The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (5 page)

F
red Eckhardt loved the book,
of course—he just didn't care for the title,
A Treatise on Lager Beers.
Something about the highfalutin word “treatise” with its thirteenth-century etymological roots and its academic pretensions, rankled him. The compact, fifty-eight-page paperback, after all, was meant to be an accessible guide to homebrewing the most popular type of beer on the planet; it was not meant to turn off would-be hobbyists with superfluous jargon. That was the last thing Eckhardt, the book's author, wanted to do. At forty-three, with a compact, muscular frame born of years in the Marines and a handlebar moustache that would become a trademark, he saw himself as an evangelist of good beer—the sorts of flavorful, robust ones he had had amid overseas deployments, including during the Korean War in the early 1950s. It was then, as a flight radio operator stationed in what is now Osaka International Airport in Japan, that Eckhardt tasted the mildly bitter pale lager Tuborg, out of Denmark, the first good beer he ever had.

Though Tuborg was—and remains—more akin to the likes of Budweiser than to what we would call craft beer, it was for Eckhardt a far cry from the beer his father had made in Everett, Oregon, twenty years before. That was standard Prohibition hooch: one can hops, ten gallons of water, several pounds of sugar, translating into roughly ten gallons of very strong—and very not good—beer. At age six, with Prohibition the law of the land, Eckhardt and a friend, at their fathers' prodding, had a glass of the beer; the aftertaste lingered through the decades and colored his perception of what beer could be. He took that perception with him, out of Oregon and to the Pacific Theater during the waning days of World War II in 1945, when Eckhardt was part of the American occupation of a vanquished Japan and stationed on the southern island of Okinawa.

To him, the Japanese beer at the war's end was pathetic, though it came in interesting packaging to mark the interesting times. He and his fellow Marines at the Yokosuka Air Base were allowed a ration of six beers weekly in cans—a new technology vis-à-vis beer, one so nascent then that the cans Eckhardt and his comrades drank from might seem exotic today. Their tops were conically shaped, with metal caps, the same kind used for bottles, sealing the opening—a sort of hybrid of today's cans and bottles. The beer on Okinawa, however terrible in retrospect, was welcomed by the Allies: rations of tomato juice or what servicemen remembered as an “Aussie can of chocolate milk of some sort” were substituted when beer supplies didn't arrive. “Wretched stuff,” thought the Oregon-raised San Francisco native barely out of his teens.

Eckhardt stayed in the Marine Reserves after 1945 and was called up in October 1950 for service again as a flight radio operator, this time throughout the Pacific, including back in Japan, where he encountered that Danish Tuborg. During this period he also earned a degree at the University of Washington in Seattle, joining tens of thousands of veterans on a GI Bill-infused march that would transform so many existing industries, including the increasingly homogenized brewing industry, and invent so many others. For his part, Eckhardt left the Marine Reserves in 1958, the same year he finished college in Seattle and moved from there back to Oregon as a partner in a Portland photography studio. He had dabbled in photography in the Marines and then had worked with a studio that did child photography door-to-door; the studio was hoping to branch out to Portland, and Eckhardt went with it.

His new city had a population of just over 372,000, sitting in the temperate valley of the Willamette River, which bisected it. And while by 1965, the year after Eckhardt arrived, Portland would have 316 barber shops, 30 movie theaters, 24 funeral homes, and—important for him—76 photography studios. Like most American cities, it would have one or no breweries. In Portland's case, it was the Blitz-Weinhard Brewery, a brick amalgam spanning four blocks on the edge of the industrial Pearl District and employing up to 220 people brewing as many as thirty-one different beers.

Blitz-Weinhard's history—and its ubiquity in the Portland area at the time—offers a good example of America's regional breweries. Founded in 1856 by Henry Weinhard, a twenty-six-year-old immigrant from the Württemberg region of present-day Germany, it was still run by the family—Henry's great-grandsons Frederic and William—but was on its way, like other regional breweries in that era of industrial consolidation, toward being acquired by Big Beer (which happened via Pabst in 1979). For the time being, though, the brewery was a point of civic pride, the nexus of Oregon's bestselling beer and a link to
its more rugged past. Indeed, Weinhard had made his way westward ninety years before from Cincinnati, which was itself developing a busy brewing scene powered by like-minded German immigrants, to Portland because there were no breweries to slake the thirst of the dockworkers and lumberjacks.

Still, Blitz-Weinhard, particularly its flagship lager, was, like Tuborg, more akin in flavor and production to Big Beer than to what we would now call craft beer. Olympia beer, brewed in Tumwater, Washington, was big in Portland, too, and Coors out of Colorado was considered exotic. For a budding beer snob like Eckhardt, these beers weren't going to cut it; something had to be done. Like Navy nuclear mechanic Jack McAuliffe, with his plastic trash can half a world away around the same time, the former Marine radio operator turned to homebrewing. It was, as it was for McAuliffe in Scotland, a rather daunting task: supplies, particularly grains and especially yeast strains, were difficult to come by (homebrewers often substituted bread yeasts and batches made entirely with grains were rare, with syrups as the main substitutes); instructions were often arcane, if not also archaic, highly technical in their explanations, and, Eckhardt figured, more useful to commercial brewers than to homebrewers. But he plunged forward, and by 1968 he was not only producing passable batches of lager but also teaching homebrewing and wine making at Wine Art of Oregon, a supply shop near I-84 that served as a meeting place and clearinghouse for Portland homebrewers. There were fifteen to twenty students per class, and they worked off instructions that sprang from books that themselves sprang from overseas or from the Prohibition era: books like Englishman C. J. J. Berry's
Home Brewed Beers and Stouts
(1963) and the second edition of Carl Nowak's
Modern Brewing
(1934).

Eckhardt eventually developed an ace up his sleeve, though. He had been self-publishing a journal titled
Amateur Brewer,
which sought to connect and inform homebrewers with techniques and each other. For
Amateur Brewer,
in the spring of 1968 he visited the only craft brewery in America: Fritz Maytag's Anchor. The brewery was then on Eighth Street, between Brannan and Bryant Streets in San Francisco's South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood. The same location Maytag had walked to from his apartment three years before to buy 51 percent of the failing brewery for the price of a used car. And, like Maytag, Eckhardt had been introduced to Anchor years earlier at Fred Kuh's Old Spaghetti Factory. “You should try it,” a friend had suggested. “It tastes like homebrew.” It couldn't possibly, Eckhardt thought. The American beer he had encountered after the Marines was all so bland, so homogenous—it didn't even approach that Tuborg he tasted a decade before in Japan. But why not? Eckhardt ordered the only beer on tap at Kuh's place and was impressed. “I could brew beer like this at home,” he thought.

And there he was, a few years later, at the source. Maytag and Eckhardt struck up a rapport, with the brewer sharing his time and expertise generously and his visitor shooting photos of the equipment: the brew kettle; the mash kettle; the primary fermenter, which to Eckhardt looked like “a small swimming pool,” its surface yellowy white and alive with the churning yeast, devouring the sugars unleashed by the earlier boiling soak of the cracked grains. This type of brewing had been done for centuries, but it was rarely done on this scale anymore—not in the United States, at least. We do not know the exact thoughts passing through the minds of Maytag and Eckhardt as they toured Anchor's brewhouse, with its worn wood floors, copper kettles, and walls of red and white brick; neither man, after all, thought to record them, as they were not aware of the specialness of their meeting. How could they have been? It had been years since Maytag's acquisition now, and no other craft brewers had come after. There was nothing to indicate to either man that they were at the start of something—if anything, it felt like the end.

Eckhardt did take it upon himself soon after the visit to try to induct at least one more person into the movement. Charles McCabe, who wrote an oftentimes acerbic column for the
San Francisco Chronicle
called “The Fearless Spectator,” had complained about the quality of American beers. Eckhardt wrote in to set McCabe straight on the tradition right in his own backyard. From then on, McCabe became a champion of Maytag's little outfit, a cheerleader in what was then one of America's largest and most influential newspapers. Here was one rhapsody on April 20, 1970:

If you happen to feel patriotic, Steam is the ONLY American beer. Other beers in this country have been named after the middle-European cities where they gained their fame ….

Yet Steam had as much to do with the building of San Francisco and Northern California as the Christian virtues, good stout Levi's, shovels, and the saving presence of whores. When people really drank Steam, there were 27 breweries in San Francisco alone. Hundreds dotted the Mother Lode Country. Now, as stated, it is made in but one place here.

Eckhardt returned to Portland with his Anchor photos and his feedback from Maytag, and he spun the two together into a slideshow for his home-brewing students. One slide would show how a brewing step—say, mashing the grains—was done at home; the next would show how it was done in a small brewery (Anchor); and so on, alternating slides to give an idea of how efforts in the kitchen might translate into the commercial realm. It was an extra mile
Eckhardt went for his students. Jack McCallum, Wine Art's owner, thought he could go even further.

“Why don't you write a book?” McCallum asked his friend one day. Eckhardt was known to be good with recipes, with the sort of organization needed to build something from some things.

“Geez, write a book?” Eckhardt replied. “Who am I to write a book?”

McCallum dropped the idea, only to bring it up again later. This time, Eckhardt reconsidered. Why not? he thought. Eckhardt bought a gallon of rose wine and drank it as he hammered out on a new typewriter what the book's subtitle plainly called “A Handbook for Americans and Canadians on Lager Beer.” But it was more than that; it was a manifesto. The last paragraph of the introduction reads more like a palatal call to arms than a jumping-off point for a collection of recipes:

After Prohibition, it remained illegal to make homebrew (it still is) and so even then there was no light to be shed on the subject. Now more than 35 years after the end of Prohibition we are just beginning to explore the possibilities of home brewing. Beermaking began in the home long before it became commercial, and now we can take it back to the home. The commercial brewers in this country have tailored their product to the lowest common denominator. There are almost no quality beers made in this country, so if you want good, old-country style beer you must make it yourself. Even the German beers imported into this country are being made to the so-called American taste. Pabulum and pap for babies. You actually can make beer just as good as the great European master brews in your own home. This book is only a start.

In the following forty-eight pages, in conversational prose that would not be unfamiliar to a twenty-first-century blog reader, Eckhardt spelled out the vocabulary of lager beer; the equipment and ingredients needed for brewing its various styles at home; the steps involved, including troubleshooting; and the care in aging and serving it postfermentation (there was even a short section on making your own bottle labels). The recipes he recounted sprang from a recipe that Wine Art had been giving to customers. It was a Canadian one, highly technical, and, to Eckhardt, poorly organized. He broke it apart and put it back together around several different lager styles—light, Bohemian pilsner, Vienna, Bavarian, and more—along the way writing of beer in personal and personable terms, a rather novel approach in a period when the nation's five biggest breweries produced nearly half its beer. Here was Eckhardt on the illegality
of homebrewing: “We should all work to have the law changed so that there is no doubt about the home brewer's rights alongside his winemaking brother.” Here he was on alcohol per volume:

There are those who think that a beer should be relatively high in alcohol. This is not reasonable, after all, why do you drink beer? If all you want is inebriation, drink hard liquor. Beer is a convivial beverage between friends, to be drunk for its own sake, as a friendly thing, not a
drunking
thing. Five to six percent is plenty of alcohol, your friends won't laugh if your beer clobbers them.

Published through McCallum's Wine Art in April 1970,
A Treatise on Lager Beers
was an earnest salvo, one that steered future craft-brewing pioneers, who decades later would be able to still recall its influence on them. But it was also a fifty-eight-page paperback sold locally in a midsize city with a single brewery unknowingly on its way into the perpetually parched maw of Big Beer. Plus there was that title with the word “treatise” that so bothered the author but that enamored McCallum, who suggested it as a way of lending gravitas to a subject many would not believe worth the weight. The word did not seem to hurt the book, though. It sold enough to warrant second through fifth printings by July 1972 (it would over the next forty years warrant two more printings and sell over one hundred thousand copies), and Eckhardt earned pennies on each. It was never much, and he would remember it mostly as just a lot of fun. Like Fritz Maytag and the Anchor Brewery he had visited and photographed, Eckhardt's book seemed terminally anachronistic—the isolated whimsy of an American who liked good beer and who was discovering it was increasingly hard to find.