by Tom Acitelli
No one cared. Or at least no one outside of Anchor’s still small orbit of two-hundred-case bottle runs and restaurant keg deliveries. There were no mentions of Liberty Ale in the media—no reviews, no stories on the rollout, the backstory, the commercial risk, the pioneer move (Maytag didn’t think much of the beer himself; he had to be persuaded to release it). Sales were always modest—the June 26, 1975, bottling produced 530 cases. What had been born Liberty Ale remained on the market as “Our Special Ale,” until it reemerged as Liberty Ale again in the summer of 1983.*
On the other hand, more than seventy million cases of Miller Lite would hit the market in 1976, its first full year of sales. Still, something had happened. Mark Carpenter traveled to Europe decades after Liberty Ale’s debut. He noticed something curious in the Belgian, Dutch, and French ales he encountered: they were using Cascade hops just like so many beers back home, where they were born.
*Modern craft beers, particularly India pale ales, might average at least two pounds of hops per barrel.
*The current iteration of Liberty Ale was reintroduced in July 1983 through 2,920 cases (per Dave Burkhart at Anchor).
CHEZ MCAULIFFE
Sonoma, CA | 1976
There was a knock on the brewery door. Jack McAuliffe answered it.
“I’ve heard of this place,” the knocker told him, “can I just look around?”
“Fuck no,” McAuliffe replied, his blue eyes running cold, the square jaw clenching that much tighter. “I’m busy, get out of here!”
McAuliffe was not to be trifled with at his brewery, and that included the pilgrims who often showed up with little notice. Normally, if they called ahead, he was happy to oblige. He would personally give tours of the old fruit warehouse off Eighth Street East in rural Sonoma, California,* the first start-up craft brewery in the United States since Prohibition, charging the visitors at the end for the samples of stout, pale ale, and porter; but the trickle had lately broken into a steady stream.
People were showing up so often and without warning that McAuliffe had taken to turning visitors away, sometimes brusquely. He and his skeleton crew needed to focus on brewing and distribution. The New Albion Brewing Company was growing.
It had started modestly enough, without any thunderclap of recognition of its importance to American culinary history, even by its founder. McAuliffe had left the Navy in 1968, settling in San Francisco, where he had done his training on Treasure Island. He studied physics on the GI Bill at California State in Hayward, and worked as an electrical technician and an optical engineer. Through it all, McAuliffe kept homebrewing. He had hauled bottles, bottle tops, some ingredients, and homebrewing books back from Scotland; he found additional supplies at wine-making shops in the Bay Area. The situation was just as he had predicted in that Boots in Glasgow in 1966: if he was going to have the sorts of beers he had discovered in Europe, he was going to have to make them himself. There were imports on the shelves—sales nationally had jumped sevenfold in the early 1970s—but six-packs were one dollar to two dollars more expensive than those of the giant domestics; and, for all their growth, imports still represented an infinitesimal slice of the American market.
Plus, some were not imports at all: European-sounding brands like Andeker, Lowenbrau, and Michelob were brewed by Pabst, Miller, and Anheuser-Busch, respectively, part of Big Beer’s “super premium” push meant to capture a more discerning consumer. The super premium push even led to a lawsuit over alleged deceptive advertising because a Chicagoan thought he was plunking down an extra couple of bucks for beer brewed in Munich, not Milwaukee. If we were to behold a typical American grocery store’s beer section, circa 1975, we would find that roughly 80 percent of the packaging staring back would be from the nation’s top ten breweries; another 2 percent, at most, would come from Canadian or European brands; and the rest from the remaining one hundred or so breweries left in the United States. One of those, of course, was Anchor. It was after a tour of Anchor that McAuliffe got his idea: he would cobble together some money and some material, and start a brewery of his own (and he, too, would use the new Cascade hops).
Why in Sonoma, in the heart of what was rapidly becoming California wine country? McAuliffe had moved there to help a friend construct a custom-built house; he worked as a tradesman, doing electrical wiring, welding, sewage—skills he had started learning at Clay’s welding shop in Fairfax County, Virginia. There was another reason, too, and it would grow in significance as the movement that McAuliffe helped launch grew.
Alice Waters had relocated to the Bay Area in the 1960s from East Orange, New Jersey, to attend the University of California at Berkeley. She studied abroad in France and, more than anything, absorbed its food—genuine crepes, Belon oysters, the hard ciders of Normandy—and the culture surrounding it. That culture was moored in the fact that the French took their time cooking; they used local ingredients whenever they could and prepared simple yet pleasantly robust meals. More important, they lingered over their repasts, elevating eating and drinking beyond the utilitarianism it was fast becoming in America. Food in France was slow. Waters took these lessons back to a Berkeley that, in her estimation, did not have any fine restaurants. In 1971, she opened Chez Panisse in an old house on Shattuck Avenue. The restaurant quickly gained a game-changing reputation for slowly prepared, simple French meals culled as much as possible from local ingredients. Francis Ford Coppola, Danny Kaye, and Mikhail Baryshnikov were regulars. The New York Times declared Waters “a chef of international repute” whose “cunningly designed, somewhat raffish establishment” was unique in the West. Even the French sang hosannas. Christian Millau, a food critic famous for his guides to Parisian restaurants, took particular note of Waters’s use of “good and beautiful products of her native land.” McAuliffe knew of Waters’s restaurant. He also knew of the Marin French Cheese Company in nearby Petaluma, the oldest cheese manufacturer in the United States, which specialized in French cheeses made with Northern California ingredients. And, of course, McAuliffe knew of the burgeoning wine industry in the area, itself a challenge to the French and to other Europeans.
McAuliffe realized he might just happen to be in the right place at the right time, and he shared with anybody who would listen the revelation he’d had during the Anchor tour. One of those people was Suzy Stern, a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, native who had driven west from Chicago with her three kids and their dog in a Dodge van for a fresh start; her son had gotten into Stanford, and Sonoma—California in general—seemed as good an option as any in America. Stern had already led a geographically varied life: college at Vassar in upstate New York; work as a United Nations interpreter on Manhattan’s East Side; then Chicago; and now Sonoma, where she went back to school at Sonoma State to study music. A friend she met through a local food co-op introduced her to McAuliffe, and Stern became only the latest person in the town of barely five thousand to hear about the shaggy-haired thirty-one-year-old’s dream for a start-up craft brewery.
Stern knew little about beer and nothing about brewing. But she was in because it seemed like an interesting idea, and McAuliffe, with his combination of bravado and technical know-how, seemed like just the guy to pull it off. Stern and a friend of hers—Jane Zimmerman, who was then the wife of Stern’s friend from the co-op—became New Albion’s original outside investors. (The two put up $1,200 each, and Jack raised the rest of the $5,000 in seed money; Stern also suspected that McAuliffe appreciated the utilitarianism of her Dodge van.) Zimmerman was on a path toward becoming a successful therapist, and Stern was still studying music; both would take a crash course in brewing from McAuliffe, the ex-nuclear submarine mechanic turned optical engineer turned contractor. This unlikely trio would, in their happenstance way, create a model for future craft beer entrepreneurs, which advised, “Your background in brewing or your knowledge of beer does not matter; what matters is your drive and determination.”
They had both in spades, McAuliffe especially. After completing an onerous approva
l process with the county—which often referred to New Albion as a “winery” on official forms (what bureaucrat had ever heard of a startup brewery?)—in the fall of 1976 McAuliffe found part of a corrugated-steel warehouse to rent on a ranch owned by the Batto Fruit Company, a large local landowner known mostly for harvesting grapes. The warehouse was at least a mile from downtown Sonoma in a remote industrial spot shaded on the west by towering eucalyptus trees, with direct sunlight from the south and east; the North Coast Mountains could be seen in the distance. The permits and the real estate out of the way, McAuliffe concentrated on a name and some know-how.
The name came rather easily and quickly. Just as Maytag had the “since 1896” on the Anchor label, McAuliffe decided on a little historical alchemy of his own. English explorer Francis Drake combed what would become the Northern California coast in the 1570s, claiming the area for Queen Elizabeth I as Nova Albion (or “New England,” Albion being an ancient name for the British Isles). As McAuliffe would tell the beer writer John Holl, “History is important in the brewing industry—but, if you don’t have a history you can just make it up.” And so he did: Drake’s ship, the Golden Hind, would stare out from the New Albion label, with the California coastline in the background and NEW ALBION BREWING COMPANY/SONOMA, CALIFORNIA above it. History—and, by association, tradition—would be paired with a sense of place.
As for the know-how, McAuliffe headed about an hour northeastward to see Michael Lewis at UC-Davis. McAuliffe had a homebrewer’s understanding of brewing; that is, he knew how beer was made and what could ruin it as well as improve it. But he knew all this only on a smaller scale; it was one thing to make five gallons on a kitchen stove, it was another entirely to make several times that amount, over and over, and have it taste the same each time. Lewis found in McAuliffe “a vacuum cleaner of information,” and McAuliffe in particular made a beeline to the older books on brewing in Lewis’s library, some from the nineteenth century. Lewis’s program would also be instrumental in advising McAuliffe on the all-important yeast strains that would give New Albion’s porters, stouts, and pale ales their flavors.
The old brewing books also provided McAuliffe a template for building the brewery in the old fruit warehouse. It is difficult for us today to imagine the odds McAuliffe and his crew faced, but nothing illustrates them better than the effort involved in fabricating New Albion’s equipment and the physicality of the brewhouse. With limited funds and the knowledge going in that New Albion’s production would not be that voluminous, at least not at first, the charming copper kettles of European breweries or smaller American operations were out of the question; and the large, industrial-size equipment of Big Beer was pointless. So McAuliffe went foraging. He took special advantage of Northern California’s contracting dairy industry and salvaged a lot of discarded milking equipment. His biggest score came when PepsiCo—ironically enough, the spurned suitor of Miller five years before—decided to stop shipping syrup in fifty-five-gallon drums; McAuliffe got hold of several, bending and welding the drums into a mash tun, a brew kettle, four primary fermenters, and ten secondary fermenters.
Jack McAuliffe next to an old-fashioned barrel cleaner outside New Albion. He got it cheap—for about fifty dollars—and made it work himself. COPYRIGHT © MICHAEL E.MILLER AND JACK MCAULIFFE
Once he assembled the equipment (or at least located it) over those nine months, McAuliffe set about building the brewhouse within the warehouse, with Stern and Zimmerman helping. It was lonely, long work in the countryside quietude. McAuliffe designed the brewery with gravity as the main power source (there were no pumps at first), setting the starting point of the brewing process on the roof. Hot water would flow from there into the mash tun (the vessel for mixing the cracked malted barley with the hot water to produce wort), then to the brew kettle so the hops and whatever other ingredients could be added, and then from there to primary and secondary fermenters on a lower level, where the wort could be cooled and the yeast added. Finally, it would move to the cellar for aging the wort-turned-beer. When you walked in, you found yourself in a small office with a coal-burning furnace, and a bottling line took up the middle of the brewhouse. The fermentation room was the size of a walk-in closet. There was a laboratory as well, with framed photos of physics and chemistry giants like Einstein, Oppenheimer, and the revered Pasteur. Finally, well above it all was Jack McAuliffe. He had fabricated an apartment for himself over the brewhouse, which he reached by ladder and where he bunked “like a spider,” with a self-made stove and shower. The founder of America’s first start-up craft brewery lived literally above the shop.
New Albion Brewing Company filed for incorporation with the State of California on October 8, 1976. Almost exactly seven months later, on Saturday, May 7, at 3 PM, the company hosted “the Consecration of the New Albion Brewery,” with an after-party nearby. It would prove to be rare time off. McAuliffe, Stern, and Zimmerman were working ten to twelve hours daily, six to seven days a week, to produce a barrel and a half, or roughly 495 bottles, at a time. And, despite a marketing pamphlet in which McAuliffe welcomed visitors so long as “you telephone me a day or two before,” the pilgrimages started soon after.
*The full building address was 20330 Eighth Street East.
THE BARD OF BEER
London | 1976-1977
As McAuliffe built beer history in Sonoma, California, Michael Jackson was giving it a lexicon seven thousand miles away. Born and raised in a working-class household near Leeds in West Yorkshire in northern England, Jackson had his first beer, a lower-alcohol mild, at fifteen at the Castle Hill Hotel in Huddersfield. He dropped out of high school a year later, in 1958, to support his family, working newspaper and magazine jobs into the late 1960s, when he also worked as a documentary producer and a program editor for British TV host David Frost. In 1969, he was covering a carnival near the Dutch-Belgian border as part of a long gig in the Netherlands that took him away from his London home. There he tasted an ale brewed within the walls of a Trappist monastery in Belgium and found it was nothing like the English beers he had been drinking since his teens. Struck by its complexity and intrigued by its history, the next day he rode the bus less than a mile and a half and, as beer writer Jay Brooks put it, “crossed the border—his Rubicon—and began exploring Belgium’s beers and culture.”
What Germany and the Czech Republic are to lagers, Belgium is to ales. For a variety of reasons, including a sixteenth-century German dictate that beer be made only with water, hops, and barley (they didn’t know about yeast’s role then), the South Carolina-sized kingdom has long boasted a rich, complex tableau of ales, from those dark as the chocolate they taste like to ones as effervescent and fruity as any sparkling wine. Brewers there, unlike in Germany, felt free to experiment boldly, often using the hops indigenous to Belgium, especially its northern region of Flanders. Belgium indisputably made the world’s most interesting ales. So it was no surprise that Jackson was smitten by Belgian beer. That the experience propelled him to become the most famous and influential beer writer ever—perhaps the most influential food writer on any one subject of the twentieth century—was almost as improbable as Jack McAuliffe birthing a brewery by hand in the hinterlands of a small town on the western fringe of the American empire. But that’s what happened.
In the same year McAuliffe began building New Albion, Jackson took over the writing and editing of a guide to English pubs when the original author balked. The slim volume allowed him his first stabs at lengthy beer writing. His pièce de résistance emerged the following year, when his The World Guide to Beer was released on both sides of the Atlantic by niche publishers.*
It boomed across 255 pages of photos and fine print, detailing in plain yet densely packed prose the genesis and provenance of hundreds of brands covering myriad styles, from not just the Northern Europe that had captured his fancy the decade before and that dominated world beer, but also to far-flung locales in the Caribbean and the South Pacific.
Michael Jackso
n in a publicity photo for his book The World Guide to Beer. COURTESY OF RUNNING PRESS, AN IMPRINT OF THE PERSEUS BOOK GROUP
Beer in the twentieth century had its piper. Never again would budding brewers, critics, and connoisseurs be without a roadmap. Charles Finkel, the wine merchant who would in 1978 begin pioneering the importation of fine European beers to the United States, including many from Belgium, told the beer writer Stan Hieronymus that The World Guide to Beer “was to me like a heathen discovering the Bible. It answered all those questions that I had about top and bottom fermentation, about hops, about yeast, about the nature of beer and the history of beer, and traditions of beer and beer culture.” British beer writer Martyn Cornell put it this way:
[Jackson] invented the expression ‘beer style,’ which was found nowhere before The World Guide to Beer appeared, forcing brewers and drinkers to think about the drink in a way they never had before, when they talked merely of ‘varieties’ or ‘types’ of beer. He introduced drinkers to beers they would probably never have heard of without his work, and he encouraged brewers, directly or indirectly, both to revive old styles and to push the envelope until, sometimes, it tore in their efforts to come up with new styles.”