The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (58 page)

Small:
Annual production of 2 million barrels or less.

Independent:
Less than 25 percent of the craft brewery is owned or controlled (or equivalent economic interest) by an alcoholic beverage industry member who is not themselves a craft brewer.

Traditional:
A brewer who has either an all-malt flagship (the beer which represents the greatest volume among that brewer's brands) or has at least 50 percent of its volume in either all-malt beers or in beers which use adjuncts to enhance rather than lighten flavor.

The annual barrelage amount was based on the tax exemption dating from 1976, but the rest of it could have read like a checklist from Fritz Maytag's earliest days with Anchor Brewing. Though no one at the Brewers Association actually attributed the definition to Maytag (and he was not on the board that approved it), the connection was unmistakable: His actions beginning forty years before regarding what went into Anchor Steam and how it was brewed set the tone for the industry that grew up afterward.

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Bra is also Petrini's hometown and Slow Food's international headquarters.

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Michael Jackson's influence on Slow Food was acute. He wrote so much and so well for its magazine,
Slow,
that in the autumn of 2007 his work was translated into Italian and published as a book,
Storie nel bicchiere
(Stories in the Glass).

O
n Tuesday, August 7, 2007,
a typically partly cloudy summer day in the British capital, the Belchertown, Massachusetts-based beer importer Daniel Shelton rode the Tube from where he was staying to the west London home of Michael Jackson. He planned to interview Jackson on camera not so much about beer but “about him, his life and work, and what it was like for him now, living with Parkinson's disease.”

Jackson had suffered from the ailment for more than a decade, but only intimates were aware. He had kept it largely secret, though he was concerned that he had started to skirt what to him was an uncomfortable line of suspicion: the disease's symptoms, including tremors and slowness of movement,
might make his wider audience think he was drunk. The situation came to a head when Jackson blacked out at the Denver airport around the time of the Great American Beer Festival in 2006. He wrote about the experience for Daniel Bradford and Julie Johnson's
All About Beer
in a column published in August 2007, titled “Did I Cheat Mort Subite?” (It was a play on the meaning of the last two words: “sudden death” in French as well as the name of a famed Belgian beer.) The first half of the column showed Jackson hard at his typical globe-trotting evangelization over the preceding year, his sixty-five years not seeming to slow him. He went on a trip to Turkey, two to Poland, and one long one to Italy to promote the new anthology of his writing about Slow Food (“to whom I was originally introduced by Charlie Papazian”), and he had plans for a fifth edition of his seminal guide to great Belgian beers. Then Denver, where his collapse had people concerned that his “profession had taken its most obvious toll”—that Jackson was drinking too much.

I was not. I hadn't had an alcoholic drink that day or the day before…. When I woke up, I was in a hospital bed. It was just like it is in the movies. I was surrounded by people in white coats, one of whom asked me: “What is your name?” When I replied, “Michael Jackson,” there was none of the usual sniggering. People in Denver know who Michael Jackson is. Nonetheless, he asked again…. “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince.” He looked at another of the white coats whom I later came to know as a neurologist. “I guess he's OK,” he said.

Then, addressing himself to me, he asked whether I was hungry, and what I fancied to eat. I suggested a large mimosa and a Denver omelet, though I think something less extravagant was eventually provided.

It was vintage Jackson: witty, conversational, aware, specific, and appreciative in its culinary allusions. It would be the last column he ever wrote. Jackson died of a heart attack on August 30, 2007. The dialogue with Daniel Shelton, too, turned out to be the last on-camera interview he ever gave. It would have been just as affecting an experience without the mortal hindsight. Jackson, though frail and haggard looking, was typically gracious, inviting Shelton and a friend into his cluttered office, fortressed with stacks of papers and books. Its walls were plastered with plaques and awards, its shelves with rows of rare bottles. A big suitcase sat by the front door, as if ready at a moment's notice for another trek. The only nod to real modernity was an opened laptop behind his desk.

Jackson talked of the Belgian bus trip in the late 1960s that “changed my life…. I knew nothing about Belgium.” He talked of pitching his newspaper editor at age sixteen a series called “This Is Your Pub.” “So you're asking me to finance you on a lawbreaking escapade?” the editor said to the underage cub reporter. “Yes.” The editor replied, “I like your style. Those are the kinds of reporters we want.” And of those first forays into writing about beer, confronting the drag of novelty with each early pitch, then discovering the satisfaction of having set the parameters all others operate within: “I write the way I write, and, at this point, people can take it or leave it.” The interview ended at a pub, where Jackson told Shelton he planned to write a book called
I Am Not Drunk,
to dispel any doubt about his Parkinson's. The two made plans to meet again.

Jackson's death loosed a torrent of tributes across the pond. His was the biggest passing yet in the American craft beer movement, and recollections started rolling in almost immediately to craft beer websites and print publications, from those long established in the movement to those who might not have even been alive when
The World Guide to Beer
debuted in 1977. A healthy portion of the tributes were seasoned with recollections of having met the critic—in the restroom at a festival, at the airport, in a pub (seemingly a sort of accidental Everest for any American beer geek), during a dinner where Jackson was the star lecturer—and always of coming away with a sense of his warmth and generosity. A September 14 memorial service in London drew Americans like Garrett Oliver and Steve Hindy of the Brooklyn Brewery; Tom Peters of Monk's Cafe, the Philadelphia pub that had hosted lectures by Jackson; Dave Alexander of Washington's Brickskeller; Charlie Papazian; Daniel Bradford; and importers Charles and Rose Ann Finkel.

A national toast was quickly organized for September 30 to honor Jackson and to raise money for the National Parkinson's Foundation. Tom Dalldorf, publisher of
Celebrator News
and Jackson's companion on their 1995 “Iron Liver Tour” of California breweries, led the toast at the Toronado, a San Francisco bar barely two miles from the original Anchor location where Fritz Maytag kicked off the movement Jackson was so instrumental in boosting. Dall-dorf spoke of how Jackson's boosterism for the American movement annoyed his fellow Englishmen: “‘Michael, why don't you ever write about English beers?' And he said, ‘Because what they're doing in America is so much more interesting.'” As for Maytag himself, he would say of the critic, “I think Michael Jackson did more for the brewing industry than anybody since Louis Pasteur.”

O
ne evening in July 2006,
Ray Daniels, Randy Mosher, and Lyn Kruger were awaiting their orders at a basement bar known for its beer selection in Durango, in southwestern Colorado. Daniels worked in the marketing and publishing wings of the Brewers Association and had written books on homebrewing; Mosher, too, had written extensively on homebrewing and was on the inaugural board of the BA; and Kruger was a trained microbiologist who was the president and COO of the Siebel Institute, the august Chicago brewing school where Mosher and Daniels also taught. Their beers arrived. One, a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, ordered precisely because it might, due to its popularity, be one of the fresher beers at the bar, looked cloudy and, worse, tasted sour and buttery—not at all the way Ken Grossman or his brewers in Chico, California, intended. The trio knew this was likely evidence of draft lines that had not been cleaned in a while. They called it to the server's attention.

“No,” she told them, “this was how the beer always looks and tastes.”

Well, they replied, that is not the way the beer is supposed to look and taste.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “There's nothing I can do.”

They asked to speak to the manager; the manager never came. Daniels, Mosher, and Kruger paid their bill, did not tip, and left their beers on the table. They would never return to the bar.

For Daniels, it was the last straw—and the catalyst for an idea he'd been batting around in his mind for a while: a training program for everyone standing between a brewer and his or her consumers. It would be similar to programs that certified wine sommeliers, some of which had been going since the 1950s, and would be geared precisely toward service workers such as the one in that basement bar in Durango, training people on how to store, serve, and talk smartly about beer before a consumer plunked down the money for it.

Daniels, like many who had come to the industry in its second, third, and fourth waves, had led a bit of a roving professional life, studying biochemistry at Texas A&M, earning an MBA from Harvard, working in pharmaceutical marketing, and, then, on a business trip to Washington, DC, in the late 1980s, having a Samuel Adams Boston Lager. It changed his life. Sporting a goatee that would turn salt and pepper in the new century, with eyes that collapsed into squints behind rectangular lenses when he explained anything libationary, Daniels became the sort of lovable beer geek who insisted on proper ways to pour different beers and threw himself into homebrewing in 1989. He published a well-received book on the topic in 1996. By 1999, he was working for the Association of Brewers, commuting between Boulder and Chicago.

Daniels suspected, then, that he had the credibility to pull off a certification program. Still, he shopped the idea around the industry, soliciting advice and getting mostly positive feedback. So, in the summer of 2007, working out of his home in Chicago, where a stainless-steel kegerator sat in the living room, he devised a syllabus as well as bought the requisite website names and filed for trademarks. He picked “Cicerone” as the name of his certification program—it could be translated from Italian as meaning “tour guide”—and made the syllabus available online for those who wanted to take the multiple-choice certification exam, which covered the proper care of beer, the history of beer styles, and what differentiated those styles. The first exam, to become a “Certified Beer Server,” was administered over the web to a little more than a dozen people on January 3, 2008; each had paid forty-nine dollars. There were questions like:

Which of the following flavors is NOT a sign of stale beer?

a) Papery

b) Cardboard

c) Banana

d) Sherry

Draft beer lines should be cleaned every fourteen days.

a) True

b) False

The methods for lager brewing began in what city and were established by what year?

a) Munich, 1900

b) Pilsen, 1842

c) Munich, 1600

d) Vienna, 1700
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Daniels quickly developed two higher levels of certification, “Certified Cicerone” and “Master Cicerone,” which not only required longer, more detailed exams but tasting tests, too, and were to be administered in person rather than over the web. He left the Brewers Association to administer the program full-time. The first Certified Cicerone exam was given in April 2008, with all seven examinees coming from the brewing industry, including brewpubs, and paying $345 each. The first Master Cicerone exam—a two-day, twelve-hour affair—was administered later in the year at a cost of $595. In its first three years, Daniels's program designated 1,400 certified beer servers, 120 Certified Cicerones, and a grand total of one Master Cicerone (out of seven who had attempted the exam): a salesman named Andrew Van Til at a Kalamazoo, Michigan-based distributor, who finished in early November 2009. “It was probably the most mentally exhausting two days of my life,” Van Til said. He recognized the upside of the designation: “The whole status of beer is elevated when you have people recognized as experts who can drive education.” Over the next few years, hundreds of Daniels's successful examinees like Van Til would filter through the industry, to distributors, to breweries, to fine restaurants in big cities, to higher-end retail chains, to the corner pub.

Expertise was the name of the game now. The craft beer movement, as we've noted, was becoming more professionalized than ever and, following the rebound after the shakeout, more confident. This was no longer an industry for voyeurs or toe-dippers. This was completely serious. In 2003, Garrett Oliver flew to New Orleans to talk about beer-food pairings before the more than three hundred attendees of the Cheers Beverage Conference, an annual gathering of representatives from the wine, spirits, and beer worlds as well as concerns like Chili's and Red Lobster. The attendees were incredulous. “I run a big place, we've got twelve hundred stores,” one told Oliver. “You want to know what my beer program is? I take the top fourteen beers in sales in the United States—and that's my beer program. You guys with your craft beer, you must be joking.”