The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (9 page)

Maytag found the hop he would use via a friend from his early ownership of Anchor in the 1960s. John Segal was a second-generation hop farmer with land in Upstate New York as well as the Yakima Valley of Washington. Segal's father, George, discovered hops while selling cheese door-to-door in the 1920s, during Prohibition. Hops then were available through retailers, including candy stores—ostensibly for brewing tea. George learned the hops
trade from one of his customers, and for a time he had a sales office across from Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal, complete with a walk-in refrigeration room for storing and showcasing varieties. George's son developed a reputation in the industry as someone willing to take risks in the pursuit of new varieties of hops for the marketplace. And it was a risk: for every new variety of hop that made it into a commercial beer, there were several, perhaps dozens, that flopped in the experimental phases.

One of John Segal's Oregon contacts, a USDA researcher named Chuck Zimmermann, who would help create some of the world's most used hop varieties, was growing just such an experimental strand—known at that point only as “56013”—at the USDA's Corvallis, Oregon, hop-breeding farm overseen by Alfred Haunold, himself a major force in hops cultivation. On a 1968 visit to the farm, Zimmermann showed Segal 56013, which was born in 1956 of a lineage that included Russian and English hops. Segal rubbed it between his fingers and liked what he felt; he took some roots back to his Yakima Valley farm for cultivation. Coors had already approached Segal about using an American-made hop for aroma because of concerns about pesticides in European hops and a blight that hit Central European yields in the late 1960s. The farmer suggested 56013. In 1972, Coors brewed a test batch and liked it; the brewer bought Cascades at one dollar a pound, a half to one-third more than what other hops commanded. The exact origins of the name remain unknown (maybe it had to do with the Oregon mountain range), but the Cascade hop as a going concern was born. It was the first widely used, American-made aroma hop and the first hop variety from the USDA's hop research program to be OK'd for sale since Prohibition. Its scent would help define American craft beer.

The first craft beer to use it was what Maytag decided to call Liberty Ale in honor of Paul Revere's ride. It was bitterer than any domestic beer on the market and more robust in flavor than even many imports, especially the German and Czech pilsners that had come to be the rubric for Big Beer. The recipe would evolve over time, and Anchor did not have the capacity to brew it regularly; but that original Liberty Ale was several times the bitterness of the new Miller Lite (the current iteration is forty IBUs). It also had that citrusy, floral aroma provided by the unfamiliar Cascade hops, and it could be drunk by the session, as the industry parlance goes. At just under 6 percent alcohol by volume, a drinker could tipple more than one Liberty Ale in a sitting and still merely get, as Charlie Papazian had realized of homebrew a couple of years before, happy and not stupid. Most consequently, by being bitterer than most but not
too
bitter, Liberty Ale straddled a coming divide in craft beer. On one
side would be the pale ales that the brewery's signature steam beer was more akin to; on the other would be India pale ales (IPAs).

The IPA style, like Anchor Steam itself, has various creation myths, ranging from a single East London brewer named George Hodgson to a recollection that British beers sent to colonial India were dosed with high amounts of hops to preserve them for the long sea voyage to simply a savvy marketing ploy from the mid-nineteenth century. Whatever the origin, IPAs came to be defined as the hoppier, and therefore bitterer, kin of pale ale. And there stood Anchor's Liberty Ale, starting with the first bottles on June 26, at the root of the coming division, a common ancestor to how both styles would be interpreted by American brewers and how those interpretations would change brewing. Liberty Ale's debut was an Event in culinary America, one that would spawn not only thousands of pretenders and usurpers but also a vocabulary (hoppiest, hoppier, hoppy, hophead), wider interest in hops and their role in brewing (and American agriculture), and a palatal pivot that would see thousands, millions, of Americans embracing bitterness over sweetness in their favored drinks. Liberty Ale would become quite possibly the most important beer of the late twentieth century.

No one cared. Or at least no one outside of Anchor's still small orbit of two-hundred-case bottle runs and restaurant keg deliveries. There were no mentions of Liberty Ale in the media—no reviews, no stories on the rollout, the backstory, the commercial risk, the pioneer move (Maytag didn't think much of the beer himself; he had to be persuaded to release it). Sales were always modest—the June 26, 1975, bottling produced 530 cases. What had been born Liberty Ale remained on the market as “Our Special Ale,” until it reemerged as Liberty Ale again in the summer of 1983.
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On the other hand, more than seventy million cases of Miller Lite would hit the market in 1976, its first full year of sales. Still, something had happened. Mark Carpenter traveled to Europe decades after Liberty Ale's debut. He noticed something curious in the Belgian, Dutch, and French ales he encountered: they were using Cascade hops just like so many beers back home, where they were born.

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Modern craft beers, particularly India pale ales, might average at least two pounds of hops per barrel.

*
The current iteration of Liberty Ale was reintroduced in July 1983 through 2,920 cases (per Dave Burkhart at Anchor).

T
here was a knock
on the brewery door. Jack McAuliffe answered it.

“I've heard of this place,” the knocker told him, “can I just look around?”

“Fuck no,” McAuliffe replied, his blue eyes running cold, the square jaw clenching that much tighter. “I'm busy, get out of here!”

McAuliffe was not to be trifled with at his brewery, and that included the pilgrims who often showed up with little notice. Normally, if they called ahead, he was happy to oblige. He would personally give tours of the old fruit warehouse off Eighth Street East in rural Sonoma, California,
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the first start-up craft brewery in the United States since Prohibition, charging the visitors at the end for the samples of stout, pale ale, and porter; but the trickle had lately broken into a steady stream.

People were showing up so often and without warning that McAuliffe had taken to turning visitors away, sometimes brusquely. He and his skeleton crew needed to focus on brewing and distribution. The New Albion Brewing Company was growing.

It had started modestly enough, without any thunderclap of recognition of its importance to American culinary history, even by its founder. McAuliffe had left the Navy in 1968, settling in San Francisco, where he had done his training on Treasure Island. He studied physics on the GI Bill at California State in Hayward, and worked as an electrical technician and an optical engineer. Through it all, McAuliffe kept homebrewing. He had hauled bottles, bottle tops, some ingredients, and homebrewing books back from Scotland; he found additional supplies at wine-making shops in the Bay Area. The situation was just as he had predicted in that Boots in Glasgow in 1966: if he was going to have the sorts of beers he had discovered in Europe, he was going to have to make them himself. There were imports on the shelves—sales nationally had jumped sevenfold in the early 1970s—but six-packs were one dollar
to two dollars more expensive than those of the giant domestics; and, for all their growth, imports still represented an infinitesimal slice of the American market.

Plus, some were not imports at all: European-sounding brands like Andeker, Lowenbrau, and Michelob were brewed by Pabst, Miller, and Anheuser-Busch, respectively, part of Big Beer's “super premium” push meant to capture a more discerning consumer. The super premium push even led to a lawsuit over alleged deceptive advertising because a Chicagoan thought he was plunking down an extra couple of bucks for beer brewed in Munich, not Milwaukee. If we were to behold a typical American grocery store's beer section, circa 1975, we would find that roughly 80 percent of the packaging staring back would be from the nation's top ten breweries; another 2 percent, at most, would come from Canadian or European brands; and the rest from the remaining one hundred or so breweries left in the United States. One of those, of course, was Anchor. It was after a tour of Anchor that McAuliffe got his idea: he would cobble together some money and some material, and start a brewery of his own (and he, too, would use the new Cascade hops).

Why in Sonoma, in the heart of what was rapidly becoming California wine country? McAuliffe had moved there to help a friend construct a custom-built house; he worked as a tradesman, doing electrical wiring, welding, sewage—skills he had started learning at Clay's welding shop in Fairfax County, Virginia. There was another reason, too, and it would grow in significance as the movement that McAuliffe helped launch grew.

Alice Waters had relocated to the Bay Area in the 1960s from East Orange, New Jersey, to attend the University of California at Berkeley. She studied abroad in France and, more than anything, absorbed its food—genuine crepes, Belon oysters, the hard ciders of Normandy—and the culture surrounding it. That culture was moored in the fact that the French took their time cooking; they used local ingredients whenever they could and prepared simple yet pleasantly robust meals. More important, they lingered over their repasts, elevating eating and drinking beyond the utilitarianism it was fast becoming in America. Food in France was slow. Waters took these lessons back to a Berkeley that, in her estimation, did not have any fine restaurants. In 1971, she opened Chez Panisse in an old house on Shattuck Avenue. The restaurant quickly gained a game-changing reputation for slowly prepared, simple French meals culled as much as possible from local ingredients. Francis Ford Coppola, Danny Kaye, and Mikhail Baryshnikov were regulars. The
New York Times
declared Waters “a chef of international repute” whose “cunningly designed, somewhat raffish establishment” was unique in the West. Even the
French sang hosannas. Christian Millau, a food critic famous for his guides to Parisian restaurants, took particular note of Waters's use of “good and beautiful products of her native land.” McAuliffe knew of Waters's restaurant. He also knew of the Marin French Cheese Company in nearby Petaluma, the oldest cheese manufacturer in the United States, which specialized in French cheeses made with Northern California ingredients. And, of course, McAuliffe knew of the burgeoning wine industry in the area, itself a challenge to the French and to other Europeans.

McAuliffe realized he might just happen to be in the right place at the right time, and he shared with anybody who would listen the revelation he'd had during the Anchor tour. One of those people was Suzy Stern, a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, native who had driven west from Chicago with her three kids and their dog in a Dodge van for a fresh start; her son had gotten into Stanford, and Sonoma—California in general—seemed as good an option as any in America. Stern had already led a geographically varied life: college at Vassar in upstate New York; work as a United Nations interpreter on Manhattan's East Side; then Chicago; and now Sonoma, where she went back to school at Sonoma State to study music. A friend she met through a local food co-op introduced her to McAuliffe, and Stern became only the latest person in the town of barely five thousand to hear about the shaggy-haired thirty-one-year-old's dream for a start-up craft brewery.

Stern knew little about beer and nothing about brewing. But she was in because it seemed like an interesting idea, and McAuliffe, with his combination of bravado and technical know-how, seemed like just the guy to pull it off. Stern and a friend of hers—Jane Zimmerman, who was then the wife of Stern's friend from the co-op—became New Albion's original outside investors. (The two put up $1,200 each, and Jack raised the rest of the $5,000 in seed money; Stern also suspected that McAuliffe appreciated the utilitarianism of her Dodge van.) Zimmerman was on a path toward becoming a successful therapist, and Stern was still studying music; both would take a crash course in brewing from McAuliffe, the ex-nuclear submarine mechanic turned optical engineer turned contractor. This unlikely trio would, in their happenstance way, create a model for future craft beer entrepreneurs, which advised, “Your background in brewing or your knowledge of beer does not matter; what matters is your drive and determination.”

They had both in spades, McAuliffe especially. After completing an onerous approval process with the county—which often referred to New Albion as a “winery” on official forms (what bureaucrat had ever heard of a startup brewery?)—in the fall of 1976 McAuliffe found part of a corrugated-steel
warehouse to rent on a ranch owned by the Batto Fruit Company, a large local landowner known mostly for harvesting grapes. The warehouse was at least a mile from downtown Sonoma in a remote industrial spot shaded on the west by towering eucalyptus trees, with direct sunlight from the south and east; the North Coast Mountains could be seen in the distance. The permits and the real estate out of the way, McAuliffe concentrated on a name and some know-how.