Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (37 page)

What he’d gotten himself was a dilapidated operation that turned out about six hundred barrels of beer a year—a brewery about the size, in other words, of Phillip Best’s 1844 brewhouse in Milwaukee. The equipment was crude, to say the least, and mostly hammered together by a sheet-metal worker. Refrigeration was nonexistent; the tanks were steel and lined, as near as the new owner could tell, with varnish; and the whole place was, to put it charitably, less than clean. That’s what Fritz Maytag had bought—that and a pile of debts.

Steese manned the brewvat, so Maytag appointed himself head salesman. Over the next few months he trudged the streets of San Francisco, trying to persuade restaurant, shop, and tavern owners to carry the beer, a task as uphill as the city’s terrain. Many people refused to believe it existed, explaining, as if to the village idiot, that Anchor had long ago shut its doors. No, Maytag would counter, Steam Beer Brewing and Anchor were very much alive and he was the owner. “No, no,” people would say. “That brewery’s gone, they closed years ago.” “They thought,” an amused Maytag recollected, “I was some kind of weirdo, a psychopath or something, pretending I owned a brewery.”

That was not as bad as what happened when people remembered Anchor. One day Maytag stopped by Schroeder’s, a decades-old German restaurant located on Front Street, and launched into his spiel. A bellow emanating from overhead interrupted him. It belonged to the restaurant’s owner, who leaned over a balcony railing and announced, in a voice that oozed its German origins, “Ja, I know your beer. It is horrible. It is sour. It is terrible beer. I will never serve that beer here.” Maytag retreated, “tail between [his] legs.”

The rebuff marked a pivotal moment. There was no point in tromping from one bar to another trying to sell the unsalable. It was time to get serious about the beer or get out of the business. Maytag had long been fascinated with science; he’d owned a microscope since boyhood. This was a challenge he understood. He cleared a small area on the brewing floor, hung a shower curtain around a desk to keep out the malt dust, installed his microscope, hunted down some books, and set to work educating himself in the mystery and science of brewing.

Night after night, Maytag stayed up reading, turning his copy of Jean de Clerc’s brewing text, his “bible,” he called it, into a tattered, dog-eared rag. He got help from a guardian angel in the form of John Borger, a retired brewing-supplies salesman who showered Maytag with advice and encouragement. He joined the Brewers Association of America. Bill Leinenkugel, a long-time BAA member, remembered him as “very, very quiet” at those first few meetings, due in large part to the fact that Maytag “listened like mad” to the goings-on, anxious to soak up any wisdom that flowed his way.

Some BAA members dismissed the newcomer as a rich kid with a new plaything but all of them tasted his beer, which, per BAA tradition, Maytag shipped to the meeting so the conventioneers could drink it. In the case of Anchor, the other brewers sipped—and then stashed the bottles out of sight, unable to finish the contents because Anchor was so bad. Still, Leinenkugel understood that Maytag was sincerely trying to learn, and was working as hard as, if not harder than, any man in the industry. Maytag, in turn, admired the other members’ family histories, in which he found echoes of his own family’s entrepreneurial past. After a few meetings, he even felt a bit sorry for them. None tended their own vats—they left that to hired brewmasters—and their modern equipment tied them to one or two types of beer. Maytag realized that his tiny, beat-up shop bestowed a kind of freedom on his work. He could make any beer that he wanted to.

But first he had to learn how. In late 1966, he flew to the east coast to attend a two-week seminar sponsored by the United States Brewers’ Academy, where he and two dozen other young men learned “everything from enzymes to how to drive a forklift.” Maytag sat next to Dick Yuengling, Jr., there to learn the business so he could take his place at his family’s brewery. Yuengling told Maytag that his family was struggling. Times were tough for a small brewer, he lamented. How small? asked Maytag. Fifty thousand barrels a year, Yuengling replied. Maytag gazed at the other man a few seconds, and then said: “Well, try five thousand barrels.”

On the way back to California, Maytag stopped in Chicago at Sieben’s Brewery Company, which was about to close its doors. Just a few years earlier, president Joseph Sieben had told a reporter that, yes, lacking the “cash surpluses and advertising” of the big brewers, he was having a “rough time.” Still, he insisted, he could “hold his own” as long as Chicagoans kept coming to his beer garden for lager and “3-inch-thick ham-and-cheese sandwiches.” Sieben’s optimism was misplaced. The good people of Chicago didn’t need Sieben’s quaint beer garden located in a deteriorating neighborhood on Chicago’s near north side, not when they could head to the chic Old Town neighborhood and sip a nationally advertised beer at the Bratskeller, a “mock-Bavarian” restaurant complete with “black-bread sandwiches ‘mit kraut,’ and candlelight.” By late 1966, Sieben was ready to call it quits. Sieben’s loss was Anchor’s gain. Maytag bought the brewery’s bottling line and hauled it to San Francisco.

It’s not clear if either man recognized the irony of the transaction: Sieben, unable to compete against the relentless onslaught of Anheuser-Busch and Schlitz, closing his doors, and Maytag, fired by near-obsessive determination and oblivious to industry bankruptcies and bloodshed, opening his.

Back home, Maytag realized that he and Steese were a poor match for the enterprise. Steese was happy to “smoke a pipe, let nature take its course.” Maytag was more ambitious: he wanted “to make the best beer in the world.” By 1968 the business was sliding toward bankruptcy, and it might have failed completely had Steese not decided, in the waning weeks of that year, to sell his 49 percent to Maytag.

In early 1969, Fritz Maytag became sole owner, president, and brewmaster of the tiny shop on Eighth Street. His assets consisted of truly awful beer with an even worse reputation; a collection of nearly unusable equipment; an outmoded bottling line; a hardworking helper in the person of Gordon McDermott; and a guy who drove the delivery truck. Another man might have given up, but Maytag possessed ambition, stamina, a nose for gustatory trends, and shrewd entrepreneurial instincts. He set to his task, more determined than ever to make if not his fortune, at least a product that would bring honor to the Maytag name, as cheese and washing machines had in years gone by.

That vow to succeed opened his eyes to possibility. Looking around San Francisco, watching his friends order drinks during evenings out, Maytag noticed that many people were drinking expensive imported beers that cost even more than the highest-priced domestics. Maytag coupled that observation with another fact: He was not and never could compete with, say, Anheuser Busch. He would never be able to brew more than a few thousand barrels of beer each year. The economies of scale that drove the giants would forever elude him. If he hoped to turn a profit, he would have to aim for that thin but discriminating slice of the market now owned by the pricey imports.

The rest of his strategy followed from those two facts. He would brew with high-quality, two-row barley imported from Europe, and he would use whole hops rather than hop extracts. He opted for flash pasteurization, which subjected the beer to fifteen seconds of heat rather than the fifteen minutes demanded by conventional heat sterilization. As for marketing, there was none except an idea: Anchor was an old-fashioned beer, pure of heart and grain. Maytag reinforced that image on the beer’s label, with its hand-lettered look and a neckband that affirmed the brewery’s “exceptional respect for the ancient art of brewing.”

Put another way, Maytag grasped what was lost on mainstream brewing: Out there was an audience eager for authenticity. Out there, the same people glued to Julia Child’s cooking show, which aired on more than one hundred television stations, and buying European cheeses, were ready for a new kind of beer. More important, his willingness to act on that belief signaled a transformative moment in American brewing. He would inspire a new generation of brewmasters, but his example also served as a beacon for his fellow BAA members, many of whom had despaired at being able to reverse a tide that once seemed inexorable.

In later years, some of the microbrewers who followed in Maytag’s path argued that he succeeded only because his personal wealth erased the red ink that otherwise would have drowned his venture. And even Maytag admitted that, denied conventional financing, he sometimes drew on his own resources to pay the bills. But a focus on Maytag’s name and inheritance obscures the brewer’s prescience. The signs were everywhere for those who took the time to look.

C
ONSIDER THE WORDS
of Mike Royko, a Chicagoan whose syndicated column appeared in hundreds of newspapers and was read by millions of people. In May 1973, Royko informed his readers that he hated big beer. “I have tried them all,” he wrote. “I’ve grabbed for all the gusto I can get. I’ve said it all when I’ve said Bud.” But “regardless of what label or slogan you choose,” he complained, “it all tastes as if the secret brewing process involved running it through a horse.”

The column hit a large, sensitive nerve. Some readers castigated Royko for criticizing the national drink. In a beery version of “Love it or leave it,” one writer instructed him to “Go to hell, if you don’t like this country’s beer. Maybe you’ll like what you are served there.” But others, sensing a kindred spirit, bombarded Royko with names of excellent but lesser-known local beers and of imported brews that put the Big Brands to shame.

Royko weighed the mixed responses and decided that, indeed, perhaps his opinion carried little weight. He would solicit others. In July, he organized a panel of eleven men and women for a blind taste test of twenty-two beers, including imports, the major American names, and lesser-known brands from tiny breweries such as Stevens Point, Huber, and Pickett.

The results surprised even Royko. The top three beers, in order from first to third, were Würzberger, a German brew; English Bass Ale; and Point Special from Stevens Point, Wisconsin, brewed by a tiny outfit whose owners sold their annual output—a mere thirty thousand barrels—within a seventy-five-mile radius of home. The bottom three? Old Milwaukee, made by Schlitz, as well as that company’s flagship brand Schlitz, and, dead last with only thirteen points out of a possible fifty-five, Budweiser.

Royko fired another salvo six months later when he used his column to broadcast the contents of a pamphlet titled
The Chemical Additives in Booze,
a mishmash of pseudo-science, innuendo, and half-truths penned by Michael Jacobson, a microbiologist who had spent the 1960s working for Ralph Nader, the gadfly lawyer who fashioned a career as a consumer advocate. In 1971, Jacobson left Nader to launch the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a group devoted to informing consumers and harassing purveyors of food and drink. The CSPI, he would say later, “is proud about finding something wrong with practically everything.”

Jacobson charged big brewers with conducting “slick, multimillion dollar advertising campaigns” that promoted an “image of near holiness and purity.” Beware, he warned. In reality, their beers were life-threatening thanks to the brewers’ practice of lacing their “booze,” as Jacobson called it, with additives. These included gum arabic, seaweed extract, caramel, enzymes, and asorbic acid (vitamin C). Beermakers, he explained, were not required to list said additives on their labels, so consumers placed their lives in danger every time they sipped one of these toxin-laced poisons.

Jacobson was correct that most brewers employed some or many additives. Most also had no choice: Competition demanded lower prices, and the only way to cut price was by reducing production costs, shortening lagering time, or using hop extract instead of whole hops. Long-distance shipping demanded that a beer’s shelf life be lengthened with stabilizers that prevented haze from forming. Last, consumers’ preference for ultra-pale, ultrabland beer resulted in brews that could not generate, let alone hold, a foamy head the way an all-malt beer could. Seaweed extract—propylene glycol alginate—to the rescue.

None of these additives was dangerous; most had been in use for decades, in many cases even before Prohibition. But only the most careful reader would glean that fact, or notice that Jacobson merely
suggested
that brewers employed such additives rather than offering proof that they did so. Nor did he provide evidence that these ingredients were or could be toxic. He also failed to support his most outrageous assertion: that brewers filtered their beers through asbestos.

“At least with a horse, we’d know what we’re getting,” Royko wrote after reading Jacobson’s pamphlet. “When you pop the top of your favorite brew, for all you know there might be any of 59 chemicals or other additives that are permitted by law.” Even if the additives were safe, he added, “it just doesn’t seem right for a man to belly up to a bar and ask for a beer without knowing he is also getting some alginate. If I want a belt of alginate, I’ll ask for it.”

In another time, Royko might have ignored Jacobson’s crackpot science. But in the early 1970s, the chemicals-are-bad message cruised straight into the hearts and minds of consumers rattled by other bad news about the environment and their food. Jacobson’s pamphlet appeared just as the newly created Environmental Protection Agency banned the domestic use of DDT, a long-controversial pesticide, and as the Food and Drug Administration warned consumers about the dangers of mercury in tuna, violet food coloring, kepone in fish, and diethylstilbestrol in cattle feed. A former staff scientist at the FDA published
Eating May Be Hazardous to Your Health: How Your Government Fails to Protect You From the Dangers in Your Food,
with chapter titles like “Poisoned by Accident: Incidental Additives” and “Cancer in Hot Dogs, Ham, Bacon . . . ” It was all too easy for a public already unnerved by toxic food, oil slicks, killer canals, and other environmental dangers to take Jacobson’s rant at face value. Moreover, his pamphlet revived an old headline: Back in 1965, more than three dozen people died after drinking beer brewed with a cobalt-based foam stabilizer. All of them were heavy drinkers, a factor that contributed to their deaths. Most were Canadian, but a handful of Americans died, too, after downing beer from a small brewery in Omaha. The news made headlines around the country and cast a bad light on all brewers even though scarcely any American beer-makers used that particular stabilizer.