The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (6 page)

M
ichael Lewis was abundantly aware that,
in 1970, he was one of a kind in the United States: its sole full professor of brewing science. And he was further aware that the four-year degree program in brewing that he was helping craft at the University of California, Davis would be unique as well. The decade before had been a fortuitous one for the English transplant, one of
happy accidents and potential realized. And it all started with a terrible time in Buffalo, New York.

Lewis, a witty Brit with a ready grin, fresh from finishing his PhD in microbiology and biochemistry at the University of Birmingham in central England, arrived in Buffalo in 1960 to discover not only for the first time in his life apocalyptic winters, but also that the facility where he was to work had burned down. It set the tone for an unfulfilling couple of years, punctuated by feelers to potential employers. He wrote, for instance, to Herman J. Phaff, a food sciences professor at UC-Davis and a world-renowned pioneer in wine yeasts. At that time, Phaff replied that he had nothing for the twenty-something researcher. But before he was to leave Buffalo for England, Lewis wrote him one more time, and Phaff replied in March 1962 that he had just gotten a grant from the brewing industry and Lewis's background was perfect for it; he should come to California and do a postdoctorate. The next month, Lewis and his wife piled their belongings (including a cat they had rescued) into their Simca, the French compact he had bought brand-new for twelve hundred dollars, and drove into New Jersey; then they turned westward along what would become Interstate 80 but which was then Route 40. The car broke down twice, including an unplanned three-day sojourn in Wyoming during inhospitably cold weather, before the couple reached the Rockies and began to crest toward a California that was itself rapidly changing.

The state had grown steadily since the turn of the century, but its population really began to boom during the Great Depression as downtrodden Americans, like those depicted in John Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath,
headed westward in search of work, California as much an idea of opportunity as a reality. Then manufacturing jobs spiked during World War II, with factories for munitions and other wartime necessities like aircraft swelling the population even more; from 1940 through 1960, California added more than nine million residents and in 1963 displaced New York as America's most populous state. With the new residents arrived a stereotype of an entire California lifestyle, one of leisure buoyed by stable jobs in growing industries, rapid housing development, perpetually sunny beaches, Disneyland, fast cars on clean new highways, and a feeling of boundary-pushing that one could not expect on the older East Coast, certainly not in Buffalo, New York. The very symbol of soaring twentieth-century commerce, the airplane found its perfect environment in California; the state's wide-open vistas and benign weather made it the perfect place to build and test them. By 1935, Boeing was the only airplane manufacturer on earth without a California address.

For California's newest resident, the descent through the Sierra Nevada Mountains into the central valley was like entering Eden. Lewis saw palm
and grapefruit trees, and the job under Phaff at UC-Davis promised research opportunities that he knew could not be had elsewhere in the United States. He turned out to be right. In 1964, he developed the university's first brewing classes and research program. By 1970, Lewis, then barely out of his twenties, and a faculty colleague, wine-chemistry expert Vernon Singleton, were charged by Chancellor James Meyer to craft what would become the nation's first bachelor's degree in fermentation science, with concentrations in wine making and brewing—and he would become America's only professor of brewing sciences for the next two decades. Lewis and other faculty culled the beer-concentration curriculum from existing courses on oenology and food microbiology. They added to these classes standard-fare scientific vertebrae like physics, chemistry, engineering and mathematics, which, along with courses in business, formed a strong but flexible backbone for what would become a phalanx of American brewers over the next forty years. Before the UC-Davis program, if an American brewer (as opposed to, say, a Belgian or a German one imported for his expertise) said he went to brewing school in the States, it invariably meant he had taken classes at the venerable Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago. Now, with the first BS degrees in fermentation science offered in 1971, American brewing expertise was beginning to be redefined. UC-Davis alumni set out for jobs in Big Beer—the only game in town, save for Anchor, seventy-five miles to the southwest on I-80. And, more important for our story, the university's brewing research served as a beacon for entrepreneurs. In fact, in 1974 Michael Lewis would sit down with a Navy veteran in his late twenties who told him he planned to open his own brewery in an old warehouse nearby. Could Lewis direct him to some research on the subject?

Before Jack McAuliffe paid that visit, though, a chance order at a dinner in Munich on the other side of the world would profoundly alter the beer world's chemistry and make efforts like his and those of Fritz Maytag all the more difficult. Craft beer as a movement in America remained, for the time, largely academic.

M
ark Carpenter needed a change
—or at least a place to work where he could figure out what that change should be. A tall, lanky native San Franciscan
in his early twenties with a heavy beard, he knew the telephone company, where he was working, was not such a place. What about that brewery on Eighth Street? He and some friends had toured it earlier in 1971—almost entirely for the free beer at the end—and Carpenter thought that might be just the spot, and an interesting one at that. He went there one day in September and told the office manager he was looking for a job. She found Fritz Maytag, who happened to be there that day and not out on sales calls or traveling for research. He and Maytag talked; Maytag introduced him to Gordon MacDermott, a 1968 Anchor hire who then ran the brewery's day-to-day operations. Carpenter, a restless soul when he entered the brewery that day, left with a positive feeling. He knew he had nailed it; he knew he had the job. He did. The brewery called him, and he started work on September 30.

The Anchor that Carpenter stepped into was in transition. By February 1969, Maytag had bought out the “pipe-smoking dreamer” Lawrence Steese and was the brewery's sole owner. It seemed to be perpetually stuck in start-up mode, however, producing with a crew of five or fewer employees, including Maytag, about a thousand barrels of draft beer a year via a fifty-seven-barrel system (keep in mind that in 1970, Anheuser-Busch, the nation's biggest brewer, opened in Merrimack, New Hampshire, what was the state's first brewery since 1950, with an annual capacity of 1.8 million barrels). One thousand barrels a year meant actually brewing only about once a month; the other days were spent on other chores, like cleaning and repairing the brew-house. With its one pump, copper kettles, and nearly constant need of maintenance, it resembled a nineteenth-century operation more than the sleeker engineering triumphs of Big Beer embodied in that Merrimack plant (in fact, it had no refrigeration or stainless-steel pipes or tanks when Maytag first bought it). It was, according to one visitor on the tours that Maytag would personally lead, “a crude and primitive, old brewery.”

Another big chore was distribution, which was handled entirely by the brewery itself, Maytag and his crew schlepping kegs to enthusiastic—also often simply sympathetic—local establishments. It was a great place, Carpenter thought, for a brewing novice to learn every aspect of the trade. But it did not make for a stable business model. Six years after Maytag's purchase, Anchor was still just getting by and not turning a profit, a pioneer in unwelcoming lands. Decisions had to be made.

The first decision came in early 1971: Anchor would become the first craft brewery since Prohibition to bottle its beer for sale. In retrospect it was an inevitable move. Unlike today, when bars in cities the size of San Francisco might sport dozens of tap handles, most bars then had one or two taps apiece. It was precious real estate, and not given over readily to some micro-brand
out of SoMa; indeed, most of Anchor's local accounts were in counterculture redoubts like the Old Spaghetti Factory and Perry's restaurant, places that, like the brewery, swam against the dominant stream, or in smaller eateries like the deli Tommy's Joynt. Had Maytag not decided then to bottle, Anchor may never have emerged beyond a curiosity; as it went, the decision proved another pioneering move, allowing the nation's only craft brewery to enter the ebb and flow of the beer industry's regnant distribution trend, however at a trickle. Big Beer, as we've noted, had embraced packaging so fervently following the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 that by 1970 more than 85 percent of beer in the United States was sold through bottles and cans at retailers. This was partly due to the myriad legislative roadblocks that cities, counties, and states threw up post-Prohibition to discourage communal drinking (obtaining liquor licenses in large cities like Los Angeles and New York remains a laborious process full of public hearings and form-filling). It was also partly due to the unrolling Interstate Highway System, which sped up the transportation of beer that could now be sealed completely thanks to the growth of aluminum cans.

Fritz Maytag inspects a kettle at the old Anchor Brewery on Eighth Street in San Francisco.
COURTESY OF ANCHOR BREWING COMPANY

And it was due to the expanded productivity capabilities of Big Beer, buoyed as they were by cheaper ingredients like rice and corn, and the economies of scale that were increasingly possible as consolidation gobbled up more small players. That new Anheuser-Busch brewery in Merrimack, for instance, would be able to produce eight million twelve-ounce bottles in twenty-four
hours in a one million-square-foot facility spread over 294 acres. The same year the Merrimack brewery opened, Schlitz, the second-biggest US beer producer, unveiled a plant in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, that covered thirty-four acres
under one
roof—about thirty-one football fields, the largest ground-up brewery in history, capable of four million barrels annually (or roughly 1.3 billion bottles). It worked so efficiently that by 1973 Schlitz could close its Brooklyn plant; it was cheaper just to brew in Winston-Salem and ship the bottles 564 miles northward for production.

Finally, American consumption habits were changing along with the American home and landscape. New-home construction was on its way to a postwar peak in the early 1970s as suburban developments spilled across the map, whole communities springing up in isolation from city centers, the distance to commercial and retail destinations covered with ever more automobiles as Americans ambled to favorite spots less and less. In 1973, American factories turned out 9.6 million new cars, the most ever. Once home from their car trips, Americans were gathering not as much around the dinner table but around something else: the television. In 1969, a record 13.3 million television sets were sold in the United States; more than sixty million households (out of sixty-three million total) owned at least one. Other appliances were becoming more ubiquitous as well; sales of the countertop microwave, born of World War II radar research and introduced by Raytheon in 1967, would outpace those of the gas range stovetop by 1975. And it had epochal company: Swanson introduced the first “TV dinners” in 1954. The plastic-wrapped meals-in-minutes could be consumed in front of the small screen's inviting glow, perhaps a can of Schlitz beside them, both picked up at the same store during the car commute home. And, no matter the living room's location, be it in Buffalo or San Francisco or thousands of points in between, the tastes of the food and the beer would be identical.

It was into this America that the first two hundred cases of Anchor rolled on April 23, 1971. The bottles clattered off a line, set up just off the first-floor taproom, that could turn out seventy-four bottles per minute if everything went right. It turned out 256,080 bottles that first year, or 10,670 cases. And the bottles went largely to the same local accounts as the kegs of draft beer—though one account was as far afield as the No Name Bar in Sausalito, nine miles away. The bottles were originally loaded and delivered by Maytag and his crew. It just made economic sense. “I need the markup for myself,” Maytag told Don Saccani, a Sacramento native turned distributor out of San Rafael, just north of San Francisco, who had been asking him for Anchor's business. “I've calculated it over and over, and I have to have that markup. We're very small, and we're going to have to continue to deliver our beer ourselves.” Then
Maytag's driver quit in the summer of 1971, only months after the pivotal bottling decision. He found himself behind the wheel of the delivery truck in San Francisco one afternoon not long after with dozens of things on his mind—and dozens of bottles of beer to deliver. Maytag called Saccani.