The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (59 page)

“All those top fourteen brands,” Oliver replied, “taste the same. There's no point in having the rest of them.” He pressed on. “Do you serve Wonder Bread in your restaurants?”

“Of course not.”

“Why not?” Oliver said. “Wonder Bread's the top-selling brand of bread.”

“Well,” the attendee said, “our customers, they come out to our restaurants, they expect something better.”

“Oh,” the brewmaster said, “you're saying your customer doesn't expect something better when it comes to beer.”

The attendee shrugged. “I don't think so.”

A few years later, Oliver drove the same point in early-morning talks to distributors—this time with different results. “There are some of you here who have been doing this for twenty or thirty years,” his standard stump speech would run, “and you're watching the world change around you, and you say you're three or five years from retirement and you don't have to learn about craft beer. I'm here to tell you that I respect what you've done, but you are not going to make it. You are not going to make it. You do not have three years; you're going to be fired.” It was not something anyone wanted to hear. But what did the owners of the distributors typically say to Oliver after the talks? “Thank you, that was a great talk.”

The confidence was not mere braggadocio—there were numbers. Craft beer sales were up an estimated 5.8 percent by volume in 2008 over 2007, according to the Brewers Association, and more than 10 percent by dollar amount sold ($6.34 billion versus $5.74 billion); the number of craft barrels produced in 2008 was 8,596,971, a quarter-million more than in 2007. Most auspiciously, the movement cracked 4 percent of market share nationally—the first time, it was thought, that that had ever happened (though over the years different regions of the country, particularly the Northwest, had seen market shares double, perhaps triple that).

These healthy numbers were especially important because of two trends ambling along with them in the last half of the first decade of the twenty-first century. First, breweries were expanding, both physically and productively. In November 2006, Greg Koch and Steve Wagner quietly opened a 385-seat brewpub in Escondido, California, just a few miles from the original brewery ten years ago in San Marcos and alongside a new brewhouse capable of producing fifty thousand barrels annually of their Stone Brewing brands like Arrogant Bastard. Around the same time, across the country, Sam Calagione's Dogfish Head was arriving on shelves in Georgia, the first new state added to its distribution in more than two years, bringing its total to more than twenty. In late 2002, Calagione added a one-hundred-thousand-square-foot brewery in Milton, Delaware, to keep up with what became
triple
-digit annual percentage sales growth for brands like 90 Minute IPA and 120 Minute IPA (they were
exactly what they sounded like: India pale ale with hops added every minute for however long the brewing took). In Colorado, in the summer of 2008, the first twelve-packs of New Belgium's Fat Tire Amber Ale in cans began appearing—the brewery had become the largest yet to embrace canning, this time with a machine that could fill fifty to sixty cans a minute.

These breweries expanded among a second trend: rising operation costs. The Brewers Association estimated it cost nearly 40 percent more by the end of 2008 to operate a craft brewery, particularly a smaller one with limited distribution, than it had at the end of 2007. The rebound in the number of craft operations meant the usual elbowing for retail space and tap handles, though now there was a new wrench: raw materials and ingredients cost more.

That one particularly definitional American beer ingredient, hops, had become especially prone to scary price spikes. As recently as the late 1990s, a brewer could call a hops supplier directly and place an order; there was a surplus nationally into the next decade. Within a few years, many of the larger craft breweries started getting their hops through long-term contracts with suppliers; this ensured they got their loads of Cascade, Centennial, Columbus, Chinook, and others, with the onus of supply falling on the suppliers. Smaller operations often did not have these long-term lock-ins, and a hops shortage in 2007 and 2008 hit them especially hard. The previous decade's surplus had driven hops prices down and then hops farmers out of business or into other crops. That was bad enough. Then a huge warehouse fire in Yakima, Washington, in October 2006 destroyed about 4 percent of America's hops supply. Finally, calamitous weather overseas, including droughts and hail storms, tightened the supply further, as did a strong euro against the dollar, which meant European brewers could get American hops for a song.

It was the perfect storm of bad luck. America's hops supply in 2007 dropped to its lowest level since the mid-1980s, and prices shot up. Hops that might have traded in the States for ninety-nine cents an ounce tripled in price after 2006, some reaching seven to eight dollars an ounce (or five to six euros). Jim Koch's Boston Beer, the nation's biggest craft beer concern, tried to fill the void, especially for smaller breweries without those long-term dealer contracts, by selling tens of thousands of pounds of its own hops at below-market prices; the first round of bidding in March 2008 drew 212 brewers, and a second one was planned for that November. Ultimately, until American hops yields recovered starting in 2009, brewers and brewpubs were often simply forced to pass along the rising costs to consumers; prices went up on pints, bombers, six-packs. It became one of the ironies of the growing-again movement that the interpretations on European styles that had made American craft beer so popular, like
the double IPA, had made it that much more expensive to compete against European counterparts.

Judging by the sales growth of not just 2008 but also subsequent years, one can see that American consumers were willing to pay that premium. Craft beer became regularly talked about as “an affordable luxury,” a status symbol of sorts just as early pioneers like Matthew Reich at New Amsterdam had envisioned: yuppies drank it then; now their hipster children did. Gone was the iffy product of the pre-shakeout years; ascendant were breweries with quirk and history, run by experienced hands, some of whom were routinely described as “rock stars,” complete with groupies in several cases (though not necessarily in the carnal sense). The movement took to new social media platforms like Facebook, launched in 2004, YouTube, launched in 2005, and Twitter, launched in 2006, in droves.

By the summer of 2009, at least 170 breweries and brewpubs would have regularly updated Twitter feeds. Many times, that number of consumers and publications would have feeds by then, too, with craft beer groups no longer delineated largely by geography, as in the homebrewing clubs of yore, but by style preferences (hopheads here, fans of cask ale there) and common traits (several groups dedicated to spreading the craft beer gospel among women in particular sprung up). One could now while an evening following the tweets of Jason and Todd Alstrom of BeerAdvocate as they reviewed beer after beer in a sitting, or get updates on upgrades at Tony Magee's Lagunitas, or follow Greg Koch as he toured behind a new book about Stone, or see what the Brewers Association was lobbying Congress for on behalf of the industry. One could also take those seemingly ceaseless arguments and counterarguments about tastes and styles to social media; it never seemed to get old.

The new-media platforms created an intimacy and an immediacy that could translate into sales (“like” your favorite brewer!), and, especially for the smaller startups, offered low- to no-cost marketing. They also offered a way to integrate quickly and cheaply the movement as a whole into others, like the locavore and Slow Food movements. Tweets and Facebook updates could be used to direct consumers to food-beer pairing dinners; to festivals dedicated to local foodstuffs, including the products of area breweries; to new partnerships between brewers and area farmers, cheesemongers, and the like. Suddenly, it was all one big virtual universe with faces put to names and personalities to brands.

Of course, the very ease with which the movement slid into social-media use only highlighted its natural stomping ground. Craft beer had become one of the accoutrements of the modern American elites, though, crucially, not necessarily elitist—unlike, say, fine wine or French cuisine. Following the spate of
very public tetchiness that preceded the shakeout, the movement personality-wise now seemed positively serene. As Paul Philippon, a one-time philosophy professor who started the Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery in Farmville, North Carolina, in the summer of 2004, memorably put it in a speech at the 2010 Great American Beer Festival: “The national brewing community is asshole-free.”

The highbrow London-based magazine the
Economist
used craft beer as a way to describe the hipper and more mobile inhabitants of twenty-first-century America: “They drink wine and boutique beers (and can discuss them expertly) but only in moderation, and they hardly ever smoke cigarettes.” No less a social barometer than the
New Yorker
cottoned to craft beer with a 9,775-word piece in its annual food issue right before Thanksgiving 2008. Written by Burkhard Bilger, whose work included a book on the more eccentric eating and drinking habits of southerners and a magazine piece on the Madagascar gem trade, it starred Sam Calagione as he pursued ever more extreme beer. It also swept in all the major trends in the movement over the past four decades, from the first saplings of growth to the late 1990s shakeout to a counterrevolution against extreme beers, represented by Garrett Oliver. The piece was perhaps the most important mainstream magazine article on craft beer since William Least Heat-Moon's “A Glass of Handmade” in the
Atlantic Monthly
twenty-one years before. The last section of Bilger's article was set at the Great American Beer Festival in 2007, the first year it sold out of tickets. About twenty-eight thousand attendees paid fifty dollars a pop to sample more than eighteen hundred beers over three days.

Wandering through the hall in the hour before it opened I saw signs for beers called Goat Toppler, Chicken Killer, and Old Headwrecker, Incinerator, Detonator, Skull Annihilator and Obamanator. Many were double IPA's that seemed to be competing for the highest IBU rating. But others were faithful recreations of ancient recipes, or else beers invented whole cloth. “When you're making an extreme beer, it's like pushing beyond the sound barrier,” Jim Koch told me. “All of a sudden, everything is silent. I remember when I first tasted my Triple Bock. It dawned on me that beer has been around for thousands of years, and I am tasting something that no brewer has ever tasted. It was inspiring, beautiful, almost reverential.” Even Garrett Oliver seemed to be bowing to the trend. His booth featured two wonderful bottle-fermented ales and a pale ale called BLAST!, with eight kinds of English and American hops. “No, this is NOT a double IPA,” a sign beneath the tap read. “Even if you believe in those.”

In his last on-camera interview in August 2007, a couple of months before the GABF, Michael Jackson said one of his motives for writing so extensively about beer when no one else was doing so was to preserve “threatened traditions.” Had he lived to read Bilger's article, to scroll through the tweets, to amble again amid the GABF or any number of other beer festivals every year, to peruse the forums of RateBeer and BeerAdvocate, to see the passion in the converts and the confidence in the veterans, he would have surely been pleased that America's beer traditions were far from threatened anymore. Instead, they represented a major culinary achievement that was now an undeniable part of the nation's popular culture. Still, the movement that Jackson had so inspired had seen its ups before—and its downs. As Bilger's article noted:

For all its success, craft beer has yet to reach the mainstream. Ninety-six percent of the market—about sixty-seven billion bottles a year—still belongs to non-craft beers and imports. Oliver remembers talking to a brewer at Anheuser-Busch a few years ago, when sales of Michelob had fallen to about a third of a billion bottles a year. “He told me, ‘I wish that brand would just die.' And that one beer was the size of the entire American craft-brewing industry.”

*
Answers: C; true; C. These were examples of questions that might be on the certified beer server test, although not necessarily questions that did appear on the test.

O
ne July evening in 2009,
in Harris's Restaurant at Van Ness and Pacific Avenues in San Francisco's Nob Hill, five men sat down to gin martinis and medium-rare steaks. Two of the men were there to discuss an idea with the other three, the oldest of whom was just past seventy and looked as if he'd stepped from a casting call for a Great Plains patriarch.

Fritz Maytag knew Keith Greggor and Tony Foglio from their reputations in the liquor trade. The pair had met at International Distillers and Vintners, the precursor to Diageo, the alcohol beverage behemoth that would come to control brands like Guinness, Smirnoff, Johnnie Walker, and Captain Morgan; Greggor and Foglio were no slouches themselves while at IDV, overseeing
the sales and marketing of brands like Baileys, Jose Cuervo, Smirnoff again, and Bombay from a high perch at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan (and, later, from across the Hudson River in New Jersey). The pair truly made their reputations after taking over Skyy Spirits in 1998, growing it over eight years into several flavored iterations of the eponymous vodka brand as well as the US distributor of labels like Cutty Sark and Campari (its Milan-based corporate parent beginning in 2002). In 2007, the pair sold their Skyy interests to Campari, and Greggor left to start the Griffin Group, a boutique concern that would look for ways to invest in the various drinks industries; Foglio followed him in 2008. The new group was based in Novato, in the San Francisco Bay Area, where both men had relocated in the late 1990s.