The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (20 page)

To the north, in Washington State, three craft breweries joined Bert Grant's groundbreaking brewpub. Inspired by Fritz Maytag's Anchor, the aptly, almost defiantly named Independent Ale Brewing Company opened in a former transmission shop in Seattle in the summer of 1982, serving a signature beer called Redhook Ale. It was supposed to be modeled after richer English ales but was born of a Belgian yeast strain, discovered by one of the brewery's founders, that produced a spicy, fruity beer; locals took to calling it “banana beer” because of the spice. Cofounders Paul Shipman, a former door-to-door wine salesman out of nearby Woodinville and the discoverer of the Belgian yeast strain, and Gordon Bowker, a one-time writer who a decade before
had cofounded the Seattle coffeehouse that became Starbucks, sold less than one thousand barrels of it that first year. But a porter in 1983 and an IPA in 1984 changed everything, and their five thousand-square-foot brewery soon reached capacity.

Around the same time, about 350 miles to the northeast, a twenty-something Washingtonian, back from bicycling through southern England and tasting what local breweries had to offer, was readying his first beer for sale. Mike Hale, who was also inspired by Jack McAuliffe's New Albion, called that first beer Hale's Pale American Ale and chose July 4, 1983, for its debut. In January 1985, Andy Thomas and Will Kemper poured the first beers from their new Bainbridge Island brewery, Thomas Kemper, at the Roanoke Park Place Tavern in Seattle. In another corner of Washington, right on both the Oregon border and the banks of the Columbia River, husband-and-wife team Tom Baune and Beth Hartwell built by hand Hart Brewing Company in an old general store in a logging town called Kalama (population twelve hundred); they called their first beer, a pale ale that debuted in 1984, Pyramid.

Finally, in the old clocktower building of the small lower-Michigan town of Chelsea, about twenty miles west of Ann Arbor, a thirty-one-year-old cook and choir director named Ted Badgerow started the Real Ale Company, the first craft brewery in the Midwest. It was a milestone for the state that had been the first to ratify the Twenty-First Amendment and that had had as many as 128 breweries before Prohibition. By the time Badgerow came along, the region was best known brewing-wise for the Stroh's plant in Detroit. His ethos, as he told
Time
magazine in July 1983, was simple: “I just crank up the stereo, stoke up the boiler, and brew some ale.” He had been doing that on one scale or another for a few years, ever since a friend in Grand Rapids, Michigan, served him a tasty ale that Badgerow, fresh off a long bike ride and thirsty, took for an import. No, the friend said, it was his own creation—homebrew. Badgerow himself undertook the hobby just as it became legal at the federal level, and before long friends suggested he started a brewery; one friend was a dairy farmer near Sparta, Michigan, named Gordon Averill, whose family concern was struggling. Badgerow worked there in the summer of 1981.

“I'm going to get rid of all of this,” Averill said one day as the pair surveyed the equipment, “and I probably won't make ten, twenty bucks on it. What am I going to do?”

Badgerow had an idea. “If we filled it with beer, think how much we could sell that for.”

The clocktower space as well as the hardness of the town's water made Chelsea the best location for the brewery in Badgerow's mind. Friends kicked
in $12,000 as seed money, and he and Averill poured in sweat equity. They got busy right away brewing—one of the first calls Badgerow made was to Otto Zavatone at Boulder Brewing for advice—while awaiting the proper state licensing (dealing with the federal ATF had been fairly easy). The state-licensing warren might have been familiar to Jack McAuliffe and Suzy Stern at New Albion in California seven years before. No one had applied for a commercial brewing license in Michigan in about twenty-five years. What form did you even fill out? A friend of Badgerow's from the choir had a brother who was a state lawmaker, and he helped them push things through. Badgerow skipped down the glazed marble of the state government building, license in hand, a bemused Averill walking more slowly beside him. They sold several cases right away of English-style bitters, bottled by hand four at a time in old Bass, Guinness, and Harp bottles that Badgerow got for cents on the dollar. The new brewery, novel as it was for the middle third of the country, had a stream of visitors (drawn as much, Badgerow figured, by the choice dartboard they had as by the possibility of free samples). The partners from the Chesapeake Bay Brewing Company traveled from Virginia Beach, Virginia, to check out the new arrival, and, oddly enough, pop-rock group Hall & Oates dipped in from a Canadian tour to buy seventy cases. Unbeknownst to Badgerow and Averill, other would-be commercial brewers were part of the stream as 1983 turned into 1984.

By the end of 1983, there were fourteen craft breweries and brewpubs, including contract concerns, selling beer in the United States. Seven were in California, three in Washington State, two in New York, and the remainder in Colorado and Michigan. (Others like Hart and BridgePort would start selling soon.) There were rumors of more breweries in Iowa, Maine, Michigan (again), northern New Jersey, and even the Outer Banks of North Carolina. What tethered them despite the differences in size, geography, and temperament? A few things. Foremost, they shared, intentionally or not, the definitional qualities of craft beer set forth by Fritz Maytag in the 1960s at Anchor. They were small, by necessity; independent, also by necessity and sometimes to the extreme of starting without proper legal green lights; and traditional, often fiercely so—witness William Newman's insistence that his beer be served warm or Lou Perrin of Chesapeake Bay assuring future consumers his beers would not be made with “corn flakes” or Mike Hale's determination to mimic the local ales he encountered in England. They were each beachheads in their own ways, helping to turn palates toward a bitterness Americans simply could not seem to abide in large numbers and reanimating the notion of the local brewery. They had also either survived or started just after that first shakeout
in 1982 and 1983 that saw the closure of DeBakker, Cartwright, and, most significantly, New Albion (the Real Ale Company in Michigan would barely make it into 1984). Collectively, then, they now represented a movement.

It is not insignificant that a term arose around this period to describe them in relation to the rest of the brewing industry. As the
New York Times
explained to readers the week before Thanksgiving 1983, “micro-breweries” were those small operations “that have sprung up over the past few years to produce a few thousand barrels of specialized beers each year for limited distribution.” The same story dismissed much of the movement: “Despite admirable intentions and some pretty good products, many of the new beers are pretty awful…. Most microbrewery founders are just beer-lovers who want mainly to make their own idea of the perfect beer. They pick up most of their brewing experience in kitchens.” Quality control, though, was not the biggest hurdle. Back-of-the-envelope calculations show the entire craft beer movement was producing no more than fifty thousand barrels of beer annually in 1984—and about half that total would have belonged to the long-established and recently expanded Anchor. That is, whatever the quality of the beer (and the evidence shows that most of it was, in fact, quite well-received), the movement was small. Each start-up was tenuous, and the competition from Big Beer fierce. Not that the large breweries noticed. They would have little noted what Steve Harrison, an early Sierra Nevada hire on his way to becoming its sales director, said at the second Great American Beer Festival in June 1983, held once again in Boulder. (Sierra Nevada won the top two spots and Anchor the third in the festival's sole award, a consumer preference poll introduced that year.) At the tail end of the homebrewers competition,
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Harrison remarked, “Basically, the whole idea of homebrewing and microbrewing is a reaction against the Budweiserization of America. There's nothing wrong with Budweiser beer. There's nothing wrong with McDonald's hamburgers or Holiday Inns, either. It's just that every beer today tastes exactly like Bud, and every hotel looks exactly like a Holiday Inn.”

The American craft beer movement was trying to change that. Its philosophy—small, independent, and traditional—was sound enough to attract converts. The definition of who could become a craft brewer continued to expand with each new operation. And they stood together amid the vanguard of a larger movement awaiting its vocabulary: slow food, artisanal, locavore. But could craft beer really work as a business, or would it, like the drink itself,
always have a shelf life of five or six years at the maximum? The answer was about to come—but from the East, not the West.

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The homebrewers competitions were crowning their own winners. The very first, in 1979, was a man from Boulder named Tim Mead. It was an ironic surname, given that mead is the name for the beerlike drink made from fermented honey. Nancy Vineyard of Santa Rosa, California, would win in 1983.

J
im Koch watched in quiet amazement
as Michael Jackson asked for a second pot of coffee. The revered critic, seated before Koch's kitchen table in the tony Boston suburb of Newton, was clad in a rumpled bathrobe and what must have been a terrific hangover—were he showing it. Instead, Jackson talked energetically as he downed cup after cup of coffee, perhaps four to every one Koch drank. The two men picked up their conversation of the evening before for a few more hours.

Koch, a Harvard-trained management consultant, had invited Jackson to stay with him on his visit to the Boston area because he had had an epiphany about beer. Jackson, whose first book was about that certainty of English life, the pub, had told his host it was a shame America lacked such a staple. Koch set out to prove him wrong—he took him to pubs like Doyle's, a local in Boston's gritty Jamaica Plain neighborhood run by three Irish-American brothers. The two tied one on, Jackson's significantly tighter than Koch's, and discussed the host's epiphany regarding the freshness of beer, which he illustrated using one of the English ales Jackson had labeled a world classic.

“Michael, this is crap,” Koch told him.

The beer was several months old, he figured from its taste, so stale through oxidation that Koch was picking up a dryness not unlike sherry. It couldn't possibly be the same beer that Jackson raved about.

The critic didn't argue. He explained to Koch that he had dubbed it a world classic after drinking it near its Yorkshire brewery, where it was freshest. In a pub in Boston thirty-two hundred miles away, it could taste different.

The information confirmed Koch's hunch about American beer, which he knew something about: his family had a long history in brewing. His father had been a brewmaster with concerns in the Midwest, his grandfather had
worked at Anheuser-Busch, and his great-great-grandfather had run the eponymous Louis Koch Brewery in St. Louis in the nineteenth century. Koch grew up in Cincinnati knowing about brewing and knowing brewers, including Adolf Merten of Ems Brewing Company, a friend of his grandfather's and one of the authors of
The Practical Brewer: A Manual for the Brewing Industry,
the oft-reissued 1946 work that was exactly what its title suggested. But it all faded to background noise, something in familial lore rather than something in family life, as Koch headed to the foliaged environs of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

After he graduated from Harvard in 1971, Koch made the masochistic decision to enter the university's dual law and business degree program. It was partway through that four-year track, while living on campus and working as a tutor and prelaw adviser, that he realized he was barreling toward a career whether he liked it or not. Koch had done nothing but school his entire short life, so he took a break. A friend, a rugby player from the Australian Outback who was studying Matthew Arnold under Lionel Trilling, had gotten him into rock climbing and suggested he become an instructor for Outward Bound, the nonprofit that coordinates wilderness expeditions. Koch found himself over four straight summers leading groups of eight to ten people, sometimes younger than his twenty-four years, into the wilds of the West on climbing and hiking expeditions. He climbed Mount McKinley in Alaska, North America's highest peak, and its South American counterpoint, Argentina's Mount Aconcagua. The Outward Bound treks (as well as the vegetarianism he would adopt in the 1980s) not only contributed to a compact, sinewy frame that would last well into middle age, but they also taught Koch a valuable lesson via nylon string. The expeditions had only so much string; on his first one, he gave his charges more string than they needed. At the end of the twenty-eight-day trip, they didn't have enough string, having cut it, lost it, or otherwise taken it for granted. The next expedition, Koch handed out less string than his charges needed, and there was a surplus at the end. They had learned to take heed and care of their resources, or to substitute others.