The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (3 page)

And the beer they drank was a local thing. Breweries and the beers they brewed were delineated by geography. What you got in Cleveland, you couldn't get in Brooklyn; the brands in Pittsburgh would seem unusual to someone from San Diego. The nature of beer was a big part of this: it was a foodstuff that tasted best fresh and could spoil after a few weeks in the bottle or can. It was best, then, to have it produced nearby. Every big city—and several smaller ones—had at least a couple of breweries, and some had a lot more than that. St. Louis and Milwaukee were each home to dozens, but it was Brooklyn, New York City's most populous borough, that would cultivate the most. By the 1870s, Brooklyn already had forty-eight breweries, most clustered in German immigrant neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Bushwick (a stretch of North Eleventh Street in Williamsburg today boasts street signs harking back to when it really was a “Brewers' Row”). From 1865 to 1915, the average American brewery went from producing 1,643 barrels a year to 44,461, and the number of breweries nationwide rose to as high as 2,783. Beer seeped into the national consciousness—president Teddy Roosevelt was known to hoist a cold one and took more than five hundred gallons of beer on safari in 1909—and it became a cultural fulcrum on which so much of the nation's collective memory turned. Indeed, most beer during this time was consumed in public houses—bars, taverns, locals, pubs—and served from barrels and kegs tapped with colorful tabs; the technology of packaging beer, especially in aluminum cans, had not yet caught up to the demand.

Not that it mattered. On January 29, 1919, came the Eighteenth Amendment: Prohibition. Producing any commercial beverage with over one-half of one percent of alcohol became illegal. Following repeal at the federal level in December 1933, American brewing re-emerged into a new business environment that quickly became defined by size rather than geography. Breweries wanted to get as big as they could as fast as they could, and they did this as would most any industry: through mergers and acquisitions. The number of American breweries shrank to 684 by 1940. From 1935 to 1940 alone, with the backdrop of the Great Depression and its grinding unemployment, the number of breweries nationwide fell by 10 percent. Some cities, like Brooklyn, never really recovered their pre-Prohibition status as brewing hubs. There, the number of breweries dropped steadily, through consolidation and simple economic stress, until by the early 1960s there would be only a few left. The same was true three thousand miles away.

At 2:31 in the afternoon on December 5, 1933, word reached San Francisco that the Twenty-First Amendment repealing Prohibition had been ratified. The siren on the city's Ferry Building facing the mainland United States sounded, and fourteen trucks trundled up Market Street to City Hall to present mayor Angelo Rossi with cases of liquor and wine.

While some of San Francisco's windy, wending streets literally ran with booze over the next few days, the actual situation for retailers and for manufacturers was a different matter entirely. Not only had Prohibition wiped out, through neglect and police action, much of the infrastructure for commercially producing alcohol, but San Francisco also emerged from the dry years into a business climate stultified by what was being called the Great Depression. Until the 1930s, Americans had applied that term to the economic downturn of the early 1870s; but this more recent one was something else entirely, with over one-fourth of the eligible American population out of work and no social safety net to catch them and their families. In San Francisco, the number of unemployed jumped an estimated 47 percent from 1930 to 1931. Such statistics got worse and worse for months, and then years, until a cruel reality seemed to settle over the City by the Bay like so much fog.

Into this fog stepped Joseph Kraus. A German immigrant steeped in brewing, Kraus was part of a trio of owners who had kept Anchor going after its original owners, Ernst Baruth and his son-in-law Otto Schinkel Jr., died over a decade before Prohibition (Schinkel was killed in 1907 in a fall from a San Francisco cable car just as a fresh version of the brewery was going up at Eighteenth and Hampshire Streets). In the spring of 1933, eight months before Repeal and with the state's OK, Kraus reopened Anchor a few blocks north, at
Thirteenth and Harrison, only to have the brewery burn down the following February (a fire spawned by the Great Earthquake of 1906 had also destroyed a previous location). Tragedy of a more bromidic kind struck Anchor after Kraus and a partner, brewmaster Joe Allen, reopened yet again at another spot: demand waned so much that Allen, by then the sole owner following Kraus's death, closed the brewery in 1959.

And why not? American tastes in beer were homogenizing, and breweries were consolidating, the Big Beer ones like Schlitz, Anheuser-Busch, and Pabst either gobbling up smaller competitors directly or rendering their market shares to a trifle. By the start of 1959, the five largest breweries produced over 28 percent of the beer Americans consumed, a jump of ten percentage points since the end of World War II. That market share would grow to nearly half within a decade, and most of the beer would be a distinctly watery interpretation of the lager style called pilsner. At the same time, new technologies were revolutionizing the way brewers distributed their beers and how Americans drank them. In January 1959, Bill Coors, a Princeton-trained chemical engineer who would later chair the brewery founded by his grandfather, introduced the seven-ounce aluminum beer can; by 1963, with the introduction of the pull-tab opening, aluminum had supplanted tin as the preferred metal for canning beer, as tin sometimes dissolved into the beer. (Despite his pivotal role in this reverberating technology, Bill Coors, asked in 2008 by a Colorado newspaper to name the biggest change during his seventy years in brewing, replied, “that so many breweries have gone out of business …. When an industry starts to consolidate, you either get consolidated or you consolidate.”)

As much as it was once a local product, beer was also something that Americans consumed largely communally: in bars, taverns, pubs, and restaurants; at ballgames, political rallies, and celebrations like weddings or graduations. Such technology as the aluminum can—and the proliferation of home refrigeration and the development of the Interstate Highway System starting in the mid-1950s—ensured that such communality was doomed. Throughout the 1950s, more and more beer was packaged for wider distribution, rumbling by the hundreds of cases over America's new highways to be shelved in freshly built supermarkets (a word that itself entered the national vocabulary in the Eisenhower years) and to be drunk in dens and living rooms just beyond the flickering penumbras of thousands, then millions, of rabbit-eared television sets. By the end of the decade, well over eight in ten beers were sold in packaging—aluminum cans in a six-pack, glass bottles along the beverage aisle. Various state and local governments abetted the trend from communal
to private consumption; spooked by the crime associated with Prohibition-era speakeasies, legislatures made it more difficult for new watering holes to open. At the same time, a three-tier distribution system was emerging that ran from producers to distributors (or wholesalers) to retailers, ensuring that the bigger the producer the more influence in the distribution system.
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Producers like Anchor never stood a chance. They did not bottle their product—and certainly did not can it—and they had neither the means nor, at first, the inclination to distribute it beyond the usual customers: local bars and restaurants. They would never be big enough to hold the attention of distributors. With distributors increasingly uninterested, and demand slackening at local bars and restaurants as more consumers drank at home, the game was truly up. Smaller breweries across the nation closed or were absorbed by Big Beer at a fantastic rate. Joe Allen's Anchor Brewing Company at Seventeenth and Kansas in San Francisco was no different.

Still, the brewery that Maytag bought control of had been given one last shot in 1960, under the ownership of Lawrence Steese, described by historian Maureen Ogle as “a laid-back, pipe-smoking dreamer,” and Bill Buck, who came from a wealthy family in nearby Marin County. Neither knew much about brewing, and the beer suffered. Tipplers from the time remembered “a truly terrible beer” and “foul,” one “kept alive more by the enthusiasm for the idea than for the beer,” as Maytag himself recalled. Buck soon sold his 51 percent stake to two overconfident ad men, who, in turn, after trying to save Anchor through more aggressive marketing, sold their stake to Maytag. Steese remained as a minority partner until Maytag bought him out, too, in 1969; and the brewery remained as essentially the ward of a few local clients, especially Frank Kuh. “We were doing a hundred kegs a month,” Maytag said, “and if the Old Spaghetti Factory weren't taking ten each week, we'd have been in trouble. I always say Frank Kuh was the one who really saved Anchor Steam.”

Maytag did his part, to say the least, leaving Steese in the early months as de facto brewmaster while he schlepped about San Francisco's hilly streetscapes as head salesman, going door to door to convince more bar and restaurant owners to carry a beer thoroughly down on its luck. So far down, in fact, that some owners refused to believe Anchor was even still brewing. They thought Maytag was some kind of weirdo—an oddity even in the counterculture's capital city, babbling about how he owned a brewery that wasn't named Miller or Pabst. He did not savor much success. But that left him time to ponder Anchor's marketing, distribution, and, especially, production. Where to take it? What to do to
get it there? Maytag's decisions throughout the late 1960s, though he could not have realized it, set the ground rules for the craft beer movement to come and were collectively a milestone in American cuisine.

First, size: Maytag kept Anchor small. Part of that was the beer marketplace—there was not much demand beyond Kuh and a few other locals for a beer that had become a pale shadow of its pre-Prohibition self. Part of it was an almost preternatural desire not to grow. That was a foreign concept to entrepreneurs, to capitalism itself, but perhaps an approach that only an heir to a family fortune could take. “I want to make all our beer in this building—hands on,” Maytag would say. “I mean this: we do not—emphatically do not—want to get too big.” Anchor in the early years of his ownership brewed a hundred kegs a month among five workers, including Maytag. Forty years after Maytag bought control of Anchor, the Brewers Association, the nation's leading trade group for craft brewers, chose a definition for “craft brewer.” The first of three adjectives that the group used in its definition? “Small.”

The second was “independent.” For Maytag's Anchor, this was easy early on: the brewery was a money loser for years and persisted in producing a product strange to most consumers—who would ever want to buy him out? Besides, its independence was part of Anchor's marketable charm. It was the plucky, back-from-the-dead (many times), little brewery in what one journalist described as “a dump of a building,” a local curiosity crafted deliberately by hand. The hands increased at only a glacial pace—the number of employees would barely rise above fifty even three decades later—and Anchor splashed “Made in San Francisco since 1896” prominently across each bottle in block-black letters, trading on local lore and enticing consumers to think about their beer in terms then increasingly uncommon: as the carefully created product of a certain time and a certain place. Made only in X since Y—it was the antithesis of mass production, where history matters little and place even less.

Finally, the Brewers Association in 2005 defined a craft brewer as “traditional.” Here, Maytag's influence in setting the movement's ground rules was unmistakable. When he bought control of Anchor in 1965, the brewery was occasionally resorting to corn syrup in its recipe, a cheaper way to goose the alcohol content and to play with the flavor. Maytag returned the steam-beer recipe to all barley malt, reaching back through the decades to Anchor's nineteenth-century roots; it was a pricier approach that introduced greater uncertainty into the brewing. A few degrees the wrong way in the boiling part of the brewing, a mismatch of malts, or a wrong measurement of the same, and the batch was ruined; its ruination, in fact, likely only to be discovered after weeks of fermentation, the unusable rotted fruits of many hours of labor the
money-losing operation could never get back. To Maytag, though, that was the point. He set up a little place in the Eighth Street building that he called “the lab,” and it was exactly that: a place to tweak Anchor's recipes, to find what ingredients worked and in what proportions. It was also where the beer was made more palatable for distribution; one of the first triumphs of Maytag's team was preventing the draft beer from souring before it made it to local restaurants and bars. Another was finding a way to bottle the beer for shipment without loading it with preservatives. By the start of the 1970s, both would be accomplished.

Still, Anchor failed to turn a profit, despite literally no competition from other craft breweries. And yet the barely thirty-year-old Maytag kept at it—small, independent and traditional. He had grave doubts, but he was genetically hardwired to be stubborn when it came to starting a new business. Plus, he absolutely loved the idea of making a product locally for local consumption—what would one day be labeled “locavore.” It was a love he got from his father, who had crafted the famous blue cheese. “I saw the pride with which my father reacted when people would ask him, ‘Have you anything to do with that blue cheese?' I saw that, and I saw I had a chance of developing a food product that could do the same.” He had a sense that the demand was out there, beyond San Francisco, a sort of commercial Manifest Destiny in reverse, a movement rolling eastward, back toward his native Iowa, all the way to the Massachusetts where he was schooled, back to a time when geography mattered in food and people took the time to care about what they ate and drank. “We had a feeling that we had a better mousetrap and the world would lead a path to its door.”