by Tom Acitelli
(c) BEER FOR PERSONAL OR FAMILY USE—Subject to regulations prescribed by the Secretary, any adult may, without payment or tax, produce beer for personal or family use and not for sale. The aggregate amount of beer exempt from tax under this subsection with respect to any household shall not exceed—
1. 200 gallons per calendar year if there are 2 or more adults in such household,
or
2. 100 gallons per calendar year if there is only one adult in such household.
For purposes of this subsection, the term “ adult” means an individual who has attained 18 years of age, or the minimum age (if any) established by law applicable in the locality in which the household is situated at which beer may be sold to individuals, whichever is greater.
The bill went to president Jimmy Carter, the devout Southern Baptist said to be a teetotaler,* who signed HR 1337 into law on October 14, 1978. It took effect February 1 of the following year.
It was perfect timing for Papazian. After graduation and a summer at a boys’ camp in Maine, he had relocated to Boulder, Colorado, in the fall of 1972; a college roommate’s brother was attending the University of Colorado and had a floor for him to sleep on. He wanted a change, and he figured it was to be found out West, not on the East Coast. He found a job as a preschool teacher, as well as an apartment, and in 1973 he began teaching evening home-brewing classes in the kitchen. Papazian earned a reputation in those early Boulder days as “a magnet,” according to one contemporary, a sort of amiable, bearded eccentric who might organize a marbles tournament or a pig roast for hundreds of his closest friends. The homebrewing classes, which he taught through the Community Free School (“where anyone could teach whatever they wanted”), fit snugly with this crunchy, up-from-the-people ethos. His first class had four students, and one of those was Charlie Matzen.
Matzen was, like Papazian, a schoolteacher in his late twenties who was also given to the outdoors, as well as a bit of what we would today call a foodie—or, at least, he could be known to throw parties with a lot of food, much the same way his new teacher and fast friend could throw parties with a lot of homebrew. The two started hanging out and traveling together, camping and chatting and plotting ways, as men of that age will do, of making more money, preferably at something they enjoyed. They found a way during a trip together to Hawaii, where Papazian joined Matzen, who was fixing up some condos that his parents owned. They went camping and talked of experiences in homebrewing—a full, five-gallon carboy of Matzen’s had recently exploded, sending shards of glass into the walls and bubbly wort into a closet of the condo below—and an idea flashed: something for the homebrewers of America! The hobby was still illegal, but both men knew that it was growing in popularity. Still, aside from the one-off instruction books of Eckhardt, Burch, and a handful of others, there was little for homebrewers to tap into editorially for expertise and inspiration.
Thus Zymurgy magazine was born (the word refers to the study of yeast fermentation, especially for beer and wine). Papazian and Matzen pieced together the first issue back in Boulder with a few volunteers and a shoestring budget of $4,000 (they each put half toward the venture). It ended up at twelve pages with two advertisements, one for a local wine-making and homebrew shop (which was also a coupon for 10 percent off), another for Green Mountain Herbs (“We’ve got hops—and more!”). The masthead on the second page consisted of Papazian as editor, Matzen as assistant editor, and Bob Telischak, a commercial artist in Nederland, Colorado, as “Art.” An annual subscription and a yearlong membership in the newly formed American Homebrewers Association together cost $4; an extra $2 got you a copy of Papazian’s self-published guide The Joy of Brewing, offered in the same issue for $2.50 by itself.
The contents revealed the template that had arisen by 1978 for writing and thinking about craft beer: Zymurgy was history, frequently of the personal kind, mixed with often highly technical how-to, all done to a whimsically friendly beat throughout. Papazian’s backstory and recipe for “Stuffed Whole Lobster A-la-mazing”—”a shrimp and stuffed lobster feast for ten people”—ended with an exhortation to “smile when you drink homebrew.” A detailed recipe for a seven-gallon batch of Vagabond Black Gingered Ale cautioned followers twice not to worry about the effort involved and to “have a beer, get relaxed” while the wort boiled. It was homebrewing presented as a calling since time immemorial, a club you wanted to join. The main story, “The Lost Art of Homebrewing,” which Papazian had picked up and reprinted from a local library and which started on the cover and jumped to two interior pages, was by Karl F. Zeisler, a newspaperman turned journalism professor at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. He wrote it in 1935, two years after Prohibition ended, when the discovery of old brewing equipment in his basement from “pre-New Deal times” triggered a Proustian recollection of an often frustrating yet rewarding hobby:
Homebrewing was practiced in upstairs halls, bedrooms, broom closets, telephone booths, and dumbwaiters, but my own technique required an entire basement. Mere dilettantes brewed only five gallons at a time—the quantity made from one can of malt—producing about 45 twelve-ounce bottles. But more sophisticated fermenters like myself made a double batch, netting approximately 85 bottles at a single ordeal. Purloining the bottles was one of the sobering elements in the whole business, for only plutocrats laid out good money for them, and many a nocturnal scavenging expedition up alleys was undertaken to meet the needs of a confirmed Brewer.
The rest of the inaugural Zymurgy unfolded in a similarly fun, instructional way, with hints at coming attractions like recipes for “stouts that taste like stouts” and “the First Annual National Homebrew Competition sometime during the month of May, 1979.” More passionate than professional, Zymurgy was literally not trying to be slick—it was rubber-cemented paper, rather than bound glossy pages—and a homebrewer in Brooklyn or Berkeley might be hard-pressed to recall, exactly, why he should care about this new publication out of Boulder. There wasn’t much news about beer or homebrewing in it. It wasn’t even the first of its kind—Fred Eckhardt had been publishing from time to time the Amateur Brewer journal since the late 1960s. It was part magazine, complete with news about breweries and reviews of brewing kits, and part detailed recipe book (Amateur Brewer number six in the summer of 1979 was the “special yeast issue”).* Moreover, there were industry trade magazines like Brewers Digest, which nearly every month pumped out sixty-plus pages of glossy beer coverage, including of smaller brewers; and the venerable Modern Brewery Age, a statistics-heavy newsletter and magazine going back to 1938†
What Papazian and Matzen did have with Zymurgy was impeccable timing: volume one, number one, was dated December 1978, less than two months after President Carter signed HR 1337, with Alan Cranston’s crucial amendment, into law. Zeisler’s story shared a corner of the cover with part of an article, “Congress Passes Homebrew,” that led with, “It’s official. If you’re eighteen years or older, you may legally brew one hundred gallons of beer for personal use each year—tax free! This probably isn’t an astonishing piece of news, as beer-making has been legal in the minds of homebrewers for years.”
Charlie Papazian homebrewing. PHOTO BY JAY QUADRACCI. COURTESY OF CHARUE PAPAZIAN
Doubly fortuitous in Zymurgy’s timing was that its publication marked the launch of the American Homebrewers Association (AHA), the somewhat pretentiously grand title that Papazian and Matzen gave to their new conclave of … well, fellow Boulder-area enthusiasts and whatever wine-making shops they could find in the Yellow Pages at the library. The magazine, though, offered a hint of the association’s aspirations to have its grasp match its reach. The article on the homebrewing legislation ended with comments from “a high-ranking representative of the AHA” on the lawmakers “championing our cause on the floor of the Senate” and urged readers to remember those who voted against home-brewing the next time they went to the polls.
There were other beer organizations, much older than the AHA, that did their own arm
-twisting on Capitol Hill. The United States Brewers’ Association (USBA) dated from the late nineteenth century, when German immigrants who had turned to brewing organized, and the Brewers Association of America dated from World War II, when smaller regional breweries got together to ensure they were able to get supplies during wartime austerity. Between the two, they claimed as members just about every brewery in America. The USBA, in particular, held powerful sway in the halls of government. It had been led since 1962 by Henry King, a gregarious Philadelphia native and food industry executive who had won a Silver Star and a Purple Heart fighting in the Pacific Theater, and whose favorite drink was known to be a whiskey-based Rob Roy. King had proven particularly instrumental in lobbying for a tax break in 1976 that would turn out to be a godsend to craft brewers, beginning with Fritz Maytag’s Anchor. The break reduced the federal excise tax on beer from nine dollars to seven dollars per barrel on the first sixty thousand barrels—so long as a brewery produced no more than two million barrels annually. Similar legislation had failed several times over the previous thirty years, but when it came up this time, King led behind-the-scenes lobbying that included fundraising from Big Beer and calling in favors from organized labor as well as other industries. It passed Congress in September 1976, and Stroh Brewing Chairman Peter Stroh nudged fellow Michigander Gerald Ford to sign it without fanfare.
Papazian and Matzen’s American Homebrewers Association had a long way to go if it hoped to be that influential. We find them instead on a December day in Boulder, one foot of snow already covering the ground and more falling. Papazian had driven his 1969 Toyota Corona to pick up the first two thousand copies of Zymurgy from the printer. Back at his place, volunteers helped organize and label the first mailing. About eight hundred homebrewers and their partisans in the Boulder area would receive copies; another one hundred would hit those wine-making shops nationwide that Papazian and Matzen had found in the Yellow Pages. Those shops soon would be able to legally sell the homebrewing supplies they had been selling anyway; their inventories of such supplies would grow in volume and quality, touching off a symbiotic role that resonates to this day. President Carter’s pen stroke had been good news to the merry band of libationary eccentrics huddled in Papazian’s home that would help their dim salvo echo well beyond the muffle of that snowy Colorado day.
*Interestingly, Carter took up wine making after he left office (per Scott Benjamin, “Life After the White House,” CBS News, February 11, 2009). Still, during the 1976 presidential campaign, the media many times reported that Carter never drank alcohol.
*This Amateur Brewer should not be confused with a later, larger magazine of the same name.
†Modern Brewery Age was an exhaustive source for this book. The author would like to take this opportunity to commend it for its statistical thoroughness.
“SMALL, HIGH-QUALITY FOOD PLACES”
Sonoma, CA | 1978
Don Barkley returned in the spring of 1978 to the warehouse on the outskirts of Sonoma. This time Jack McAuliffe was away, probably down in Davis doing more research or in San Francisco picking up grains from the city’s last malt house, the Bauer & Schweitzer Malting Company. Suzy Stern greeted Barkley in the small office at the warehouse entrance.
He pleaded his case again: he was a student of Michael Lewis at UC-Davis and wanted practical experience this summer in small-scale commercial brewing because he hoped to found his own small brewery someday.
“Sure,” a delighted Stern said, “come back! And you want to work for free, right?”
“Yeah, well, maybe for some free beer.”
Barkley that summer fell into a grueling work rhythm with McAuliffe, Stern, and Zimmerman. Workdays often started around 6 AM with the milling of about one hundred pounds of malted barley in a wooden mill that McAuliffe had built, working off nineteenth-century designs. They would then mash the barley in hot water piped in from the nearby mountains to release the sugars that the yeast would convert to alcohol. While it mashed, they might sit around the small office, drinking coffee in the heat provided by the sootbelching stove (the local feed store sold stacks of coal, so fire was never a problem during the bitter winter months—warmth might be, but fire wasn’t). Then they would boil the mashed barley and add hops, depending on the beer type. New Albion got its hops, mostly the Northern Brewer and Cluster varieties, from the family-owned Signorotti Farm in Sloughhouse, east of Sacramento; one or two bales would last an entire year.*
After the boil, the wort would be cooled and then left to ferment. Within a few weeks it would be time to bottle. Unlike Big Beer—unlike most commercial beer in the world—New Albion’s ales were not pasteurized. Instead the yeast went into the bottles along with everything else, providing a further fermentation punch and a generally more complex beer. The beer was sold in returnable twelve-ounce bottles labeled by a machine built in 1910—”We don’t believe in throwing things away,” McAuliffe told a reporter—and packaged in twenty-four-count wooden cases made and silk-screened by McAuliffe himself. New Albion’s ales were then sent out to a Bay Area that was apparently quite thirsty for them, no matter the price.
Bottles of New Albion might retail for ninety-five cents to $1.05 each, making them perhaps the most expensive beers produced in the United States. As with Anchor, most of the brewery’s accounts were local (New Albion and Anchor occasionally shared shelf space, the first time since Prohibition two craft beers did), though McAuliffe started getting requests from other parts of the country. He could not deliver. The twelve-hour days were barely keeping up with the beer’s popularity locally. McAuliffe had already upped production to pay for Barkley—the curious student became an increasingly masterful employee for $150 a week and all the beer he could drink. And it was not like the company was full of frills: Stern’s van still served as the main distribution vessel, as well as the conduit for supply runs; and McAuliffe still lived arachnid-like above the shop. It was just that, perhaps primed by Anchor, the marketplace wanted its craft beer. The company lost $6,000 its first fiscal year and was on its way to falling just short of breaking even in its second. As the Washington Post noted in a Sunday story in July 1978:
From the first week New Albion beers were available, the brewery has been unable to meet demand, selling every single bottle every single week despite the fact that the rate of production has already doubled. And some time this summer, McAuliffe will begin distributing kegs to local bars for the first time. As with the bottled product, the keg beer will be fermented in the container, making it America’s only noncarbonated draft beer.
Was McAuliffe worried? Nah. “It’s real beer,” he assured the Post. “All you have to do is make a good beer, and it will sell.” And, like Fritz Maytag down in SoMa, he would not advertise. “We don’t really have to. If you make good beer—if you put money into the ingredients of your beer—you don’t have to pay for advertising. It’s when you get into the mass market that you can’t tell your beer from the others except by the difference in advertising.” He then harked back to Alice Waters’s operation, also in the Bay Area. “It’s just like cosmetics, or bread, in the big mass market. That’s why we don’t advertise; small, high-quality food places don’t have to.”
How such a quote must have gone over in the boardrooms of John Murphy’s Miller. “Great Taste, Less Filling,” “It’s Miller Time”—these worked on the public. How dare this upstart! Big Beer’s trade voice did, in fact, push back a bit. In a letter to his father dated August 1, 1978, McAuliffe recounted with a certain insouciance his run-in with Henry King’s USBA for further comments he’d made about ingredient shortcuts. The letter, too, showed a son not yet thirty-five tell his father that he was part of something—something that was growing, that was directly related to the after-school hours at Clay’s welding shop back in Fairfax and to the hobby he had dragged from Scotland and that they had engaged in together. Even the media coverage was growing—and its quality, too. Gone was the editorial wonderment of the year before at this st
range thing called small-scale commercial brewing. It was replaced by earnest descriptions, clips from the time brim with explanations of such terms as “bottle fermentation,” “cellaring temperatures,” and “wort.”
Dear Pop—
Here’s a clipping from the Washington Post. I got my hand slapped by the United States Brewers Association, Augie Busch president, for saying all that stuff about rice & enzymes. I told them I was going to be good from now on.
We’re getting new malt storage capacity—15 tons, so I won’t have to go to the city [San Francisco] every two weeks to pick it up.
I think we’ll show a profit this coming year.
Love,
Jack
*A hop bale weighed around two hundred pounds.
THE BEARDED YOUNG MAN FROM CHICO
Chico, CA | 1978
Byron Burch listened to the twenty-three-year-old from Chico, California, go on about his plans to open a small brewery. Burch, the author of Quality Brewing and the co-owner by then of a homebrewing shop in San Rafael, was familiar with such a storyline; he knew Jack McAuliffe and Fritz Maytag and had heard of plans for other small breweries, though the idea still seemed novel, even foolhardy. The young man from Chico had written to him because of his book, and the two ran into each other at a wine-making trade show at the Claremont Hotel in the hills of Berkeley. They headed to Burch’s place in the nearby Oakland flatlands to get away from the conference for a bit and to shoot the breeze over some of their own homebrews. The homebrews turned into dinner, and the young man ended up crashing there.