Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (41 page)

McAuliffe savored the local ales, porters, and stouts, which were unlike anything he’d tasted before and a universe away from the pale lagers he knew in America. The only drawback in this otherwise blissful revelation was that the ale he most enjoyed was a local brew firmly attached to a town far from Holy Loch. Jack knew nothing about brewing but he was mechanically adept, in possession of more than ordinary common sense and intelligence, and open to new ideas. If he could repair nuclear submarines, he could figure out how to make ale.

Homebrewing catapulted McAuliffe’s understanding of beer’s complexities and potential into a new universe. Over the next two years he brewed regularly and read everything he could find on beer and beermaking. He bought a motorcycle and spent a month’s leave touring western and northern Europe, expanding his zymotechnic horizons.

When McAuliffe’s tour of duty ended in 1968, he headed back to the United States and college. He graduated in 1971 and took a job as an optical engineer with a firm in Sunnyvale in California’s South Bay. But he spent his free time devouring the knowledge needed to build and operate a brewery. He visited Wine and the People in Berkeley and Michael Lewis at Davis. McAuliffe told the professor he planned to start a brewery. Lewis was, understandably, skeptical—but not for long. He recognized that McAuliffe was “very smart” and had presented a “complete story” about why he wanted to found a brewery and how he planned to do it. The university owns an extensive collection of brewing books and magazines, Lewis told McAuliffe, advising him to study them and let him know what else he could do to help.

McAuliffe pored over the materials in the Davis library, especially the nineteenth-century texts and read Pasteur and works on microbiology. He taught himself basic accounting. He found copies of
Brewers Digest
and studied the ads, hunting for suppliers and equipment, although when he called them for information, they “acted like he was from Mars.” Never mind. McAuliffe had served a two-year apprenticeship at a welding shop during high school. He would build what he needed, using the beer books for ideas and inspiration.

He nosed about his San Francisco friends and acquaintances, hunting for adventurers willing to invest in what he proposed to call the Barbary Coast Brewing Company. There were no takers, and San Francisco real estate was too expensive for McAuliffe to act on his own. Sonoma, forty miles north, was another story. Rents were cheaper there, and the town offered something more. In the 1970s, Sonoma inspired offbeat ventures and gustatory passion. The area’s burgeoning wine industry pulsated with the energy of its own renaissance. A new generation of chefs had converged on the area, influenced by Alice Waters and anxious to employ local wines as a springboard for a new kind of American cuisine. The town contained an artisanal bakery and shops selling superb local cheese. A man who had studied sausage-making in Germany introduced locals to charcuterie elevated many notches above American hot dogs. This, McAuliffe decided, was the kind of place and these were the kinds of people who would support quality beer.

In 1975, McAuliffe quit his job and rented a piece of property three miles southeast of Sonoma. Eucalyptus trees shaded a corrugated steel warehouse and small shed. There was no potable water at the site, so McAuliffe trucked what he needed from a well in the nearby hills. The brewer’s funds were limited to about five thousand dollars, which meant that he had to rely on ingenuity and elbow grease. He removed the structure’s existing floor and poured a new one that sloped toward a drain. He built a malt bin and fashioned fermenters from fifty-five-gallon barrels. He fabricated a malt mill based on a design in a nineteenth-century brewing book and salvaged a vintage 1910 labeling machine, a goofy contraption whose glue pot and treadle-operated mechanism attached labels to bottles “with the approximate velocity and cadence of a horse swatting a fly with its tail.”

He christened the place “New Albion.” Seventy years earlier, San Francisco had been home to the Albion Brewing Company, and McAuliffe wanted to revive its name. The appellation allowed the twentieth-century sailor and explorer-of-beer to honor another sailor-explorer: Sir Francis Drake, the sixteenth-century Englishman who sailed San Francisco Bay in the
Golden Hind
and dubbed the land of hills and fog “New Albion.” McAuliffe hired a local artist to design the brewery’s logo and labels. The result was one of the most graceful labels to adorn a bottle of American beer: In the center was an image of the
Hind
framed by the hills of the San Francisco Bay, the ship’s sails billowed in full wind. Two sheaves of barley stood on either side, and across the top a simple furled banner read “new albion brewing company SONOMA CALIFORNIA.”

Word spread through the tight-knit northern California homebrewing community. A crowd showed up for the grand opening that summer of 1977—showed up and proceeded to get drunk on beer that delivered more of a punch than most people were used to. Byron Burch and his soon-to-be wife Nancy Vineyard made the pilgrimage to Sonoma that day. Nancy promptly decided that Jack was crazy. He looked for all the world like a “sea captain . . . listing to one side,” a “squint and a cock to his head.”

Vineyard wasn’t the only one who questioned McAuliffe’s state of mind. Making beer when the only potable water lay miles away? Using equipment straight out of Dickens? Crazy perhaps, but . . . successful, at least when measured by his goal, which was to make and sell beer. McAuliffe and Suzy Stern (Jane Zimmerman jumped ship early on) brewed a barrel and a half five times a week—making ale, porter, and stout—and bottled it on Wednesday. They promptly sold every drop, and with no advertising. “If you make good beer,” McAuliffe told a reporter from the
Washington Post
who visited in the summer of 1978, “you don’t have to pay for advertising.” The beer’s selling point was its purity: McAuliffe used nothing but malt, hops, water, and yeast. No enzymes or corn grits; no stabilizers. Not even any pasteurization, New Albion products being bottle-fermented for five weeks in a cool cellar. This was a risky road to travel, but McAuliffe managed because he understood the importance of sanitation and monitored his yeast and beers with religious devotion in his inner sanctum, the laboratory.

New Albion’s reputation spread thanks to a stout that rattled beer connoisseurs’ senses and a porter that sang with flavor. The Maltose Falcons visited, as did other homebrewers. Frank Prial, who covered wines for the
New York Times,
paid a visit. The editor of
Brewers Digest
toured the tiny brewery and paid the compliment of treating Jack as a peer rather than as the nut-case crank that many brewers no doubt thought he was.

Don Barkley showed up, too. Barkley had begun homebrewing in 1971, the same year he graduated from high school. He heard about McAuliffe when he visited Michael Lewis to discuss enrolling in the Davis brewing program. A few weeks later, Barkley and his wife-to-be headed to New Albion, where he planned to offer his services—free—for the summer. The couple found the proprietor in the brewery office. Barkley introduced himself and explained that he wanted to intern for the summer. McAuliffe, known less for his smooth business manner than for eccentricity and a bluntness that often bloomed into rudeness, responded in form. “Get out,” he commanded.

Barkley left, but returned a few weeks later. This time he found Suzy Stern. He repeated his offer: free labor for the summer. Sure! said Stern. In June 1978, Barkley pitched a tent on property owned by a nearby homeowner, donned rubber boots, and started work. He earned a case of beer a week and all he could drink on the job.

New Albion, he soon learned, had been built with meticulous care, the handiwork of a professional at heart. It was also no place for the indolent, the lazy, or the indifferent. “You have to be totally committed,” McAuliffe said. “The only thing you think about is beer and brewing.” The job involved working ten or twelve hours a day, six or seven days a week. Fighting with suppliers who were not used to penny-ante orders of malt and hops. Hauling carloads of beer to San Francisco and driving back for the empty bottles. Landing a distributor and then hoping he would keep the beer refrigerated until it was delivered to the retailers. Driving to San Francisco to retrieve a shipment that exploded on the shelf because it had gone bad or, more often, because the retailer had stored it improperly. This was not Schlitz or Miller, something designed to withstand nuclear attack. New Albion products were living creatures that demanded care and respect.

The boss was not the easiest guy to work alongside, but his respect for the past and his optimism about a new brewing future permeated New Albion. “We knew we were doing something completely bizarre in terms of the brewing industry,” Barkley said later, “but also that there was this unique history that nearly commanded that this happen, that we do this.”

Outside New Albion’s small yard, beyond Sonoma’s utopian confines, lay inspiration in reverse. Barkley’s classmates in the Davis program planned to grab their degrees and head for an executive position at one or another of the big beer factories where they would wear suits and ties and tell union workers “what button to push.” Neither they nor their future employers grasped that a new chapter in brewing had begun—that Americans had changed, and that brewing must change with them. The same was true at meetings of the Master Brewers Association that McAuliffe and Barkley attended. Most members were corporate brewers—suit-and-tie-wearing button-pushers—and they didn’t think that McAuliffe and Barkley belonged in their group. Michael Lewis, who sat on the Association’s board of governors, defended the two brewers, the one bearded, the other with hair hanging down to his waist. McAuliffe and Barkley, he pointed out, met membership criteria: They operated a commercial brewery, and a successful one at that; and they possessed considerable experience, and in Don’s case, formal education.

The irritation of the MBA’s arrogance evaporated once the two brewers returned to New Albion, where beer’s new era unfolded on a daily basis. So did the brewery’s woes. Several years of experience had taught McAuliffe that the sticking point of his operation lay at the retail end of the equation. He sold bottles of New Albion to tavern owners for about sixty-seven cents and they passed them on to consumers for as much as two dollars. There, McAuliffe realized, was where the money lay. There and in large-scale production, more than he could manage in his current location.

On, then, to Phase Two: First, move to a larger location and expand production beyond the current forty-five barrels. Second, switch from returnable bottles to one-way packages, an expensive but necessary proposition. McAuliffe knew that although most people supported ecologically correct reusable bottles in theory, in reality consumers, retailers, and distributors hated having to pay the deposit and then lug the bottles back to the store. Third, and most important, open a pub where McAuliffe could sell his wares and collect that hefty markup currently landing in others’ pockets.

The plan required the pioneers to hurdle two obstacles. First, they had to eliminate the state law that forbid brewers from selling their products at retail, and second, find money to pay for the projects.

They vaulted the legal hurdle with comparative ease. McAuliffe and Fritz Maytag contacted Tom Bates, a California assemblyman, and the trio constructed a bill that would eliminate the half-century-old ban on “tied” houses and allow brewers to sell beer in an attached outlet that also offered food. The wine industry supported the bill, for many vintners recognized that wineries attached to tasting rooms and sales shops could become profitable components of California tourism. The bill passed and would go into effect in January 1983.

Alas, the new law did nothing in the short term to counteract the impact of the Catch-22 of small brewing: The path to solvency and profit lay in large-scale production. Getting to large production required a larger operation. But McAuliffe could expand only if he earned money by selling more beer, and he couldn’t sell more beer until he could expand. And so on.

As for conventional funding, well, bankers were not accustomed to dealing with brewers, who, by virtue of the product they sold—alcohol—operated in a different risk pool than someone who, say, wanted to open a restaurant or a clothing store. Besides, who ever heard of someone starting a brewery? Did this guy think he was going to compete with Augie Busch? Besides which, Don slept in a tent and bathed in spring water, and Jack “lived like a spider” in a cubbyhole above the brewery that he reached by climbing a ladder. Hardly the face and place to inspire bankers and other deep-pocketed members of the community.

McAuliffe was determined to break into mainstream finance or go down trying. He wrote a detailed business plan and designed new packaging that demonstrated New Albion’s willingness to accommodate consumers and retailers. He designed new labels, too, which, while less stunning than the originals, looked more conventional. He obtained an option on a piece of property in Sonoma, a lot with an old Victorian house and a second structure large enough to accommodate a thousand-gallon brewery.

The preparations lured McAuliffe and Barkley straight into the brewer’s Catch-22. The prospectus and the paper on which to print it, the property option, and the labels—all of it cost more money than New Albion was bringing in. Barkley added $5,000 of his own money, but it was not enough.

The end came in November 1982. Barkley emptied the brewvats for the last time. Over the course of a few days, the crew jackhammered Jack’s graceful sloping floor into oblivion and dismantled every piece of equipment. Even then, Barkley’s optimism overruled his regrets. “We knew,” he said later, that small brewing “could work, knew it was the right idea. We knew the whole concept was good.”

H
E WAS RIGHT.
Jack McAuliffe forged a seminal moment in American brewing, his importance rooted in the very failure that ordinarily relegates fallen pioneers to history’s dustbin. He demonstrated that it was possible to build a brewery from scratch using scrap metal and salvaged equipment. Most of the first generation of new brewers followed his lead. Many avoided the small brewer’s Catch-22, but only because McAuliffe’s tumble into that merciless trap illuminated the snare.