by Tom Acitelli
They then sought materiel and advice. Ware visited Jack McAuliffe at New Albion and got further help, including with supplies like grains and hops, from what would seem like an odd choice: Jeff Coors, scion of the increasingly cultish Big Beer brand (Coors was available only in eleven states by the mid-1970s, and no less than Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford were said to have had cases of it flown to Washington, DC). Coors’s grandfather and Ware’s grandmother had dated—plus Jeff Coors thought it would be good for legislative lobbying purposes to have a second brewery in Colorado. Ware, Hummer, and Nelson also retrieved in Denver an old stainless-steel food-processing kettle that could hold a barrel and a half at a time. And they named Zavatone, who had worked as a chef and a fisherman, brewmaster. Finally, Nelson had a farm near Hygiene, at the edge of the Rocky Mountain National Park, and on that farm he had some goats, and next to the goats was a steel shed that they then turned into the Boulder Brewing Company’s first brewhouse. In it, they brewed a stout that won a blue ribbon at the American Homebrewers Association’s first-ever national competition, held in the brewery’s nearby namesake city. It was a nice little confidence builder.
The partners were soon spending $25,000 on the construction of a three-story, one thousand-square-foot brewhouse, also on Nelson’s farm, to supplant the goat shed. They didn’t have the local government green-lights for it, but they figured—correctly, it turned out—that once it was built, it would be hard for the authorities to order it shuttered. When the authorities did get wind of the brewhouse, they were actually helpful and a tad bemused by the whole enterprise. Their response was like the one from Sonoma County that Jack McAuliffe encountered in setting up New Albion four years before: Who had ever heard of such a thing as a new small brewery? By July 4, 1980, Boulder Brewing had twenty cases of hand-labeled, hand-filled bottles to sell at the Gold Hill Inn, a rustic resort near the Rocky Mountain National Park. The American craft beer movement was no longer a West Coast thing.
*California Steam appears to have been as short-lived as its second word. The author asked those involved at the time in the American craft beer movement in the San Francisco Bay Area for their recollections of the brewery. No one could recall much about it—only that it had existed and that it perhaps ran into legal trouble because of the similarity of its name to Anchor’s signature brand (there is no record in California of a court case involving the companies). The Maltose Falcons newsletter, in fact, may signify the most thorough reference to California Steam in its time.
THE WEST COAST STYLE
Chico, CA | 1979-1981
Ken Grossman and Paul Camusi reassessed their plans. They knew they needed to talk to Jack McAuliffe again. They drove the three hours from Chico to Sonoma and analyzed the mechanics—and, more subtly, the finances—of the nation’s first start-up craft brewery. McAuliffe and Suzy Stern—Jane Zimmerman had bowed out by then to pursue what became a successful career as a therapist—were still working long days alongside Barkley and a handful of others, including those brought in to bottle on Wednesdays. And the output was still relatively small, with the forty-five-gallon batches translating into about twenty cases of beer at a time.
The only big thing that had changed at New Albion by then was that it had switched grain suppliers—from the soon-to-close Bauer & Schweitzer Malting Company to the soon-to-move Anchor nearby. As he often did in his role as munificent godfather, Fritz Maytag cut a deal with McAuliffe to supply New Albion with grains. Every six to eight weeks, someone would drive Stern’s Dodge van to San Francisco, with a bin hooked up to the back that could hold as much as sixteen hundred pounds of malted barley. The driver would spray about that amount from Anchor’s silo and drive it right back to Sonoma.
Otherwise, things in the corrugated-steel warehouse continued apace, with fame lapping at the edges of Jack McAuliffe’s dream. Michael Lewis, by then renowned in the industry for regularly placing his UC-Davis graduates at some of the nation’s most well-known breweries, routinely led classes of ten to twenty through the brewery, with McAuliffe, in these instances, an obliging tour guide willing to answer numerous questions. Stern once found an envelope in the office mail addressed simply as “The Brewery, Northern California.” Newsweek mentioned “America’s smallest brewery” in a story about the big ones (“The people who sit at a bar and drink eight or nine bottles of Budweiser are not going to be the people who drink New Albion,” Stern told the weekly). And one day, someone knocked on the door—someone who had written some of the era’s more memorable pop songs. James Taylor was a beer fan and had heard of the little brewery; might he look around? Beer writer Michael Jackson, too, dropped by. Tom de Bakker picked him up at the San Francisco airport and showed him first around his own brewery in Novato; then he drove him twenty miles in his 1968 Triumph 250 to New Albion. There Jackson signed a copy of his book The World Guide to Beer. Finally, none other than New York Times wine critic Frank J. Prial paid a visit in late spring and liked what he saw, telling the Old Gray Lady’s influential readership of “what may be one of the country’s best beers.” Prial took refuge amid the brewing terminology in a wine simile: “Because New Albion is not filtered, it is not crystal clear like most mass produced beers. It also contains small amounts of yeast. Like true Champagne, New Albion’s final fermentation literally takes place in the bottle.”
These were heady times for New Albion, and Grossman and Camusi at first sought to emulate McAuliffe’s approach of rendering their homebrewing operation into a slightly larger commercial one. But then they thought harder about it. New Albion’s output in 1979 was sufficient to cover the brewery’s operating expenses, but not enough to fund much growth. If they wanted their own commercial venture to be profitable, then they would have to brew more beer at a time. They settled on a ten-barrel system, which could produce roughly 315 gallons per batch, and set about physically and financially building what became Sierra Nevada Brewing Company in Chico. Their efforts are illustrative of the challenges that start-up craft breweries still faced fourteen years after Maytag saved Anchor and more than three years after McAuliffe built New Albion. There simply wasn’t the equipment available; and traditional funding, from commercial or investment banks and private equity firms, was a nonstarter. What institution in its right fiscal mind would loan someone thousands—maybe hundreds of thousands—to build a small, inherently fragile company to compete with Anheuser-Busch and Miller?
Even Maytag, with his profitability since 1975, confronted a bankruptcy scare involving Anchor’s move to Mariposa Street in August 1979. In fact, that first year at the new location was déjà vu all over again: Anchor lost money. Worse yet, Maytag had pledged his own assets, including real estate and stocks, to build out the Mariposa site, designing and buying equipment before any financing came through, leaving him with sleepless nights. Then one morning, he woke up, got dressed, went downstairs, and couldn’t leave. He went back to bed. The larger plant, though, did allow Anchor to expand its production and therefore its distribution; soon it regained its financial footing. Still, in a way as pioneering as much of what Maytag had done to that point, the bankruptcy scare served as an unspoken cautionary tale to the second wave of American craft brewers that came after him: watch your growth, kids. Some in the second wave (and third and fourth) would heed this tale. Others would not.
As for McAuliffe, as heady as the times were for his little warehouse operation, he did not recommend the business. He told the Washington Post that first full year of operations:
You know, you have to either have a great deal of money—an unbounded amount of capital—or you have to be able to weld and do water chemistry and build the place and go get money and write business plans and do design, mechanical analysis, structural analysis, and all that stuff … and then run the brewery. There aren’t too many of them out there like that.
You have to be totally committed. The only thing you think about is beer and brewing. You work 10 hours a day, eight days a week. That’s the way it is.
A former Air Force officer, Defense Department analyst, and MIT lecturer with a formidable knack for number crunching, Weinberg went to work for Anheuser-Busch in 1966 as a vice president of corporate planning; five years later he struck out on his own to produce for clients exhaustive surveys of the brewing industry. By 1980, Weinberg was predicting that only a handful of breweries would remain by the new millennium. It was a pervasive and persuasive shorthand. Bill Coors, grandson of the Big Beer founder and driving force behind the aluminum can that did so much to change the way Americans consumed beer, told Henry King of the USBA that there would be only five breweries by the year 2000. “I was simply extrapolating the death curve out,” Coors said later.
To get capital in this climate meant to get it from yourself, friends, or family (or, most likely, a combination). Grossman and Camusi decided after visiting McAuliffe again that they would need $50,000 to start up Sierra Nevada in Chico (another early decision after other locations around San Francisco were ruled out). They foolishly tried banks first—Grossman did not own any credit cards and had run his homebrewing shop on the good graces of his own prompt bill payments to nonmainstream venders; Camusi may have had a gas card but not much else. Still, they buttoned up and went into banks—and were duly turned away. It was not merely the lack of credit but the state of the brewing industry that banks could read about via Weinberg, Coors, and others. A brewery—a small one in a relatively remote area of Northern California at that—was simply not a sound investment. At this point, we can almost step back and see the American craft beer movement as a doomed venture by 1979 and 1980, one that was by no means assured of stumbling out of the decade of stagflation and oil crises in any kind of fighting shape. The country, like a listing ship in rough seas, was about to turn into a major recession that would make borrowing all the more difficult, for craft brewers and everyone else.
Steve Dresler, Sierra Nevada’s brewmaster, adds hops to the early brew kettle fabricated by ken Grossman. COURTESY OF SIERRA NEVADA BREWING COMPANY
Grossman and Camusi dug into their own pockets—Grossman sold the homebrewing shop in the old La Grande Hotel for a few thousand—scrounging just over $15,000. Then, as their original $50,000 projection doubled, they hit up family, arranging for them to invest through a limited partnership. The business would lose money, the two figured; with a limited partnership, at least their relatives could claim the losses on their taxes. It was a relentlessly stressful time. The two drove to Mount Vernon, Washington, one day to pick up a secondhand bottle filler, washer and labeler for a total of $5,250. On the hours-long drive back, Grossman, then the married father of one, had plenty of time to mull over the fact that he had just spent nearly all the money he had to his name—and for only a part of the operation. Maybe this whole brewery thing was a mistake. Look at Jack McAuliffe and his crew—ten- to twelve-hour days for twenty cases per batch, even three-plus years in. Look at Fritz Maytag, like a duck, gliding along on the surface, paddling furiously just below. Or look at . . who? Ware, Hummer, and Nelson in the Rocky Mountain goat shed? The de Bakkers, where Tom worked on his days off from firefighting and Jan on the others?
Still, the pair pressed on, downsizing the physical size of their brewery, a converted metal warehouse on Gilman Way in Chico, to avoid additional city fees; soaking up information from Michael Lewis and the UC-Davis brewing library; and scooping up future fermenters and refrigerators from old dairy farms in Northern California that themselves had fallen victim to industrial consolidation. Then Grossman and Camusi settled on a recipe for what would become their signature beer, a fateful decision they made simply because they liked the taste and because Grossman had been visiting Washington’s Yakima Valley regularly to pick out favored hops for his homebrewing shop. They did several test batches of various beers, including stouts and pale ales, using different hops, and finally they settled on a pale ale with generous helpings of Cascade.
Grossman and Camusi brewed the first batch of what became known as Sierra Nevada Pale Ale in the third week of November 1980.* They spent time tweaking it, however, and it was not until the eleventh batch of the recipe the following March that they were satisfied they should sell it commercially. Released in the spring of 1981, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale was a bold, bitter statement in more than recipe: The start-up had chosen a distinctly American, and slightly more expensive, hop variety to power its pale ale’s taste, one developed, cultivated, and popularized commercially in the western United States. The Eurocentric conception of what a bitter beer could be would change forever. The West Coast was prepared to define the style for the world.
*The first beer the pair tried to brew commercially was, in fact, a stout, with the pale ale attempts starting a few days later (per Ken Grossman to the author in an e-mail, July 2012).
MAYFLOWER REFUGEE
Boulder, CO; Manhattan | 1981-1984
Daniel Bradford was restless. He had spent the last dozen years on a headlong run from his roots on the East Coast and now found himself directionless in the Rockies. The second child of six and the eldest son, he had grown up in New England acutely aware of being a direct descendant of William Bradford, who came over on the Mayflower and was an early governor of the colony that became Massachusetts. When he was eleven, his father, who had bought a firm that manufactured papermaking machines, moved the family from that state to Maine, where they lived in a house dating from 1694 on one hundred acres of land fertile with pheasant, fox, and moose. It was isolated—enough to drive a young man to romantic daydreams of escape. Bradford chose the West; it was more of a concept to him than a geographic destination (aside from a visit to an uncle in Minnesota, he had never left the region his ancestors pioneered). So, after graduating with his high school class of seventy-two in 1968, the tall, wiry young man went west, to the University of Colorado at Boulder. It was the first time he’d been on an airplane.
Mainers had never heard of a hippie. In Colorado, they were de rigueur. Within a few weeks, Bradford was part of the counterculture. He protested against Vietnam and for civil rights and women’s lib; there were sit-ins and demonstrations, confrontations with the police and speeches to the masses (Bradford delivered one on campus, though later he would not be able to recall the topic). He also worked jobs in the publishing industry, including for a bookstore, an academic publisher, and a magazine wholesaler. The whole time he studied the social sciences, intrigued by people’s decision-making processes: Why do we do what we do? The coursework qualified him for more coursework, and he pursued first a master’s and then a PhD at Colorado before becoming disillusioned with the snippy infighting of academia and walking away “totally disoriented” at the end of the 1970s. Friends connected him with a job selling books door to door, which was fine for the intellectual refugee—he hustled enough in the summer to take the fall and winter off. During that time he hoofed it around Europe, including France, Italy, and Britain, handed off from friend to friend and couch to couch, now past thirty and still searching for something that he knew wasn’t anywhere near rural Maine. After he returned to Boulder in 1981, a friend made what seemed like an odd suggestion, even with Bradford’s publishing background: become a literary agent. Not only that, but the friend had a particular client in mind: Charlie Papazian.
Papazian’s six-page syllabus for his early homebrewing classes in Boulder had grown to a seventy-eight-page, self-typed,
self-published title in 1976 called The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, which sold a couple of thousand copies. In that fateful year, 1978, he revised it to about one hundred pages and again self-published it. This was the edition that Bradford picked up on the recommendation of their mutual friend. He was blown away. He knew little about beer and less about brewing, but he got that Papazian’s breezy, conversational style nonetheless exposed a wealth of technical know-how. Plus, as with the launch of both Zymurgy and the American Homebrewers Association, it was all just such perfect timing. Legalization at the federal level had opened up the pipeline for higher-quality ingredients and now allowed for a freer flow of ideas between commercial brewers and the homebrewers who might want to join them. Papazian himself was a charming evangelist, the same “magnet” who had arrived in Boulder almost a decade before, sleeping on other people’s floors as he traveled to deliver lectures and tutorials and setting up the AHA’s office on his approximately fifty-square-foot back porch. When Bradford met Papazian, the AHA’s staff consisted simply of volunteers plus Papazian and Charlie Matzen, neither of whom paid themselves in the first couple of years. Papazian was able to quit his day job teaching kindergarten and preschool in Boulder in 1981, though Matzen continued to teach sixth grade in nearby Longmont. Matzen left the AHA soon after to pursue a successful real estate career, though he did serve as a judge at early homebrew competitions and on the association’s eventual board of directors. It was clear to Matzen that his friend was more passionate, seeing the AHA as a real nationwide venture, a way of professional life.