The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (12 page)

So why did it matter if homebrewing was illegal? It didn't, really. Papazian wound up teaching homebrewing classes out West a few short years after he learned it himself in Charlottesville. If the feds did come busting down the door, he figured, the publicity around his arrest would popularize homebrewing a lot more than he could alone. Fred Eckhardt in Portland didn't think about it, issuing only practical warnings about not selling any homebrew commercially or to minors. Fritz Maytag in San Francisco told Byron Burch after that three-hour tour of Anchor in 1974 not to mention that he had shared his expertise, lest the feds make trouble (it was only in an updated 1992 reissuing of
Quality Brewing
that Burch thanked Maytag). The federal Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms essentially adopted a hear-no-evil, see-no-evil approach to enforcement, and there is no record of any American, including those who ran homebrewing shops, being arrested for homebrewing when it was illegal. “It's been a very low priority item,” as an ATF technical adviser noted at the time. An aide to California US senator Alan Cranston put it more bluntly: “It's a dopey law.” But it was an obnoxious one. And it could stifle the entrepreneurial juices of homebrewers perhaps considering turning pro. Finally, as Eckhardt pointed out in
A Treatise on Lager Beers
in 1970, if homebrewing were legal, “a number of new brewing materials and chemicals would be a good bit easier to obtain; indeed, we might find access to some of the famous German malts and any number of brewing aids available now only to the commercial brewers.”

Whatever the reason, it had to go, and a group of California homebrewers, including Maltose Falcons members Lee Coe, a homebrewing instructor, and Nancy Crosby, the head of a trade group representing wine-making shops, lobbied Cranston to introduce a bill legalizing homebrewing. Cranston grew up in Los Altos, worked as a newspaper reporter, and served in the Army during World War II, returning home to make a living in land investment and home construction—lucrative pursuits in postwar California—before being elected state comptroller and then senator in 1968. The Democrat was as good a legislator as any to push for the change; and it only seemed appropriate that the effort at legalization should come from the Golden State, where so much commercial innovation was then happening.

Legalization, though, was not an inevitability no matter how busy homebrewers were underground. Similar legislation had failed in Congress before, and a bill brought up by the House of Representatives in 1976 would have limited a household to no more than thirty gallons of beer at a time and two hundred gallons over an entire year. Homebrewers found that unacceptable—it would mean less aging time, worse beer. “The worse your beer, the more you could make—the better your beer, the less you could make,” Lee Coe told the Associated Press. Coe, whom Eckhardt described as “a California homebrew curmudgeon” from Berkeley, had written his own homebrewing guide in 1972. “The faster you could drink it, the more you could make—the slower you would drink it, the less you could make.” We can note in the comments of Coe and others the evolution in the purpose of homebrew itself—during Prohibition, it was made almost entirely to pack a kick that could not be had commercially. Forty years later, it was made to savor and as an alternative to commercially available products. Cranston's key role came when that House bill wended its way to the upper chamber. He proposed an amendment, No.
3534, that deleted the thirty-gallon limit, and, on Friday, August 25, 1978, the Senate passed a reconciled bill by voice vote with no dissent. The part about homebrewing, nestled between one about home wine making and one about illegally produced beer, read:

(c) BEER FOR PERSONAL OR FAMILY USE—Subject to regulations prescribed by the Secretary, any adult may, without payment or tax, produce beer for personal or family use and not for sale. The aggregate amount of beer exempt from tax under this subsection with respect to any household shall not exceed—

1. 200 gallons per calendar year if there are 2 or more adults in such household,

or

2. 100 gallons per calendar year if there is only one adult in such household.

For purposes of this subsection, the term “ adult” means an individual who has attained 18 years of age, or the minimum age (if any) established by law applicable in the locality in which the household is situated at which beer may be sold to individuals, whichever is greater.

The bill went to president Jimmy Carter, the devout Southern Baptist said to be a teetotaler,
*
who signed HR 1337 into law on October 14, 1978. It took effect February 1 of the following year.

It was perfect timing for Papazian. After graduation and a summer at a boys' camp in Maine, he had relocated to Boulder, Colorado, in the fall of 1972; a college roommate's brother was attending the University of Colorado and had a floor for him to sleep on. He wanted a change, and he figured it was to be found out West, not on the East Coast. He found a job as a preschool teacher, as well as an apartment, and in 1973 he began teaching evening home-brewing classes in the kitchen. Papazian earned a reputation in those early Boulder days as “a magnet,” according to one contemporary, a sort of amiable, bearded eccentric who might organize a marbles tournament or a pig roast for hundreds of his closest friends. The homebrewing classes, which he taught through the Community Free School (“where anyone could teach whatever
they wanted”), fit snugly with this crunchy, up-from-the-people ethos. His first class had four students, and one of those was Charlie Matzen.

Matzen was, like Papazian, a schoolteacher in his late twenties who was also given to the outdoors, as well as a bit of what we would today call a foodie—or, at least, he could be known to throw parties with a lot of food, much the same way his new teacher and fast friend could throw parties with a lot of homebrew. The two started hanging out and traveling together, camping and chatting and plotting ways, as men of that age will do, of making more money, preferably at something they enjoyed. They found a way during a trip together to Hawaii, where Papazian joined Matzen, who was fixing up some condos that his parents owned. They went camping and talked of experiences in homebrewing—a full, five-gallon carboy of Matzen's had recently exploded, sending shards of glass into the walls and bubbly wort into a closet of the condo below—and an idea flashed: something for the homebrewers of America! The hobby was still illegal, but both men knew that it was growing in popularity. Still, aside from the one-off instruction books of Eckhardt, Burch, and a handful of others, there was little for homebrewers to tap into editorially for expertise and inspiration.

Thus
Zymurgy
magazine was born (the word refers to the study of yeast fermentation, especially for beer and wine). Papazian and Matzen pieced together the first issue back in Boulder with a few volunteers and a shoestring budget of $4,000 (they each put half toward the venture). It ended up at twelve pages with two advertisements, one for a local wine-making and homebrew shop (which was also a coupon for 10 percent off), another for Green Mountain Herbs (“We've got hops—and more!”). The masthead on the second page consisted of Papazian as editor, Matzen as assistant editor, and Bob Telischak, a commercial artist in Nederland, Colorado, as “Art.” An annual subscription and a yearlong membership in the newly formed American Homebrewers Association together cost $4; an extra $2 got you a copy of Papazian's self-published guide
The Joy of Brewing,
offered in the same issue for $2.50 by itself.

The contents revealed the template that had arisen by 1978 for writing and thinking about craft beer:
Zymurgy
was history, frequently of the personal kind, mixed with often highly technical how-to, all done to a whimsically friendly beat throughout. Papazian's backstory and recipe for “Stuffed Whole Lobster A-la-mazing”—”a shrimp and stuffed lobster feast for ten people”—ended with an exhortation to “smile when you drink homebrew.” A detailed recipe for a seven-gallon batch of Vagabond Black Gingered Ale cautioned followers twice not to worry about the effort involved and to “have a beer, get relaxed” while the wort boiled. It was homebrewing presented as a calling since time immemorial, a club you wanted to join. The main story, “The Lost
Art of Homebrewing,” which Papazian had picked up and reprinted from a local library and which started on the cover and jumped to two interior pages, was by Karl F. Zeisler, a newspaperman turned journalism professor at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. He wrote it in 1935, two years after Prohibition ended, when the discovery of old brewing equipment in his basement from “pre-New Deal times” triggered a Proustian recollection of an often frustrating yet rewarding hobby:

Homebrewing was practiced in upstairs halls, bedrooms, broom closets, telephone booths, and dumbwaiters, but my own technique required an entire basement. Mere dilettantes brewed only five gallons at a time—the quantity made from one can of malt—producing about 45 twelve-ounce bottles. But more sophisticated fermenters like myself made a double batch, netting approximately 85 bottles at a single ordeal. Purloining the bottles was one of the sobering elements in the whole business, for only plutocrats laid out good money for them, and many a nocturnal scavenging expedition up alleys was undertaken to meet the needs of a confirmed Brewer.

The rest of the inaugural
Zymurgy
unfolded in a similarly fun, instructional way, with hints at coming attractions like recipes for “stouts that taste like stouts” and “the First Annual National Homebrew Competition sometime during the month of May, 1979.” More passionate than professional,
Zymurgy
was literally not trying to be slick—it was rubber-cemented paper, rather than bound glossy pages—and a homebrewer in Brooklyn or Berkeley might be hard-pressed to recall, exactly, why he should care about this new publication out of Boulder. There wasn't much news about beer or homebrewing in it. It wasn't even the first of its kind—Fred Eckhardt had been publishing from time to time the
Amateur Brewer
journal since the late 1960s. It was part magazine, complete with news about breweries and reviews of brewing kits, and part detailed recipe book
(Amateur Brewer
number six in the summer of 1979 was the “special yeast issue”).
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Moreover, there were industry trade magazines like
Brewers Digest,
which nearly every month pumped out sixty-plus pages of glossy beer coverage, including of smaller brewers; and the venerable
Modern Brewery Age,
a statistics-heavy newsletter and magazine going back to 1938
^†

What Papazian and Matzen did have with
Zymurgy
was impeccable timing: volume one, number one, was dated December 1978, less than two months
after President Carter signed HR 1337, with Alan Cranston's crucial amendment, into law. Zeisler's story shared a corner of the cover with part of an article, “Congress Passes Homebrew,” that led with, “It's official. If you're eighteen years or older, you may legally brew one hundred gallons of beer for personal use each year—tax free! This probably isn't an astonishing piece of news, as beer-making has been legal in the minds of homebrewers for years.”

Charlie Papazian homebrewing.
PHOTO BY JAY QUADRACCI
.
COURTESY OF CHARUE PAPAZIAN

Doubly fortuitous in
Zymurgy
's timing was that its publication marked the launch of the American Homebrewers Association (AHA), the somewhat pretentiously grand title that Papazian and Matzen gave to their new conclave of … well, fellow Boulder-area enthusiasts and whatever wine-making shops they could find in the Yellow Pages at the library. The magazine, though, offered a hint of the association's aspirations to have its grasp match its reach. The article on the homebrewing legislation ended with comments from “a high-ranking representative of the AHA” on the lawmakers “championing our cause on the floor of the Senate” and urged readers to remember those who voted against home-brewing the next time they went to the polls.

There were other beer organizations, much older than the AHA, that did their own arm-twisting on Capitol Hill. The United States Brewers' Association (USBA) dated from the late nineteenth century, when German immigrants who had turned to brewing organized, and the Brewers Association of America dated from World War II, when smaller regional breweries got together to ensure they were able to get supplies during wartime austerity. Between the two, they claimed as members just about every brewery in America. The USBA, in particular, held powerful sway in the halls of government. It had been led since 1962 by Henry King, a gregarious Philadelphia native and food industry
executive who had won a Silver Star and a Purple Heart fighting in the Pacific Theater, and whose favorite drink was known to be a whiskey-based Rob Roy. King had proven particularly instrumental in lobbying for a tax break in 1976 that would turn out to be a godsend to craft brewers, beginning with Fritz Maytag's Anchor. The break reduced the federal excise tax on beer from nine dollars to seven dollars per barrel on the first sixty thousand barrels—so long as a brewery produced no more than two million barrels annually. Similar legislation had failed several times over the previous thirty years, but when it came up this time, King led behind-the-scenes lobbying that included fundraising from Big Beer and calling in favors from organized labor as well as other industries. It passed Congress in September 1976, and Stroh Brewing Chairman Peter Stroh nudged fellow Michigander Gerald Ford to sign it without fanfare.