The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (11 page)

*
The World Guide to Beer
was originally published in the United States by New Jersey–based educational publisher Prentice-Hall. The author quotes from and references a May 1978 edition published by Ballantine.

I
n 1976, Anheuser-Busch
opened a brewery in Fairfield, California, that would have the capacity to turn out four million barrels of beer a year. About thirty miles to the west, New Albion was toddling along toward an annual output of four hundred barrels. And this only because McAuliffe, Stern, and Zimmerman brewed nearly every day (Wednesday was bottling day), forty-five gallons at a time, about nine times the typical homebrew batch. The first beer that New Albion produced was a pale ale, and it was put into bottles with a blue label featuring Francis Drake's ship. They used a manual labeler—one blue label at a time—and self-delivered the beer into a marketplace that didn't quite know what to make of it.

Nothing illustrates this disconnect better than a visit that an Associated Press reporter paid to New Albion in the late autumn of 1977, shortly after McAuliffe finished the nine months of creation. The comments by him and Stern, and the reporter's attempts to make sense of the brewery in 455 words for the readers at home, show bravado versus bafflement.

Something is brewing amid the golden fields and aromatic vineyards of California's lush wine country—but it sure ain't vino. It's ale, brewed by a man and two women in what may be the nation's smallest commercial brewery, located outside this small rustic town 20 miles north of San Francisco.

“Most of the domestic beers have adjuncts, like corn and rice,” Stern told the reporter, “instead of the pure ingredients we use: hops, yeast, malt, and water.” She went on to label Big Beer in America “a national disgrace,” a blizzard of “chemicals, stabilizers, and all sorts of things” that hide beer's true and ancient nature.

It was not hyperbole on Stern's part. The Food and Drug Administration earlier in the year had moved to require that ingredients be displayed on the labels of alcoholic beverages. The move came in response to the years-long crusade of one-time Nader Raider Michael Jacobson, a microbiologist by training who argued that beer was full of potentially toxic additives. A lot of his research turned out to be more sensationalistic than scientific, buoyed by that culture of the informed consumer popularized by his old boss Ralph Nader. For instance, Big Beer did famously use gum arabic, the hardened sap of some species of acacia tree in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the appetizing-sounding propylene glycol alginate—seaweed extract—to goose the size and duration of the heads on beers. They did this only because their watery pilsners would never form the sort of natural head that all-malt beers could, especially after they'd been shipped hundreds of miles. But the seaweed extract and the hardened sap and other shortcuts, like corn syrup, never killed anyone (beer's ethyl alcohol, in abusive amounts, could do that without any help). However, the Reagan administration scotched the FDA's requirement in 1981, after years of court battles and before it ever took effect. Still, such background noise could only bolster New Albion's claims to purity versus Big Beer. “You can really taste the balance between the hops and the malt,” Stern explained that autumn day. Alas, the craft was beside the article's point; about halfway in, the reporter turned to the odds that New Albion faced as a business.

The three [McAuliffe, Stern and Zimmerman] work 12-hour days, brewing, bottling, cleaning, and bookkeeping. New Albion turns out about 45-50 cases a week and sells them to Pay Area [sic] retailers at $14.16 a case. Liquor stores sell New Albion at about [a] 90-cent deposit, a price that “compares with those of imported beers.” McAuliff [sic] thinks that's a bargain. “Ours is much better than the imports you get here,” he said…. “Like most things, you can make it cheaply or you can make an excellent product,” he said. “Corporate brewers chose the first path.”

We can easily read between the lines to see the length of New Albion's odds: twelve-hour days to craft an unfamiliar product retailing for more than its competitors. And McAuliffe could—and did—look eastward to the new Anheuser-Busch plant turning out in under an hour what New Albion would be able to produce in a year. However, we can read quite clearly the swagger inherent in the enterprise, a determination to soldier on in the service of fine ingredients for a fine product, one that was defiantly local. Present, too, was a
clear dose of humor like we saw in Merlin Elhardt's Maltose Falcons newsletter. While McAuliffe told the AP reporter that the brewery wasn't looking to compete with the bigger brands, Stern deadpanned, “Maybe we'll become rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”

That same winter, a Bay Area native named Don Barkley decided to return to school. He had spent the last few years as an electrical-mechanical draftsman and had long had an interest in homebrewing, which he settled on after a dalliance with wine making that proved too tedious—you had to wait months, sometimes more than a
year,
before sampling your creation. Barkley's brother-in-law was taking a wine-making course through UC-Davis's extension program, and suggested he check out the school's brewing courses. Barkley, his long hair flowing, met with Michael Lewis in the professor's office.

“I want to learn about making beer,” he said, “and I want to start my own little brewery sometime.”

Lewis looked at him quizzically. Most students wanted to study at UC-Davis so they could land a management-level job at one of the big or regional breweries. What other options were there, really? “Well,” Lewis began, “there is this guy over in Sonoma by the name of Jack McAuliffe who is starting a little brewery.” He explained that McAuliffe spent hours at a time hoovering up the university's brewing library. “You may want to go talk to him.”

So Barkley went to the warehouse to see McAuliffe and explain himself. And McAuliffe, as was his wont, promptly showed him the door. Yes, he understood that the eager young Barkley would work for free, that he just wanted the hands-on experience of a commercial brewery; but McAuliffe had too much on his plate right now, so would Barkley please leave?

Barkley left. He would not return until the following year, which was lucky for him, as it turned out to be the most important one in the American craft beer movement.

T
he year 1978 was the first
undeniably pivotal one in the American craft beer movement. Hindsight shows that as that year dawned, the movement was headed inexorably toward a reckoning. Commercial pioneers like Fritz Maytag and Jack McAuliffe, evangelists like Michael Jackson and Fred Eckhardt, eager disciples like Mark Carpenter and Don Barkley were all in place as if actors on a darkened stage as the audience gathered. Our script even had an appropriately omnipotent villain in Miller Lite and the rest of Big Beer's imperious consolidation. And the audience! An audience the likes of Merlin Elhardt and his Maltose Falcons in John Daume's wine-making shop; of patient tutors like Michael Lewis and John Segal; of frustrated Everymen like Mike Royko and his band of blind-tasting judges; of outlier inspirations like Alice Waters and every Belgian who had ever brewed; and of those primed to care about the content of their foodstuffs, those already standing athwart TV dinners and toward more appetitious alternatives that their older selves would one day call locavore—they were out there, waiting. The play really needed only two things to start.

It needed a legal imprimatur, as if in days of old when German princes and Spanish archdukes decided which ingredients could go in which beers and at what amounts. And it needed some sort of organization, a tent for the tribe to gather under and rally around, both professionally and amateurishly. Just as humankind may very well have ceased millennia of hunting and gathering to grow grains to brew beer, so too did the craft beer movement need its own reason to stop going in isolated directions and rally around something larger. Both would occur in 1978.

It was a year of fateful visits, tribal gatherings, and organizational flexing that we can now look back on as essential to the decades that came after in American beer. And it all started with a teetotaler's pen stroke.

Charlie Papazian grew up in a rural area of northern New Jersey about forty miles west of New York City and walked the mile and more to school past working dairy farms. The long walks presaged a lifetime of outdoors activities that would leave him a model of physical fitness, slim well into middle age. One of three brothers, he enjoyed science classes and gym the most, and world and modern European history, too. He was a solid B student, with some As sprinkled in, enough to land him a spot in the late 1960s at one of the nation's top public colleges, the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He intended to study chemical engineering during a five-year program, but chemistry got in the way—Papazian didn't get the language of it, so to speak. He switched to nuclear engineering because he had a felicity with math and physics. He was in Naval ROTC for two and a half years and took graduate-level courses in biomedicine, preschool and early education, art, and philosophy while keeping up with the math, physics, and engineering training. Into this academic rigor in 1970 a wrench was tossed.

A friend of Papazian's, whom he had met through his education classes and who ran a preschool nearby, mentioned during a visit to his apartment near campus that one of his neighbors homebrewed. Would Papazian ever be interested in trying some?

He would.

They walked to a place off Montebello Circle in Charlottesville and met the neighbor, an older man who had been homebrewing since Prohibition. He used a very simple recipe, which he shared with the visitors: one can of hop-flavored Blue Ribbon malt extract, five or six or seven pounds of sugar, some yeast, mix with water, and ferment for five gallons or thereabouts. The neighbor pulled some bottles from his basement that he had been aging for probably a year. It tasted decent to Papazian, better than what he was buying for sixty-nine cents a six-pack.

Papazian and his circle were soon brewing beer themselves. They brewed in the dirt-floor basement of his friend's preschool, in a fourteen-gallon trash pail and right next to a coal-fired furnace that shot sooty rockets now and again. The results were awful. Scholarship was in order. Papazian read up on homebrewing, discovering he could substitute corn sugar for cane sugar and could use something called dried brewer's yeast instead of dried bread yeast. Pretty soon what he and his pals were brewing in the preschool basement was turning out tasty. Word got around Charlottesville, and they threw some fantastic parties powered by their homebrew. It was during these parties that Papazian, the would-be nuclear engineer from the wilds of northern Jersey, realized what turned out to be his most impactful theorem: when people drank homebrew, they got happy, not stupid.

Papazian's homebrewing experiences in the 1970s were pretty typical no matter the location. As we have already seen, while Papazian was jiggering recipes in the basement trash pail in Charlottesville, the early Maltose Falcons members were appraising homemade concoctions in a Los Angeles wine-making shop. They all felt their ways along using the literature available to them, like the limited-run American books by Fred Eckhardt and Byron Burch, or the older British ones; they became, by necessity, amateur organic chemists and microbiologists. They also shared information via word-of-mouth or by hastily scribbled lists, a dipsomaniacal game of telephone, started during Prohibition forty years before and seemingly ceaseless so long as the vast supply of commercial beer remained, in the words of one of Mike Royko's judges, “lousy.” Finally, they all cadged and cobbled what they could ingredients-wise, mostly through wine-making shops; there may have been as many as one hundred or slightly more by the late 1970s nationwide, with most carrying brewing supplies as well, with a nod and a wink.

Homebrewing was illegal in the United States; wine making was not. It appears to have been a simple oversight of federal lawmakers in 1933, when they may have been distracted by the Great Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe. In any case, the oversight would spur the explosion in creativity exemplified by homebrewing clubs like the Maltose Falcons (or San Francisco's own San Andreas Malts, founded in 1978) and individuals like Papazian and McAuliffe. Homebrewing was a calling, a passion, something more than a hobby, and the illegality might only heighten the thrill. “The difference is gargantuan between my beer and commercial beer,” a thirty-seven-year-old photographer from the Philadelphia suburbs told a newspaper reporter. “I know what's in mine. My brother-in-law likes a dark beer, and I make it to his taste…. Describe it? Describing homemade brew is like describing a rainbow to someone who is blind. No, you have to taste it.” And it was cheaper than commercial beer; it might cost thirty-one cents in the Philly area to brew a quart of homemade beer, and seventy cents to buy the same amount in a store.