by Tom Acitelli
For the young man, the trade show in the spring of 1978 was a tipping point in a short life that seemed somehow to have been inexorably aimed toward craft beer. He had grown up in downtown Los Angeles and in the more suburban Woodland Hills, the middle child of three in a typical middle-class family of 1950s and 1960s America. He had a fascination with taking things apart that started in the cradle—the toaster, electrical outlet covers, even the washing machine, usually with kitchen knives or tweezers, anything in arm’s reach and while his mother wasn’t looking. Eventually, he came to learn how to put them back together as well, although not always in the same places: a neighbor’s lawnmower engine once became the power for a go-cart. By adolescence he could build things from bare-bones ingredients; he would never forget the time he built a screwdriver from scratch in junior high shop class, something much harder than it sounds. He also would never forget the neighbor who homebrewed and made his own wine, the rows of carboys on a side porch with air locks bubbling away, the weekend pop-ins to discover pots of boiling malt and hops on the kitchen stove.
In the summer of 1969, he gave it a go himself. He spent less than twenty-five dollars at John Daume’s wine-making shop in Woodland Hills to buy an open-top plastic fermenter (like what McAuliffe bought in Glasgow a few years before, it was a glorified trash can), a five-gallon glass carboy, a hydrometer, a short length of plastic tubing, and a crude bottle capper. The ingredients he bought at the grocery store down the road: canned Blue Ribbon malt extract and a lot of cane sugar. He was aiming for high alcohol content, not high quality. That changed in 1970, when, while at a homebrewing shop, he discovered Fred Eckhardt’s A Treatise on Lager Beers. Now a high school student who had little use for his classes, he devoured the information and switched to all-grain brewing, the technical know-how building since before he could walk gelling nicely with his newfound passion to produce not-terrible concoctions that he and his friends could enjoy.
Shortly after graduation—he skipped the actual ceremony—our young man, now conspicuously bearded even though not yet eighteen, commenced a couple of seemingly random journeys that in fact turned out to be as life altering as the neighbor who homebrewed. The first trip was a ten-hour drive to Chico, about 175 miles northeast of San Francisco, so a couple of friends could check out the local college there. They ended up in the impossibly seedy La Grande Hotel downtown, with no air-conditioning in the sultry June nighttime, an oddball assortment of permanent residents, and a shared bathroom down the hall spattered with blood. It was not an auspicious welcome to the town of thirty thousand. The young man decided to stay nonetheless; it was as good a redoubt as any to plan his post-Southern California life. He looked in the Yellow Pages for bike shops—he had been working at them on and off since junior high—and landed a job at a local Schwinn store. He and his friends the next day found a five-bedroom house to rent on the south end of town, and he called his mother to tell her he was moving in two weeks.
The second journey then commenced. He and a friend biked their way roughly ninety miles from Novato to Ukiah, stopping along the way to sample the wares of a burgeoning Northern California wine scene—and to discover, almost by accident, commercially produced craft beer. Our young man had heard of the particular brand, maybe even knew a bit about its recent history as a resurrected example of pre-Prohibition brewing. Regardless of what he knew, the timing was perfect, as the brewery had only a short time before begun distributing bottles, and it was in a small restaurant off Highway 1 that Ken Grossman had his first Anchor Steam.
We can with hindsight trace a straight line from Grossman’s encounter with Anchor Steam to his development of what became the definitional pale ale of the West Coast—what made “West Coast” an adjective in craft beer. He spent the next few years studying chemistry as well as other sciences at Chico State and a nearby community college, working on and off in bike shops, and honing his skills as a homebrewer to the point where he was able to malt his own barley. Part of this was necessity, as ingredients were scarce; another part was that Grossman and his new wife were leading an up-from-the earth existence in their one-room house next to a little creek in the foothills above Oroville, California. They raised goats for milk and made their own cheese. Home-brewing meshed nicely with such a slow approach to food. By 1976, Grossman and a next-door neighbor were co-owners of a homebrew shop in Chico, paying fifty-seven dollars a month to rent a second-floor space in the La Grande Hotel, the same dive he had crashed in right out of high school his first night in town. (When money was tight, they paid their rent in janitorial services for the building.) Grossman taught homebrewing classes at the shop, building up a customer base that, along with a side gig brokering the sales of wine grapes, allowed him to quit his second job at the bike shops. The line was almost complete: Ken Grossman could now focus on beer full-time.
The 1978 trade show in Oakland provided him an entrée into what he would later call “my community.” He met Fred Eckhardt, Byron Burch, and many of the homebrew-shop owners who had supplied his own venture early on. He also met Fritz Maytag, who acted as the tour guide during a group visit to Anchor’s Eighth Street brewery, which struck Grossman as “fairly crude” with a “small, cramped bottling line. It had only a few open fermenters and a handful of aging tanks in a dank cellar.” No matter. He understood its significance—the only other brewery he had ever toured was the gigantic Anheuser-Busch plant and Busch Gardens in Van Nuys, California, as a child. Anchor was something much different. So was its beer. At the end of Maytag’s tour, Grossman bought cases of Old Foghorn; initially brewed in November 1975, it was the first new barleywine by a domestic brewer since Prohibition, reviving perhaps the world’s strongest, most complex ale style for American palates. He had never tasted anything like it before.
Grossman’s tour of Anchor came at a transitional time for the brewery. It was outgrowing the Eighth Street location; Anchor’s production had increased twenty times over, from six hundred barrels annually in 1965 of iffy steam beer in kegs to 12,500 barrels of consistently high-quality beer in different styles, available from kegs or bottles. Maytag, after a long search, would move the twelve-employee operation in the late summer of 1979 about a mile southward, to an old Chase & Sanborn coffee roastery at Mariposa and De Haro Streets. In the new facility, Anchor’s bottle runs could jump from 70 a minute to 275. While other operations were in their infancies, just toddling forth into the unforgiving beer market of consolidation and homogeneity, such growth was a sign of Anchor’s entry into a confident adulthood. General Brewing, the only other brewery left in San Francisco, capped its last bottles of Lucky Lager at the end of March 1978 and closed for good, leaving Maytag’s operation supreme locally. Nationally, Anchor was distributing as far as Wisconsin and New Jersey, and it was leading the way in fresh styles with Liberty Ale, Old Foghorn, Anchor Porter, and, since November 1975, the first seasonal ale by an American brewer since Prohibition.* More than that—and more important for the larger movement—Maytag had developed a reputation as an approachable godfather of craft brewing, the man you could see or at least telephone for free advice.
If his 1978 visit to this transitioning Anchor opened Grossman’s eyes, a visit that same year to Jack McAuliffe’s New Albion changed his life. Grossman’s older brother had introduced him to a fellow homebrewer and cycling enthusiast named Paul Camusi before the Berkeley trade show. Grossman and Camusi eventually fell into talking about opening their own commercial brewery, though neither was quite sure what that meant. The visit to New Albion, which they planned after the Berkeley trade show, clarified things immensely. They saw in McAuliffe’s gravity-flow system of secondhand equipment, cobbled together by pluck and luck, a homebrewing kit writ slightly larger. It brewed forty-five gallons at a time; Grossman was brewing fifteen gallons at a time at his home in Oroville, having fabricated a refrigerated cabinet on the covered porch. A little elbow grease, some start-up capital, a willingness to, like McAuliffe, work tortuous hours—it didn’t seem so far
-fetched. Grossman and Camusi, epiphany in hand, finished the New Albion tour with McAuliffe, who charged them for the samples at the end and was eager to get back to work.
McAuliffe would not remember the bearded young man from Chico stopping by—so many people did in those days and, besides, Grossman had toured with a group. But Grossman never forgot. His visit to New Albion was one of the tipping points of that tipping-point year for American craft beer, an event that was by no means inevitable but that changed the course of our culinary history.
*The 1975 seasonal ale was called Our Special Ale and became known over time—with regular tweaks to the recipe—as Christmas Ale. It began life modeled after Liberty Ale, which became a standalone brand for the second time in 1983 (per Dave Burkhart at Anchor).
THE FIREMAN AND THE GOAT SHED
Novato, CA; Hygiene, CO | 1979-1980
The June 1979 newsletter of the Maltose Falcons carried this report:
The California Steam Brewery has just begun under the watchful eye of Rich Dye. The DeBakker Brewing Company owned by Tom DeBakker [sic] has just gotten underway. That makes four small breweries, all located in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area! We all welcome you as worthwhile additions to the fine art of brewing and look forward to trying your product. If some of you good people “up north” could furnish the Maltose Falcons with their addresses, we would be grateful.
The other two small breweries, of course, were Anchor and New Albion. DeBakker and California Steam were the third and fourth American craft breweries since Prohibition. The latter disappeared quickly—not least because the name and the label may have been all-too-similar to Anchor’s—and was notable largely because Dye was a vintner who ran a winery out of the same warehouse that held his brewery; he was the first to make the leap from fine wine to craft beer.* The other brewery mentioned in the newsletter had sturdier staying power.
Tom de Bakker did not know of Jack McAuliffe’s operation until he read about it in the papers. He just knew, ever since he had tasted imports like Pilsner Urquell and Bass, that he liked good beer. The son of a San Francisco socialite and a Dutch-born father, de Bakker grew up with one sibling, a sister, in the city’s Presidio Heights neighborhood. He went northward to study fine arts, particularly sculpting, at Sonoma State University, where he met his wife, Jan. The couple spent about a year in Hawaii after graduation, and then returned in 1973 to hunt for work. De Bakker joined the fire department of Marin County, about thirty minutes north of San Francisco; he would rise to captain and then chief before his mid-thirties. All along, on and off, he homebrewed, producing drinkable batches from the get-go with the usual amalgam of canned syrups and secondhand know-how. This homebrewing, in an increasingly familiar pattern, led to commercial brewing. De Bakker built a gravity-flow brewery in about two thousand square feet of warehouse space in Novato, around twenty miles north of Sonoma, using secondhand equipment, including a chiller for the wort from an old dairy farm, a grain grinder he pieced together from junkyard parts, and a mash tun and kettle from a liquidator. The barrels for aging he fabricated from old soda ones. De Bakker got his grains from the Bauer & Schweitzer Malting Company in San Francisco, positioning his pickup truck in the same spot where the railroad cars would await deposits, taking on a ton or so, and then fishtailing it back up to Novato.
In July 1979, the DeBakker Brewing Company capped its first bottles of pale ale with a six-hundred-dollar contraption its founder got for fifty dollars from the Falstaff brewery on Tenth Street when it closed the year before. The bottles themselves were overstock from a company that supplied the Olympia Brewery in Seattle. Their labels included a sharp red seal at the center, with an eagle clutching barley and hop twines (the ATF made him remove a shield with the Stars and Stripes across the eagle, arguing it was too close to symbolizing the USA, which was de Bakker’s whole point). Around the seal ran not only a description of the beer but also a little education for the consumer, who might be scared off by that pulpy film undergirding the beer: “The fine sediment at the bottom of the bottle is the result of a natural bottle conditioning using the krausen process.” Five hundred cases hit the shelves of Bay Area retailers, selling for ninety cents to $1.20 a bottle. The de Bakkers knew what they were up against but, like the pioneers down Highway 101 in Sonoma, proceeded with a dash of swagger. “What Suzy Stern, Jack McAuliffe, Jan, and I are doing is just the beginning,” he told the Los Angeles Times for a front-page story on the “resurgence of small breweries.” “I think tiny breweries like DeBakker and New Albion will be springing up all over the United States just as boutique wineries have in recent years. It is just a matter of time.”
The twenty-nine-year-old firefighter, who kept his day job through it all, was on to something. As the Maltose Falcons newsletter suggests, with its request for basic information like addresses, the American craft beer movement, for all the flurry of 1978, remained a diffuse one, often still dependent on word of mouth and lacking much commercial infrastructure (in the de Bakkers’ case, they replaced McAuliffe’s discarded PepsiCo barrels with discarded Coca-Cola ones for aging). The twenty-first century may have been fast approaching, but the communication, with its mailings and phone calls, remained more akin to the nineteenth. But in the same Northern California area where the craft beer movement was taking its first baby steps, the American fine wine movement was at a toddler’s trot. By Prohibition, Sonoma County had 256 wineries spread over twenty-two thousand acres, making it the largest wine-producing region in California; like it did with breweries, however, Prohibition destroyed the wineries. And, as did the brewing industry, the wine industry began a long, slow slog back after Repeal in 1933. Something happened on the way: vintners like Robert Mondavi opened their wineries for tours and tastings starting in the late 1960s. An area once renowned simply for the utilitarian cultivation of grapes became a destination point for so much more. In sonorous perspicacity, guides and critics, amateur and otherwise, began to speak of terroir and tannins, of bouquets and varietals, of the lushness of the cabernet and the dryness of the merlot; “oaky” leaped from the domain of arborists to that of winemakers and their striving consumers. By 1975, more acres of Sonoma County were covered by wineries than were ever covered before Prohibition. Tom de Bakker, who had been inspired in part by the newer wineries he encountered in college in Sonoma, could be forgiven for thinking the same pleasant fate would befall craft beer.
Grossman and Camusi believed there was an audience out there, too, so much so that they took their time in building what became the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company. They knew of other breweries starting up in 1979 and into 1980, including DeBakker, California Steam, and Cartwright Portland, further up the road in Portland, Oregon. Founded by Charles and Shirley Coury, who had owned a vineyard for fifteen years in nearby Forest Grove, Cartwright Portland (“Cartwright” was Shirley’s maiden name) debuted from a building on SE Main Street in the late spring of 1980 with about 150 cases of a mild ale in the English style. It sold for one dollar a bottle and did not get the warmest reception from consumers. Still, locals really wanted it to work—the Courys’ enterprise represented the first craft brewery not only in Oregon but also in the entire Pacific Northwest outside of Northern California.
Rudolph “Stick” Ware, David Hummer, and Al Nelson were the first to open a craft brewery beyond the West Coast—and the first to open one in a goat shed. For Ware, it all started back in his junior year of high school in South Pasadena, California, when a friend’s uncle—one of fourteen siblings of the friend’s mother, all born on the Louisiana bayou—blew into town to avoid some legal entanglements back home and took the boys to Los Angeles to buy homebrewing supplies. Uncle Slim showed them the ways of bread yeast and Blue Ribbon extract, and the boys made some pretty terrible beers. The bug had bitten, however, and Ware continued to tinker with homebrewing through college and graduate school in experimental physics, right into his postdoctorate at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics out of the University of Color
ado in Boulder. The institute’s chairman was David Hummer, a theoretical astrophysicist of Amish stock who was married to a British woman. Hummer himself had made the leap beyond extracts and syrups to all-grain brewing; he crushed the malted barley with a rolling pin and used a bridal veil to dip them into a five-gallon thermos cooler. Voilà—mash tun! The pair of PhDs brewed some fine batches this way, so much so that colleagues came up to them in the cafeteria after one particular party and asked for any more of the beer that had fueled it. Ware looked at Hummer.
“Hey, we ought to start a brewery,” he said, more than half-joking.
As these sober boasts go, though, Ware soon found himself on the phone with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) office in Denver. A helpful voice on the other end sent a two-foot-thick stack of papers that Ware promptly left for weeks undisturbed on the kitchen table of the small farmhouse he shared with a fellow musician named Otto Zavatone (Ware played sax and Zavatone the piano in a local band called the Fornicators). He had his work at the institute, his music gigs, and the small farm where he and Zavatone grew and raised what they could eat (they once hit a monthly low of ten dollars in groceries)—he didn’t have time for red tape. Eventually, he confronted the stack and called the ATF back. The same helpful voice directed him to the parts that he absolutely had to fill out, and on September 25, 1979, he and Hummer and a third partner, an engineer named Al Nelson, had the forty-third brewery license in the United States.