The Audacity of Hops

by Tom Acitelli

  Whatever the fate of contract brewing, others were still trying the old-fashioned way, albeit with readier access to material than Jack McAuliffe had ever had. A couple of hours’ drive up the Hudson River from Reich’s dream, a budget analyst for the state of New York, William S. Newman, was opening the first stand-alone craft brewery in the eastern United States with his wife, Marie. Tall and lanky, with owlish glasses and shaggy hair parted slightly off-center, Newman had actually filed incorporation papers with the state as early as October 1979—almost a year to the day, in fact, since President Carter signed the legislation legalizing homebrewing federally. Newman was beyond that stage by the time his Wm. S. Newman Brewing Company opened in an old warehouse in Albany’s industrial district with an annual capacity of five thousand barrels (though it would at first produce half that). He had apprenticed at the Ringwood Brewery in southern England, bringing back a taste for that country’s pub culture and its milder ales. Newman’s pale ale debuted in February 1982, described in the New York Times with quotation marks around the adjective “hopped.” He insisted at first that local establishments serve this and subsequent beers warm, at about fifty degrees Fahrenheit, in the English style, which the vendors were not always happy to do. Newman realized this insistence was a problem for the all-draft operation when an amber ale he brewed, which was meant to be served cold, began to outsell the pale ale. “Americans like their beer cold,” he concluded. Newman sprung into action in 1983, acquiring a bottling line and tweaking the pale ale recipe a bit to make it acceptable for serving at cooler temperatures (thirty-seven to forty degrees). He rolled out the East’s first specialty craft beer since Prohibition, Winter Warmer, in 1983, a brown ale of nearly 6 percent alcohol per volume that he compared to a Guinness-like stout, though not as bitter.

  Further down the East Coast, in the Virginia Tidewater, an orthodontist and a veterinarian, both in their mid-thirties, were putting the finishing touches on what would become the first craft brewery in the South. Jim Kollar, a Penn State linebacker turned veterinarian, had been homebrewing since before the federal law change, creating increasingly larger batches until he and his friend Lou Perrin, the orthodontist, decided to make the commercial leap with a few other investors, all relatives, and a brewmaster hired from West Germany. They were prepared to put up as much as $250,000 to make the Chesapeake Bay Brewing Company work from the ground up at an old industrial park in Virginia Beach. That would allow them to produce twenty-five hundred cases a week eventually of a signature amber lager they planned to brew using Cascade hops. As Perrin told a reporter in the winter of 1982 as he poured cement at the brewery site, those expecting a “locally brewed Budweiser” would be disappointed. “It will be made from only malt, hops, yeast, and water,” he said. “That means no corn syrup, no corn flakes.”

  William Newman in his brewery in downtown Albany. COURTESY OF CHARLIE PAPAZIAN

  Back West, more California craft breweries were in start-up mode. Jim Schlueter ran across Michael Lewis’s brewing curriculum while browsing the course catalog as an aimless freshman at UC-Davis. He earned a degree in that curriculum and went to work in Wisconsin for Schlitz, then one of the biggest breweries in the country. Wanting, however, to “brew beer by tongue rather than by computer,” he cobbled together $350,000 in loans and started the River City Brewing Company in an old upholstery shop in downtown Sacramento, California. It was the first American craft brewery to focus on lagers rather than ales. In Mountain View, California, amid the microchips and venture capitalists of Silicon Valley, a father and son were using what they saw working in the burgeoning computer industry in the making and marketing of craft beer. Kenneth Kolence had in 1967 cofounded Boole & Babbage Inc., one of the world’s first computer software concerns. His son Jeffrey had written his senior paper at California Polytechnic on the operations and layouts of small breweries and the mistakes they made in both. The younger Kolence then spent six weeks studying at a small brewery in England while his father raised $400,000. By the end of 1983, their Palo Alto Brewing Company was selling ten to fifteen barrels a week of their flagship London Real Ale, a bitter, to a half-dozen or so bars in San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties south of San Francisco for $2 to $2.40 a pop. Nearby, in Berkeley, another family brewery, albeit on a smaller scale, was inching forward. Charles Ricksform started brewing small batches of ale in his basement in 1981, with his two sons and a daughter, under the name Thousand Oaks Brewing Company.

  Also in California, the nation’s second and third brewpubs, after Bert Grant’s in Yakima, Washington, were opening. (Governor Jerry Brown had signed legislation in 1977 that allowed for on-premises sales of beer up to certain amounts, removing the sort of legal ambiguity that would continue to haunt brewpubs and would-be brewpubs in other states.) That third brewpub belonged to Bill Owens, a slender photojournalist with a shock of thick salt-and-pepper hair, who homebrewed so much that, on his fortieth birthday in 1978, a friend suggested they start a brewery. Owens went to his accountant and asked how one raised money these days. The accountant reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a form meant for another client. “White out ‘almond farm’ and put in ‘brewery,’” he said, explaining a limited partnership.

  Owens rented an old camera store in downtown Hayward, southeast of San Francisco, and renovated it using about $90,000 he raised through selling thirty-three shares through the limited partnership. The equipment came in the usual way: from a candy company, a food manufacturer, and, of course, a dairy, with sixty-two feet of pipe laid from the brewhouse to the bar with the help of an investor who normally worked on nuclear bombs. The brewhouse was visible through a picture window that allowed the customers up front to see where the beer they were drinking was coming from. Buffalo Bill’s Brewpub opened on September 9, 1983, with annual production reaching about three hundred barrels. As Owens told the writer William Least Heat-Moon a few years after opening, the money came in the ingredients-to-sales ratio, something that would hold true for other brewpubs nationwide. “For $130 worth of ingredients, I can make a $2,500 profit,” Owens explained. “A glass of lager—that’s all I brew now—costs seven cents. I sell it for a dollar and a half. Compare my profit on a bottle of commercial beer—forty cents.”

  Bill Owens in the summer of 1985 in his Buffalo Bill’s Brewpub in Hayward, California. COURTESY OF BILL OWENS

  One hundred and twenty miles to the north, California’s oldest brewpub had already been under way for a month by September 1983 in the impossibly appropriate town of Hopland. It also claimed remarkable parentage: the start-up equipment for the Mendocino Brewing Company came from Jack McAuliffe’s New Albion. So did its first brewmaster, Don Barkley. It was the founders and first employees of Mendocino that did McAuliffe the grim favor of absorbing the equipment he had fabricated when the old fruit warehouse in Sonoma had to be vacated. McAuliffe went with it, for a while—he left the new brewpub pretty soon after arriving, and then he left the craft beer movement altogether. Barkley, along with Mike Lovett, another old New Albion hand, and the company’s three founders, Michael Laybourn, Norman Franks, and John Scahill, quickly built Mendocino’s Hopland Brewery, Tavern, Beer Garden, and Restaurant into a success. They were soon brewing 120 cases of beer a week on the old New Albion equipment, and it was selling out in as little as three days, all out of this novel thing called a brewpub. The location didn’t hurt, either—ninety miles north of San Francisco, off one of the nation’s busiest highways, 101.

  Farther north, in Oregon, two vintners were picking up where two other vintners had left off. Dick and Nancy Ponzi owned Ponzi Vineyards near Portland, and they hired a native of the area, Karl Ockert, an avid homebrewer fresh out of Michael Lewis’s program at UC-Davis, to fashion the first craft brewery in Oregon since the Courys’ Cartwright Portland closed in 1982. The Columbia River Brewery brewed its first beers, ones more on the malty than the prevailing hoppy side, in late 1984 in an old, three-story cordage factory in Portland’s industrial northwest. With an ann
ual capacity at first of six hundred barrels, it was eventually renamed the BridgePort Brewing Company.

  On the same unremarkably grungy side of the Willamette River, two brothers in their twenties who learned homebrewing from an uncle were pushing toward their own brewery, unhappy with the commercially available beers in Portland. Kurt and Rob Widmer had drawn up a business plan that set as a goal twenty draft-beer accounts. They quickly surpassed that after their April 1984 opening and came to help define American beers that used wheat instead of barley as the primary grain. Together, BridgePort and Widmer—with no small help from Portlander Fred Eckhardt, who continued to write regularly about beer in local media and his own publications—would spark not only one of the more significant local craft beer booms but also a renaissance of that area of the city.

  To the north, in Washington State, three craft breweries joined Bert Grant’s groundbreaking brewpub. Inspired by Fritz Maytag’s Anchor, the aptly, almost defiantly named Independent Ale Brewing Company opened in a former transmission shop in Seattle in the summer of 1982, serving a signature beer called Redhook Ale. It was supposed to be modeled after richer English ales but was born of a Belgian yeast strain, discovered by one of the brewery’s founders, that produced a spicy, fruity beer; locals took to calling it “banana beer” because of the spice. Cofounders Paul Shipman, a former door-to-door wine salesman out of nearby Woodinville and the discoverer of the Belgian yeast strain, and Gordon Bowker, a one-time writer who a decade before had cofounded the Seattle coffeehouse that became Starbucks, sold less than one thousand barrels of it that first year. But a porter in 1983 and an IPA in 1984 changed everything, and their five thousand-square-foot brewery soon reached capacity.

  Around the same time, about 350 miles to the northeast, a twenty-something Washingtonian, back from bicycling through southern England and tasting what local breweries had to offer, was readying his first beer for sale. Mike Hale, who was also inspired by Jack McAuliffe’s New Albion, called that first beer Hale’s Pale American Ale and chose July 4, 1983, for its debut. In January 1985, Andy Thomas and Will Kemper poured the first beers from their new Bainbridge Island brewery, Thomas Kemper, at the Roanoke Park Place Tavern in Seattle. In another corner of Washington, right on both the Oregon border and the banks of the Columbia River, husband-and-wife team Tom Baune and Beth Hartwell built by hand Hart Brewing Company in an old general store in a logging town called Kalama (population twelve hundred); they called their first beer, a pale ale that debuted in 1984, Pyramid.

  Finally, in the old clocktower building of the small lower-Michigan town of Chelsea, about twenty miles west of Ann Arbor, a thirty-one-year-old cook and choir director named Ted Badgerow started the Real Ale Company, the first craft brewery in the Midwest. It was a milestone for the state that had been the first to ratify the Twenty-First Amendment and that had had as many as 128 breweries before Prohibition. By the time Badgerow came along, the region was best known brewing-wise for the Stroh’s plant in Detroit. His ethos, as he told Time magazine in July 1983, was simple: “I just crank up the stereo, stoke up the boiler, and brew some ale.” He had been doing that on one scale or another for a few years, ever since a friend in Grand Rapids, Michigan, served him a tasty ale that Badgerow, fresh off a long bike ride and thirsty, took for an import. No, the friend said, it was his own creation—homebrew. Badgerow himself undertook the hobby just as it became legal at the federal level, and before long friends suggested he started a brewery; one friend was a dairy farmer near Sparta, Michigan, named Gordon Averill, whose family concern was struggling. Badgerow worked there in the summer of 1981.

  “I’m going to get rid of all of this,” Averill said one day as the pair surveyed the equipment, “and I probably won’t make ten, twenty bucks on it. What am I going to do?”

  Badgerow had an idea. “If we filled it with beer, think how much we could sell that for.”

  The clocktower space as well as the hardness of the town’s water made Chelsea the best location for the brewery in Badgerow’s mind. Friends kicked in $12,000 as seed money, and he and Averill poured in sweat equity. They got busy right away brewing—one of the first calls Badgerow made was to Otto Zavatone at Boulder Brewing for advice—while awaiting the proper state licensing (dealing with the federal ATF had been fairly easy). The state-licensing warren might have been familiar to Jack McAuliffe and Suzy Stern at New Albion in California seven years before. No one had applied for a commercial brewing license in Michigan in about twenty-five years. What form did you even fill out? A friend of Badgerow’s from the choir had a brother who was a state lawmaker, and he helped them push things through. Badgerow skipped down the glazed marble of the state government building, license in hand, a bemused Averill walking more slowly beside him. They sold several cases right away of English-style bitters, bottled by hand four at a time in old Bass, Guinness, and Harp bottles that Badgerow got for cents on the dollar. The new brewery, novel as it was for the middle third of the country, had a stream of visitors (drawn as much, Badgerow figured, by the choice dartboard they had as by the possibility of free samples). The partners from the Chesapeake Bay Brewing Company traveled from Virginia Beach, Virginia, to check out the new arrival, and, oddly enough, pop-rock group Hall & Oates dipped in from a Canadian tour to buy seventy cases. Unbeknownst to Badgerow and Averill, other would-be commercial brewers were part of the stream as 1983 turned into 1984.

  By the end of 1983, there were fourteen craft breweries and brewpubs, including contract concerns, selling beer in the United States. Seven were in California, three in Washington State, two in New York, and the remainder in Colorado and Michigan. (Others like Hart and BridgePort would start selling soon.) There were rumors of more breweries in Iowa, Maine, Michigan (again), northern New Jersey, and even the Outer Banks of North Carolina. What tethered them despite the differences in size, geography, and temperament? A few things. Foremost, they shared, intentionally or not, the definitional qualities of craft beer set forth by Fritz Maytag in the 1960s at Anchor. They were small, by necessity; independent, also by necessity and sometimes to the extreme of starting without proper legal green lights; and traditional, often fiercely so—witness William Newman’s insistence that his beer be served warm or Lou Perrin of Chesapeake Bay assuring future consumers his beers would not be made with “corn flakes” or Mike Hale’s determination to mimic the local ales he encountered in England. They were each beachheads in their own ways, helping to turn palates toward a bitterness Americans simply could not seem to abide in large numbers and reanimating the notion of the local brewery. They had also either survived or started just after that first shakeout in 1982 and 1983 that saw the closure of DeBakker, Cartwright, and, most significantly, New Albion (the Real Ale Company in Michigan would barely make it into 1984). Collectively, then, they now represented a movement.

  It is not insignificant that a term arose around this period to describe them in relation to the rest of the brewing industry. As the New York Times explained to readers the week before Thanksgiving 1983, “micro-breweries” were those small operations “that have sprung up over the past few years to produce a few thousand barrels of specialized beers each year for limited distribution.” The same story dismissed much of the movement: “Despite admirable intentions and some pretty good products, many of the new beers are pretty awful…. Most microbrewery founders are just beer-lovers who want mainly to make their own idea of the perfect beer. They pick up most of their brewing experience in kitchens.” Quality control, though, was not the biggest hurdle. Back-of-the-envelope calculations show the entire craft beer movement was producing no more than fifty thousand barrels of beer annually in 1984—and about half that total would have belonged to the long-established and recently expanded Anchor. That is, whatever the quality of the beer (and the evidence shows that most of it was, in fact, quite well-received), the movement was small. Each start-up was tenuous, and the competition from Big Beer fierce. Not that the large breweries noticed. They would have litt
le noted what Steve Harrison, an early Sierra Nevada hire on his way to becoming its sales director, said at the second Great American Beer Festival in June 1983, held once again in Boulder. (Sierra Nevada won the top two spots and Anchor the third in the festival’s sole award, a consumer preference poll introduced that year.) At the tail end of the homebrewers competition,* Harrison remarked, “Basically, the whole idea of homebrewing and microbrewing is a reaction against the Budweiserization of America. There’s nothing wrong with Budweiser beer. There’s nothing wrong with McDonald’s hamburgers or Holiday Inns, either. It’s just that every beer today tastes exactly like Bud, and every hotel looks exactly like a Holiday Inn.”

  The American craft beer movement was trying to change that. Its philosophy—small, independent, and traditional—was sound enough to attract converts. The definition of who could become a craft brewer continued to expand with each new operation. And they stood together amid the vanguard of a larger movement awaiting its vocabulary: slow food, artisanal, locavore. But could craft beer really work as a business, or would it, like the drink itself, always have a shelf life of five or six years at the maximum? The answer was about to come—but from the East, not the West.

  *The homebrewers competitions were crowning their own winners. The very first, in 1979, was a man from Boulder named Tim Mead. It was an ironic surname, given that mead is the name for the beerlike drink made from fermented honey. Nancy Vineyard of Santa Rosa, California, would win in 1983.

  THE LESSON OF THE NYLON STRING

  Newton, MA; Boston | 1983-1984