The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (61 page)

I
t was the first Friday
in February 2010, and that meant the annual first pours of Russian River brewpub's Pliny the Younger, a so-called triple IPA from the accidental progenitor of the double IPA, Vinnie Cilurzo. The beer had debuted in 2005 and had, according to Cilurzo's operation, “gobs of IBU”—well over the 90 IBU threshold generally thought to define a double IPA (or what the Great American Beer Festival called an Imperial IPA). It had proved popular enough each February it was released. Patrons could come in and buy tenounce glasses of Pliny the Younger for $4.50 or new half-gallon growlers for $37; supply usually lasted two to three months.

But 2010 seemed different. Cilurzo and his crew had heard rumblings for about a week. Pliny the Younger had scored a perfect 100 rating on both Beer-Advocate and RateBeer. It had only five days before won the People's Choice Award at the tenth annual Double IPA Festival at the Bistro in nearby Hayward. Still, Russian River prepared as if this second Friday in February would be like the last five: the beginning of a gradual sellout of Pliny the Younger. No more, no less.

Then, around 6
AM,
the line started. It snaked through Fourth Street in downtown Santa Rosa, and those in it could be seen tapping their smart phones, pecking out texts and e-mails to others who might come. Even the weather cooperated; it was the dead of winter, but it was fifty degrees by 11
AM,
with nary a breeze beneath partly sunny skies. The line grew; the brewpub opened.

The day was a blur. It was all hands on deck as one patron after another stepped through the door. Even husbands, wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, and buddies were drafted by Cilurzo into filling glasses and growlers. Friends of his from Kern River Brewing near Bakersfield had come up for the pour; he put them to work pouring. Cilurzo drilled holes in the back of the cold box in the brewhouse to open up another filling station; he yanked other beers from the
taps and ran those lines to Pliny the Younger. Natalie Cilurzo filled growlers without a break all day. Russian River would sell its entire supply of Pliny the Younger—twenty barrels, or forty kegs, a supply that had every previous year taken at least two months to run dry—in eight hours. They forbade growlers the next year and had more staff for the pour.

Such scenes were reenacted in the new decade at craft breweries and brewpubs throughout the nation on an almost monthly basis. More operations than ever before were releasing special annual brands or lines of beers that loosed happy clamors upon their release dates, followed quickly by the now de rigueur debates on the web and through social media. If brewers like Cilurzo were rock stars, their specialty beers were hit songs. Many of these—nearly all, in fact—could be classified as extreme beers: big, brassy, unapologetic recipes with lots of different ingredients, some used in no other beers on the planet, and packing alcohol punches.

Sam Calagione at Dogfish Head remained the Mick Jagger of extreme beer. Like Michael Jackson almost a generation earlier with
The Beer Hunter,
Calagione even had his own Discovery Channel television show,
Brew Masters,
in late 2010. He introduced as many as one million viewers an episode to concoctions like Chateau Jiahu, based on a nine-thousand-year-old recipe culled from ancient pottery jars found in China; the first season ended with episode six highlighting the Italian craft beer movement, and America's influence on it,
*
as well as Dogfish Head's collaboration on beers for a new brewpub called Eataly atop the old International Toy Center in Manhattan's Flatiron District. Calagione also published his own memoir-cum-business-advice-book in 2005, during a run that saw others, like Steve Hindy and Tom Potter at the Brooklyn Brewery, Jeremy Cowan at Shmaltz, and Greg Koch and Steve Wagner at Stone pen theirs.
^†

Calagione, Koch, Cilurzo, Cowan, Garrett Oliver, and others also often found themselves at the pouring end of long lines at the Great American Beer Festival and other events, fans patiently waiting for what seemed like eternities for a quick word with their heroes. The GABF bespoke the continued growth in the industry. After almost collapsing in 1984, when it leaped from Boulder to Denver, it set an attendance record in 2010, with forty-nine thousand people tasting twenty-two hundred beers from 455 breweries representing forty-eight states and the District of Columbia, as 3,523 beers total competed in seventy-nine style categories. The festival then tied the attendance record in
2011, its thirtieth year, selling out in one week. It shattered the other numbers, adding a brewery from Puerto Rico for the first time in the process. (The most competitive category both years, according to the Brewers Association, was the American-style IPA, suggesting that, yes, Maytag and his crew were on to something with Cascade hops and Liberty Ale in 1975.) John Hickenlooper was the latter year's surprise speaker at an industry luncheon that included several beer writers; he spoke not only as the cofounder of Denver's first brewpub, Wynkoop, but also as its former mayor—and Colorado's governor, elected in 2010. Some of the same faces at the GABF, too, could be found later in the year, every other year, at Salone del Gusto in Turin. Calagione and Charlie Papazian shared the dais there at a lecture on Italian craft beers in October 2010, when Salone del Gusto set its own attendance record.

Things were moving farther and farther from the point where anyone could remember America as
not
the world's innovator in beer and brewing. At the same time, though craft beer's market share still paled against Big Beer's, the segment's reach was growing as the wider industry's was shrinking. For three years in a row, beginning in 2009, the wider industry sold fewer barrels of beer; at the same time, craft beer sales were growing by double digits. In 2011, the nation's 1,063 brewpubs and 877 craft breweries sold 13 percent more beer than the year before, while the entire industry's sales were down more than 1 percent, similar to a drop in 2010. As for market share, it was 5.7 percent by volume in 2011, an almost 50 percent increase from three years before. The healthy growth meant more jobs than ever before in American craft beer (an estimated 103,585) and more breweries operating in the United States than at any time since the 1880s (and more than in any other country). “The smaller brewers' activity,” the
Wall Street Journal
noted right before New Year's Day 2012, “is a bright spot in an economy still struggling to kick manufacturing and construction into higher gear.” It was a role the movement was familiar with, one that stretched once again the definition of a “craft brewer.”

On December 20, 2010, the Brewers Association changed the definition of a craft brewer by raising the amount that one could produce annually from two million barrels to six million. That was the new “small”; the terms “independent” and “traditional,” heralded by Maytag in the 1960s, remained intact. While some complained it was a sop to the association's larger members, which were quickly closing in on two million barrels a year, others said it was a sign of the times. “A lot has changed since 1976,” said Nick Matt of F. X. Matt, who chaired the board that voted in the change. “The largest brewer in the United States has grown from 45 million barrels to 300 million barrels of global beer production.” (The 1976 nod was to the Henry King-backed tax change that helped ease costs considerably for smaller brewers.)

The definition change reflected the Brewers Association's efforts, under new COO Bob Pease, to change the law itself to move the annual cap to six million barrels and to halve the tax rate on small brewers from seven dollars per barrel on the first sixty thousand barrels.
*
As it was, the definition swept together every iteration of commercial brewing in America outside of Big Beer, from the likes of Boston Beer and Sierra Nevada to the smallest licensed operations, nanobreweries, which were now popping up and which were, with their small batches, homebrewer founders, and self-distribution locally, a throwback to the movement's earliest days.
^†

Perhaps nothing stamped the ubiquity of the craft beer movement in the new century's second decade than the nation's very officialdom. In April 2010, the 111th Congress passed a resolution in praise of American Craft Beer Week, citing the movement's contributions to the economy and to the national palate by championing “historic brewing traditions dating back to colonial America.” The week itself, started by the Brewers Association, dated from 2006, when Congress passed a similar resolution. Satirist Stephen Colbert spoke of the gravity of the milestone on his Comedy Central show, which reached more than 1.2 million viewers four nights a week: “This isn't one of those fake holidays, like Grandparents Day or Women's History Month—no, this is officially sanctioned by Congress as of 2006!” And, in February 2011, for Super Bowl Sunday, President Obama and the first lady served a honey ale made by the White House Mess using the fruits of a beehive on the mansion's grounds—the first time brewing had ever been done at the White House in its 210-year history.

*
That sixth episode never aired in the United States, though it was broadcast in other parts of the world.

†
Pete Slosberg beat everybody. His
Beer for Pete's Sake
was published in 1998.

*
The tax law change would also institute a new rate of sixteen dollars per barrel on beer production above sixty thousand barrels up to two million barrels. Only breweries making no more than six million barrels would be eligible. It had, as of June 2012, yet to pass Congress.

†
There may have been as many as eighty-four American nanobreweries in operation by June 2012. They were defined almost entirely by size—no more than a couple of barrels produced at a time.

T
he Vineburg Deli & Grocery
comes up suddenly on Napa Road in Sonoma County. By the time you reach it, you're more than fifteen miles east of the 101 and nearly a mile from downtown Sonoma, worlds past the Golden Gate and well into the bucolic blur of one vineyard after another. From your
perch on two-lane roads, heading northeastward, you see the rows of grapes punctuated by warehouses and small houses, with hardly any souls appearing to be in or about them. Then a plastic yellow sign says the deli's straight ahead on the right. You find it just behind a surprisingly crowded gravel parking lot, before Napa intersects with Eighth Street East—right along a vineyard and before another. This is wine country undoubtedly, though every few weeks at the Vineburg counter someone asks directions to “the Albion Brewery.”

More than thirty years had passed since Jack McAuliffe had his idea for opening a brewery. For seven years, the idea burned bright as a dream come true, inspiring others to follow in his footsteps and loosing the American craft beer movement as it would come to be understood. Then it flamed out rather suddenly in 1982, for reasons even decades on not entirely clear, though evidently having a lot to do with the capital-intensive nature of brewing and the crucible of distribution to a marketplace that still didn't know what to make of the pale ales and porters. What equipment that could be salvaged from the New Albion Brewery on Eighth Street East, the equipment that McAuliffe, spiderlike and solitary, had rigged into a gravity brewhouse, was disassembled and shipped off to the new Mendocino Brewing Company in Hopland. That's where McAuliffe ended up for a time, though he left, not content to be a hand on someone else's ship, and faded from the movement he had done so much to build. Early pioneers like Ken Grossman, Charlie Papazian, and Steve Hindy would remember McAuliffe's name, although those who arrived in the 1990s and the new century would likely have never heard of him. He worked as an engineer after leaving Mendocino, moving to Nevada at one point and to Squaw Valley, near Fresno, California, where the author Maureen Ogle found him.
*
Her writing on McAuliffe in the mid-2000s shined a much-deserved spotlight on his contributions.

McAuliffe was sanguine about the newfound fame. Just as visitors who did not phone ahead were apt to have New Albion's door slammed in their faces, McAuliffe did not like undue attention, especially from a crowd; he wasn't introspective, wasn't the kind of person to ask himself “what if.” He could be blunt, though he had a sense of humor about the whole affair. When asked during a question-and-answer segment at the 2011 Craft Brewers Conference in San Francisco why he chose Sonoma for his brewery, McAuliffe replied, “It's really simple—that's where I lived!” Still, he knew people would ask those things—people would want to know. He was back in the papers, thirty years after being written about by the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post,
back in the trade publications that had grown up since New Albion closed, his legacy for the first time scrutinized in online forums and in social media unfathomable when the brewery was getting snail mail marked simply “The Brewery, Northern California.” In 2007, the Brewers Association bestowed its Recognition Award on McAuliffe, an accolade previously won by the likes of Fritz Maytag, Jim Koch, Michael Jackson, and Bert Grant. He was part of the pantheon; he couldn't avoid it.