The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (57 page)

S
hortly after the turn of the century,
Garrett Oliver was at a party in Manhattan's West Village hosted by Rob Kaufelt, the owner of New York institution Murray's Cheese. As often happened in small talk, someone asked him what he did. He said he was the brewmaster at the Brooklyn Brewery, an intriguing job description that usually prompted follow-up questions. His interlocutor in this case was a literary agent, and the two fell into talking about books about beer. Oliver mentioned that he had wanted for a while now to write a book about beer and food. He had recently begun hosting beer dinners at the brewery in Williamsburg and elsewhere, and he had seen what he called the “aha moment” spread across hundreds of faces as they realized the potential in pairing the right beer with the right food. Imagine codifying that somehow and sharing it with a mass audience. “The beer is here,” Oliver explained, “the food is here. Why aren't people putting two and two together? I feel literally bad for people who don't know the combination of beer and food.”

The conversation would lead to the publication by HarperCollins in 2003 of
The Brewmaster's Table: Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer with Real Food,
an effort to educate the general public about exactly what the subtitle implied: what beer went best with what foods. It was not new territory. Jack Erickson had written and published the 146-page book
Great Cooking with Beer
in 1989; Lucy Saunders's 154-page
Cooking with Beer: Taste-Tempting Recipes and Creative Ideas for Matching Beer & Food
had come out seven years later; Candy Schermerhorn's 86-page
Great American Beer Cookbook,
published in 1998, included a foreword by Michael Jackson; and there had been myriad shorter pieces within other beer books before and since, as well as extensive writing by Jackson, perhaps most prominently his 1983 piece for the
Washington Post
on which beers to pair with which parts of a Thanksgiving feast.

What set Oliver's book apart was not simply its heft (384 pages) but its holistic approach. It was not just a way to enhance the dining experience by complementing that Thai dish's spiciness with the bitterness of an IPA; it was instead a manual on how to weave beer into one's lifestyle, how to, as Oliver put it in the introduction, use beer to amplify the “symphony” that eating should be: “Great beer from around the world is now available everywhere, and, unlike wine, it's an affordable luxury. You can enjoy it literally every day. Once you discover traditional beer, your ‘food life' will be transformed into something fascinating, fun and infinitely more enjoyable.”

If Oliver's words sounded like Folco Portinari's 1990 Slow Food manifesto, it was no accident. By 2003, Oliver was very familiar with that tract, which saw the understanding and resultant appreciation for good food and drink as essential for the “slow, long-lasting enjoyment” of life. He had learned about the Slow Food movement in the late 1990s from a flier about its biannual trade show in Turin, Italy, called Salone del Gusto, and wrote movement cofounder Carlo Petrini directly, asking how he could get involved. Petrini wrote back that the next Slow Food event was a cheese festival in Bra, a town in northern Italy's wine country.
*
Why didn't Oliver come up with something for that? The brewmaster then connected with Rob Kaufelt, and the two flew to Italy on different flights, each with a suitcase full of cheese should one or the other get stopped by security (Kaufelt did, though he and his cheese still made it). The Americans were a hit in Turin.

From there, Slow Food asked Oliver to get involved in setting up the movement in the United States, which became Slow Food USA in 2000, the same year Petrini declared from Midtown Manhattan that American craft beer was the purest expression of Slow Food's principles; Oliver found himself on its board and later on the board of the entire international body. Oliver's partner at the Brooklyn Brewery, Steve Hindy, had also been involved in Slow Food early on, serving as a judge for its 2002 international awards, which included traveling to Bologna, Italy, to help present the top award to a beekeeper from rural Turkey. After that, Hindy went to his first Salone del Gusto in Turin and was pleased to find “an astounding gathering of artisan food producers—tiny producers of traditional cheeses, game, vegetables, fruits, breads, wines, beers, liquors, oils, vinegars, and all manner of prepared foods. It was nourishing just being in the presence of so many like-minded people.”

Salone del Gusto in Turin, Italy, the biennial trade show for Slow Food. This one in 2000 marked the second attended by American craft brewers.
COURTESY OF SLOW FOOD INTERNATIONAL

Two years before, Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head had attended Salone del Gusto as a panelist, the happy convergence of travel funds from the state of Delaware as well as an interest by the movement in his and other American craft beer (the Association of Brewers helped defray the shipping costs of craft beers). Calagione, like Hindy, was pleasantly surprised by what he found in Slow Food. With its rebellion against fast food in all its iterations and effects, Slow Food, Calagione saw, was “exactly in step with what we were revolting against at Dogfish—which was bland, industrialized, monochromatic beer.” The Association of Brewers had been sending representatives to Salone del Gusto since the second one in 1998; Charlie Papazian, in fact, stepped in then to lead a Belgian beer tasting when Michael Jackson's Alitalia flight was delayed, and Papazian later lectured on artisanal brewing. By the 2004 Salone
del Gusto, American craft brewers. who made it to Turin, usually through the Association of Brewers, were being treated like rock stars by their Italian hosts, peppered with compliments and questions.

Along with the Slow Food movement, Oliver's book reflected Jackson's work—every beer writer's effort did, really—and
The Brewmaster's Table
could be read as an American update on
The World Guide to Beer.
*
Oliver wrote lovingly detailed descriptions of the various European beer styles, country by country, often interwoven with his own first encounters with them. Of course, he also gave a thorough tutorial on how to pair food with beer, and he did so in a conversational, almost conspiratorial tone no one had effected before at book length. Here was Oliver writing about pairing beer with after-dinner food, like sweets:

Quit chuckling and listen up, because I've got a secret for you—beer is brilliant with dessert. In fact it's unbeatable. I once hosted a beer luncheon attended by New York's top sommeliers…. As dessert was served, I issued a challenge—that none of the guests could think of a single wine that could match these desserts as well as either of the beers I was serving…. My challenge was a bit unfair—wine never stood a chance. I served my own Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout, an Imperial stout with a huge complex dark chocolate and coffee flavor, and Lindemans framboise, a sweet Belgian lambic fermented with outrageously fragrant raspberries…. The sommeliers conceded my challenge, and they hadn't even tasted my vanilla ice cream and chocolate stout float.

There was also a fair amount of sprightly contempt for Big Beer throughout the book. In a section about proper storage and glassware (and years before the craze of young-adult books and movies about vampires!), Oliver wrote:

Some American mass-market brewers do use clear glass bottles. They avoid the “skunking” problem by avoiding hops altogether; instead, they use chemically altered hop extracts that won't react with light. How very appetizing. Somehow, this reminds me of Dracula, and the idea that you can't see him in a mirror. The undead have many tricks at their disposal, so beware.

Again, though, it was Oliver's holistic approach to beer that would prove so influential, that would put an exclamation point on years of trying to convey to consumers a wider appreciation of craft beer. If Jackson's writings put a craft beer bottle in someone's hands, Oliver's put that bottle next to a plate. So many would cite
The Brewmasters Table
as influential in their thinking of craft beer's place in not only what they ate but often their daily lives as well. Charlie Papazian called it “a masterpiece.” Critics spoke of it in the same breath as Jackson's
World Guide.
Mario Batali, the celebrity chef and restaurateur, wrote that the book whetted his formidable appetite “for more than ale and beer, but also for the whole lusty experience of true satisfaction at the table.” People just seemed to
get
it. As Oliver fervently noted, “Real beer
can
do everything. Mexican, Thai, Japanese, Indian, Cajun, and Middle-Eastern food, and barbecue, are far better with real beer than with wine. Even with traditionally wine-friendly foods, beer often shows superior versatility and flavor compatibility. The range of flavors and aromas in beer is vast—it's deep and wide and tall, and it easily surpasses that of wine.”

These were observations Jackson had been trying to get across for what seemed like ages—his “farting against a gale,” as he'd put it three years earlier. Now here they were spelled out with gusto and confidence by an American working in what had become, and what had survived to remain, the world's most robust beer culture. No one could argue with Oliver: “The heady mix of a newly vibrant food culture, the wide availability of imported classic beers, and the emergence of excellent American craft brewing have made the United States the most exciting place in the world to enjoy the juice of the barley.”

This success, tested it as it was by the shakeout, was a big reason for what became of the Association of Brewers and the Brewers Association of America: After a two-day meeting in October 2004 at the Boulder headquarters of the Association of Brewers, the two bodies announced a merger set for early January. It had been a long time coming. The BAA had been a formidable force in the entire American beer industry since its original efforts during World War II to ensure that brewers got their fair shares of coveted material, including tin and barley. It had then served as the main trade voice in lobbying the government through the ups and many downs of its members, which for decades included the majority of American brewers; of the twenty-eight breweries from thirteen states represented at what would be considered the BAA's first meeting in May of 1942, only two were left by the late 1990s—and they were under different owners. Still, as the industry consolidated, regional breweries relied on the BAA more than ever, as did many of what became the regional craft breweries; and after he was picked as its president in 1999,
Daniel Bradford, the first employee of the AB way back in the early 1980s, restored a sizable portion of the BAA's oomph. But it was just Bradford and one other employee, and annual revenues of $395,000 versus the AB's $2.6 million in revenues and twenty-three employees led by Charlie Papazian, Bradford's old mentor. Plus, the AB had created a juggernaut in its Great American Beer Festival, which was now the world's biggest beer festival outside of Europe; the biannual World Beer Cup; the conferences and competitions of the American Homebrewers Association (which itself huddled under the AB's umbrella);
Zymurgy
and
New Brewer
magazines as well as an emerging web presence; the Craft Brewers Conference, which seemed to happen at every major recent pivot in the industry; and a book-publishing arm drawing some of the top critics of the day. In addition, due largely to its in-house research institute, the AB was the eminently quotable source on so many statistics and trends in not only craft beer but also the wider American industry; a newspaper or magazine reader of the early 2000s might be forgiven for thinking the craft beer movement and the Association of Brewers were one and the same. As with American interpretations of European styles and Jackson to Oliver, this was another torch-passing moment that spoke to the strength of the movement.

Besides, many of the nation's most prominent craft brewers wanted a merger. The board selected to oversee the merger, culled largely from the boards of both associations, read like a Who's Who of the past thirty years in American beer: Jim Koch of Boston Beer; Gary Fish of Deschutes; Steve Hindy of the Brooklyn Brewery; Kim Jordan of New Belgium; Ken Grossman of Sierra Nevada; Rich Doyle of Harpoon; Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head; Nick Matt of F. X. Matt; Brock Wagner of Saint Arnold; and the beer writer Randy Mosher, representing the homebrewers association. It just did not make sense anymore to have two organizations working toward the same goals, especially if the strengths of each could augment the other under the same letterhead. The BAA, especially under Bradford, had lobbying acumen; the AB, under Papazian, was the undisputed face of all non-Big Beer in America.

Nerves frayed during the more than eighteen months it took to plan and execute the merger, but everyone was all smiles as it went through in January 2005, with Papazian as the first president of what was dubbed the Brewers Association (BA) and Bradford returning full-time to
All About Beer
magazine and its annual World Beer Festival, which Bradford and Julie Johnson launched in 1995 and now took place in cities around the South. (The Brewers Association would launch yet another festival three years after the merger called SAVOR, a sort of mini-Salone del Gusto, celebrating craft beer's role with food and held in Washington, DC.) One effect of the merger came in a
long-sought definition of just what a craft brewer was in America. The BA's board, chaired first by Kim Jordan, voted in the fall of 2005 to define an American craft brewer as: