The Audacity of Hops

by Tom Acitelli

  Another big chore was distribution, which was handled entirely by the brewery itself, Maytag and his crew schlepping kegs to enthusiastic—also often simply sympathetic—local establishments. It was a great place, Carpenter thought, for a brewing novice to learn every aspect of the trade. But it did not make for a stable business model. Six years after Maytag’s purchase, Anchor was still just getting by and not turning a profit, a pioneer in unwelcoming lands. Decisions had to be made.

  The first decision came in early 1971: Anchor would become the first craft brewery since Prohibition to bottle its beer for sale. In retrospect it was an inevitable move. Unlike today, when bars in cities the size of San Francisco might sport dozens of tap handles, most bars then had one or two taps apiece. It was precious real estate, and not given over readily to some micro-brand out of SoMa; indeed, most of Anchor’s local accounts were in counterculture redoubts like the Old Spaghetti Factory and Perry’s restaurant, places that, like the brewery, swam against the dominant stream, or in smaller eateries like the deli Tommy’s Joynt. Had Maytag not decided then to bottle, Anchor may never have emerged beyond a curiosity; as it went, the decision proved another pioneering move, allowing the nation’s only craft brewery to enter the ebb and flow of the beer industry’s regnant distribution trend, however at a trickle. Big Beer, as we’ve noted, had embraced packaging so fervently following the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 that by 1970 more than 85 percent of beer in the United States was sold through bottles and cans at retailers. This was partly due to the myriad legislative roadblocks that cities, counties, and states threw up post-Prohibition to discourage communal drinking (obtaining liquor licenses in large cities like Los Angeles and New York remains a laborious process full of public hearings and form-filling). It was also partly due to the unrolling Interstate Highway System, which sped up the transportation of beer that could now be sealed completely thanks to the growth of aluminum cans.

  Fritz Maytag inspects a kettle at the old Anchor Brewery on Eighth Street in San Francisco. COURTESY OF ANCHOR BREWING COMPANY

  And it was due to the expanded productivity capabilities of Big Beer, buoyed as they were by cheaper ingredients like rice and corn, and the economies of scale that were increasingly possible as consolidation gobbled up more small players. That new Anheuser-Busch brewery in Merrimack, for instance, would be able to produce eight million twelve-ounce bottles in twenty-four hours in a one million-square-foot facility spread over 294 acres. The same year the Merrimack brewery opened, Schlitz, the second-biggest US beer producer, unveiled a plant in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, that covered thirty-four acres under one roof—about thirty-one football fields, the largest ground-up brewery in history, capable of four million barrels annually (or roughly 1.3 billion bottles). It worked so efficiently that by 1973 Schlitz could close its Brooklyn plant; it was cheaper just to brew in Winston-Salem and ship the bottles 564 miles northward for production.

  Finally, American consumption habits were changing along with the American home and landscape. New-home construction was on its way to a postwar peak in the early 1970s as suburban developments spilled across the map, whole communities springing up in isolation from city centers, the distance to commercial and retail destinations covered with ever more automobiles as Americans ambled to favorite spots less and less. In 1973, American factories turned out 9.6 million new cars, the most ever. Once home from their car trips, Americans were gathering not as much around the dinner table but around something else: the television. In 1969, a record 13.3 million television sets were sold in the United States; more than sixty million households (out of sixty-three million total) owned at least one. Other appliances were becoming more ubiquitous as well; sales of the countertop microwave, born of World War II radar research and introduced by Raytheon in 1967, would outpace those of the gas range stovetop by 1975. And it had epochal company: Swanson introduced the first “TV dinners” in 1954. The plastic-wrapped meals-in-minutes could be consumed in front of the small screen’s inviting glow, perhaps a can of Schlitz beside them, both picked up at the same store during the car commute home. And, no matter the living room’s location, be it in Buffalo or San Francisco or thousands of points in between, the tastes of the food and the beer would be identical.

  It was into this America that the first two hundred cases of Anchor rolled on April 23, 1971. The bottles clattered off a line, set up just off the first-floor taproom, that could turn out seventy-four bottles per minute if everything went right. It turned out 256,080 bottles that first year, or 10,670 cases. And the bottles went largely to the same local accounts as the kegs of draft beer—though one account was as far afield as the No Name Bar in Sausalito, nine miles away. The bottles were originally loaded and delivered by Maytag and his crew. It just made economic sense. “I need the markup for myself,” Maytag told Don Saccani, a Sacramento native turned distributor out of San Rafael, just north of San Francisco, who had been asking him for Anchor’s business. “I’ve calculated it over and over, and I have to have that markup. We’re very small, and we’re going to have to continue to deliver our beer ourselves.” Then Maytag’s driver quit in the summer of 1971, only months after the pivotal bottling decision. He found himself behind the wheel of the delivery truck in San Francisco one afternoon not long after with dozens of things on his mind—and dozens of bottles of beer to deliver. Maytag called Saccani.

  “Why don’t you take over San Jose for us?”

  “I’ll do it,” Saccani quickly replied. “I’ll be there tomorrow.”

  He would get all of Anchor’s accounts and eventually began carting the beer out of California in refrigerated trucks over freshly paved highways. The first shipment left the state in 1975, and rumors of the beer began traveling as far as the East Coast around the same time, though it was liable to be lumped in with Coors, also a western creation. Oddly enough, one of Anchor’s first extra-California destinations was Coors’s home state; Maytag’s reasoning was that Coors had been “bringing a little of Colorado to California for so long that we thought we’d reciprocate.” Regardless of the wider distribution, Maytag still refused to advertise, and he set the price for his product in line with the prices of European imports, or about twice what a consumer would pay for Big Beer six-packs.

  Turning the distribution over to Saccani meant he and his crew could focus on brewing. The beer they were making now was getting better and better, more uniform in its taste and appearance. This was partly a consequence of the lab that Maytag had set up shortly after his stake purchase in 1965. There, with his microscope and his books on microbiology and chemistry (Louis Pasteur’s Studies on Fermentation: The Diseases of Beer, Their Causes and the Means of Preventing Them was a particularly trusted reference), Maytag worked through the transition of Anchor’s steam recipe back to its nineteenth-century roots. He also sought and got help from chemists like John Borger, a field rep for a chemical company, and Joseph Owades, who would play a pivotal role in several other breweries, big and small. Maytag likened such brewing advice to getting input on cooking from Julia Child, another pioneer changing the American palate. Uniformity in the beer was also a prerequisite for bottling—it had to taste the same wherever it went, just like the Big Beer brands did. And, unlike kegged beer, it had to retain that taste should it sit on a supermarket shelf or in a bar’s cooler. If there were too many sour-tasting—or “skunked”—bottles circulating, Anchor’s reputation would suffer. There were a few such bottles in the early going, but they were caught before they left the brewery and the entire batch they were a part of was poured out. By 1973, in Maytag’s estimation, Anchor was producing “consistently marvelous stuff.” Ironically, and unbeknownst to him and his crew, that was the same year that the dinner in Munich loosed an idea that would transform American brewing.

  The Anchor Brewery team in the 1970s, led by Fritz Maytag, in tie in the middle. Mark Carpenter is standing immediately to Maytag’s right. COURTESY OF ANCHOR BREWING COMPANY

  LITE UP AHEAD
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  Munich; Brooklyn | 1970-1973

  George Weissman, chairman of Philip Morris International, was on a diet. That presented a challenge, as his dinner guest for the evening was John Murphy, the new president of Miller Brewing, which Philip Morris had finished acquiring in 1972 from the descendants of its eponymous founder, Frederick Miller, after a battle for control with rival suitor PepsiCo.

  Murphy, a six-foot-three-inch 250-pound Bronx-born backslapper with an accounting degree from Villanova and a JD from Columbia, enjoyed a stiff drink and a good joke. He once declared that running a brewery was any good Irishman’s dream come true, though he freely admitted to knowing next to nothing about brewing. He suggested he and his calorie-conscious boss have beers with dinner. Why not? Milwaukee-based Miller was, after all, one of the ten largest breweries in the United States, with a history stretching back to before the Civil War. The brewery had been among those early pioneers of American pilsner—the pale, uncomplicated cousin of the Czech original and the lager style that had found such massive favor in the marketplace. Weissman, also a Bronx native, worked in small-town newspapers after getting a business degree from City College, and later did PR in Hollywood; Murphy had been a lawyer with Philip Morris since 1962. By the time the pair sat down to dinner during a business trip, Miller, along with nine other household names like Anheuser-Busch, Schlitz, Pabst, and Coors, was producing over two-thirds of all beer sold in the United States; and that market share was growing. It was only fitting then and perhaps no accident that Miller’s pilsner, baldly called “The Champagne of Beers” in marketing materials and advertisements, was the color of gold.

  Still, Murphy had not been appointed merely to be a caretaker. Miller’s new corporate parent planned to aggressively expand in a bid to belt Anheuser-Busch from the top spot among American brewers (Frederick Miller himself competed in the mid-1800s with Anheuser-Busch cofounders Adolphus Busch and his father-in-law, Eberhard Anheuser—America’s beer scene, in some ways, had not changed for a century). Miller had already expanded its Fort Worth brewery and bought land in Delaware for another one; it had also recently acquired Canadian brewery Formosa Springs and was hunting for others. Miller would also be moving away from the chichi in its marketing and advertising, darkening its collar a deeper shade of blue in a common ploy of Big Beer, then and now: changing the image rather than the recipe. Murphy planned to banish the “Champagne of Beers” tag in favor of something more everyday, less exclusive. Size and perception—Miller was changing both by the time of the Munich trip.

  But would that be enough to best a brand that had been calling itself “The King of Beers” since the nineteenth century? For every beer Miller produced in the early 1970s, Anheuser-Busch produced three—and sold much more. Powered by Budweiser, the St. Louis-based brewery’s signature red-and-white-and-drank-all-over brand, Anheuser-Busch seemed almost effortlessly ubiquitous, accounting for nearly one-fourth of the beer sold in the United States annually; in 1973, for instance, Americans would buy more than 9.6 billion cans and bottles of Anheuser-Busch beers, which along with Budweiser included brands like Michelob and Busch. Weissman and Murphy knew what Miller was up against. The last twenty years of competition had left only a handful of big American brewers standing. And the ones that were left were still thirsty. Schlitz had been the number-one brewer in 1950. It was number two now, and fading fast behind Adolphus Busch’s heirs. What to do?

  A waiter offered Weissman a German beer called Diat pilsner (or Diat pils), a low-sugar lager targeted toward diabetics. It was fermented longer than most beers, thereby burning off more sugar and more carbohydrates. The thorough fermentation, however, produced a greater alcohol content—some Diat pilsners reached 6 percent alcohol per volume, nearly two percentage points stronger than a typical Miller or Budweiser—and that greater alcohol content amped up the calorie count. So while in fact it did not have fewer calories than regularly fermented beers, Diat pilsner quickly gained a reputation in Europe as beer for the weight-conscious. It didn’t have as much sugar or carbohydrates—that had to be good, right? Weissman took the waiter up on his suggestion. Murphy joined him. The two titans hoisted to their lips the unfamiliar pilsner with the pale complexion and the effervescent texture.

  “There’s room for something like this in America,” Murphy said.

  Light beer was born—light everything, really. The repercussions of the chance dinner encounter with Diat pilsner not only sparked the launch of Miller Lite in February 1975, but it also reverberated through America’s cuisine. Even the bastardized word itself—popularized by Philip Morris and its hired ad agency, McCann Erickson Worldwide, though its usage might go back to the nineteenth century—weaved its way inextricably into the lexicon, becoming both an adjective and a verb in many ways. “Lite” meant action on the part of the consumer, a verbal shorthand for healthier living. “The word skittered across hundreds of new-product labels (more than 350 in the first half of the eighties),” wrote business reporter Rob Walker in a New York Times obituary for Murphy, who died in 2002 at age seventy-two. “Light became lite, and took on a life of its own.” Businesses fell in line with the trend, whether they produced pie fillings or barbecue sauces or … beer. Schlitz introduced its own light beer by 1976 (Miller sued unsuccessfully to prevent Schlitz from using “Light” in its marketing); Anheuser-Busch introduced Natural Light a year later. Both beers were priced more cheaply than most other brands.

  The lower-alcohol imitation of the Diat pilsner that Murphy tasted in 1972 was the latest major innovation recipe-wise by Big Beer. It was a smash hit. Within a generation, almost half the beer sold in the United States would be light. Two-thirds of that would be Miller Lite. As Walker noted, “Murphy was right beyond anything he could imagine.” His triumph had so little to do with taste. Miller Lite and all of Big Beer’s light concoctions to date owe their straw-yellow appearances, alkaline aftertastes, and mild buzzes to a simple business move: buying the rights to a formula for lower-calorie brew. What then sold the public on light beer was the selling of light beer itself.

  First, Murphy’s people didn’t market it as a diet beer despite the 96 calories per bottle. There had been one such stab already: Gablinger’s Diet Beer, developed at Rheingold Brewing in Brooklyn by the biochemist Joseph Owades, who found a way to isolate an enzyme that could break down higher-calorie starches and make them easier for yeast to gobble up. It notoriously flopped after its 1967 debut; the clunky name didn’t stick and the advertising was corny. One early commercial showed an obese man shoveling spaghetti with one hand and drinking a Gablinger’s with another, as if the beer would do little to add to his weight. “Not only did no one want to try the beer,” Owades remembered, “they couldn’t even stand to look at this guy!” And Miller had already tried the diet beer approach and failed, too. Miller had acquired Meister Brau, a Chicago brewery, around the time of Murphy’s Munich revelation. Meister Brau had been brewing its own diet beer, using Owades’s recipe after acquiring it from Rheingold. When Miller took over, it followed the failed Gablinger’s lead and marketed Meister Brau Lite as a diet beer to “people with a weight problem or to women,” remembered one Murphy protege. “There was a woman on the can even.” It flopped.

  Diet, then, was out as a marketing scheme—beer drinkers just weren’t the sort to count calories, and alcohol was not exactly regarded as a curative. What then? Change the perception of the beer. Tell American consumers what they want, and then give it to them, an inversion of sorts of one of capitalism’s sacred tenets: the supply would not only precede the demand but create it as well. For Big Beer in the early 1970s, new was never really new; and besides, who but the ruling breweries had the resources to develop a new product and mass-market it? It was an approach that Fritz Maytag’s Anchor could not imagine, with its two-hundred-case bottling runs and self-distribution.

  So Murphy retired the long-time, gilded Miller tag, “The Champagne of Beers,” and birthed the earthier “Great Taste, Less Filling” and “
Everything You Always Wanted in a Beer. And Less” as well as the simple “It’s Miller Time.” With an advertising budget that would swell to nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in Miller Lite’s first seven years, the brewery bought the exclusive beer spots on Monday Night Football and the College Football Game of the Week, where its ads relentlessly flogged the point that Miller was a beer for every occasion, every day (this was, of course, a pre-web era of three networks and only nascent cable television). This Everyman pitch was cemented when Rodney Dangerfield, Mister “I Don’t Get No Respect,” began appearing in Miller commercials in the 1980s along with retired pro athletes. In well under ten years, Miller had, through the aggressive marketing of an acquired product, elbowed its way into the number-two spot behind Anheuser-Busch, leapfrogging five other breweries. Its annual sales crested $4.6 billion. Weissman’s chance order in Munich had worked; all it took was some titanic marketing. The brewing was the easy part.

  “BREWED THROUGH A HORSE”

  Los Angeles; Chicago | 1973-1978

  In January 1978, Merlin Elhardt, who had for years been homebrewing the delicate German lagers he had encountered while a US soldier in Europe, pecked out the following as part of a newsletter for his fellow enthusiasts: