Here, There, Elsewhere: Stories From the Road

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Excluding some explosive accident a home brewer brings forth in his basement, Redhook for now is indeed the most extreme brew in the country. Even Joseph Owades, the renowned American brewing chemist and inventor of Lite beer, agrees. Drinkers who love Redhook (“It’s why I drink beer”) and those who hate it (“Right out of the cowshed”) agree. “With Redhook,” Bowker said, “we polarized the market. Our success began with that.” When the men, both still in their thirties, introduced the ale to Seattle in the fall of 1982, the mayor publicly, grandly, tasted a glass, looked about, his eyes staggered, and said, “This is no quiche-eater’s beer.”

  No eater of quiche is Rod Mason, six-foot-four, two-hundred-fifty pounds, a former trooper in the Royal Horse Guards Household Cavalry Regiment. In that first Redhook autumn, Mason, retired from the Queen’s Guard and settled in Seattle, owned the Guardsman Tavern just north of the Redhook brewery. He was a critic of Redhook ale; that is, his English palate considered it one of the few brews in America worth criticism. His grandfather, owner of a small pub in Gloucestershire, was a dedicated cellarman who knew how to care for beer: how to store it, how to tap a barrel and pull it through the hand pumps into a glass. He taught Mason that special knowledge, and the boy learned, he said, “from the cellar up.”

  A brewer can make the finest beer in the land, but if the publican is careless, the customer might as well buy some slumgullion. In the Guardsman, Mason saw that Americans were ready: “I knew the number of people who were happy with their beer was small, but they didn’t know where to turn. Then came Redhook. It was alarmingly inconsistent in those days of working out the crinkles.” The brewery hired Mason as a kind of ambassador of its new world of old-style beers. He said, “The ales here are finally perfected. They’re what we want them to be. If we get a bad batch now, we sewer the whole lot.”

  Inconsistency is both bane and boon to the microbrewer; Americans want, he thinks, strict consistency in a beer, while Englishmen realize that small variations are proof of handcrafting, something more valuable than assembly-line sameness. Shipman said, “Redhook is going to be a slightly different taste every time you drink it. It doesn’t pretend to be consistent. By that I mean, precisely the same. That’s the real nature of an ale brewed in the traditional way.”

  Americans once drank top-fermented, English-style ales, rich of color, full in flavor, heady with aroma, and delightfully variable. In the years following the 1812 war with England, the newly arriving middle Europeans—Anheuser, Busch, Heileman, Mueller, Pabst, Schaefer, Schlitz, Stroh, and more—brought along German-style lagering, a technique lending itself to mass production because lagers are cheaper to brew, easier to transport and store than are top-fermented ales. As a result, older American brewing methods disappeared for the usual big corporation reasons.

  Today, microbrewers find themselves educating Americans to what another century knew. “Six years ago this country didn’t have any reference point for tasting a real ale,” Mason said, “and even today Americans are still edgy about the very word ale. Even the color of some ales intimidates. Few people realize that the so-called ales produced by the large companies are not truly ales at all. The word has been terribly abused in this country.” The Venerable, in an Orwellian pronouncement, said, “Control the language and you control the people.”

  I asked Shipman, if an eighteenth-century brewer like George Washington were in Seattle today, which beer would he recognize? “I’d guess Redhook. It’s traditional—almost a barley wine which Washington would know.” So is the past the future here? “I believe we’re going to leave the lager age. It’s had its time or at least its dominance. What we’ll see is both industrial beers and postindustrial beers. Redhook will be here with Budweiser, but I don’t believe Anheuser-Busch will begin making anything resembling a true ale. The economics are against it. Ale is expensive to brew, and the demand is still limited. But what you see with us is one more sign that smokestack America is dying. We’re brand-new, four years old, and already we’re brewing five-thousand barrels a year. In 1985 we grew by fifty percent. Five years from now we can be up to twenty-five-thousand barrels. Anchor Brewing was an inspiration to us, and we can grow the way it has. We can get as big as our ability to stand the stress.”

  The stress lies in the touchy nature of ale brewing. When top-fermenting yeasts go to work on hopped wort, when they begin to shape the character of the brew, it all happens quickly—within an hour or so. The critical time for a bottom-fermented lager may last a day. The ale master must decide fast what to do with the fermentation, and on his decision company profits ride. The success of Redhook comes from good decisions in several places, none more critical than in the brewhouse; after all, a barrel of Winterhook is not a washing machine that can be sent back up the assembly line to have a gear replaced. It’s more like a jump shot in basketball: Once the ball is off the fingertips, the character of its flight has been decided. If there is excellence, it’s already in the shot.

  It took nine thousand dollars and thirty-two days to clean the Redhook brewhouse of its transmission-shop crud, but that once-oily floor became the point of departure for brews that helped change the way people perceive and drink beer in Seattle. To the freshened building, the partners brought from Germany a stacked, copper brew kettle so fine it’s almost high-end sculpture, and the cost was commensurate: something more than a half-million dollars.

  Of the seven traditional steps in brewing—malting, milling, mashing, boiling, fermenting, maturing, racking—Redhook does each but the first. Its entirely American malts—no extracts like some micros that start with step four—come from an independent maltster. Redhook adheres to the sixteenth-century Rheinheitsgebot, the Bavarian purity law still exercised in Germany, that requires a brewer to use only barley, water, and hops (the action of yeast was then unknown). No adjuncts of corn grits, flakes, or starch; no rice, sorghum, milo, or syrups; and no additives, no chemical compounds. In the United States it is legal for a brewery, as at least one major company has been alleged to do, to introduce forty-eight additives and four adjuncts and still call its beer “pure” in prime-time commercials. Several of the additives—foaming agents, head stabilizers, taste enhancers, colorings, antioxidants, emulsions—are a reason for industrial brewers to print on their labels incomplete lists of ingredients.

  During our yeasty, malty investigative imbibing over the last months, the Venerable and I had noticed an absence of hangovers, although on a couple of evenings we edged, in the interest of complete reporting, toward immoderation. Rick Buchanan, the Redhook brewhouse foreman, said, “True ales tend to be less, let’s say, toxic than industrial lagers. Alcohol poisoning comes from fusel oil, and brewing at higher temperatures the way industrial breweries do, increases fusels.” Maybe low fusel oil explains how Queen Elizabeth’s handmaidens in the sixteenth century withstood a sixteen-pint daily ale allowance.

  When we went from the brewhouse into the conference room, Rod Mason drew glasses of Winterhook for us. We appraised, sniffed, sipped, and even tapped on the firm head composed of almost microscopic bubbles. The composition and durability of the froth are such useful indicators of quality that a German patent on a beer tap has one legal-sized-page description of a proper head: It should be persistent from first sip to last; bubbles should linger from the initial tilt of the glass to the last; and they should be uniform, without randomness, and “possessed of minuteness.”

  At noon we drove to the Pacific Inn, a small eatery serving good grill-food, to see what can happen between a racked keg and a tapped beer. “Most taverns,” Mason said, “even in Seattle, set their refrigeration for Miller or Rainier because that stuff won’t pour warm. It turns to foam. At an industrial-based temperature, you won’t be able to taste a good ale, and your extra brewing cost is wasted.”

  (I remembered a Georgia gas station where a man came in wanting a bottle of beer—this in the days of primitive refrigeration—and the proprietor asked what kind. The customer said, “That bottl
e that’s froze to the coils.”)

  Shipman said, “We’ve found that drinkers abuse what they can’t taste. To compensate, they drink too much.”

  “Our ales lend themselves to moderation because they’re flavorful,” Mason added. “We gain customers by improving our beers. A big brewer can’t do that without raising costs and that means losing customers. Factory beer gets locked into mediocrity.”

  The Venerable: “I don’t suppose corporate greed could have anything to do with it.”

  By the individual character of its beers, a good micro can take sales from industrial brewers, but it struggles with distribution. Since bottling is expensive and retail shelf space can be hard to get, most small brewers initially produce only draft beer. Redhook waited four years before beginning to bottle a small percentage of its beer for sale only at the brewery, a change Shipman hopes will be a first step toward reaching customers beyond Seattle. From that point, he sees three courses open: “We can remain small and sell only locally. We can serve our beers only here at the brewery by piping it directly from the maturation tank to the tap—the brewpub method. Or, we can grow into a middle-size regional as Anchor has.”

  Tashmoo: “Or you could get bought up,” and to that the Redhook crew smiled.

  In San Francisco, the Anchor brewery, near Franklin Square, looks onto worn warehouses—one on its way to becoming a mall—and onto tennis courts and the hind ends of half-century-old houses. As in Ballard, the past is jowl by rosy cheek with the future. The Anchor building, a Depression-era structure, was once a Chase and Sanborn instant coffee and pudding factory. When Fritz Maytag, whose grandfather founded the Iowa washing-machine manufactory, bought the historic but foundering Anchor Brewing Company in 1965 and later moved it to these larger quarters, he had to sandblast the interior to get out the smell of roasted coffee. Now the brewhouse—with fine German-made kettles looking like great coppery onions, the brass fittings and chromium knobs gleaming, the air full of hops and ferment—may be the most handsome in the country.

  Maytag is a former student of literature—an interest he shares with a number of other new brewers—and a devoted reader of Thoreau. Now president and brewmaster, Maytag walked us through the brewhouse. He said, “Making steam beer is a what-the-hell-is-this? business.” Unique to San Francisco, steam brewing is a cross between English and German methods: a lager yeast fermented at higher ale temperatures. The “steam” appears when the pressurized maturation tanks are opened and carbon dioxide hisses out. When Maytag bought the company, it brewed only draft beer, and that poorly. He started with improving the quality by using top-grade ingredients, by taking greater care, and by reviving traditional ways. Only then did he begin bottling. Later yet he added an ale from a recipe he himself wrote; then he added a porter, an annual Christmas brew, and recently a wheat beer and a barley wine. Eighty percent of the annual production of 38,000 barrels is Steam Beer, with Liberty Ale and the porter making up almost all of the other 20 percent.

  He brews tiny quantities of the three newest types for several reasons, all of which come down to his love of beer. He said, “A Christmas ale is a brewer’s midwinter tradition. It’s also a present to the people who support us, and it’s a way of reconnecting with the roots of a holiday custom. This year, all the barley in our seasonal beer comes from one farm near Tule Lake, California. Our employees went up there for the harvest to see the source of what we make and to see our connections with nature—and the risks in nature. As for barley wine, I make it because I believe in it. I came to love it when I studied brewing in England. Our Old Foghorn costs twice as much for half as much yield, and it’s a damned nuisance to bottle, and it’s expensive for the customer. But barley wine is one of the most interesting malt drinks on earth, although it’s poorly understood and not much appreciated. It’s something to sip by the hearth. A contemplative drink. It’ll never have wide popularity, but I own the place so I can do what I like. A brewery should have a hallmark—a drink of absolute distinction. Old Foghorn will become ours. Wheat beer? I’ve said for years that it could have a big audience, and ours will. In a way, it’s the opposite of Old Foghorn—it’s a hot-day, light beverage. It’s our lawn-mower beer.”

  When we were there, only 10 percent of Anchor production was sold on draft, all of it Steam Beer available only locally. But, in bottles, Steam and Liberty Ale are making their way across the country. Maytag said, “If micro means production under ten-thousand barrels a year, then we were a micro for a decade. But we’ve grown because what we make is true, traditional, honest, and good. We celebrate the materials for what they are.” By that he meant at least 80 percent two-row barley. He believes the cheaper six-row barley used by the industrials produces a coarser beer. Maytag adds three hoppings of whole flowers—no hop pellets—and is always ready to dump any batch that goes awry. For Liberty Ale there’s a dry hopping—a second addition of hops that gives superb aroma and splendid taste. Nowhere an adjunct or additive; Anchor Brewing observes the Rheinheitsgebot.

  Maytag’s change to quality gave his beers recognition, and the move to bottling gave a wider audience to make Anchor for a while the fastest growing old-name brewery in America, but he told us the growth would stop at fifty-thousand barrels. “I won’t swear I’ll stop there, but one should have guidelines, a controlling principle. I like business that’s small enough for the employees to see our interdependency.”

  “Against the corporate tide,” said the Venerable.

  Production Manager Mark Carpenter, his white overalls turned to camouflage by yeast stains and penciled-down brewing times, said, “One of my fears is that Anheuser-Busch will start making a real ale. I’m afraid our growth will catch their eye. Maybe keeping customers was easier when people laughed at something called ‘steam beer.’ ” His anxiety is whimsical. Makers of traditional brews know that the market for Wet Air will remain huge. After all, popular tastes in America rarely have been noted for discrimination.

  After we came out of the Anchor brewhouse and headed toward the tasting room, to our amazement, we came upon the Arch Satan himself, the Dark One incarnate, the father of Wet Air: the biochemist Joseph Owades, inventor of Lite beer. The Venerable now alleges that upon seeing him, I began fumbling about my belt as if reaching for a sidearm.

  Within a handshake of me stood one of the very men who had done in American beer. I asked him why he did it. Owades—suited and vested without flaw, a trim man, clipped mustache—had just finished teaching his seminar “All About Beer.” The biochemist earned the first doctorate in the country in brewing science and wrote his dissertation on cholesterol before going to work for Fleischmann’s Yeast Company where he began studying the microbial action of yeasts. Later, he joined Rheingold Brewing in New York City and started working to remove “calories beer doesn’t need.” He believed people resisted drinking malt beverages for two reasons—the taste and their fear of weight gain. After much research, he wrote a recipe that reduced calories and “lightened” even further the mild taste of lager. He said, “Lowering carbohydrates—calories—also lowers the mouth feel. The analogy’s not exact, but a regular beer stays on the tongue like ice cream. A light beer slides off like a sherbet, and that changes taste perception.”

  Rheingold produced the recipe under the name of Gablinger, but after tobacco behemoth Philip Morris took over Miller Brewing, the corporation bought the rights to the name Lite from Meister Bräu Brewing Company. With parts of three breweries assembled into one, Philip Morris set loose the advertising, and American beer hasn’t been the same since.

  I asked Owades what beer he drinks. “Since I live in San Francisco now, I usually drink Anchor Steam.”

  Tashmoo, under his breath: “He’s standing in its brewery.”

  Had the inventor’s discovery made him wealthy? “All I received was my usual monthly salary.”

  Murmuring Tashmoo: “Ask about CEO-style bonuses.”

  Not to atone for Lite but because he was hired to create them, Owades
wrote the generally respected recipes for several East Coast contract brews from New Amsterdam and Samuel Adams.

  “Tell me,” the Venerable said, “can you tell the difference between, let’s say, a Budweiser and a Coors?”

  “All major American beers are structurally very similar. No, after two beers I won’t be able to tell the difference between a Budweiser and a Coors, but with an Anchor Steam and a Redhook, I could distinguish them after a half-dozen. It’s true that microbrewers are broadening the spectrum, but you’ll see a lot of them fail because brewing’s hard work and what they produce just isn’t good. But the best ones, a metropolitan area will support.”

  Microbrewery failures so far have come more from undercapitalization than a poor product. New Albion Brewing of Sonoma, California, the first true American micro, went under because it began bottling before it was financially stable. When it comes to distribution, Jonah must face the leviathans. An industrial brewer can make (sometimes through illegal means) distribution difficult for a small company, particularly by demanding extensive shelf space from retailers. One solution for a micro is to eliminate shelf space and distribution altogether by running beer from the maturation tank directly to the customer’s glass, or, as the Venerable said, “Put the cat under the milk cow. From teat to tongue.” In this country, brewpubs are still scarce, but in colonial America, a traveler could find tavern after tavern serving its own beer, some of it, assuredly, swill.

  The brewpub also provides the owner with complete control over his ales and lagers, an important aspect when excellence is the aim. No other alcoholic beverage is so sensitive, so perishable as beer. It can be changed by towel lint in the glass, a refrigerator three degrees off, a poured beer sitting on a waiter’s tray in a warm room an extra few minutes, on and on. Virtually everything that is not beer is its enemy.