The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (30 page)

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The restaurant portion of the New Amsterdam brewpub went out of business, too, shortly after the 1989 sale.

R
egal trumpets blare;
goblets, flutes, steins, chalices, mugs, and bottles rush past with beer brands from England, Belgium, West Germany, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, and America emblazoned on their glass. A man's hand
reaches down to cradle the last vessel in the pantheon; he brings the beer inside it, a Trappist ale, to his nose and then to his lips. The music shifts to ragtime jazz. Episode two of Michael Jackson's series
The Beer Hunter
can now begin.

And it does, with sweeping shots of the San Francisco Bay and of Jackson walking resolutely amid hilly streets with cable cars, on his way to a festival with almost two hundred beers on tap. We see tables with banners and wares from Sierra Nevada, Boston Beer, and the Mendocino Brewing Company. We see the taps running, the glasses passed, brimming with beer. “They come from a generation of tiny breweries,” Jackson's voice explains over the images to British viewers back home watching Channel 4 and American ones watching the Discovery Channel, “that have sprung up all over America in the last decade.”

With his rumpled suit, owl glasses, salt-and-pepper goatee, and circlet of unkempt curls, Jackson looked like anyone's favorite English professor. He wandered amid the festival floor and confronted for his audience a resurgence in brewing and interest in beer unlike anywhere else in the world. “To a Beer Hunter, America's Northwest beckons like a new frontier, and Americans are beginning to discover that there's more in the kingdom of beer than a standard six-pack from the supermarket.” Festival-goers smilingly explained the libations in their sampling glasses for the charming, curious beer bard from Yorkshire: a lager by way of Santa Cruz, California; an extra special bitter from Hood River, Oregon; an amber ale from Mendocino County in California.

The episode aired on the Discovery Channel on August 30, 1990. It showed an American craft beer movement in seemingly full and unstoppable bloom. The movement certainly appeared so on a macro level. It was in the midst of a four-year run that would see the number of craft breweries and brewpubs increase tenfold. The stories of the entities' origins—and their geographies— were becoming ever more diverse, the plausibility of their individual success more and more assured. Americans were catching on and catapulting craft beer sales.

Or so it seemed. Scratch a little bit, and we see that none of the above was really true. Of the more than 120 craft breweries and brewpubs in the United States, about half were along the West Coast and one-third were in California. For all the growth in numbers through the 1980s, one in four beers sold in the country came from Anheuser-Busch, and other Big Beer rivals like Coors absorbed most of the rest of the market share. Brewpubs were illegal in nearly half the fifty states. Craft sales as a percentage of overall American beer sales could be measured in the very low single digits, whether they came from retailers or from taps steps away from the kettles and tuns (brewpubs made up the majority of newer operations). Craft breweries and brewpubs produced
an estimated 120,000 barrels in 1988 and 180,000 in 1989, according to the Association of Brewers, the trade organization for the smaller operators that emerged out of Charlie Papazian's American Homebrewers Association and became the go-to media source on craft brew statistics. It was all so many specks on Big Beer's windshield.

Jackson was unequivocally correct that “the kingdom of beer” now had many more mansions and that many of these new houses were distinctly American. Jackson was also spot on that America remained a “new frontier”—enough so that fresh ventures nearly a quarter-century into the movement could still claim pioneering “firsts” on their entrepreneurial CVs. These included the Samuel Adams Brewhouse, a brewpub co-owned by Jim Koch that was the first brewery in Philadelphia since Christian Schmidt's closed in 1987 (a contract operation called Dock Street, which brewed its beers through F. X. Matt in Utica, New York, and would grow into a full brewpub off Logan Square by 1990, was started in Philly in 1986 by former pastry chef and restaurant manager Jeffrey Ware). The Samuel Adams Brewhouse, under brewmaster Jim Pericles, opened in December 1989 with three beers: a lager called Ben Franklin Gold, Poor Richard's Amber, and George Washington Porter.

An earlier first on the other side of the continent was the Hood River Brewing Company, started in Hood River, Oregon, right across the Columbia River from Washington State, by Jerome Chicvara, Meg Roland, Irene Firmat, and partners. It became the first craft brewery in Oregon to bottle its beer for sale. Chicvara, who worked for a distributor selling beer, had wanted to contract brew what he called Sasquatch Ale. Finding no breweries willing to do it, he set about raising $50,000 from thirty-three people, mostly relatives, as well as another $150,000 from one of the state's economic development engines, and he opened a physical brewery in an old fruit-canning warehouse. Homebrewer David Logsdon, who owned a laboratory in nearby Parkdale that made, among other products, yeast cultures for wineries, devised Hood River's flagship beer, Full Sail Golden Ale, with the first kegs released in the late spring of 1987 and the first bottles shortly before Thanksgiving.

There was also the Great Lakes Brewing Company, founded by brothers Patrick and Daniel Conway in late 1986. Patrick Conway had studied abroad in the early 1970s in Rome; from that base he had soaked up the pub and brewery culture of West Germany, Belgium, and Britain. The brothers raised money and supplies throughout 1987 and early 1988 and opened in September of that year Cleveland's first brewery since Christian Schmidt and Sons closed in 1984. The city had once hosted as many as eleven breweries after Prohibition and nearly thirty in the decade after the Civil War. The Conways'
one-thousand-barrel, 140-seat brewpub at the 120-year-old Market Tavern building near downtown also signaled the first craft brewery in the Buckeye State entirely. Thaine Johnson, a brewer at the shuttered Christian Schmidt, was coaxed out of retirement to oversee the production of three initial beers retailing at $2.20 a glass, including an amber ale named after Clevelander Eliot Ness, best known for enforcing (or trying to, at least) Prohibition.

There was also the Connecticut Brewing Company, a contract operation started by John Foley, a twenty-six-year-old Wall Street bond trader and friend of Mass. Bay Brewing Company cofounders Rich Doyle and Dan Kenary. His Nathan Hale Golden Lager, a recipe culled from the state's pre-Prohibition era and brewed through the Lion Brewery in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, became the first craft beer based in Connecticut; it hit shelves and bars in the winter of 1989.

There was also Deschutes Brewing Company, a brewpub started by Gary Fish, who grew up in the California wine business and started in the restaurant industry as a dishwasher in high school and a waiter in college. He relocated from a restaurant in Salt Lake City to start a brewpub in Bend, Oregon, with John Harris as brewmaster in June 1988 (Harris would later move to the Hood River brewery that became known as Full Sail).

In Vermont, Long Trail Brewing Company joined Stephen Mason, Stephen Israel, and Alan Davis's Catamount Brewing. Specializing in German-style beers, Long Trail was started by Andy Pherson in the fall of 1989 in the impossibly small town of Bridgewater Corners—the brewery joined a general store and a post office as the main commercial ventures. Across the country, in Palo Alto, California, Dean Biersch and Dan Gordon, who had spent five years studying brewing in Munich, were into their second year of running Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant, a 185-seat brewpub carved from an old theater; the pair talked openly of turning the concept into a chain. And on the central Oregon coast, the Rogue River Brewing Company, founded by Jack Joyce, Bob Woodell, Rob Strasser, and Jeff Schultz (Schultz was Woodell's accountant and a homebrewer), was in its first year at a new location. The company's initial brewpub in Ashland, a sixty-seater with a ten-barrel system in the basement, proved too small, so they moved the business 270 miles northwestward to Newport. The new brewpub opened in May 1989 with John Maier, a Siebel Institute graduate and former assistant brewer at Geoff and Marcy Larson's Alaskan Brewing Company, as brewmaster.

A year and a half before that, Sierra Nevada had completed what may have been a first in the movement as well: a major expansion by a physical brewery involving at least one conventional loan source. In part with funding
from Bank of America, Ken Grossman and Paul Camusi's concern opened a twenty-five-thousand-square-foot brewery on East Twentieth Street in Chico, California, and, in 1989, added an adjoining twenty-seven-hundred-square-foot brewpub. The complex featured a beautiful, light-drenched, cavernous, one-hundred-barrel brewhouse capable of producing sixty thousand barrels annually under the direction of brewmaster Steve Dresler, though the founders doubted the company would ever reach that capacity. For now, it was simply satisfying to have undergone such a growth spurt after shakeouts in the wider industry. Grossman was especially pleased his brewery did not need to sell its soul to grow—the decision to open later rather than leap in during the late 1970s had made a difference. So had a cover story in the
San Francisco Examiner
Sunday magazine. On May 25, 1986, readers throughout the Bay Area awoke to a big, blocky headline,
THE BEER THAT'S MAKING CHICO FAMOUS,
and a photograph of Camusi and Grossman that absorbed the magazine's entire cover. They were out in a sown field, the California sky stretching away toward the horizon, the two young men in jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers, sitting atop boxes of beer, stacked kegs beside them, their hair unkempt, a bearded Grossman holding a half-full glass, Camusi holding a bottle, the craftsmen taking a breather—clip the photo and the two could literally be the poster boys of the craft beer movement to that point. The subsequent story by Michael Castleman, which covered Sierra Nevada's history and hinted at the expansion to come, helped immensely in getting their brands into more hands than any West Coast brewery in the second or now third wave.

Closures and readjustments had thinned that second wave considerably (the first wave, Anchor by itself, pushed merrily on). This late-1980s third wave was diffuse geographically and divergent in background, just as it may never had read an issue of
Zymurgy
or heard of Jack McAuliffe's New Albion. Bond traders, restaurateur refugees from the wine industry, beer salesmen, accountants—all were all in on what looked from the outside like that growing industry marveled at by Michael Jackson in
The Beer Hunter
and personified so coolly by Grossman and Camusi on that magazine cover. On the inside, too, it seemed a rather burgeoning industry. The seventh annual Microbrewers Conference, as it was called,
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was held over three days beginning on August 30, 1989, in the San Francisco Hilton. The theme was “Brewing into the Future,” and the registration fee for members of the Institute for Brewing Studies, a wing of the Association of Brewers, was $392 ($462 for nonmembers). Session
topics included, “Which to Choose: Brewpub or Microbrewery?” hosted by David Geary; “Brewpub Packaging for Premise Sales—Why, How, and Special Regulations,” hosted by Don Barkley; and “Practical Brewery Sanitation,” hosted by Michael Lewis, still the nation's only full professor of brewing science. More than two hundred brewers, vendors, and others related to the industry attended. It was a far cry from the first conferences as well as the first homebrewers competitions and Great American Beer Festivals—much larger numbers-wise, more regimented, and decidedly, necessarily, more forward-looking and less amateur. As big a harbinger of the shift as anything was the discontinuation after the 1989 GABF of the consumer preference poll—from now on, every competition would be decided by a panel of judges.
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It was no small thing, either, that by now the Microbrewers Conference was held in a different city each year; 1988's had been in Chicago, which in under a year caught up to New York in its number of breweries. The first—and the first brewery in America's third-largest city since the Peter Hand Brewing Company folded in 1978—was Sieben's River North, which could seat four hundred people in its pub and brew up to five thousand barrels. It was started by Jim Krejcie, who got the idea after attending an AHA conference in 1982. He borrowed $10,000 from his mother, enough for the brewing equipment, the space in an old warehouse near the North Branch of the Chicago River (he made the landlord a partner to get lower rent), and the name of what had been Chicago's oldest beer garden, Sieben's. He also collected as partners Bill and Ron Siebel, the brothers who ran Chicago's august Siebel Institute, which had been training brewers since the late nineteenth century. Sieben's River North's first brewmaster was Peter Burrell, a geologist by training taking courses at Siebel. The brewpub opened in September 1987 to fifteen-minute waits for tables. It was followed within a year by the Tap and Growler in Chicago's Greektown neighborhood and Goose Island about two miles north of Sieben's. Attendees at the 1988 Microbrewers Conference visited each one, as they would visit Mendocino, Gordon Biersch, and other brewpubs in the Bay Area a year later.