The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (52 page)

O
n February 9, 1999,
the three-year-old website BrewGuide.com published this:

Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.

Chico, California

Known for using insane amounts of hops with all of their brews. Definitely West-Coast style, and catering to the hop-heads of the world.
Porter

• Category:
  Porter
  
• Presentation:
  12oz brown twist. Standard SN label with a sky blue label. No freshness date.
  
• Appearance:
  Rich dark brown (true Porter colour) with tan, creamy head.
  
• Smell:
  Earthy malt aromas with some aromatic hop presence.
  
• Taste:
  Upfront there's a semi-acidic twang (black malt) with a citrusy hop flavour, followed by some malt sweetness and a dry/ burnt aftertaste.
  
• Notes:
  An excellent West-Coast interpretation of a Porter.
  

We can glean a lot from this ninety-seven-word review about the state of what Michael Jackson, Steve Hindy, Charlie Papazian, and other pioneers were calling “beer culture.” First, its medium: BrewGuide.com was the product of two brothers, Todd and Jason Alstrom, who grew up in and around Springfield, Massachusetts, and got into craft beer in the late 1980s through Boston Beer and Pete's Brewing brands. They tried their hand at homebrewing—an early attempt involved pounds of sugar for a brown ale that clocked in at more than 14 percent alcohol by volume—and both partook freely of European lagers and ales during the years Todd was stationed by the Air Force in England (Jason visited as often as he could—he wasn't underage there). When Todd returned to the States in 1995, the American craft beer movement was hopping, as we've seen, with more brands and styles than he could have dreamed of in his salad days. To help make sense of the new scene, Todd penned his first beer review on a napkin at the end of a dinner with his parents on August 22, 1996, in Northampton, Massachusetts. He gave 3.88 stars out of 5 to the Steel Rail Extra Pale Ale from the Berkshire Brewing Company, the western Massachusetts brewery started two years before by homebrewers Christopher Lalli and Gary Bogoff. Todd's brother took up the habit, too, and together they launched BrewGuide.com in late 1996, using Todd's background in code writing and web design.

It was a propitious time to be involved in both websites and craft beers. In 1989, an English programmer named Tim Berners-Lee created what he christened the World Wide Web. Launched in January 1992, it busted the Internet, for decades largely the provenance of academics and governments, wide open, its templates for the masses and global interconnectivity ready to transform how people shared information. The number of websites quickly exploded, especially after Marc Andreessen, inspired by Berners-Lee, figured out in 1993 how to make uploading graphics and photos to the web easy with his browser Mosaic. BrewGuide in 1999 could have an entirely different look—graphics, including a blocky, black-and-yellow logo—and a much wider audience—anyone with access to a web browser—than the Home Brew Digest in 1989, with its pictureless, black-and-white e-mails between college students.

We can also tell from BrewGuide's Sierra Nevada Porter review that there was now a standard way of talking about beer, whether you were a returning judge at the Great American Beer Festival or a guy on his computer just getting into something other than yellowy, mass-produced pilsner. Beer was to be evaluated, à la Michael Jackson, on its appearance, taste, and smell, even on its packaging. More than that, it was to be understood within how well it hewed to the style it claimed to be, the styles brought back to modern life by Jackson in the 1970s and further delineated for an American audience by the GABF when it adopted categorized, judge-awarded medals in 1987. A porter was an “excellent” porter only if looked, smelled, and tasted like an excellent porter. But the review also tells us that it was now understood that styles could be broken down further. It was like terroir with wine: it mattered where the beer came from, not because, as with wine, the geographic origin of the ingredients could define the taste, but because the geographic origin of the
brewer
could. Thus the Alstroms could type about a definite “West Coast-style … catering to the hop-heads of the world.” It was a given that the informed craft beer consumer knew what defined the West Coast style (and that there were enough American craft breweries now to make knowing the geography worthwhile).

A couple more things. The labeling battle of the previous few years between Anheuser-Busch and Boston Beer surely influenced the reference to “no freshness date.” Consumers cared because it seemed something they should care about now. And finally, the adjectives: “earthy,” “rich,” “creamy,” “citrusy,” “dry/burnt.” It was unusual when the program for the first GABF in 1982 described a beer's aroma as “flowery.” Now such perspicacious tongue rolling was expected, even important. There were hundreds of different beers out there now, even after the shakeout—more than the United States had seen in nearly a century. They came in all sorts of different styles, some of them dormant for generations, from breweries big and small. You needed all the verbiage you could muster to explain the differences. It was surely one of the ironies of the American craft beer movement that, just as it hit its biggest challenge—the shakeout of the 1990s—more people than ever were offering their opinions on what brewers were doing wrongly or rightly.

The watershed for craft beer online, however, was less editorial page and more news section. RealBeer.com was launched in 1994 by Mark Silva, who first encountered the web while working at an advertising and marketing firm. By the winter of 1995, he and his wife, Darci, a television producer, had quit their day jobs and hit the road in service of research for RealBeer.com; physical visits and phone calls were the norm, after all, not only in the pre-web age but through its infancy. Credit cards maxed, a bit worse for wear some days,
the couple trolled around the country in a ten-thousand-pound, thirty-four-foot trailer, with $20,000 worth of computer equipment and America's better trailer parks for temporary addresses, visiting breweries and brewpubs and snapping thousands of photos. After two years on the road, Mark Silva set up shop in San Francisco, California, with Pat Hagerman as a business partner and the site's president (Hagerman's brother had introduced him to RealBeer years earlier after seeing it on a brewery tour).

The pair set about growing it as a one-stop shop: “Everything you could ever want to know about craft beer can be found here, and more!” For the web at the time, RealBeer was remarkable aesthetically, crisply organized, and easy to navigate, with inviting graphics and idiot-proof engines for searching for breweries or for factoids through what it called the “Library.” You could click through to the musings of beer writers and critics, including newer names like Gregg Glaser and Will Anderson. Crucially for the site's business model, there were also ways to connect quickly and easily with various beer-related products: sign up for a ten-week brewing apprenticeship from the American Brewers Guild, the training school cofounded by UC-Davis's Michael Lewis in 1994; buy a CD-ROM of Michael Jackson's series
The Beer Hunter;
or send a gift subscription to newer publications like
Brew Your Own
magazine and
Southern Draft Brew News.
You could even take a year-by-year virtual tour of the Great American Beer Festival; distant were the days of hearing about it secondhand from a snail-mailed homebrewing club newsletter or print publication. If only for its exhaustive list of craft breweries and how to find them, Silva and Hagerman's RealBeer was the most important informational advance of the craft beer movement since those first newsletters from the likes of the Maltose Falcons.

Print was not dead yet, though. Two brothers-in-law who liked to homebrew, Tony Forder and Jack Babin, mocked up a four-page dummy of a beer newspaper in Forder's northern New Jersey attic; Forder, who had a background in reporting and editing, and Babin, whose experience was in sales and marketing, pitched it to brewers at a beer festival in Boston in 1992. A proper, twenty-four-page inaugural edition of what they called
Ale Street News
dropped that summer; the paper would grow to be the nation's largest-circulation beer publication, with three bimonthly regional editions: New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Midwest/West. A couple of years before Forder and Babin's mockup, Tom Dalldorf bought control of the
California Celebrator,
a bimonthly newspaper started by Bret and Julie Nickels out of Hayward in 1988. Dalldorf would serve as editor as well as publisher, growing what he renamed the
Celebrator Beer News
from thirty-two newsprint pages to an average
of sixty glossy ones by 2000, after peaking at eighty during the craft beer boom, and expanding its coverage nationally and internationally.

Dalldorf, a blues musician with a wry sense of humor, also set himself up as a sort of sidekick for Michael Jackson. The pair set out in 1995 on the “Iron Liver Tour,” a two-week jaunt to every craft brewery and brewpub then in California; the same year saw the debut of the annual
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit parody showing brewers wearing trunks and boots in their brew-houses. (These newer publications could have unintended consequences. One of Dalldorf's writers, Nico Freccia, founded the 21st Amendment brewpub in San Francisco's South Park neighborhood in 2000, with Shaun O'Sullivan, an assistant brewer at the Triple Rock Brewery in Berkeley, California. John Hickenlooper had had his craft beer epiphany there a decade before; the two met in a UC-Davis brewing course.)

Both
Ale Street News
and the
Celebrator Beer News
would establish online presences, but the web push started with RealBeer and the BrewGuide (which changed its name to BeerAdvocate in 2000), plus a third competitor. Bill Buchanan started RateBeer out of Atlanta in May 2000 to provide “a forum for beer lovers to come together and share their opinions of beer and breweries.” Overwhelmed by the user traffic, Buchanan quickly turned the operation over to Joe Tucker, who had helped redesign the site that first year. A UC-San Diego graduate who spent much of the dot-com boom of the 1990s in Silicon Valley, including a stint as a computer-game developer, Tucker set RateBeer on a strict course of user-generated reviews. Anyone could log on and opine; the volume of negative or positive reviews that a particular brewery or beer got decided its rankings. As Tucker saw it, it was a democratization for beer that gelled with the ethos of the industry, where the traditional marketing favored by Big Beer was avoided, even mocked. The sober assessments of RateBeer's reviewers were more akin to Jim Koch's radio spots about barley, hops, and the Reinheitsgebot than Rodney Dangerfield's commercials for Miller. For instance, Anchor Steam, the oldest brand in the movement, would be reviewed forty times by different consumers by late April 2001, drawing a score of 3.71 stars out of 5 and assessments like this: “Banana notes in the aroma. Flavor is mainly dry with a refreshing bitter finish. A good beer for the warm season.”

BeerAdvocate and RateBeer both quickly grew to include tens of thousands of reviews of thousands of beers and breweries. Their success inspired the formats and inclusive styles of dozens of imitators, especially web forums for homebrewing clubs that might have before taken the form of an e-mail listserv in the style of the Home Brew Digest. It was like nothing the brewing industry, whatever the sector, had ever seen: the masses weighing in, and
frequently. Sometimes that led to legal threats over bad reviews, and both sites struggled at first to draw advertising (print publications like
Ale Street News
and the
Celebrator Beer News,
both free to readers, had a relatively easier time of it, as the medium was much better understood by advertisers). But once the floodgates of consumer beer reviews had been opened, it was impossible to dam them. Ironically enough, both websites would father print arms, including compendiums of their reviews and, in the case of BeerAdvocate, a glossy magazine.

Many of the consumer-reviewers were homebrewers—many more, in fact, than there might have been at any point in American history. Homebrewing was by 2000 legal in every state except Alabama, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Utah. There were at least seventeen hundred homebrewing clubs throughout the forty-four states where it was legal (and, though we can't be certain, surely some in the half-dozen holdouts). Some states, California and other Western redoubts in particular, had such active homebrewing scenes that they spawned their own large-scale homebrewing competitions and web-based networks. Nationally, the inaugural National Homebrew Competition, the brainchild of Charlie Papazian and Charlie Matzen, had drawn thirty-four entries in 1979; the number had swelled nearly eightyfold by 2000, with more than three thousand judges evaluating 2,668 homebrews in twenty-eight categories. The competition was so big that preliminary rounds now preceded the final national verdicts.

Of course, with more cooks in the criticism kitchen than ever before and with the web's search engines—Yahoo and Google were years old by 2000—providing ways to learn information faster than ever, an insularity within the beer culture seemed inevitable. While the search engines may have been able to gin up information with instantaneous ease, they often did not provide the context for understanding it. Everyone could fancy him- or herself an expert.

And experts could be insufferable—which meant Tony Magee, again, couldn't help himself. By 2000, his Lagunitas Brewing was one of the most respected craft breweries in the nation, with a new thirty-barrel brewhouse in Petaluma, California, plus an adjoining brewpub where one might happen upon an ale aged in barrels usually used to age pork or a rockabilly band shifting seamlessly into “Okie from Muskogee” before a crowd of unsuspecting California neohippies, the very sort that Merle Haggard had aimed the tune at in 1969. The fresh digs came from a marathon for new investors that Magee had run in 1998, competing against the sour taste among the wider public left by the ongoing shakeout and finishing just before the December 31 deadline for raising a minimum amount of capital lest he have to return earlier
investments: “I remember hammering a good guy for the last piece needed to make the minimum capital raise,” Magee would recall, “and existentially hearing myself sounding like one of those soulless stock guys you see squeezing blue-haired dowagers for cash in bad Wall Street movies. That last chunk came through on December 27, and I got drunk.”