The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (31 page)

They also dropped in on Anchor Brewing on Mariposa Street. Fritz Maytag's operation was as pivotal as ever in the movement, and Michael Jackson made it a point, along with his producer and director Bob Bee, to make it the focus of that second episode of
The Beer Hunter.
If Jackson were the rumpled English professor, Maytag was every bit the English department's chairman—physically trim in middle age and crisply dressed, tactfully restrained in his
enthusiasm, slow in picking his words, frowningly serious about the bottom lines, financial and otherwise. He and Jackson walked about the copper kettles of the beautifully apportioned Anchor brewhouse. Maytag explained for a second generation that first encounter with the old, struggling brewery in August 1965. “I found it to be intriguing that it was an entity,” he said, “and that it was a local thing. It was a real, local entity; and the idea of saving it appealed to me from the beginning.”

Later in the episode, Jackson accompanied Maytag and his crew on a more than three-hundred-mile bus ride to Tulelake, near California's Oregon border, to the single field on the one farm that produced the barley used in Anchor Christmas Ale. Maytag used the annual trip to remind his crew—and himself—that the beer they crafted came from the earth, the local earth at that, and should the earth not cooperate in birthing the proper ingredients, everything could go awry. The riders played cards and guitars, sang and laughed, talked and sipped—it was a trip everyone watching would have liked to have been on. Maytag sat slightly apart, glancing at the Northern California landscape as it rolled from brushy to verdant, flatter to hillier. He shared his American perspective with his foreign guest: “I think there's a dangerous closeness to having beer almost become a commodity in our country. For a while there, we had almost lost the idea that beer could be wonderful and that there were different styles of beer, and that brewing companies could have personalities. I think we were very close to losing that. It's coming back now.”

*
The Association of Brewers would change the name to the Craft Brewers Conference. This conference replaced earlier microbrewer meetings, which were often part of the annual homebrewers competition.

*
Boston Beer Company's beers had won the consumer preference poll in 1985, 1986, 1987, and 1989.

“I
am fed up with restaurants!”
declared the poet Folco Portinari. The eyes of the delegates from fourteen nations swung to him. “All restaurants should be closed for one year. Journalists are the only ones who eat in restaurants. The rest of the people eat what they make at home.”

Portinari went on to propose a promotion of a “realistic cuisine” that would help “recover” people who no longer ate locally, who no longer cooked
for themselves, who were no longer in tune with what wasn't mass-produced and marketed to them. He ended his remarks, which had stopped the first International Slow Food Congress in its officious tracks, on an almost fatalistic, yet pragmatic note. “It is useless to fight against fast food, but we must support tradition.”

That the delegates had gathered in early December 1990 in Venice was no accident. Carlo Petrini had picked it because, as he told a reporter, it was “the slowest city in the world.” Petrini had not been able to forget the protests outside of the new 450-seat McDonald's off the Spanish Steps in Rome in 1986. In the interim, he and Portinari started a group dedicated to the enjoyment of locally produced food and drink, envisioning it as a deliberate reaction to the rise in fast food, in mass-produced foodstuffs, in the growing distances between producers and consumers wherever they happened to be in the world. Slow Food, as it was called in any language, was a mix of tongue in cheek and deadly seriousness. It even had a manifesto, written by Portinari and signed the previous December in the Opera Comique in Paris by delegates from fifteen nations, including the United States. The first two paragraphs stated the group's grievances:

Our century, which began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model. We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods.

Toward the end of the 248-word manifesto, Petrini and Portinari, and their partisans, got to what they were trying to effect.

Our defense should begin at the table with Slow Food. Let us rediscover the flavors and savors of regional cooking and banish the degrading effects of Fast Food….

That is what real culture is all about: developing taste rather than demeaning it. And what better way to set about this than an exchange of experiences, knowledge, projects?

That first congress brought earnest discussion of the goals laid out in the manifesto. It also brought suggestions that showed a certain bravado as well as naivete: a journalist from Austria proposed bringing the recently liberated nations of Eastern Europe onboard; a delegate from Venezuela said his country
would host a cooking school based on Slow Food's principles. Americans were skeptical about the movement. As Sheldon Wasserman, an authority on Italian wines, asked at a New York press conference announcing the manifesto, “Why does there have to be an organized movement for this?”

“To share the enthusiasm,” replied Nino Beltrami, a math professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and one of Slow Food's American organizers. “Concertgoers,” Wasserman went on, “share a love for music by going to a concert, and those who enjoy good food share their interests by going to dinner together at some place other than McDonald's. There are already plenty of food and wine organizations for those who want to join them.”

Beltrami was left to explain that Slow Food wasn't meant to be elitist. It was meant, as the manifesto said, to promote the enjoyment of food and drink made as close to a consumer as possible from the finest ingredients available (it was meant to be affordable as well, though this wasn't said in the manifesto or in much of the movement's first months). Slow Food was reactionary, much like the American craft beer movement; both drew inspiration and guidance from earlier times and set themselves in opposition to what seemed like their ages' prevailing and inevitable norms. Slow Food—what was the point? A small-scale brewery, Mr. McAuliffe? You must be kidding; the state of California doesn't have a form for that!

Slow Food also arrived in an America coming off a decadelong fitness craze. Hundreds of exercise videos designed for the advent of the VCR hit shelves and were hawked in magazine ads and late-night television commercials; some sold into the millions and actually spawned sequels. Gym chains like Bally Total Fitness, Crunch, Planet Fitness, and Equinox started, in the 1980s, opening hundreds of locations, including several in each of the nation's largest cities. Home-gym suppliers did tens of thousands of dollars in business per month. C. Everett Koop dusted off the bully pulpit of the national surgeon general, intoning through the Reagan administration like the voice of a vengeful God against smoking and sloth. George H. W. Bush reinvigorated the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports by making Arnold Schwarzenegger, the world's highest-paid movie star and recently minted Kennedy in-law, its chairman; millions of school kids were condemned to compete through pull-ups and sprints for certificates from the president, who made it a regular point to be seen jogging, buff Secret Service agents in tow, a habit his successors were compelled to adopt. The fitness craze almost appeared an inevitable successor to the consumer concerns that arose the decade before over the nation's food supply, the same concerns that sparked those twelve million
home gardens in the mid-1970s. It would be years, though, before Slow Food and the locavore movement it championed—and grew in tandem with—joined this emphasis on fitness in the United States. But there were Americans paying attention to Petrini, Portinari, and their disciples, enough to note the delicious symbolism (probably intentional) during that first night of the first International Slow Food Congress. A banquet was held at the Palazzo Pisani Moretta, a fifteenth-century palace along the Grand Canal in Venice, reachable by motorboat. The 250 delegates, press, and guests dined beneath chandeliers and sconces lit only by candles. It evoked, as one observer noted, an “earlier, slower” time.

T
hings were slow
at the F. X. Matt Brewing Company—and not in a good way. Nick Matt had joined his brother F. X. at the family regional in 1989, a year after its one hundreth birthday and after a career that included a stint as a top executive at Procter & Gamble. Nick Matt also came aboard just after he, his three brothers, and their sister bought out a family trust to gain control of the brewery their grandfather had started.

It was a precarious time. Like the handful of other older, family-run regionals, F. X. Matt was losing money, operating under capacity, and being squeezed by Big Beer. It couldn't compete as strongly on the marketing end, and it couldn't, in many instances, produce its brands cheaply enough to compete with Big Beer's cheapest labels. F. X. Matt faced the additional challenge of having the largest Old Milwaukee franchise outside of Milwaukee in its hometown of Utica, New York. The Stroh's brand almost dared F. X. Matt to price its Utica Club and Matt's Premium more cheaply. What to do?

The brothers streamlined where they could and upped their marketing game. They changed their packaging, including the labels, to make them pop more from retailers' shelves. They turned their down times into money with contract brewing for craft operations like Matthew Reich's New Amsterdam, Jeffrey Ware's Dock Street, and Tom Potter and Steve Hindy's Brooklyn Brewery. They got local and state tax breaks. They even started exporting to Japan
and brewing a nonalcoholic beer. A mild optimism set in amid the 130-plus employees. Through it all, F. X. Matt (the man and the brewery) refused to compromise on product quality. Cuts and savings might come elsewhere, but not on the ingredients and the time taken to brew their own beer. It turned out to be a crucial decision, though it seemed like a suicide pact. The marketing changes were unlikely to make a big enough difference, and the contract brewing wasn't by itself going to keep the brewery going. Then the Great American Beer Festival intervened.

F. X. Matt had been making an all-malt lager it called Saranac 1888 since 1985, named after a lake in Upstate New York and the year of the brewery's founding. It was not one of their main brands and was more akin to the craft beers starting to circulate than to Utica Club or Matt's Premium. The brewery entered it in the GABF in 1987 and, to its surprise, walked away with a silver medal in the Continental Pilsners category (losing to Samuel Adams Boston Lager but edging out a pilsner from fellow family-run regional August Schell). That was a nice spot of good news amid the bad, though it did little to nothing to stem what seemed like a slide into oblivion. A headline in the February 6, 1989, metro section of Syracuse's
Post-Standard
seemed to say it all about Upstate New York's biggest breweries:
MILLER, BUD TO BOOST PRODUCTION; MATT HOPES TO SURVIVE.
Then, again, the GABF intervened.

F. X. Matt had another beer in its Saranac line called Saranac Amber Lager. Like the 1888, it wasn't a big part of the brewery's repertoire, accounting for perhaps 1 percent of its sales. At the 1991 GABF, the amber won the gold medal in the American premium lager category. The silver medalist? The Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing Company, which Miller had bought in 1988. Nick Matt remembered the news reaching Utica from Denver; it gave everyone pause. “If this is such a great beer,” they thought, “maybe we should spend more time focusing on it.” So that's what F. X. Matt did. The brewery swung its marketing squarely behind the Saranac line, which also included a black and tan, a pale ale, and a pilsner, pushing it in place of less expensive brands like Matt's Premium and Utica Club. Sales of Saranac grew several years in a row. The main marketing tool? The GABF gold medal. It was not so much that F. X. Matt's brewing expertise shifted—Saranac had been part of its lineup, their brewers knew what to do—but that the focus shifted. The medal showed the regional, which made its bones in the last golden age of American brewing, a path away from consignment to the history books.

So there it was to many inside and outside the industry: craft beer could be a great business move. It was the way, the truth and not the light. What could possibly go wrong if you marketed everything right?

A
merican, Saudi-Arabian, British,
French, Italian, and Canadian warplanes tore through the desert sky. They attacked Iraqi targets at a rate of more than one sortie per minute, searching for the Scud missiles that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had been lobbing into Israel. The patricianly grim president George H. W. Bush, architect of the international force now in its third day of attack, vowed “the darndest search and destroy mission that's ever been undertaken.” He urged patience, however, and his military men echoed him, telling reporters the war would be a slog, not a sprint. Twelve warplanes had been shot down, including four American ones; seven crew members from those planes were missing. The bombing continued day and night.