The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (8 page)

Elhardt's newsletter was for the Maltose Falcons, the homebrewing club he had founded in 1974 in suburban Los Angeles. It was the first homebrewing club in the nation, and it sought to reconnect enthusiasts with a hobby whose high-water mark had been mothered by necessity during Prohibition. People like Fred Eckhardt's father, with his ten-gallon recipes of sugar, syrup, and water, had created strictly utilitarian brews of strong strength but dubious taste. Elhardt, however, was using all-grain recipes fermented with yeast that he actually cultured at home (he was said to have smuggled some yeast strands out of the Tuborg brewery in Denmark). Such a transition from utilitarian home-brewing was no accident—and no easy, inevitable feat. But it would prove incalculably beneficial to the larger craft beer movement as both a training ground for future commercial brewers and a testing ground for the American palate.

The excerpt from the Maltose Falcons newsletter tells us just about everything we need to know about homebrewing in the mid-1970s, as well as a lot about the would-be American craft beer consumer (“would-be” in the sense that at the founding of the Maltose Falcons, Fritz Maytag's Anchor was the only commercial option).

First, it was a newsletter. That is, it was a typed-out, black-and-white memo to a group of like-minded people, and the group was small enough that Elhardt could reasonably expect to be able to circulate it to enough individuals and still make it worth his while. The world of homebrewing—and craft beer—was then a small one that commanded and demanded the attention of its inhabitants.

Second, the reputation of Fred Eckhardt, 950 miles north in Portland, preceded him. Elhardt gives him no introduction in the newsletter because
none was apparently needed. Therefore, while craft beer was a small world—or
because
it was a small world—expertise traveled and experts were emerging.

Third, the expertise of Eckhardt and of Maltose Falcons member Louis Leblanc was recounted by Elhardt. It had to be; information on how to make good beer, we can surmise, had to be shared through word of mouth, printed or verbal. Aside from the older, more technical homebrewing books and Eckhardt's
A Treatise on Lager Beers,
there was
Quality Brewing: A Guidebook for the Home Production of Fine Beers
by Byron Burch, published in 1975 with a borrowed five hundred dollars because Burch tired of repeatedly answering the same questions at the Berkeley, California, homebrewing and wine-making shop where he worked (much the same motive that compelled Eckhardt six years before).

Fourth, Elhardt tossed dashes of humor and whimsy into the newsletter with his talk of radioactivity from a blown keg and the need only for a ready glass to relieve the pressure. This suggests that the original initiates of the American craft beer movement enjoyed their pursuit and found pleasure in it rather than pretention. It was a good time as much as it was a passion.

Fifth, that Elhardt was the newsletter's author suggests he had some expertise recognized by the wider group, and we know that Elhardt's expertise came in large measure through his experience with European beer. The craft beer movement in America, such as it was, followed an undisputed leader: Europe.

Finally, a feeling of expectation infuses Elhardt's paragraphs. It was what a financial analyst might call a forward-looking statement, meant to not only inform its readers but also prep them for something in the near future. The news of Eckhardt's beer-tasting booklet tells us that the Maltose Falcons members knew they had to keep their taste buds in ready shape for the beers that would surely come (the “John” that Eckhardt's booklet was available through was John Daume, the club's financial sponsor, who hosted its meetings from the beginning at the wine-making shop he opened in 1972 in L.A.'s Woodland Hills). Homebrewers like those in the Maltose Falcons—early members included a utility lineman, a PhD student at UCLA, a church deacon, and an artist—emboldened the movement with their growing interest and their growing numbers. (The Maltose Falcons would soon count more than a hundred dues-paying members.) They were by far the largest leg of an emerging three-legged stool: Fritz Maytag's Anchor was the commercial leg and the other was writers like Fred Eckhardt and Byron Burch, who also visited Anchor as he set about assembling his homebrewing guide. Maytag gave him a tour of the Eighth Street brewery that ran to three hours. It was not just generosity on Maytag's part; he knew that the more informed homebrewers there were, the more craft beer consumers there might be.

Information was becoming a premium commodity in the American consumer marketplace. The very notion of the “informed consumer”—the savvy shopper who peers around the corners of advertising to the nuts and bolts of a particular product, including its geographic origin—had only just come into vogue. This was in large part due to Ralph Nader, whose 1965 book
Unsafe at Any Speed
chronicled the campaigns of major automakers against safety improvements, including seatbelts, and made him and his legion of Nader Raider lawyers media darlings. The creation of Earth Day (1970) and new federal bodies like the Environmental Protection Agency (also 1970) and the Consumer Product Safety Commission (1972) further drove the notion of the informed consumer (as did, in no small measure, the criminality exposed by Watergate in 1974—if you couldn't trust the president to properly police things, who could you trust?). And if consumers' pursuits of information left them particularly skittish about a product, they could decide to opt out of the marketplace in some measure. As Nader pointed out in an October 1975 interview, consumers' skepticism of a food supply increasingly dominated by factory farming was “tied to the fact that twelve million home gardens have been started in this country in the past two years.”

We should not overstate this informational shift as it pertains to beer. Americans were not running out to buy all-grain homebrew kits (there weren't any legally for sale then in the United States) or setting up yeast cultures in test tubes next to the toaster. There was, however, a perceptible attitude shift in the early 1970s among those who, like the Maltose Falcons members, were paying attention. Ken Grossman, who would at the decade's end cofound the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, opened a homebrew shop on the second floor of a former fleabag hotel in Chico, California, in 1976. For him, the hobby gelled with what he called the “other homesteading activities” he and his wife pursued at their small, creek-side stead in the nearby town of Oroville: raising goats for fun as well as for milk and cheesemaking. Charlie Papazian, who would, also by decade's end, cofound the American Homebrewers Association and pen the early draft of what became the bestselling homebrewing guide ever, saw the hobby he took up while a student at the University of Virginia as something that made people happy when they drank it, rather than stupid, which seemed to be the case when they downed sixty-nine-cent six-packs of Big Beer. And Jack McAuliffe simply got a kick out of sharing his now years-old pastime with his father once he shipped out from Scotland for the States.

Along with this shift among homebrewers was a more general Everyman realization that something was missing from the once grandly heterogeneous tradition of American brewing, that barely a hundred breweries was not
enough for a nation of two hundred million splashing across a continent and over the Pacific. In early 1973, the
Chicago Daily News's
Mike Royko, famed for his columns about Windy City politicians and criminals (and criminal politicians) and the recipient of the previous year's Pulitzer Prize for commentary, lamented that “America's beer tastes as if it were brewed through a horse.” The column touched a national nerve. How dare he criticize the national drink! One reader gave him a Plan B: “Go to hell, if you don't like this country's beer. Maybe you'll like what you are served there.”

Royko responded by organizing what may well have been the first beer taste test by a newspaper. The results, printed on July 9, 1973, were telling. Of the twenty-two beers, including imports, blindly sampled by eleven tasters, Budweiser, the signature brand of the nation's biggest brewery, finished dead last, with Schlitz, then the number-two brewery, just ahead of it (judgments regarding Bud: “a picnic beer smell,” “lousy,” “Alka Seltzer,” “yeccch”). No brands from the nation's top-five breweries, in fact, finished in the top five (and, we should note, Anchor Steam was not among the twenty-two sampled). The overall winner was a West German pilsner, followed by England's Bass Ale; and the domestic champ was Point Special, a pilsner from the regional Stevens Point Beverage Company in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. “Great flavor and a great beer smell,” as one judge put it; “light and lovely,” said another. The 116-year-old brewery, which would change ownership several times in the next thirty years and add cola making to its activities, enjoyed a 20 percent sales bump from the win. But it turned down a request by airline TWA for two hundred cases a week because it would deplete its supply and hurt local distribution. When a liquor store in the Rockies requested Point Special, it got the same answer. There were consumers out there; there just wasn't that much variety available unless you made it yourself.

T
hough the first Anchor bottles
meant for points beyond California had headed out of the Eighth Street brewery on Don Saccani's trucks in 1975, America's only craft brewery still was not turning a profit. What to do? Maytag
looked at the calendar and saw a chance for further innovation wrapped in a marketing opportunity: the nation's two-hundreth birthday, which was fast approaching.

Maytag had the year before finally started to brew his signature steam beer consistently enough that it arrived to vendors, whether in kegs or bottles, tasting the same time and again. He had also developed the idea for an Anchor Porter, a darker, richer ale once all the rage in nineteenth-century England (its name supposedly came from its popularity among porters along the new railroads). The brewery that Maytag bought in 1965 had been producing a dark steam beer by adding caramel coloring; he discontinued that and brewed a real porter. To his and his crew's surprise, they learned that no commercial brewery in England was producing one; the Anchor Porter brewed and kegged in the winter of 1972 would be the first in modern times. It was a seminal moment in the nascent American craft beer movement: a brewery from the New World supplanting any in the Old in one of its signature beer styles. Anchor Porter was first bottled on July 17, 1974, and hit the backs of Saccani's trucks.

Around that time, Maytag and Gordon MacDermott traveled to England to survey the beer scene—in particular, to case any good ale styles perhaps worth Anchor's imitation. What they discovered instead was the genesis for an American original that would embitter a generation of beer drinkers. Maytag and MacDermott visited the family-run Timothy Taylor brewery in bucolic Keighley, West Yorkshire, and sampled its Landlord, described by one leading critic as “a bitter with a color of pale honey and a wonderful aroma of hay, earthy with deliciously bready grain flavors lingering in the aftertaste.” Landlord was distinguished by its fruitiness and its “very full-flavored hop presence,” not by any sweeter malt concentration. It was a bitter beer, but one, oddly enough, refreshing in its bitterness.

At this point, it's important for our story to step back and learn about the importance of hops in beer, as they will come to play an outsized role in the American movement. Unlike grains, which serve a more utilitarian role in brewing, hops, along with yeast, can make or break a beer as far as its style; and many craft brewers would come to define themselves by their use of hops. Hops are the flowers of humulus lupulus plants. Since the Middle Ages, they have been used as the primary bittering agent in beer. Hops also help stabilize a beer's foam (or “head”) and act as a preservative. They grow mostly in Northern Europe, particularly Germany and the United Kingdom; Australia and New Zealand; and, especially, the Pacific Northwest. Once harvested, hops can be added throughout the brewing process as pellets or cones, including
after fermentation (when their addition is called “dry hopping”). They can be added during the earlier “bittering” stage of brewing or the later “aromatic” stage. Until about the early 1970s, no US-grown hops were considered by even domestic brewers worthy of being used in the aromatic stage to give a beer a certain scent; instead, American hops were used for bittering and European hops for aroma.

Finally, hops are delicate flowers—stored or shipped too compactly or loosely, or under the wrong temperatures, and they can lose their intended flavors and therefore ruin an entire batch of beer. Partly because of this mercurialness, Big Beer after Prohibition stopped using large quantities of hops in their brewing batches; Big Beer's lagers usually had as little as two ounces of hops per barrel.
*

More than anything, though, the American postwar palate—weaned on soft drinks, fruit juices, sugar-packet bins beside automatic coffeemakers, and Tang—had simply grown unaccustomed to bitterness in drinks. A brewer by the early 1970s would be foolish to produce a drink many times bitterer than a cup of coffee. Consequently, most American beers of the time registered on the low end of the zero-to-one-hundred International Bitterness Units scale used to measure beer's bitterness. A bottle of Miller Lite, for instance, was around ten IBUs.

The idea that Maytag took from Timothy Taylor in West Yorkshire back to Anchor in San Francisco would end up creating a beer with as much as four times that bitterness. First, the idea. The nation was turning two hundred, and Maytag figured that a lot of breweries, big and small, would be doing special brews—or, at least special packaging—to commemorate the bicentennial. Maytag opted out of the scrum by deciding to brew something to commemorate the two-hundredth anniversary of Paul Revere's April 18, 1775, ride through the Boston area to warn of a British attack. It also undoubtedly imbued what he brewed with a delicious dose of irony, since the beer would be an ale in the tradition of what he had tasted in England, particularly the Landlord at Timothy Taylor.