The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (53 page)

Meanwhile, Lagunitas's beers, particularly its IPA, were among the definitional ones for the West Coast style; and some of the more extreme, complete with Magee's pioneering free-form stories on the packaging, literally defied definition, losing time and again on technicalities at various festivals. Few of the newly empowered consumer-critics could understand Magee's entrepreneurial race for capital; fewer, perhaps, could countenance his brewery's far-out style interpretations. But that's how he and many other craft brewers, particularly the ones started since the 1980s, approached their work: as adding something to an existing style, Americanizing, if you will, what would inevitably be a centuries-old European construct.

Sometimes the brewers' approaches bumped up against the more cocksure attitudes of the consumer-critics. Take when Magee, whose laid-back nature might now be complemented by the occasional thin beard and Hawaiian print shirt, got an e-mail from a member of an Oregon homebrewing club who wanted him to explain the style of Lagunitas's new seasonal. The brewer typed back that it was an “Uzbeki Raga Ale.” It was a completely improvised contraption designed to show his shoulder-shrug for canonical definitions; it was also funny. The member, however, was not amused, and quickly shared his chagrin with others on the homebrewing club's listserv. That sparked a week-long debate over Magee's fake style, an impassioned back-and-forth worthy of record-store clerks perched ever on either side of the Beatles-Stones divide. The largely humorless debate over style became an equally humorless debate over Magee's perceived insouciance. How dare he be so flip about beer! Such was the ridiculous crucible some craft brewers bore as they reinterpreted traditional European styles.

The debates could turn so didactic at points, so shrill even, that brewers might throw up their hands in these same public forums and wade right in. Sam Calagione, whose Dogfish Head, like Magee's Lagunitas, specialized in pushing the style boundaries, would post this missive in the midst of a Beer-Advocate comments thread on supposedly overrated breweries:

It's pretty depressing to frequently visit this site and see the most negative threads among the most popular. This didn't happen much 10 years ago when craft beer had something like a 3 percent market
share. Flash forward to today, and true indie craft beer now has a still-tiny but growing market share of just over 5 percent. Yet so many folks that post here still spend their time knocking down breweries that dare to grow. It's like that old joke: “Nobody eats at that restaurant anymore, it's too crowded.” Except the “restaurants” that people shit on here aren't exactly juggernauts. In fact, aside from Boston Beer, none of them have anything even close to half of one percent market share. The more that retailers, distributors, and large industrial brewers consolidate the more fragile the current growth momentum of the craft segment becomes. The more often the BeerAdvocate community becomes a soapbox for outing breweries for daring to grow beyond its insider ranks the more it will be marginalized in the movement to support, promote, and protect independent, American, craft breweries.

For every know-it-all consumer-critic, though, there seemed to be a handful of novices, and web forums like BeerAdvocate and RateBeer provided them ways to explore their newfound interest like no consumers in the craft beer movement could before. They also could not be ignored. The web cut through geography, cut through class, cut through education level, cut right to the heart of what the herd liked. When, in the middle of the decade, RateBeer reviewers ranked a creation of the tiny monastic brewery Westvleteren as the world's best beer, motorists lined up more than a mile and a half deep in front of the monastery in the pin-drop quiet of the Flemish countryside—the only place, along with a bistro across the street, where the beer could be legally sold. When the monks ran out, they then refused, per their traditions, to brew more to slake the newfound demand.

Its influence undeniable, the web remained for that first decade a second read in the craft beer movement when it came to spotting larger trends or to placing the movement within other developments in American cuisine. None other than Fred Eckhardt appears to have been the first critic to link craft beer with Slow Food, for instance. Long acknowledged by the new century as a godfather to beer writers much as Fritz Maytag was to brewers, Eckhardt still penned from Portland (though not regularly for the
Oregonian
anymore), where a word or two with him might be as much reason for a craft beer pilgrimage to the city as a visit to one of its pioneering breweries, like BridgePort and Widmer Brothers. He had been writing regularly since the early 1990s for Daniel Bradford and Julie Johnson's
All About Beer.
In a March 2003 column, in a tone as conversational as the one he might have effected in the 1960s,
Eckhardt connected a bunch of dots at once: Slow Food and craft beer, the influence of American craft beer now worldwide, the newfound focus by craft brewers on their immediate markets, and beer's place in general at the dinner table.

For some time now, the Slow Food people in my part of the world have acted as though beer did not exist. That's OK, because until very recently I thought of them as an anti-McDonald's group and not much else. I could sympathize with them, but I wasn't ready to squander $60 of my ill-gotten finances on such a narrow philosophy.

It was Garrett Oliver who changed my views. He spoke at length on that subject when I interviewed him a while back at his Brooklyn Brewery in New York City, where he is a member of Slow Food's New York board….

Carlo Petrini, who started Slow Food, has said that the American microbrew movement is the purest expression he's ever seen of the concept of Slow Food in action—bringing back from the dead a whole beer industry and various beer styles. The United States has become the Ark for beer styles. Many of the Belgian breweries you love couldn't exist without their US sales.

J
eremy Cowan climbed from
the New York City subway into a sticky Monday morning in June. He walked with a bit of a jaunt in his step, ironic given his situation. He had not had a regular job in more than six years, during which time he had married, divorced, and seen his business flop, losing close friends and family a collective $135,000 in investments. Just that month, he had charged $50,000 to two credit cards with no real means of ever paying it off. He was a grown man couch-surfing in Brooklyn, living as of that morning above a wood-burning pizza joint in a sublet with no air conditioning. Cowan, a Southern California native and Stanford grad, really had nothing to lose now, which might have explained his optimism.

He was meeting a sales rep from a local distributor to help move his beer in what was the nation's most populous Jewish neighborhood. That was important: Cowan's beer was a creation of a contract operation called Shmaltz Brewing Company. Its number one brand? He'Brew. It was one of the more remarkable marketing shticks of the American craft movement, a celebration of religious and brewing traditions that everybody, Jewish or otherwise, could enjoy, as well as a gradated affirmation of resiliency. That's because, like the Jews of old, Cowan's Shmaltz Brewing had wandered, dogged by the pharaonic tumult of the late 1990s shakeout.

Cowan had started the company from San Francisco, soliciting advice from Dan Gordon at the celebrated brewpub chain Gordon Biersch and from Pete Slosberg at Pete's Brewing (it turned out Cowan and Slosberg attended the same synagogue) and riffing marketing-wise off a tagline he and his teenage buddies came up with when they had the idea that became He'Brew: “Don't Pass Out, Passover.” The first one hundred cases of his premier beer, Genesis, a kosher pomegranate-infused ale tied to Hanukkah in 1996 (pomegranates being one of the seven sacred species listed in the Torah), sold out quickly.

Cowan soon found himself in the familiar entrepreneurial role of doing everything at once, including distribution: Monday in South Bay, Tuesday in Marin County, driving his grandmother's old car and, later, a tan minivan with vinyl seats and no air conditioning wherever fresh supplies were needed. He also perfected the interviewee art of answering the question, Are you profitable? We're on the
cusp
of profits, Cowan would explain, blurring the fact that Shmaltz lost money year after year in the beginning. By 1996, his original brewer, a brew-on-premises store in Mountain View, had tanked, and Cowan contracted with Anderson Valley Brewing, the respected lower-Mendocino County concern started by ex-chiropractor Ken Allen more than a decade before.

Everything appeared to go swimmingly brand-wise for the next few years—Cowan, in fact, found himself turning down two tidy offers from Vijay Mallya to buy Shmaltz—but then the bottom dropped out of the industry, and demand dried up as distribution became more and more difficult. The beer was good and the marketing catchy (the tag for Messiah Stout: “It's the Beer You've Been Waiting For”); the repeat business, however, was touch and go. Cowan arranged to turn over the company to Anderson Valley and then split for some introspection in East Asia. When he returned to the States, he headed east.

An attempt the previous decade to infiltrate the New York City market had stalled; there was too much craft beer clogging the region's already choppy
distribution channels. This go-around, Cowan connected with the official subdistributor of the Brooklyn Brewery's distribution arm. While the brewery focused on distributing in the region higher-end brands like Ken Grossman's Sierra Nevada, which it rolled out in New York in the early 1990s, the subdistributor focused on mass-market ones like Heineken and Corona.
*
It was a way to divide up the nation's most competitive marketplace. Cowan also switched contract brewers, from Anderson Valley to the Olde Saratoga Brewing Company, a few hours' drive north of New York City. Vijay Mallya, Cowan's would-be employer, had taken the brewery as collateral for unpaid loans he'd made to James Bernau, the vintner turned brewer who had dreamed of a chain of brewpubs and whose IPO for Nor'wester had cratered after 1996. Shmaltz would specialize in six-packs in New York, instead of the twenty-two-ounce bombers of the company's earlier days in the Bay Area. Like the bombers, though, the six-packs needed schlepping, and that's how Cowan found himself striding toward America's largest Jewish neighborhood on that sticky June day in 2003.

Except it wasn't the largest Jewish neighborhood. That would have been the Upper West Side of Manhattan about twenty blocks uptown. Instead, Cowan realized the directions from his distributor's sales rep were taking him to Hell's Kitchen, the old Irish neighborhood that was then decidedly grittier than its northern neighbor, its retail peppered with small shops invariably run by first- and second-generation Muslim immigrants from the Middle East. Cowan met the sales rep, Nidal, at the corner of Forty-Ninth Street and Ninth Avenue. He learned that Nidal was born in East Jerusalem to Palestinian parents who fled to Jordan in 1967 and then to northern Italy, where Nidal went to high school and spent his twenties. He had recently immigrated, settling in Coney Island and marrying a woman born in the Dominican Republic who converted to Islam. The pair popped into their first lead of the day, a standard-issue New York bodega, with the raised deli counter and register behind ostensibly bulletproof plastic, which was papered with voided lottery tickets and other adverts.

“I'd like to introduce you to this man,” Nidal said. These were regular stops for his distribution work.

Cowan then started in on his spiel, pitching first himself and then the beer.

The man behind the register, a Yemeni Muslim, peered down through a sliding gap in the plastic. “What's the name again?”

It's called He'brew Beer.

“What is this, some kind of Jewish thing?”

Well …

Cowan pivoted to a fresh angle: the beer was brewed in New York State, great quality, great packaging, a competitive price.

Suddenly, the bodega was packed. Someone rushed from the back room, another from the cooler, still another from the entrance; the man behind the bulletproof plastic and the new arrivals shouted in Arabic to each other. Cowan and Nidal waited. The man behind the register looked at the latter.

“Dude, what's the deal,” he said in English.

“I don't know,” Nidal said, “It's just beer—just business.”

The man looked at Cowan, at Nidal, at everybody else in the bodega. He looked at Cowan's black T-shirt; the He'brew logo was emblazoned in big, gold letters across his chest. He looked at everyone again.

“All right,” he said, “send me a case of each and we'll see how it goes.”

The salesmen exited the bodega. Holy crap! Cowan thought. He had sold a Jewish beer with a Palestinian refugee educated in Italy, the husband of a Dominican woman, to a Muslim from Yemen in a neighborhood famous for Irish gangsters.

Only in America.

Such seemed the resiliency in the fresh, green century of American craft beer. It streaked with surprising speed out of its 1999 nadir, the first year when more craft breweries closed than opened and a year after there was virtually no sales growth to speak of. By 2000, the trend had reversed itself, though just barely, with 100 closings and 102 openings, according to the Association of Brewers. In 2001, the numbers were similarly close: 76 openings, 74 closings. Craft beer seemed to be a bright spot not only in America's dismal manufacturing picture but in the national economy as well. The recession undoubtedly dried up traditional sources of capital, like commercial bank loans, though the breweries and brewpubs that survived the shakeout were clearly growing.

However, they weren't growing more than the larger operations, the veterans that might more properly be called “regional craft breweries” at this point because of their production volumes. These included Kim Jordan's New Belgium (Jeff Lebesch retired from the company in 2001), Gary Fish's Deschutes, and Ken Grossman's Sierra Nevada (he had in early 1999 bought out cofounder Paul Camusi, who then left the movement to pursue other interests like farming walnuts and harvesting Bordeaux grapes). Still without an official definition from either the government or a trade group, most craft brewers defined their sector against the small-brewers tax credit dating from 1976, which set
an upper limit of two million barrels annually. No craft breweries or brewpubs came close to two million barrels, of course, so different strata developed.