The Audacity of Hops

by Tom Acitelli

  When it came to Big Beer in most of the United States, however, it was, as Larry Bell put it, “straight lager country.” Bell was a native of the Chicago suburb of Park Forest, a Cubs fan with neatly combed blond hair and a beard that would eventually shrink to a goatee. He had first encountered beer during a bicycle road trip at age sixteen, when he and a friend came upon some unopened Old Milwaukee cans at a campsite. Bell encountered decidedly better-quality beer when his older brother invited him years later to Washington, DC, where they hit the Brickskeller, the bar near DuPont Circle that once held the Guinness world record for largest selection of commercially available beers (1,072). After college in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Bell picked up homebrewing via a coworker at the Sarkozy Bakery in Kalamazoo in 1980. He visited the Real Ale Company shortly after its launch a couple of years later in Chelsea eighty-five miles away and asked the usual questions of Ted Badgerow, who, if you had pressed him later, would not have been able to remember Bell in particular among the many who popped in to talk shop. Bell had an interest in food and might have become a chef or even a farmer, had the Real Ale Company tour not intervened. He, like Ken Grossman at New Albion twenty-three hundred miles away and four years before, took away from this visit to the Midwest’s first craft brewery the notion that the distance between homebrewing and a commercial iteration was navigable. Besides, there wasn’t that much competition in between the coasts.

  Bell incorporated an eponymous brewery with the state of Michigan the week after July 4, 1983; the brewery was actually a homebrew supply shop in Galesburg, east of Kalamazoo. Soon, however, Bell was collecting investors and a fifteen-gallon soup pot for a brewing kettle; and in August 1985, in three rooms of an old plumbing warehouse on East Kalamazoo Avenue, he was brewing test batches of English ales. Sales via secondhand bottles began the following month. By that time, Ted Badgerow’s Real Ale Company in Chelsea had closed down, broken by the same financial pressure that had weighted earlier craft breweries, with a dearth of lending sources making expansion all but impossible even as demand stayed relatively high. Bell’s operation, called Kalamazoo Brewing Company, had become in its first full year the oldest craft brewery between Colorado and the East Coast.

  Reaching this milestone underscored a strange new reality in the craft beer movement. Yes, the Stroh Brewery in Detroit could produce in thirty minutes what Kalamazoo could produce in a year (520 barrels). But just as Bell supplanted Badgerow, there was a flow of new craft entrants that meant competition was now coming from within the movement, as well as from without, with a breadth no one had seen before. The AHA’s Daniel Bradford explained it like this in the summer of 1986: “You can now get more beers in places like Boulder, New York, Madison, and Berkeley than anywhere in Europe. There are about three hundred brands available in some of these cities. Because of that,” he went on, “a market segment is opening up that can’t be dealt with by major breweries because it is basically too small. The larger breweries require a certain volume to keep plants going, and they can’t handle this.” The American craft beer movement by its third wave in the mid-1980s had its niche marketplace all to itself, which proved a blessing and a curse.

  *Jackson’s highest accolade was “world classic,” however. According to the critic Stan Hieronymus, Jackson declared only one American craft beer a world classic in all seven editions of his Pocket Guide to Beer: Anchor Steam (http://appellationbeer.com/blog/a-short-history-of-jacksons-world-classics/).

  BEER, IT’S WHAT’S WITH DINNER

  Washington, DC; Portland, OR | 1983-1987

  One September evening in 1985, on the ground floor of an old hotel off Washington’s tony DuPont Circle charging sixty dollars a night, a Bethesda, Maryland, schoolteacher stepped to the microphone and told the fewer than three dozen people assembled about the first beer of the tasting: Tsingtao out of China. Bob Tupper was the MC for the evening at the Brickskeller, the family-owned restaurant dating from 1957. It was owned, as was the Marifex Hotel upstairs, by the Coja family, one of whom, Diane, had married Dave Alexander a few years before; Alexander and his father-in-law, Maurice, set about making the Brickskeller a beer Mecca. It amassed a reputation as the place in the District to find hundreds of brands from across the globe and the place not to order a Miller Lite.

  When the local wing of the Cornell University alumni association approached Coja about holding a beer tasting, he approached Tupper, who he knew had an encyclopedic collection of tasting notes and, owing to his career as a history teacher at a private school in Maryland, had no fear of public speaking. Tickets were fifteen dollars a pop and included a modest buffet to go with the ten beers, including German and English ones meant more to illustrate the styles than to showcase the brands. It turned out to be the first commercially run sit-down beer tasting with food in the United States, unwittingly sparking a trend that would redefine the parameters of American craft beer.

  Other tastings at the Brickskeller followed in the new year, with Tupper adding a dollop of multimedia to the proceedings with slides, some from photos he had taken during brewery visits; and eventually the restaurant drew none other than Michael Jackson as a regular lecturer at the tastings. Anchor beers, too, became a regular in Tupper’s tasting lineups, as did other craft brands as they became available in the District (or before they did: Tupper’s mother-in-law put three cases of Samuel Adams Boston Lager in a nondescript brown box and paid its Greyhound bus fare from up north). The tastings were as much a way to introduce the curious to good beer as it was to stay one step ahead of the neo-Prohibitionists. The Washington city council was considering requiring that new liquor-license applicants gain the approval of a majority of residents living within sixteen hundred feet. “If we did have to justify our existence,” Dave Alexander figured, “we could say we were here for the education.”

  The education of the would-be craft beer consumer was a real thing by the mid-1980s. This was distinct from the education of the homebrewer or of the homebrewer looking to make the leap to small-scale commercial brewing. This was education in the more general and pressing sense: how to draw more consumers. This push, subtle and sporadic as it was with events like the Brickskeller’s, chose to position craft beer as part of a well-rounded palate (if not diet). Why not? Fine American wine in the previous decade had grown as a respected accompaniment of fine food. “There is a new gourmet influence,” the brewing consultant Joseph Owades told a reporter in the summer of 1984. “People now are exposed to so many new tastes. They want fresh pasta, more flavorful wine—and richer beer.” The education also offered a crucial marketing peg for the fledgling industry, one that would only grow in leaps and bounds. Call it an aspiration quotient, one summed up beautifully by Matthew Reich, who was fond of saying that his New Amsterdam was “not for the six-pack drinker. It’s the beer to have if you’re having one. With dinner.” This was very important for the craft beer movement: Wine for a long time had held an exalted place in popular culture, the provenance of elites, worthy of critics empaneled by major publications like the New York Times; beer had not. The coverage of it mattered.

  As was his custom by now, Michael Jackson stood at the vanguard. He wrote for the Washington Post in November 1983 what was very likely the first article in a mainstream American newspaper about pairing beer with food, and vice versa. The Post was still in its Watergate afterglow of nine years before, the third-largest daily US newspaper by circulation, read not only by the denizens of the White House and Congress but also by a wide regional audience from central Virginia through Maryland. On November 16, 1983, the week before Thanksgiving, they awoke to a discursive, at times humorous, essay meandering through four pages on which beers to have with which foods on the big feast day. Jackson eased his readers into the unfamiliar territory with wine as well as with an emphasis on the geographic origins of different beers, which in itself might have seemed unfamiliar. For the main course:

  With the centerpiece of the meal, the turkey, the wine-drinker has a difficult choice.
Should it be a medium-dry white? Or a drier medium-bodied red? Among beers, I would opt for a pale but medium-dry brew of the type produced in the city of Munich and elsewhere in Bavaria…. With just a hint of sweetness to match some of the turkey’s accompaniments, these Munich Light beers have plenty of body without being too filling. Their alcohol content is pretty ordinary, at well under 4.0 percent by weight or 5.0 by volume. As for serving temperatures, the simplest rule to observe is that any beer from Munich or elsewhere in Bavaria should be served chilled but not to American popsicle level; not less than 48 degrees, in fact.

  It was something any person with healthy taste buds could get right away: certain beers went well with certain foods. But it was a matter of getting consumers to pair the beers with the foods in the first place. The era of light beer—not to be confused with the “Light” that Jackson referred to, which had to do with the German beers’ color—was in full force, with tens of millions being spent on television and print ad campaigns to move tens of millions of barrels. Anheuser-Busch had debuted Bud Light (formerly Budweiser Light) in 1982, with a commercial of a mighty Clydesdale running through a seemingly endless pasture, a deep, unseen voice intoning, “A light beer worthy of the King of Beers.” Miller Lite, the brand it was meant to usurp, inaugurated the celebrity-studded Lite Beer Bowling Tournament in September of the same year. Beer was still seen as a beverage to be consumed when you’re having six, with or without dinner, and as close to “popsicle” as possible. As for its geographic origins, it was not important if it wasn’t local. Attempts to integrate American beer with gourmet food seemed as hopeless as Rodney Dangerfield’s attempts to roll a strike in the Lite Beer Bowling Tournament (he couldn’t down a pin).

  The sit-down beer-food tastings and Jackson’s articles were a start, though. He would write more for the Post and other American publications throughout the decade and would host pairings at venues that included the swanky Pierre hotel in Midtown Manhattan, where four Belgian chefs devised the lunch menu; Monk’s Cafe in Philadelphia’s Center City as well as at the metropolis’s Museum of Archeology and Anthropology; and the Century House in the hamlet of Latham, New York. That one, on November 4, 1986, even got a little advance press.

  English beer authority Michael Jackson will visit Albany Nov. 4 to conduct “The Quintessential Beer Tasting,” at 8 PM at the Century House in Latham. The international beer tasting, sponsored by Albany’s Newman Brewing Company, will be open to the public…. For the Albany show, he will lead a guided tour through a selection of 13 international beers. Tickets at $6 per person are available through Newman’s Brewery … and at the door.

  Largely, though, press for the tastings or for craft beer generally was slim to none. From consumer media, it was mostly of the parachute variety: The reporter would be assigned to cover an event like the Great American Beer Festival; he would arrive, gather what background he could, garner some quotes from attendees and organizers for color, and be gone as quickly as he arrived. Rare, too, was the byline with any gravitas in the industry or with readers. Frank J. Prial’s spring 1979 visit to Jack McAuliffe’s New Albion was so far the most storied example—the Times’s wine critic stomping about the wilds of Sonoma, scribbling notes on craft beer! When T. R. Reid of the Washington Post phoned Daniel Bradford to tell him he was coming to Boulder for the second GABF in June 1983, it was all Bradford could do to not shout across the office to his boss, “Charlie, the Washington Post called, and they’re sending a guy to cover this!” The silver lining in consumer coverage was that it had long ceased writing of craft beer as if it were a blip in the marketplace or a mere curiosity; knowledge about the brands and the brewing process was diffuse enough, and sources plentiful enough, that these parachuted reporters could get up to speed quickly.

  From trade media, the coverage was more in-depth, and followed the conversational, we’re-all-in-this-together tone set by homebrewing club newsletters like those of the Maltose Falcons in Los Angeles or self-published memoranda like Fred Eckhardt’s Amateur Brewer out of Portland or Charlie Papazian’s increasingly professionalized Zymurgy, the quarterly out of Boulder. As we’ve seen, they all mixed recipes and reviews with whatever news, including information on upcoming events, that could be amassed in the pre-Internet age, when even a long-distance phone call could be an event. Wider industry trade publications covered craft beer as well. The three most prominent were the monthly magazine Brewers Digest, the multifaceted Modern Brewery Age, and the bimonthly magazine All About Beer, started by Mike Bosak in 1979 with a sixteen-page issue that included news of homebrewing’s federal legalization and Anchor’s production at its new Mariposa Street location. The latter publication, which might have been the largest with a claimed readership of 160,000 by 1983, was dismissed by many in the industry, as it sometimes sold editorial space (including the cover).

  It was Fred Eckhardt, though, even more than Jackson, who dragged craft beer coverage over the hump from esoteric toward commonplace. On April 25, 1984, a Friday, tucked onto a page of Portland’s daily newspaper, the Oregonian, with ads for Diet 7-Up and Atta Boy dog food as well as a call for contestants for a rice-cooking competition, were two brief stories and one photograph, what those in the newspaper trade call a thumbnail. The shorter of the two articles was headlined BEER EXPERT WRITES COLUMN, and it gave Eckhardt’s CV in digestable nuggets: “Eckhardt is a ‘self-taught’ amateur brewer who started making his own beer in 1969 [sic], in the fashion his father did during Prohibition.” It was the warm-up for the longer article: MOST AMERICAN BEERS LACK ONE THING: TASTE. The ensuing column marked the opening of what would be the first regular American newspaper coverage of craft beer. The type of writing championed by Michael Jackson out of England had found a domestic expression in Eckhardt in the Oregonian, which was one of the most respected midsize dailies in the country, with a weekday circulation of 249,000. And the ex-Marine did not hold back.

  From that first column on April 25: “When drinking San Francisco Steam Beer [Anchor Steam], or a well-made dark beer, you notice the taste. Most domestic brews taste alike and many of us are forced to look to imports for the kinds of taste we used to find in American beer.” The list of “Twenty Beers with Class” at the end of the column included Anchor Liberty Ale and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.*

  From a June 20 column after Eckhardt returned from the third GABF: “Since the voting was limited, and somewhat chauvinistic as a popularity contest, I am taking the liberty to list my choices for the twenty top beers at the festival. And, yes, I did taste all of the thirty-six beers which are not available in these parts…. Rumor mills say the New Amsterdam Amber (already in California) will come north this fall.”

  And this one on the Fourth of July of the same year:

  Anyone who thinks that great beer has to be brought into Portland from a great distance just hasn’t been paying attention. Some of the best beer in the world is made within 200 miles of Portland, where there are six breweries…. Good beer is becoming stylish, and if we hang in there, there’ll be real taste in American beer again. In fact, it is here now. We have Redhook and Grants [sic] brewing world-class beer, but only on draft. The new Ponzi operation, Columbia River Brewing [later BridgePort], is set to produce beer by mid-August, but also only on draft.

  Fred Eckhardt speaking at the old Brickskeller beer bar in Washington, DC, in 2002. COURTESY OF DAVE ALEXANDER

  Eckhardt’s Oregonian columns continued through the 1980s and set a precedent in mainstream outlets not only for opinionated, conversational coverage of craft beer but also for sometimes putting the cart before the horse when it came to writing about brewers and their beers. Eckhardt, for one, would sometimes suggest a particular style to one of the Portland breweries—a winter ale, say—and then write about it once it was produced. Or he would write about a style that was unavailable from local brewers as a none-too-subtle nudge. Like Jackson’s coverage, Eckhardt’s combined a genuine desire to educate the consumer with a soft spot for mentoring these start-up
breweries.

  William Least Heat-Moon also had ulterior motives. He wanted something to write about that might require a road trip. Ex-Navy, with a PhD in English from the University of Missouri, he had crafted a bestselling memoir in the early 1980s called Blue Highways, about traveling America’s back roads after he lost his job and his estranged wife on the same winter’s day. Critics compared it favorably to John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The pursuit of rediscovering something in America—namely areas empty of strip malls and fast-food joints, and the characters who inhabited them—perhaps uniquely qualified Heat-Moon to write the first long-form consumer magazine story about beer since the craft movement began. Besides, the third paragraph of Blue Highways could all but serve as a credo for the movement’s entrepreneurs: “A man who couldn’t make things go right could at least go. He could quit trying to get out of the way of life. Chuck routine. Live the real jeopardy of circumstance. It was a question of dignity.”

  Heat-Moon’s 6,978-word chronicle of his visits to nearly every brewpub and craft brewery in the country in the mid-1980s—Ken Grossman’s Sierra Nevada was the big exception, owing to time and traveling expenses—was published by the 130-year-old Atlantic Monthly in November 1987 under the entirely appropriate headline A GLASS OF HANDMADE. Heat-Moon and a friend, whom he called The Venerable Tashmoo,* not only sampled myriad glassfuls but also learned the brewers’ back stories and techniques, starting in Albany.