The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (55 page)

“Everybody knows about microbreweries,” someone said at this conference. No, they don't. I have even met people in Seattle or Portland, Oregon, who are unfamiliar with the phrase “microbrewery.” Far more are familiar with the phrase, but unsure what it means. Or whether it is a good thing. Some people still get a bit giggly about having been to a brewpub, as though it were somehow not “normal” beer. Would they feel the same way about visiting a cook-from-scratch restaurant as opposed to a McDonald's?

We understand the differences because we love, live—and no doubt breathe—beer. It is easy to forget that not everyone shares our passion…. As a young television producer, I persuaded James Baldwin and Norman Mailer to appear on a program. Thrilled with achievement, I asked an aunt what she thought of the program. “I liked the black man,” she said, “but that feller with the curly hair was a bit of a loudmouth.” The names James Baldwin and Norman Mailer had meant nothing to her. We have to allow for the fact that millions of people drink without thinking, as though they were sleepwalking, but could be awakened to the pleasures of good beer.

Jackson did not need to spell it out for his audience: however it looked now, future growth was not a given.

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The partnership between Brooklyn Brewery and the subdistributor, SKI, would end acrimoniously within a couple of years as the brewery moved to sever the partnership so it could sell both its New York and Massachusetts distribution companies. Per Hindy and Potter,
Beer School,
233-254.

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An investment firm would acquire Gordon Biersch and Rock Bottom in November 2010 and merge them under a firm chaired by Frank Day.

B
y all rights, given what we know now,
Vinnie Cilurzo's decision in May 1994 should have caused the heavens to open and a ray of deific light to bathe his plastic fermentation tank. As it was, nothing much happened; Cilurzo's decision produced a pretty decent beer. What was the decision? To double the hops and to up the malt a bit in a pale ale recipe he had. Why? To cover any off-flavors in a batch that simply had to work. Cilurzo, a twenty-four-year-old with close-cropped brown hair and big, almond-shaped eyes, was one of three partners and the brewmaster for a new, four-thousand-square-foot brewpub called the Blind Pig, the name a play on Prohibition-era bootlegging, in Temecula, California, about sixty miles north of San Diego. He didn't have much experience brewing at the professional level, though he had known for a while that he wanted to be a brewer. He had grown up around wine—his parents owned a winery nearby with nearly two dozen peacocks—and he had homebrewed in college as well as in the winery's basement. He hopped around Europe, including an illuminating spell in Belgium, and worked at his parents' winery before embarking on what would become the Blind Pig with $160,000 from investors.

The brewpub launched with three beers: the obligatory pale ale, a golden ale, and a seasonal, the Blind Pig Inaugural Ale. This last one was where Cilurzo's decisional alchemy came in. The equipment was secondhand, thanks to Electric Dave down around the Mexican border. Electric Dave was Dave Harvan, a one-time electrician who blew into the former mining community of South Bisbee, Arizona, in an old Volkswagen van in the late 1970s. Ten years later, off State Route 92, off an unmarked road and through a tunnel made of corrugated metal, in a part of the Old West where mounds from the old mines gave the landscape an apocalyptic feel, Harvan started the first craft brewery in Arizona since Prohibition.

The Grand Canyon State's brewing history reflected the larger national changes, especially when it came to consumer tastes. The only Arizona brewery
to make it out of Prohibition for any length of time—eight tried—was the Phoenix-based Arizona Brewing Company. It shed consumers, however, as its home city's population boomed after World War II; then as now the Phoenix region was one of the nation's fastest growing. The newcomers brought with them tastes for the homogenized Big Beer brands they'd grown accustomed to elsewhere, and the Arizona Brewing Company was acquired in 1964 by Canadian conglomerate Carling. The Phoenix brewery closed in 1985; one of the fastest-growing states in the union was without any semblance of local beer.

Enter Harvan in 1987 with a tie and some wingtips he got at the Salvation Army to personally lobby state officials to follow the growing trend of legalizing small breweries and brewpubs. The state did just that, authorizing operations that produced a minimum of ten thousand barrels annually. Chicago transplants Joe and Addie Mocca opened the state's first brewpub in the spring of 1988, Bandersnatch, in downtown Tempe, with another partner, making it a popular hangout for students at nearby Arizona State University. Soon after, with $25,000 from investors, some of them teetotalers by necessity, Harvan began producing beer in his South Bisbee garage with a seven-barrel brew-house he rigged himself that included plastic fermentation tanks. A reporter who made the trip out described the brew as having “a rich, slightly intoxicant quality to it, full-bodied, lacking the watery blandness characteristic of macrobreweries.” Harvan happily drank at least six bottles' worth a day and self-distributed the rest in kegs with his white Dodge pickup for seventy-five dollars each. An arrest for marijuana smuggling soon put Electric Dave temporarily out of business—he would reopen on the same small scale in 2000—and his equipment in the hands of other brewers, including Vinnie Cilurzo at the Blind Pig.

Cilurzo called the seasonal he crafted from Electric Dave's equipment a “double IPA.” It was about 6 percent alcohol by volume and ninety-two IBUs in bitterness—that is, it was about the same alcohol content as Anchor's landmark 1975 Liberty Ale but more than twice as bitter. What had seemed a curiosity not even a generation ago was coming into its own as a distinct style. As we've discussed, the so-called West Coast style was already largely defined by its bitterness; Ken Grossman's Sierra Nevada Pale Ale might be the archetype, with Fritz Maytag's Liberty Ale the urtext. But what Cilurzo had crafted was so much more bitter that in time his creation, along with those from a handful of other brewers on the West Coast and elsewhere, would redefine the style. Bitterness became almost a badge worn by consumers who had a jones for it: they were hopheads and proud of it.

Whether Cilurzo's moniker, double IPA, constituted a brand-new, distinct beer style remains an open question. The first mainstream-media reference
to “double India Pale Ale” or “double IPA” did not appear to have come until nearly a decade after Cilurzo's first batch. The reference was to a Double IPA Festival in February 2002, hosted by Victor and Cynthia Kralj, owners of a pub and beer garden in downtown Hayward, California, called the Bistro. IPAs had to be at least ninety IBUs to enter. The following year, the Great American Beer Festival added a category called “Imperial or Double India Pale Ale,” as official an acknowledgment as brewers of double IPAs could get. (The Pizza Port brewpub chain out of San Diego, California, would win the first gold and silver medals in the category.)

Cilurzo would gain his widest audience for hoppier beers after the Blind Pig, which, like so many other brewpubs and breweries of the era, went out of business in the late 1990s. He then connected with the Russian River Brewing Company in Guerneville, California, about seventy-five miles up Highway 101 from San Francisco. The fifteen-barrel brewhouse opened in May 1997 within the Sonoma County vineyard of its owner, Korbel Champagne Cellars. The company used Centennial and Cascade hops grown on the vineyard in its beer, which was served out of a new on-site restaurant and to local retailers.

Korbel was not the first vintner to segue into craft beer. Charles and Shirley Coury at the short-lived Cartwright Portland and Richard and Nancy Ponzi at BridgePort Brewing, both in Portland, Oregon, had pioneered that pivot at least fifteen years before. Others followed, including up and down California's esteemed wine country. Along with Korbel in Sonoma, there was the Sonoma Mountain Brewery, opened a couple of months after Russian River Brewing and owned by the Benzinger family, which had made its name in California wines. Downstate, in Santa Barbara County, there was the Firestone Walker Brewing Company. Brothers-in-law Adam Firestone and David Walker spent months studying brewing at UC-Davis and started the brewery in 1996 on the Firestone family's vineyard in Los Olivos (the family had actually crafted a nonalcoholic beer as far back as the late 1980s). Almost as a nod to an adjective now beloved by beer geeks and wine snobs alike, Firestone Walker was known to ferment its ales in sixty-gallon oak barrels, which could leave—wait for it—an “oaky” taste.

While Firestone Walker would expand twice within six years, eventually relocating farther north to Paso Robles, California, the Benzingers and Korbel would turn back to wine full-time in the same period. The former simply converted its brewing equipment to wine making. In Korbel's case, however, there was a handoff: The winemaker in 2002 sold its Russian River brand to Cilurzo and his wife, Natalie. The couple, along with partners Jerry Warner and Jim Muto, reopened Russian River as a seven-thousand-square-foot brewpub in downtown Santa Rosa, California, in April 2004 after investing
$750,000 in startup costs, including $75,000 for old brewing equipment from a defunct North Carolina operation. The reborn Russian River, like the old Korbel-controlled brand, produced fifteen hundred barrels annually at first but grew its production to slake demand, especially for its Pliny the Elder, a double IPA named after the Roman naturalist that won the gold medal for Imperial or Double India Pale Ale at both the 2005 and 2006 GABF. (Pizza Port had captured it again in 2004, the category's second year; through 2011, with one exception, California breweries won every gold and silver medal in the category—West Coast style, indeed.)
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The Cilurzos were part of what we might call the craft beer movement's fourth wave. It was one of relative youngsters—the Cilurzos and Jeremy Cowan were barely into their thirties by the new century—not really old enough to have known an American beer scene without Samuel Adams or Sierra Nevada, without sincerely earnest debates over style at BeerAdvocate or RateBeer. Despite their ages, it was also a wave populated by those tested, sometimes even broken, by the shakeout of the late 1990s. They were, then, cognizant of being part of a wave, of something that might either continue to crest or to crash messily. They often proceeded accordingly, this new batch of craft brewers, keeping their distribution close to home and their eyes on innovation. This innovation might come through different styles, or it might simply come through geography: the movement, now at least a generation old on the West Coast and getting there on the East, could still seem like the latest thing in the middle of the country.

When the Bricktown Brewery opened in downtown Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in the fall of 1992 as the Sooner State's first-ever brewpub, patrons would invariably ask Luke DiMichele, the UC-Davis-trained brewmaster, “You brew the beer right there?” The novelty lingered through the next decade, to when Rick and Shaneen Huebert opened the first start-up brewery in Oklahoma since voters endorsed statewide repeal in 1959, in a sixty-five-thousand-square-foot space in Oklahoma City's Capitol Hill neighborhood. The
Daily Oklahoman
carefully explained the Hueberts's eponymous operation to its readers in May 2004: “Huebert Brewery produces about 45 barrels of beer every two weeks…. The facility is capable of producing fifteen barrels at a time. Brewers use the barrel as their standard of measurement, and 330 bottles can be made from one barrel.”

When Saint Arnold Brewing Company released a golden ale called Fancy Lawnmower in the summer of 2002, the oldest craft brewery in Texas had to
explain the joke: “‘Lawnmower beer,'” according to the August 7 food section of the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram,
“is a term used by some microbrew fanciers seeking to denigrate the watery, industrially produced, mainstream lagers that most American drinkers happen to prefer.” That such a lead would run in a Texas newspaper was a testament to the craft beer movement's growth in what had become by 2000 the second most-populous state in the union. A lot of that craft beer growth was due to the efforts of two thoroughly disgruntled investment bankers in Houston, Brock Wagner and Kevin Bartol, who chucked their day jobs to open Saint Arnold in the summer of 1994, near the Hempstead Highway in Houston. They put in half a million of their own money and raised $400,000 more, visiting most of the craft breweries then in existence (this was right before the boom), soliciting advice, and knowing full well the Lone Star State was the land of actual watery lawnmower beers, not craft ones.

Texas may have had nearly sixty breweries in the decade after the Civil War, but then it underwent its own miniwave of consolidation as Big Beer precursors like the early Anheuser-Busch barged in and the number of breweries sank to the single-digits before 1900; after a post-World War II spike, the number stayed that way, with six breweries in operation in Texas by the early 1980s. Most of these were owned by outside forces, including Anheuser-Busch's 126-acre Houston plant, which could produce 3.2 million barrels annually, and Miller's in Fort Worth, which could produce more than twice as much. Even the locally beloved Lone Star brand was owned by G. Heileman out of La Crosse, Wisconsin. The original reception, then, for Saint Arnold in 1994 ranged from incredulity to ignorance, with Wagner and Bartol, homebrewers since their days at Rice University, pressing on through guerilla marketing and a radio ad a few years in that Wagner estimated boosted sales roughly 0.0001 percent.