the cheapest imports for distributors to carry. By 1985, with more European brands making the transcontinental trek, 10 percent of the beer sold in San Diego was imported, more than twice the national average.

This would turn out to be the peak of a trajectory that started in the early 1970s as some imports started clocking in at an unacceptable six dollars a bottle. Big Beer reasserted itself; the craft beer movement germinating in Northern California seemed a world away, the odd Anchor tap or six-pack just about the only glimpse a San Diegan might catch of it. Then, in the mid-1980s, two friends, Chris Cramer and Matt Rattner, began toying with the idea of opening a craft brewery after moving to the Mission Beach neighborhood after college. Cramer, who had grown up in San Diego, had an older cousin named Karl Strauss, a German immigrant who had worked his way up over forty-four years at Pabst to head its national brewing operations and later became a noted brewing consultant. Intrigued by his cousin's idea and old enough to remember a pre-Prohibition America, Strauss helped the pair of twenty-somethings design the brewery and recipes as well as train the brewers (he also lent his name to the brewpub).

On February 1, 1989, the Karl Strauss Brewing Company opened with a Vienna lager, a pilsner, and a brown ale on tap and to lines around the block on Columbia Street in downtown San Diego—the city's first brewery since Prohibition. Paul Holborn, a homebrewer who studied under Michael Lewis at UC-Davis, had opened the first brewpub in the wider San Diego County more than a year before, the short-lived Bolt Brewery in Fallbrook, which named its beers after those three San Diego breweries that staggered out of Prohibition. (Holborn would go on to be a brewing consultant at the respected Pizza Port brewpub chain in San Diego in the early 1990s.) Within a year of Cramer and Rattner opening the Karl Strauss brewery, several more entrepreneurs let it be known they were planning their own in the city and surrounding county. San Diego was late to the game, but it had arrived.

So had the rest of Southern California by the start of the 1990s. Its quality and scope still could not hold a candle to Northern California—few regions nationwide could—but Greg Koch, the newly minted beer geek, did have regional options. Most were brewpubs or connected to a brewpub, including the largest craft brewery in Southern California at the time, the Alpine Village Hofbrau in Torrance, which opened in 1988; it specialized in German lagers with its ten-thousand-barrel brewhouse, which sold much of its beer at the adjoining restaurant. Several operations, typical of the time, were firsts for the region since Prohibition: the first brewpub on a beach (Belmont Brewing
in Long Beach, summer 1989); the first brewpub in Santa Barbara (the Brewhouse Grill and State Street Brewing, summer 1990); the first craft brewery in Orange County (Heritage Brewing in Dana Point, December 1989); the first in Ventura County (Shields Brewing in Ventura, winter 1990). Southern California's oldest craft brewery was the Angeles Brewing Company in L.A.'s Chatsworth neighborhood. Richard Belliveau, a mechanical engineer who relocated from Maine to Los Angeles in the late 1950s and later opened his own machine shop, filed papers with the state in July 1985 after assessing the sorry state of the area's beer. “Nobody's doing it here,” he thought, “I'm going to get rich.” It, of course, did not quite work out that way; it would take Belliveau nearly two years to start brewing commercially in early 1987 in an old industrial park, held up by a zoning variance; and then it would not be until the early 1990s that he broke even, when annual sales tipped into the six figures.

Also in Los Angeles, there was Gorky's on Eighth Street downtown, a funky, twenty-four-hour bistro noted for its in-house Russian imperial stout. Steps from the Manhattan Beach Pier was the Manhattan Beach Brewery, which two brothers, Michael and David Zislis, and a friend, John Waters, opened in the summer of 1991 with an eight-barrel system.

These last three operations were largely it for the nation's second-largest city beer-wise in the early 1990s. Luckily for Koch, who then was living in an artist's loft in downtown Los Angeles, he spent a lot of time in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was there that he learned about a Saturday class being offered through UC-Davis's extension program and taught by Michael Lewis, “A Sensory Evaluation of Beer.” Lewis, who in 1970 was the nation's sole full professor of brewing science, now had academic company, as did the UC-Davis program he helped build. Oregon State University in Corvallis, home of the USDA's hop-breeding farm and birthplace of the Cascade hop, had started a fermentation-science degree program in 1996.