The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (16 page)

Grossman and Camusi dug into their own pockets—Grossman sold the homebrewing shop in the old La Grande Hotel for a few thousand—scrounging just over $15,000. Then, as their original $50,000 projection doubled, they hit up family, arranging for them to invest through a limited partnership. The business would lose money, the two figured; with a limited partnership, at least their relatives could claim the losses on their taxes. It was a relentlessly stressful time. The two drove to Mount Vernon, Washington, one day to pick up a secondhand bottle filler, washer and labeler for a total of $5,250. On the hours-long drive back, Grossman, then the married father of one, had plenty of time to mull over the fact that he had just spent nearly all the money he had to his name—and for only a part of the operation. Maybe this whole brewery thing was a mistake. Look at Jack McAuliffe and his crew—ten- to twelve-hour days for twenty cases per batch, even three-plus years in. Look at Fritz Maytag, like a duck, gliding along on the surface, paddling furiously just below. Or look at . . who? Ware, Hummer, and Nelson in the Rocky Mountain goat shed? The de Bakkers, where Tom worked on his days off from firefighting and Jan on the others?

Still, the pair pressed on, downsizing the physical size of their brewery, a converted metal warehouse on Gilman Way in Chico, to avoid additional city fees; soaking up information from Michael Lewis and the UC-Davis brewing library; and scooping up future fermenters and refrigerators from old dairy
farms in Northern California that themselves had fallen victim to industrial consolidation. Then Grossman and Camusi settled on a recipe for what would become their signature beer, a fateful decision they made simply because they liked the taste and because Grossman had been visiting Washington's Yakima Valley regularly to pick out favored hops for his homebrewing shop. They did several test batches of various beers, including stouts and pale ales, using different hops, and finally they settled on a pale ale with generous helpings of Cascade.

Grossman and Camusi brewed the first batch of what became known as Sierra Nevada Pale Ale in the third week of November 1980.
*
They spent time tweaking it, however, and it was not until the eleventh batch of the recipe the following March that they were satisfied they should sell it commercially. Released in the spring of 1981, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale was a bold, bitter statement in more than recipe: The start-up had chosen a distinctly American, and slightly more expensive, hop variety to power its pale ale's taste, one developed, cultivated, and popularized commercially in the western United States. The Eurocentric conception of what a bitter beer could be would change forever. The West Coast was prepared to define the style for the world.

*
The first beer the pair tried to brew commercially was, in fact, a stout, with the pale ale attempts starting a few days later (per Ken Grossman to the author in an e-mail, July 2012).

D
aniel Bradford was restless.
He had spent the last dozen years on a headlong run from his roots on the East Coast and now found himself directionless in the Rockies. The second child of six and the eldest son, he had grown up in New England acutely aware of being a direct descendant of William Bradford, who came over on the
Mayflower
and was an early governor of the colony that became Massachusetts. When he was eleven, his father, who had bought a firm that manufactured papermaking machines, moved the family from that state to Maine, where they lived in a house dating from 1694 on one hundred acres of land fertile with pheasant, fox, and moose. It was isolated—enough to drive a young man to romantic daydreams of escape. Bradford chose the West; it was more of a concept to him than a geographic destination (aside from a visit to
an uncle in Minnesota, he had never left the region his ancestors pioneered). So, after graduating with his high school class of seventy-two in 1968, the tall, wiry young man went west, to the University of Colorado at Boulder. It was the first time he'd been on an airplane.

Mainers had never heard of a hippie. In Colorado, they were de rigueur. Within a few weeks, Bradford was part of the counterculture. He protested against Vietnam and for civil rights and women's lib; there were sit-ins and demonstrations, confrontations with the police and speeches to the masses (Bradford delivered one on campus, though later he would not be able to recall the topic). He also worked jobs in the publishing industry, including for a bookstore, an academic publisher, and a magazine wholesaler. The whole time he studied the social sciences, intrigued by people's decision-making processes: Why do we do what we do? The coursework qualified him for more coursework, and he pursued first a master's and then a PhD at Colorado before becoming disillusioned with the snippy infighting of academia and walking away “totally disoriented” at the end of the 1970s. Friends connected him with a job selling books door to door, which was fine for the intellectual refugee—he hustled enough in the summer to take the fall and winter off. During that time he hoofed it around Europe, including France, Italy, and Britain, handed off from friend to friend and couch to couch, now past thirty and still searching for something that he knew wasn't anywhere near rural Maine. After he returned to Boulder in 1981, a friend made what seemed like an odd suggestion, even with Bradford's publishing background: become a literary agent. Not only that, but the friend had a particular client in mind: Charlie Papazian.

Papazian's six-page syllabus for his early homebrewing classes in Boulder had grown to a seventy-eight-page, self-typed, self-published title in 1976 called
The Complete Joy of Homebrewing,
which sold a couple of thousand copies. In that fateful year, 1978, he revised it to about one hundred pages and again self-published it. This was the edition that Bradford picked up on the recommendation of their mutual friend. He was blown away. He knew little about beer and less about brewing, but he got that Papazian's breezy, conversational style nonetheless exposed a wealth of technical know-how. Plus, as with the launch of both
Zymurgy
and the American Homebrewers Association, it was all just such perfect timing. Legalization at the federal level had opened up the pipeline for higher-quality ingredients and now allowed for a freer flow of ideas between commercial brewers and the homebrewers who might want to join them. Papazian himself was a charming evangelist, the same “magnet” who had arrived in Boulder almost a decade before, sleeping on other people's floors as he traveled to deliver lectures and tutorials and setting up the AHA's
office on his approximately fifty-square-foot back porch. When Bradford met Papazian, the AHA's staff consisted simply of volunteers plus Papazian and Charlie Matzen, neither of whom paid themselves in the first couple of years. Papazian was able to quit his day job teaching kindergarten and preschool in Boulder in 1981, though Matzen continued to teach sixth grade in nearby Longmont. Matzen left the AHA soon after to pursue a successful real estate career, though he did serve as a judge at early homebrew competitions and on the association's eventual board of directors. It was clear to Matzen that his friend was more passionate, seeing the AHA as a real nationwide venture, a way of professional life.

Papazian's association was determined, certainly, but was still in start-up mode more than two years on. And it was far from nationwide—outside of the Boulder-Denver area, you would have been hard-pressed to find many card-carrying AHA members. The evangelist needed an evangelist. Bradford became the AHA's first full-time hire as marketing director. He stood out, especially in contrast to the bearded, breezy Papazian: the wiry Bradford was usually clean-shaven and could even be found in a snugly knotted tie if duties demanded it. His first order of business would be finding a mainstream publisher for
The Complete Joy of Homebrewing.

It was an arduous, at times insulting task. Bradford traveled early on to the pitiless concrete canyons of Manhattan, where he kept a ridiculous schedule, taking meetings with nineteen publishers over three and a half days, animated by the belief that Papazian's booklet from the 1970s could be a bona fide book in the 1980s—and not just a book, a brisk seller powered by a now-bicoastal movement that had added several comers to its commercial ranks in recent years. The AHA by 1984 was claiming more than three thousand dues-paying members—a startling swell in less than five years that nevertheless seemed rather paltry to publishers in Gotham. Bradford confronted a skepticism similar to what craft brewers confronted from retailers and distributors: Craft what? You mean a whole book on brewing your own beer? For national release? On a major imprint? You can't do that; there aren't enough possible buyers to justify it. Bradford had never worked Manhattan before. He was sleeping on friends' floors. He was rushing everywhere. “I am going to sell this goddamn book,” he thought. Faced with his persistence, every publisher smiled and told him they were interested. He flew back to Boulder satisfied and took up his marketing duties again at the AHA. Not a single publisher responded over the next two weeks. He had been sold slow no's.

Bradford pressed on. He had little to lose—he was living in a basement apartment and driving a car that didn't go in reverse. He secured one more
sit-down with Avon, a publisher best known for romance paperbacks and comic books. Back in Manhattan, he resolved not to leave the publisher's offices without a firm commitment. “You'd be stupid not to do this deal,” he told them. Papazian's book was so …
there.
It was a countercultural memo to the yuppie decade, Maynard G. Krebs teaching Gordon Gekko how to homebrew—more than that, how to get back to the earth a bit and away from the plastic fantastic, an urtext for the locavore movement. It might have been oversell, but it worked. Avon offered a small advance, and Papazian got on with it back in Boulder. Through the late spring and summer of 1983, he spent the mornings and afternoons writing in longhand, and then, after everyone else had gone home from the AHA offices at his place on Nineteenth Street, he would input the writing into the word processor via the association's lone computer.

The 331-page book he produced, which was published nationally in 1984, became rather quickly the bestselling book on homebrewing ever, an expanded update to the earlier works of Fred Eckhardt and Byron Burch and their British counterparts from yesteryear.
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There were an estimated 1.4 million homebrewers in America by then, and many responded to Papazian's tone in
The Complete Joy of Homebrewing,
just as Bradford expected. That tone was set in the book's introduction, especially the last three words of its third paragraph, part of a mantra that would become inextricably linked to Papazian:
^†

Making quality beer is EASY! Don't let anyone tell you any differently. At the same time, making bad beer is easy, too. The difference between making good beer and bad beer is simply knowing those little things that make a big difference and insure success every time. Above all, the homebrewer should remember not to worry because worrying can spoil the taste of beer faster than anything else. Relax. Don't worry.

The tone belied the technical knowledge, including detailed recipes, that Papazian sought to impart from his years of homebrewing and teaching home-brewing. The book's sections for the beginning, intermediate, and advanced homebrewer were divided into careful demarcations. Witness the table of contents for “The Secrets of Fermentation” starting on
page 102
, under the intermediate section:

• Temperature
  
• pH
  
• Nutrients and food
  
• Oxygen
  
• Good health
  
• Life Cycle: Respiration
  
• Fermentation
  
• Sedimentation
  
• Listening to your beer
  

And for those paying particularly close attention to the American craft beer movement in 1984,
The Complete Joy of Homebrewing
got some added gravitas via a preface by Michael Jackson, who was by then an advising editor and regular contributor to
Zymurgy.
The critic noted the renaissance taking place in beer in the United States and urged fledgling homebrewers not to be daunted by any perceived lack of supplies or technical capabilities.
Habemus zythum!
He then bolstered this encouragement with a concluding anecdote that we should note at length, as it shows just how sinuously deep the movement that Jackson and Papazian helped foment could run by mid-decade:

Wherever my travels take me in the United States, and whichever commercial beers I am asked to taste, whether by a magazine, a scientific institute, or a brewer, I always seem to finish up in someone's garden at the weekend, enjoying their own home-produced vintage. My hosts always turn out to be members of the American Homebrewers Association. It happened again the other day, in Washington, DC. My hosts were a physicist and his schoolteacher wife. They had friends present, an executive in a government agency and a couple of journalists from a famous newspaper. We enjoyed that same pleasure usually experienced cooking together, except that we were brewing. While we went about it, we sampled the recently matured product of their last brew.