Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (44 page)

1986, Reich replied, “If a contract brewer wants to sell beer he has to lie . . . Basically, he has to perpetrate fraud.” That comment came back to haunt him in 1987, when his “real” brewery failed. Reich returned to Utica and contract brewing—returned, it would seem, to perpetrating fraud.

The conflict contained more than a hint of the puritanical and condescending—real brewers wear rubber boots; fake ones wear suits—to say nothing of ignorance of history. Consider Vince Cottone’s 1986
Good Beer Guide,
an introduction to the “new” beers and breweries of the Pacific Northwest, and one of the first published surveys of craft beer. Cottone advised readers that he would focus only on what he called “True Beer,” which he defined as “ideal, uncompromised beer . . . hand-made locally in small batches using quality natural ingredients, served on draft fresh and unpasteurized.” True beer was pure beer; the brewer added nothing “to cheapen the beer,” including such disgusting adjuncts as corn or rice. “It’s not a new kind of beer . . . ,” he explained. “Before prohibition, it was served in nearly every tavern in town, until corporate mergers and osmosis rationalized it into the bland and boring Industrial Brew.”

Cottone was wrong, of course. Before Prohibition, beermakers created rich, hearty lagers brewed with corn and rice. Historical inaccuracy aside, though, there is much to ponder in Cottone’s words. By his definition, the beer made at Anchor was not “true” because it was pasteurized and bottled. The stuff from Mendocino was out of the running (bottled), as, of course, was Sam Adams (bottled, pasteurized, and, its worst sin, not “local”). Aside from that, what was “handmade” beer? Did “true” brewers stand over their vats, à la Jacob Best and sons, stirring the wort with huge paddles? And then there’s the “ideal, uncompromised” segment of Cottone’s equation. Who knew what that meant?

But the most curious aspect of Cottone’s ideal is the emphasis on “small batches.” How small was small? The new brewers faced the same bottom line as any other entrepreneur: They were in business to make money. In order to stay in business, they had to be large enough to earn a profit so they could grow even larger. But once they achieved a level of success that enabled them to increase production, were they still making “true beer”? Grossman and Camusi, to name one example, aimed at national, not local, distribution, a goal they could achieve only by expanding. In 1988, they built a larger brewery that was more efficient, because more mechanized, than the original shop. Did Sierra Nevada Pale Ale still count as a “handcrafted” beer? Not according to Carol Stoudt, owner of Stoudt Brewing in Pennsylvania. “True micros,” she sniffed, “should stay in their own area.”

What about Redhook? Paul Shipman and Gordon Bowker also opened a new brewery in 1988. Like Grossman and Camusi, the Seattle entrepreneurs abandoned their cobbled-together start-up gear in favor of new, state-of-the-art equipment that allowed them to double production, from about ten thousand barrels a year to twenty thousand. Shipman boasted that the computer-controlled, automated plant was one of the most “technologically advanced” outfits in the country. A reporter who attended the company’s grand opening asked him if the focus on technology meant that Redhook had given up on “handcrafted” beer. Of course not, Shipman replied. “You don’t taste the automation. You taste the brewing.”

Therein lay the point that Jim Koch—and the Busch family and Frederick Pabst and other great brewers—had understood all along: What mattered most was not a brewery’s size or location but the integrity, consistency, and quality of its beer. As it turned out, the contractors had the last laugh. By the early 1990s, contract breweries numbered forty-seven—only half the number of microbreweries (and far fewer than the 165 brewpubs), but enough to indicate that plenty of consumers and brewers alike measured quality by ingredients and process rather than by place or size.

Nor did the controversy affect craft brewing’s upward trajectory. By the late 1980s, microbrewing had matured from a screwball idea into a viable industry. Sales were climbing at an average rate of 40 percent a year. National press coverage fueled interest in the phenomenon, which in turn inspired still more breweries and brewpubs. Jim Koch’s early success and the money he spent on marketing and touting the virtues of fresh, full-bodied American beer also boosted the industry. Homebrewer Fred Eckhardt, who had launched a career as a brewing journalist, admitted as much, stating the case with his usual bluntness. “We need contract brewers,” he wrote. “Without them, the craft brewing industry would still be small time.” Koch and other contract brewers, he told readers, had “done more for craft beer and craft brewing than almost anyone else,” by running “educational” advertising and by producing high-quality “gateway beers” by which an otherwise uninformed public learned about “the delights of taste in beer” and then went on to sample and enjoy other craft brews.

Craft brewing benefited as well from the influence and vision of Charlie Papazian, the man who had co-founded the American Homebrewers Association. As microbrewers opened their doors, homebrewers reported the news in letters to
Zymurgy,
the AHA newsletter, so that by accident rather than design, the AHA became a clearinghouse of information about the brewing renaissance.

In the spring of 1981, Papazian sponsored a brewing conference, the centerpiece of which was a ninety-minute session titled “The Small Commercial Micro-Brewery in America—Its Revival.” Panelists from Boulder Brewing and Cartwright Brewing of Portland, Oregon, showed slides, discussed their journey from home to commercial brewing, and answered questions from an audience that was less interested in the history of the revival than in how to get in on it themselves.

With that conference—the first of many—Papazian provided a home base for the people who were forging a new era in American brewing. But in that same year, Papazian also persuaded Fred Eckhardt and Michael Jackson to join the
Zymurgy
staff as advising editors, and so provided a platform for new brewing’s two most important chroniclers.

In 1969, Eckhardt, who lived in Portland, Oregon, had published a short homebrewing pamphlet. “A Treatise on Lager Beer” was less important for its instructional content—even Eckhardt conceded it contained errors—than for its manifesto-like call to arms. American brewers, he charged, had transformed traditional lager into “pasteurized carbonated malt ‘pop’” designed for “the female palate.” “Even the German beers imported into this country are being made to so-called American taste. Pablum and pap for babies.” Thanks to his strong voice and forceful opinions, and his proximity to the microbreweries opening along the Pacific coast, Eckhardt emerged as one of the most important voices for “new” brewing.

So, too, Michael Jackson. The Englishman’s 1978
World Guide to Beer
had introduced Americans to the complexity and range of beer styles, but his columns in
Zymurgy
provided insight into and information about the craft-brewing revolution. Over the next thirty years, both men would broaden their reach, as each published hundreds of articles and columns in magazines and newspapers, Eckhardt offering cogent commentary on new brewing and Jackson providing beer drinkers and journalists alike with a vocabulary for thinking about and analyzing beer.

Papazian followed the 1981 conference with the Great American Beer Festival in May 1982. The first event proved modest, consisting as it did of a handful of craft brewers and about a thousand gallons of various lagers, ales, porters, and stouts. Papazian sandwiched the four-hour fair in between a homebrewing competition and the small brewers’ conference, which had grown into a two-day affair and included panels on packaging, bacteria control, marketing, and legal issues.

The projects required every penny Papazian could lay hands on and then some, but whatever doubts he had about the wisdom of his actions vanished in November 1982, when he traveled to Fort Lauderdale for the annual gathering of the Brewers Association of America. Most of those present came from mainstream small breweries—West End, Hudepohl, Spoetzl, Stevens Point—and they’d never heard of Papazian or his venture. Though some of the old-timers welcomed him, Papazian felt “uncomfortable” and “out of place.” Still, he was nothing if not a genius when it came to seeing opportunity, and he returned to Boulder convinced that the needs of regional and small beermakers like Yuengling and Leinenkugel were not the same as those of microbrewers, and that his plan to provide microbrewers with an alternative made more sense than ever.

Papazian’s assessment of the BAA was only partially correct. It was true that the BAA’s membership had shrunk in recent years, along with its budget, but Bill O’Shea, in his late seventies and in poor health, still provided small commercial brewers with essential services: lobbying, good relations and constant communication with the USBA and with behemoths like AnheuserBusch, and information about tax laws and regulations that applied to every brewer regardless of size. That explains why the two most successful microbrewers, Ken Grossman and Fritz Maytag, had already joined the BAA. They regarded themselves as part of a larger brewing industry, not as homebrewers grown large. Charlie Papazian didn’t agree, at least not in the early 1980s. As far as he was concerned, microbrewing was an “extension of homebrewing” and therefore an extension of the AHA. Tax issues? Labeling laws? Relax and have a homebrew.

On the other hand, Papazian’s naiveté proved to be a powerful and liberating tool. His lack of knowledge about the complexities of the larger brewing industry allowed him to shape the infrastructure for what amounted to a new branch of an established industry. In that regard, he proved a direct descendant of Frederick Pabst and Adolphus Busch, both of whom entered brewing unencumbered by ideas about how things ought to be done. Papazian recognized, for example, what Bill O’Shea did not: Microbrewers faced a unique set of problems, such as locating equipment sized for a small operation, or persuading maltsters to sell product in small lots. Had O’Shea understood that (or had the association replaced O’Shea with someone less rooted in the past), the BAA might have become “home” for craft brewers.

But O’Shea did not, and so Papazian seized the day. In early 1983, he launched the Institute for Fermentation and Brewing Studies (later the Association of Brewers). The IFBS sponsored an annual conference devoted entirely to microbrewing and published
New Brewer,
a magazine for microbrewers—defined as breweries and brewpubs that produced fifteen thousand barrels a year or less—that contained articles on everything from marketing, label design, and trademark law to water treatment, hop varieties, and yeast.

Microbrewing now had a home of its own. Papazian’s conferences and
New Brewer
provided forums where people who were passionate about beer could share their energy and ideas, where novices learned from professionals, and where everyone learned how to create a brewery in an industry otherwise oriented toward plants that made five million, rather than five hundred, barrels of beer.

All of it fueled brewing’s newest wing. Nearly two hundred new breweries opened between May 1993 and October 1994, and the volume of craft beer produced in the United States doubled between 1990 and 1994.

Not everyone was prepared for the difficulties they faced, but the second wave of brewers enjoyed one advantage over the pioneers: easier access to funding. Bankers that once laughed at the likes of Ken Grossman and Jim Koch lined up to loan money in the early 1990s. When Gregory Kelly decided to open a microbrewery in Atlanta in 1994, he started with $150,000 of his own funds, but a group of professional investment managers anted up another $1.2 million. The money allowed Kelly to hire a professional brewmaster and buy brewing equipment imported from England. Nor did Kelly, who chucked an executive post at Guinness to open his own shop, conceal his motives. “I didn’t do this to get free beer,” he told a reporter. “I’m in a business.”

This summarized the attitude of that second wave of new brewers, who were less starry-eyed homebrewers than hardheaded entrepreneurs elbowing their way into a booming industry. Certainly that explains the continued growth of the Association of Brewers’ programs and services for craft brewers. By the early 1990s, Papazian had replaced his cadre of volunteers with a professional paid staff and expanded the conference to include a trade show. He moved the annual event from city to city, but wherever it landed, thousands of people showed up to prowl cavernous convention centers filled with industry-related booths and exhibits—malt dealers, sign makers, and purveyors of glassware, hop pellets, and yeast.

T
HE INVESTORS
kept coming—followed closely by Big Beer, which had finally noticed the revolution in its midst. Not, of course, because anyone at Anheuser-Busch, Miller, or Coors regarded the new brewers as a viable threat. In 1982, A-B and Miller together controlled an astonishing 56 percent of the market for beer, 32 percent of which belonged to A-B. But that share, enormous as it was, was also stagnant, growing at single-digit rates if at all. In the last two decades of the century, Americans’ consumption of alcohol in any form plunged to historic lows. In 1975, for example, Americans drank 1.1 gallons of alcohol in the form of spirits; in 1985 they consumed 0.90 gallons, and that amount tumbled by another third by the early 1990s. Per capita beer consumption hit its post-repeal peak in 1981 at 23.8 gallons. By century’s end, that would fall to fewer than twenty gallons.

The explanation for the drop was twofold. First, the wave of baby boomers who boosted beer sales in the 1960s and 1970s had aged past the “peak” drinking years of young adulthood. To brewers’ dismay, they were not being replaced by an equally large cohort of young drinkers. Second, and more important, temperance had reared its head again. A century earlier, reformers had defined drinking at any level as a social evil and a moral issue. But the failure of Prohibition forced Americans to adopt a more subtly calibrated stance on alcohol: Drinking itself was not bad; the problem was lack of moderation.