But I’d wanted to visit Belgium by myself. Ever since my parents bought me a plane ticket to visit my grandparents across the country as a kid, unaccompanied, I’d loved traveling alone. As a journalist, I’d had all kinds of solo adventures, from hiring a guide to take me into the Ecuadorian Amazon in a dugout canoe to shadowing a truffle hunter in Istria, Croatia, who had four cell phones. But since Oscar was born, I’d stopped going on long trips. Oscar and Tony needed me at home. The few times I had traveled, I’d made my trips short, to New York City, Chicago, and some remote places in Oregon. So I’d been looking forward to my European beer trip as a chance to reconnect with everything I loved about traveling alone. Yet there I was, offering to sacrifice that experience to a woman I’d just met.
“Sure!” Sarah replied, before I had a chance to reconsider.
Before the Belgium trip, I was planning one other solo excursion. On a sparkling October afternoon, I sat in the backseat of an airport shuttle van, between a tan man in a loud shirt that looked like it had seen a few Jimmy Buffett concerts and a twenty-something woman wearing librarian glasses and a hoodie. Normally, we’d have broken the ice by complaining about air travel—the delays and lack of leg-room—but since we were in Denver on the first day of the Great American Beer Festival (GABF), we had something else in common. Before I could find my seatbelt, the guy was showing me pictures on his phone of a broken glass carboy, a scene that should have included police tape: the innocent carboy looked like it had been slashed across its midsection. The guy, a junior high school science teacher from Pasadena who was attending the festival for the first time, said he hadn’t dropped or even nudged the vessel when the top just came off, leaving murky brown wort pooling on his concrete patio.
“It was so crazy,” he said, his face flushing with excitement. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The woman to my left was a biology major who worked for a small brewery in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. She told us that last winter the ground froze to a depth of eighty inches there. At first this fact seemed unrelated to beer, but she then revealed that the deep frost broke water lines, which prevented the brewery from making beer for a while. She too was a first-timer at GABF, but she seemed more experienced because she already had a hangover. Tonight, she told us, she’d be pouring her brewery’s beers on the floor of the festival.
“I can’t believe it,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s so exciting.”
The Great American Beer Festival is the largest and most well-known beer festival in the United States, an event that has been happening since 1982. Like Renaissance fairs do for LARPers, GABF brings together people with a shared passion. In this case, celebrating that passion involves consuming a copious amount of beer. The Brewers Association puts on the festival. The group planned to welcome 49,000 festival attendees this year, and Denver—already a craft beer hot spot—became a place of beer-pairing menus, shuttle buses with discounts for beer lovers, offshoot beer festivals, tap takeovers, and brewery tours. GABF felt like the perfect place to explore beer styles, something I hadn’t yet started to really study. At the festival, I’d be able to taste dozens of styles of beer and have the chance to ask brewers questions about those beers right on the spot.
I was a bit embarrassed I still hadn’t been to the biggest beer festival in the country, but I’ll be honest: the idea of three days at this huge festival, at any beer festival, sounded like too much, mostly for my liver. In the weeks leading up to the event, I asked experienced festival goers for advice on surviving a multiday drinking event. One Portland brewer told me to drink lots of water between beers, the kind of tip that seems ridiculously obvious until a throbbing dehydration headache on day two. Another brewer told me to expect a GABF “bloated face” look.
“With the altitude and all the drinking, you just puff right up,” he said.
“You mean Great American Beer Farts?” said Megan Flynn, former publisher and editor of Beer West magazine. Megan assigned me my first-ever beer story back in 2007, and since then we’d become good friends. “You’ll see what I’m talking about,” she said, without cracking a smile. I knew Megan wasn’t a big fan of beer festivals (“She’s more of a beer dinner kind of girl,” one of our mutual friends had said), but I had a hard time imagining she’d invent a story about mass farting. There was only one way to find out.
Every year for more than three decades, the Great American Beer Festival has produced a timeline of the American craft beer movement, marking both superficial moments, like when brewers were allowed to put alcohol contents on labels (1995), and more profound changes, like when nearly 1,500 breweries showed up to serve beer at the festival (2001).
In the early 1980s, a Boulder resident named Charlie Papazian founded the festival. Those were the days when just a handful of domestic brewers were starting to produce small-batch beers, especially ales, marking a departure from the standard lagers that had built brands like Budweiser and MillerCoors.
When I called Charlie to hear his version of how the festival came to be, he told me GABF had its foundations in homebrewing. As an experienced homebrewer, Charlie helped create the fledgling American Homebrewers Association during a time when homebrewing was illegal in most states, thanks to residual legislation from Prohibition. In 1980, he told me, he heard a man with a British accent on the radio talking about Cascade hops as part of a Blitz-Weinhard advertisement. He asked around and discovered the guy was a British beer writer named Michael Jackson, the most important beer writer of the modern era. Charlie was already familiar with the writer; his girlfriend had gifted him Michael Jackson’s book, The World Guide to Beer, which “blew his mind.” Charlie tracked down Michael Jackson—a task that, without the Internet, took weeks—and invited him to attend the 1981 National Homebrewers Conference in Boulder. To Charlie’s surprise, Jackson accepted, and he was present during a particular moment that Charlie told me stands out as important in the history of American craft brewing: American microbrewers stood on a stage and talked about their craft for the first time. (The term “microbrewer” and “microbrewery” dissolved in popularity during the 2000s, and became replaced by “craft brewer” and “craft breweries.”) The two men became fast friends; later that year, Charlie visited the beer writer at his London home, and they went to the Great British Beer Festival together. A kernel began to germinate.
“If England could have a national festival that celebrates their beer culture, wouldn’t it be cool to do something like that in the United States?” Charlie said, to which Jackson responded, “What beer would you possibly celebrate with?” It was a friendly joke, but one based in reality. Not many microbreweries existed in the United States, just a few pioneers, including Boulder Beer Co. and Sierra Nevada. But Charlie was determined. He and his homebrewer friends made a list of about forty beers that would be suitable for drinking at a celebration of small-batch, American-made beer, including Ballantine IPA and Narragansett Porter.
“Some of the breweries had beers called ales, which sometimes were not as distinctive as we would have liked,” Charlie remembered. “We took what we could get.”
The list included one beer made by a corporate giant: George Killian’s Irish Red by Coors Brewing, which Charlie said was “really good in those days.” Otherwise, the large corporate brewers didn’t make beers the homebrewers deemed interesting, so the big boys weren’t invited. The homebrewers publicized the new beer festival in their magazine, which postal workers delivered to three hundred people, many of whom had taken Charlie’s homebrewing class in Boulder. A new beer bar sponsored the festival, as did a small organic market, which would be swallowed up by Whole Foods decades later. The first GABF was held in 1982 at the Harvest House Hotel in Boulder; eight hundred people showed up to drink beer from twenty-two breweries.
Until 1985 the Great American Beer Festival and the National Homebrewers Conference were one and the same. Even for the year after the festival moved from Boulder to Denver, the two were combined. Even
tually, splitting the conference and the festival into two events, plus changing the location, proved problematic. “The reception [in Denver] was not as enthusiastic as it was here in Boulder,” Charlie said.
Organizers worked hard to spread the word. In fact, until six or seven years ago, the GABF scrambled to sell tickets, even on the day of the event. Times have changed: tickets for the 2014 GABF sold out in thirty-two minutes.
Charlie told me the early days of GABF served an important purpose for commercial brewers, both today’s pioneers and yesterday’s weirdos. “You had to be persistent, psychologically,” he said. “It’s hard to do something when everyone thinks you’re crazy.”
The beer fest was a lifeline that gave new professional brewers support and what Charlie called “renewed energy,” a reminder that they were part of something bigger. A new American beer culture was dawning.
Microbrewers of the 1980s struggled, not only with the cultural perception that their beers and business models were strange, but also with a jungle of laws and misconceptions about beer that had roots in one of the most radical pieces of U.S. legislation: Prohibition. Before the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibited the production, sale, and transportation of “intoxicating liquors,” a law that went into effect in 1920, the country boasted a full century of German-influenced beer brewing, especially on the East Coast.
John Wagner, a Bavarian immigrant, brought lager yeast with him on his voyage from Europe to the United States in 1840. He made his home in Philadelphia, where he started brewing with the bottom-fermented yeast, which ferments at cooler temperatures than ale yeasts, making beers that were a notable departure from the city’s famous ales. Today, a plaque at the site of Wagner’s house, where he did his brewing, reads: AMERICA’S FIRST LAGER. Then August Krug formed a brewery in Milwaukee, which became Schlitz Brewing Co., and George Schneider started the brewery in Saint Louis that would become Anheuser-Busch. Lagers quickly became popular all over the country.
In 1810, 140 breweries were operating in the United States. By 1873, 4,131 breweries were making beer. This would be the largest number of breweries ever to operate in this country. While the number of breweries declined in the years leading up to Prohibition as a result of consolidations and the creep of dry states, the thirteen-year ban on alcohol production would forever alter the American brewing landscape. When Prohibition was repealed in 1933 with the passage of the Twenty-first Amendment, breweries that had survived those years by producing things like ice cream and malt extract fired up brew kettles once again. But many of them wouldn’t survive the next few decades; the beer brewing landscape had changed.
During the fifty years between the end of Prohibition and the first Great American Beer Festival, the U.S. beer industry became dominated by large corporate breweries, the model that still defines the American beer landscape today. But the craft brewing market share is inching into mass-market beer territory every year, which has prompted the recent spate of acquisitions of small breweries by larger corporate breweries, a trend that has beer lovers and journalists debating about the merits of the word “craft” and the concept of quality. What does it mean if a great beer is being made by a small or mid-sized brewery owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev? Does it make the beer less great?
When I think about mass-produced beer in the United States during the twentieth century, two images come to mind. One is an advertisement from 1952, an illustration of a young woman holding a smoking skillet and wiping tears from her eyes. Her dashing husband has his arm around her shoulder. The copy reads:
“Anyway, you didn’t burn the Schlitz!”
There’s hope for any young bride who knows her man well enough to serve him Schlitz Beer. For what man (or woman) can resist the taste of Schlitz Beer.
Two bottles of Schlitz sit on the table with two empty pilsner glasses and dinner plates. At least the young bride gets her own beer, I thought.
The other image, a photograph, shows Ronald Reagan standing among four men with perfectly coiffed hair and gleaming white teeth. The year was 1954, and the picture was part of a series of commercials Reagan did for Pabst, which explains why he is wearing a starched apron with a Pabst blue ribbon seal on the front. Reagan’s biographer, Bob Woodward, described the commercials as a low point in the actor’s career, which probably had no correlation with the quality of the beer. But Reagan’s apron strings are untied and his hands hang limply by his side. For me, his posture of defeat encapsulates that era in beer.
Flash forward to the 1980s. Reagan was the fortieth president, and many of the one hundred or so breweries in the United States had names Americans will find familiar today: Miller, Anheuser-Busch, Coors, and Pabst. But a nascent beer industry was bubbling under the surface, one greatly influenced by Charlie Papazian. There’s no better place to witness what he started than on the floor of the Great American Beer Festival.
The inside of the Colorado Convention Center in Denver has the acoustics of an airplane hangar and the charm of a Costco. The main room was arranged to support a singular activity: serving 5,601 beers from more than 1,300 breweries to anyone who had a ticket and could hold a glass. I had a media pass, which came with two important perks: skipping the lines to get into the festival and the option to enter fifteen minutes before the public. Those things didn’t mean much to me on day one. In fact, I didn’t even arrive in time to use those extra minutes, a mistake I wouldn’t make again.
The floor was organized by breweries’ geographical regions, from the Pacific Northwest to the Southeast. Experienced festival goers advised me to enter with a plan, to know exactly which booths I wanted to visit before I stepped onto the floor. After all, this was my chance to try beers that weren’t distributed in Oregon. For the most part, beer distribution in the United States is divided into east and west; it’s hard for West Coasters to find most East Coast beers, and vice versa. Because Oregonians prefer to drink locally made beers, I was living in a strange beer bubble filled with wonderful Oregon beers and not much else.
Because I ignored the advice to have a plan, I was immediately overwhelmed. Should I immerse myself in one region or try all the beers of a certain style? I started wandering. Under the numbing glare of fluorescent lights, I noticed I was in the Oregon aisle, which felt like a relief. I saw familiar faces at most of the booths, and I saw familiar beers. I stopped at the Barley Brown’s Beer table. The brewery, which is located in a rural part of the state, consistently goes home with medals from the festival’s competition. This year’s medal winners wouldn’t be announced for a few days, but this was my chance to taste some superior beers that might catch the judges’ attention. A volunteer filled my glass to the one-ounce tasting line, the specified volume of each pour at GABF. The beer, Hand Truck Pale Ale, a gold medal winner in 2013, hit my tongue with a burst of grapefruit and the sticky texture of resinous hops, the comfort food of beer for a Pacific Northwesterner. The brewery was pouring four other beers, and while I wanted to try them all, I reminded myself that there were hundreds of other beers to try. Even so, I asked for a pour of a wheat beer, another gold medal winner, before walking away.
I started pin-balling between Oregon booths. I’d chat and drink, then chat and drink. I came across brewer Van Havig telling another journalist about aging beers in gin barrels. I told Van I was already feeling overwhelmed by the number of beers I wanted to try.
“It’s like being a shark surrounded by sardines,” he said.
After Oregon, I ended up at the Firestone Walker booth, where I tried the Bretta Rose, a refreshing Berliner weisse (a tart and fruity style that originated in the Berlin area) fermented with raspberries and aged in French oak “puncheons,” which are large barrels, or casks. Not only was I drinking beer, I was learning new words! I clung to my festival guide and pen as though they were golden compasses. I couldn’t see any clocks, which made me feel like I was in a casino or a grocery store, and I started to wish they’d dim the fluorescent lights even a little bit. I me
an, we were drinking beer!
My bag and coat felt heavy, so I headed to the Oregon Brewers Guild booth and asked if I could stash my stuff behind some kegs. Before I left, I noticed they were pouring a couple of fresh-hop Oregon beers. How could I pass up the chance to drink those? After more wandering, I waited for Dogfish Head beer in a line two-people wide, a human barrier that would have made Greenpeace proud. I laughed out loud. There’s something ridiculous about standing in line for a beer in a place where hundreds of beers are available without a wait.
Among U.S. craft brewers, Dogfish Head is like Kim Kardashian, a high-profile media darling who’s loved or hated, depending on whom you ask. Sam Calagione founded the brewery in 1995 with the tagline “off-centered ales for off-centered people.” The brewery has produced a range of interesting beers, many of which were created in honor of historical moments and rare ingredients. For example, a beer called Pangaea is brewed with ingredients from every continent, including basmati rice from Asia and crystallized ginger from Australia. Midas Touch was brewed in accordance with the chemical analysis of residues in clay vessels found in King Midas’ tomb. The brewery’s best-selling beer, the 60 Minute IPA, is an India pale ale named after the sixty hop additions made during a sixty-minute boil. The beer also happens to have sixty International Bitterness Units (IBUs). The brewery is highly successful, yet beer geeks deride many of the brews for being unbalanced and undrinkable, the product of a focus on concept, not quality.
I squinted to see the list of beers hanging behind the table. There was Beer Thousand, a collaboration with the band Guided by Voices, which was made with ten grains and ten hops and measured 10 percent alcohol by volume (ABV). The word chicha caught my eye. I’d tried chicha in Peru and Ecuador, so I already knew the fermented beverage is often made with saliva. People chew grains, usually corn, and the enzymes in their saliva begin to breakdown the starches in the grain into maltose, a type of sugar. To make the Dogfish Head version, which includes Peruvian peppercorns, yellow and purple maize, and soursop fruit, brewery employees chewed the purple maize and spit it out, then added it to the mash. A video on the brewery’s website shows Sam chewing the stuff. (The corn was then sterilized by the brewing process, so anyone wanting to come in direct contact with Sam’s mouth bacteria would have to find another way.)
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