Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (45 page)

The medical establishment took over from there. The word “alcoholism” appeared in the psychiatric literature as early as 1915, but in the 1930s and 1940s, medical and mental health professions began defining the inability to moderate consumption as a disease. They adopted the word to label people who could or would not practice restraint. From this new paradigm came Alcoholics Anonymous and a view of immoderate drinking as a medical rather than a moral issue. In 1970, the nation’s legislators caught up with this cultural shift when Congress passed the Comprehensive Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism Prevention, Treatment and Rehabilitation Act, the first major federally funded effort to manage alcohol use since the Eighteenth Amendment.

One result was the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), which sponsored studies of drinking as well as programs designed to educate the public about alcohol’s dangers and develop treatment for those who abused it. Under its first director, NIAAA programs provided general information about alcohol and spread the gospel of “responsible drinking.”

That changed in the late 1970s, when the agency’s second director announced his intention to “stabilize per capita consumption” and to treat alcohol as a “dangerous drug.”

That message reached receptive ears. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, millions of baby boomers hit their thirties. Waistlines expanded. Wrinkles appeared. Many now had children to protect and care for. Add to that bad news about the environment and deteriorating global politics, and the result was a near manic desire for control, which, in turn, sparked an outburst of moral rectitude and self-righteousness. A consumer analyst observed: “It’s not easy to get up at five-thirty every morning to go running. People who do it become very prudish about it, and very judgmental about people who don’t.” Another observer offered a somewhat more charitable view of the scene. “The sixties generation is no longer engaged in political activity,” he explained. “People feel profoundly guilty and are directing that guilt against themselves.” Jogging, dieting, denial, and abstinence allowed aging boomers to “feel whole and pure and clean again.”

Whatever the motivator, the result was the same: A broad swath of Americans affiliated with an array of organizations launched a full-bore assault on drinking. The coalition included such groups as Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD, founded in 1980); Remove Intoxicated Drivers (RID, 1979); Students Against Driving Drunk (SADD, 1981); the National Parent—Teacher Association; and the Seventh-Day Adventist, Methodist, Mormon, and Baptist churches. They were joined by Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, who stuck with his original modus operandi—inflammatory rhetoric interspersed with half-truths—in his ongoing campaign against the manufacture, sale, and consumption of alcohol. Together this coalition lobbied for higher taxes on alcohol, warning labels on alcohol containers, and a ban on alcohol advertising.

It is a measure of the times that they got almost everything they went after, only failing to restrict advertising. Congress attached federal highway funds to a stipulation requiring that states raise the drinking age to twenty-one; by the late 1980s, every state had complied. Stadiums and arenas banned seat-side beer sales. Many venues created alcohol-free “family” seating, limited customers to two beers, or stopped selling altogether after the seventh inning or third quarter. Spectators at the 1987 Orange Bowl game between Miami and Oklahoma watched the game sober after Bowl sponsors banned all alcohol at the stadium. “Happy hour,” that two- or three-hour period at the end of the workday when many bars offered customers special prices on drinks, came under attack. Some states outlawed the practice and others placed restricted hours on such promotions. Bar owners appeased the zealots by removing happy-hour signs, but retaliated by discounting the tabs of regular customers or by handing out free food.

The press generally played along, printing as fact Michael Jacobson’s assertion that advertising caused people to drink excessively and ignoring a more substantive series of studies that indicated that advertising merely sealed brand loyalty by making consumers feel good about the brand they already drank. When his Project SMART (Stop Marketing Alcohol on Radio and Television) failed in its original goal—derailed by alcohol industry lobbyists who bombarded congressional hearings with evidence from the fact-based studies—Jacobson threw children into the mix. Kids, he argued, were being led down the path of ruin by beermakers who designed humorous commercials specifically for child audiences.

The press picked up the story and ran with it, despite the lack of evidence that children favored beer commercials over others or that advertising of any sort caused them to drink. Moreover, study after study showed that the rise in teenage drinking had little to do with alcohol advertising and everything to do with the neo-temperance crusade itself and the social upheaval that rippled through American society in the wake of the economic turmoil of the 1970s. Nothing could have been better designed to promote youthful drinking than the non-stop message, taught as early as grade school, that alcohol was a drug and therefore evil and forbidden. Teenagers being hormonally programmed to do precisely what their elders warn them not to, underage drinking ballooned, and then escalated further after the national drinking age rose to twenty-one, as eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-olds who had assumed they’d be allowed to drink imbibed anyway, laws be damned. Other studies showed that kids turned to drink to manage the stress of a soaring divorce rate, parents working longer hours at fewer jobs, and overburdened school systems and teachers.

The anti-alcohol campaign forced beermakers to rethink their spring-break and campus promotions, which even the most pro-drink fanatic was forced to admit had spiraled out of control. Consider
Beachin Times,
a glossy, sixteen-page insert that Miller Brewing distributed on campuses just prior to spring break. Filled with pictures of buxom young women in beach attire, the text tutored male readers on ways to “turn spring break into your own personal trout farm.” An article about beach volleyball asked readers to “[n]ame something you can dink, bump, and poke. Hint—it’s not a Babe.” Anheuser-Busch’s contribution to spring break that year—a two-foot-tall inflated beer bottle—seemed positively Victorian by comparison.

Pressed by the threat of restrictive legislation on one side and angry parents on the other, brewers toned down their beachside presence. Representatives offered kids free phone calls home and doughnuts and coffee at rest stops en route to and from spring break destinations, and replaced the inflatable bottles and free T-shirts with banners and buttons that urged partiers to “Think When You Drink” and “Know When to Say When.”The popular Anheuser-Busch “party animal” of the mid-1980s, Spuds McKenzie, and the animated frogs of the early 1990s went by the wayside, and A-B and Miller pulled their advertising from MTV.

Alcohol consumption rates plunged. But what might have been a disaster for fledgling craft brewers turned out to be a blessing, because this variation on temperance fostered both selfindulgence and snobbery. Perhaps a jogger decided that ice cream, for example, was bad for her. Having decided to limit her intake to a single dish of the forbidden once a month, she also determined to maximize her pleasure. Why eat the cheap stuff packed with artificial flavors and fillers when she could savor pricier confections made with real milk and eggs?

The same held true for beer. Drinking just one beer? Make it a rich, satisfying, expensive bottle of microbrew. You could enjoy your beer and be both healthy (just one bottle!) and in the know (factory beer is passé; hip people drink microbrews).

As a result, sales of microbrewed lager and ales soared. And that turned out to be a good thing for old-line small local and regional brewers as well. They had thrived in the early 1970s thanks to the mania for “real” and local beers. But as that decade had wound to a close, the tide and times had turned against them. The late 1970s battle between Anheuser-Busch and Miller resulted in a series of price wars that hurt the group of brewers ranked just below the two giants—regionals like Heileman and Stroh, who, damaged by the cheap beer coming from the giants, turned on the still smaller local brewers ranked below them.

The Matt family experienced the brunt of this chain reaction in the early and mid-1980s when Stroh, desperate to grow its market, unleashed a barrage of price promotions in largely rural upstate New York, territory it had previously ignored in favor of more populated urban markets. Sales at F. X. Matt Brewing, as the company was called after 1980, dropped by 200,000 barrels in the space of a few years, a devastating loss for a company barely able to hang on in the best of times. The family pinned its hopes for survival on contract brewing, making beer for Matthew Reich and microbrewers Dock Street, Brooklyn, and Harpoon.

F. X. Matt, the grandson of the brewery’s founder, recognized that brewing was undergoing a profound transformation, one that might change his family’s fortunes. After consulting with Joseph Owades, the brewing chemist who developed “diet” beer, Matt introduced full-flavored Saranac 1888, a malt-rich lager that recalled the brewery’s nineteenth-century heritage. This was a risk for a company that had survived for more than a century on local loyalty: Would upstate New Yorkers, their wallets already battered by a badly depressed local economy, be willing to spend a few more cents on a new beer?

The initial answer was a resounding no. Saranac 1888 limped along until 1989, when F. X., his brother Nick, and other Matts bought the brewery outright from the family trust that had owned it since their grandfather’s death in 1956. The new owners expanded the Saranac line and dumped all their sales and advertising resources into it. In 1991, they took a Saranac beer to the Great American Beer Festival. It won the gold medal in its category, American Premium Lagers. The award granted the beer, and the brewery, a new cachet, linking both in the public’s mind with the new microbreweries. Over the next few years, company sales doubled as a new generation of northeastern beer drinkers fell in love with Utica—and its baby brother, Saranac—all over again.

So, too, down in Pottsville. Dick Yuengling had left his family’s brewery in the 1970s, a victim of the generation gap that caused father and son to spend more time shouting at each other than working together. Dick Junior wanted to modernize and revamp for efficiency. His father, concerned about the impact on his employees and the layoffs that would result, refused. Frustrated by his father’s resistance, the younger Yuengling bought a beer distributorship and struck out on his own.

But in the early 1980s, Dick Senior became ill. The son returned to Pottsville and bought the brewery, determined to save it and his family’s heritage. He and his brewmaster developed their own hoppy, malt-rich special brew, Yuengling Traditional Amber Lager, and introduced Black & Tan, a mix of porter and lager. But Yuengling recognized that he needed help negotiating the terrain beyond Pottsville and the brewery’s traditional market. In 1990, he hired a marketing director who revamped the company’s labels with a modern design that emphasized its heritage. Sales jumped upward in double-digit increments and rose 400 percent during the 1990s. Students from nearby colleges trekked to Pottsville to tour the plant and have their picture taken with local hero Dick Yuengling, who was, by the late 1990s, the nation’s fifth-largest brewer.

The Leinenkugel family followed a different path to new brewing. In 1982, Jake Leinenkugel left the Marine Corps and returned to Chippewa Falls at the request of his father Bill, who wanted to retire. The younger Leinenkugel dived into a crash course in the ways and means of making and selling beer. Minneapolis and Chicago represented two important markets for the company and it was there that he first noted the new craft beers. He also watched as sales of Leinenkugel Bock, a decidedly old-fashioned brew, soared as much as 30 percent in a year. “Something,” Jake realized, “was going on.”

The “something” became more clear in 1987, when he met Jim Koch and some of the other craft brewers. Later that year, Jake took his beer to Denver and the Great American Beer Festival. As it happened, 1987 marked the first year of the professional blind judging. Leinenkugel won a gold medal and, Jake being his father’s son, he returned home convinced not just of the advertising potential but the possibilities that this new breed of brewers and beer had for his own company.

But he also recognized that in beer, as in life, there were no guarantees. Rural Wisconsin was still rural Wisconsin, and younger drinkers, especially college students, were handing their money over to his new competitors, microbreweries in Milwaukee and Madison. Jake was not sure the company and its minuscule 120,000-barrel output would survive.

That explains the shocking announcement he made in 1988: He had sold the company to Miller Brewing. The news stunned Leinie-heads, who feared the worst, but the deal enabled the Leinenkugels to keep the company’s doors open and its workers in paychecks, an important consideration to a family that had provided their neighbors with employment for over a century. The partnership provided Leinenkugel with funds, world class technical assistance and, most important, access to the Miller distribution network. And, to nearly everyone’s surprise, Miller executives kept the promise they made not to meddle in Leinenkugel affairs.

P
ERHAPS THAT WAS
because Miller Brewing needed Leinenkugel as much as Leinenkugel needed Miller. Executives at A-B, Miller, and Coors had watched, frustrated, as microbrewing grew in double digits. The question was what to do about it.

People “are bored with mainstream beers,” groused the president of Heineken USA. “With a micro, they’re not drinking a brand at all, but an idea.”And a scary one for marketers who lived and died by brand and image. A Heileman executive complained that the “meddlesome thing” was not the small brewers, but the “consumer’s willingness to spend more—lots more—to leave their traditional brands for wholesomeness, variety and novelty.”