by Tom Acitelli
Rich Doyle, Dan Kenary, and George Ligeti certainly hoped so. On August 12, 1982, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped to what would turn out to be a recession low of 776.92. It had nowhere to go except up: the bull market run of the 1980s was snorting and pawing at the gate. The three young men, all Harvard graduates, could stand to make a financial killing. All had already started down particularly lucrative roads: Ligeti worked in oil and gas, Kenary as a corporate lending officer, and Doyle in New York at the precursor to the financial services firm Lehman Brothers. But they pivoted. Doyle went back to Harvard to earn his MBA, and to avoid more class time he signed on for an independent study project that involved drawing up a business plan. He chose beer. Like fellow Harvard MBA Jim Koch around the same time, he had read an article on Fritz Maytag, and he had heard about Bill Owens’s Buffalo Bill’s brewpub in Hayward, California. Doyle had also traveled in Europe and to other parts of the world—even working for a spell as a bartender in New Zealand—and had discovered the pleasures and poignancies of locally produced beers. Why couldn’t the beers he and his buddies drank in the Boston area also be locally produced? Killian’s Irish Red, the Coors stab at a red ale introduced at the Great American Beer Festival in 1982, was perhaps the most exotic thing going in the area. With his roommate and through the independent study, Doyle began drawing up a business plan for a start-up brewery in greater Boston.
He enlisted Kenary, a Worcester, Massachusetts, native who had earned an MBA from the University of Chicago and whom Doyle had known since before college; and Ligeti, a Canadian who was also passing through the Harvard program. Part of the plan’s research involved visits to craft breweries out west. Kurt and Rob Widmer, clad in coveralls, talked brewing at their Portland, Oregon, operation; so did Richard and Nancy Ponzi in nearby Bridgeport, Connecticut. Paul Shipman of the Independent Ale Brewing Company, brewer of the increasingly popular Redhook Ale, met the visitors in the former transmission shop in Seattle; and Doyle by himself popped in on Mike Hale’s brewery farther south in Washington State. At different times, he and Kenary made it northward in the state to visit Thomas Kemper by the Canadian border; and then they went over the border.
Canada had had its own brush with Prohibition. Before and during World War I, provinces and territories in the Great White North began banning alcohol production to some degree, as well as forbidding imports from south of the border and elsewhere. After the war ended in late 1918, provincial and territorial governments began repealing their prohibitive measures, starting with Quebec the following year. Prohibition had left its mark, though, and it would be a generation before Canada had really replaced the hundreds of breweries, wineries, and distilleries it lost. The first Canadian craft breweries began opening in the early 1980s, inspired in part by American ones. Canada did, however, beat America to the first brewpub on the continent. Opened in 1980, two years before Bert Grant’s brewpub in Yakima, Washington, John Mitchell and Frank Appleton’s Horseshoe Bay Brewery and Roller Inn Pub, on British Columbia’s Howe Sound, about thirty miles north of Vancouver, was also the country’s first craft brewery. Doyle and Kenary stopped nearby in Victoria at another creation of Mitchell’s, Spinnakers Gastro Brewpub and Guesthouses, which opened in May 1984 and which served classic English-style ales from hand-pumped taps.
Doyle, Kenary, and Ligeti were not homebrewers—just what we would now call beer geeks—so the visits were a technical eye-opener. The plan moved forward, often during brainstorms in Doyle and Ligeti’s Watertown, Massachusetts, apartment or at local bars. They set a production goal in their business plan of sixty-five hundred kegs and eight thousand cases annually by year five, with nearly $2 million in revenue. As for the first year, they would be ecstatic with one hundred draft accounts. In the spring of 1986, the trio began raising funds from family, friends, and friends of friends, eventually amassing $430,000 from thirty-five people. The trio, like the young couple behind Alaskan Brewing, the Larsons, found that beer got an emotional reaction from people—a gut feeling, whether they knew much about it or not. That came in part, Doyle, Kenary, and Ligeti realized, from the growing popularity of other foodstuff start-ups that stood athwart the homogeneity of their particular niches. These included Ben & Jerry’s, the ice cream brand started by two Vermont hippies in 1978 with $12,000 (one-third of it borrowed), and, of course, Starbucks, then a quirky, almost quaint chain out of Seattle, many years from its hegemony. This was a fresh context in which newcomers could think about craft beer—as another foodstuff that was tastier and created in a more hands-on way, often locally, and therefore costing a little bit more than the bigger brands.
Rich Doyle, left, and Dan Kenary. COURTESY OF THE MASS. BAY BREWING COMPANY
Funding incoming, Doyle called Michael Lewis at UC-Davis. He asked for recommendations for brewmasters. Lewis listed several of his students, and Doyle headed westward to interview them. He hired twenty-three-year-old Russ Heissner, who had worked at a California winery. They found and fixed up a couple of thousand square feet of warehouse space in an old Navy yard on the South Boston waterfront. It was still the Southie of mobster Whitey Bulger and gang turf wars, a gritty, largely industrial swathe the general public avoided; the city was happy to have the Mass. Bay Brewing Company as a tenant. They bought the kettles from JV Northwest in Oregon and a secondhand soda-bottling line. They also bought a truck to do distribution themselves, as every wholesaler in the area turned them down (“Five thousand cases? Not big enough”). Heissner’s first recipe was for what the company called Harpoon Ale, a sweet, citrusy amber. The first two commercial kegs of it, delivered by Doyle and Kenary, were tapped at bars in Beacon Hill and Jamaica Plain on June 2, 1987, a Tuesday. Breweries were back in Boston.
WEEPING RADISHES AND SCOTTISH LORDS
Portland, ME; Abita Springs, LA; St. Paul, MN; Manteo, NC | 1985-1986
David and Karen Geary were, like the Larsons in Juneau, another husband-and-wife team keen on bringing a craft brewery to a particularly geographically inhospitable place: in this case, Portland, Maine, with its long winters and a population of just over sixty-one thousand in a state still mostly rural. The Pine Tree State’s last commercial breweries had closed with Prohibition—and never came back. In March 1986, longtime homebrewers Hugh Nazor of Georgetown and Jon Bove of South Portland introduced Portland Lager, a recipe they arranged to have contract brewed by the Hibernia Brewing Company in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. It proved popular with locals, even at five dollars or more a six-pack, though not popular enough for investors—Nazor and Bove spent fruitless years trying to raise funds for a brewery for their Maine Coast Brewing.
David Geary’s path proved more successful. It all started when the twentieth Laird of Traquair stayed with him in Portland, Maine. Peter Maxwell Stuart had in 1965 revived the brewery at his family’s estate, a dictatorially ornate Scottish castle dating from 1107, complete with a hedge maze and priest holes. Geary knew Stuart’s American importer. After a pleasant enough stay in Portland, the laird told Geary that if he ever wanted to learn the brewing trade, he should drop him a line—Stuart would set him up with an unpaid job at the Traquair brewery and give him letters of introduction to other breweries in Britain. Geary did just that after the company he sold medical supplies for went bankrupt, and at thirty-eight he could not stomach the process of sending out résumés. He incorporated the D. L. Geary Brewing Company in October 1983 and then split for Scotland and England for three months. The hours were long—mash would happen around 6 AM—but the lifestyle was beyond quaint for the former salesman from Maine. There was tea at 10, a beer at 11 (in line with the British custom of elevenses), and the camaraderie of craftsmanship. The bearded, blond-haired Geary almost forgot it was a business, as cutthroat in Britain, where the brewing industry was also consolidating, as it was in the New World.
After the mash, we went into the storage room where Peter Lennox made tea for the four of us. We discussed beer, sports, and politics and I felt very comfortable. At one point the Laird
called my name from outside and I could see George and Ian become tense about the prospect of being caught away from their duties. It surprised me somewhat. I guess I thought this whole estate was a storybook affair, but it’s clear that it’s a business, and a large one at that.
Back in Portland, Geary and his wife embarked on a fundraising tear. In a year and a half, they raised $300,000, including from the doctors who had been Geary’s clients. Everyone thought it was a cool idea. Other than the odd bottle of Samuel Adams, there just wasn’t local beer on the shelves or from the taps in Maine (and Samuel Adams Boston Lager was being brewed in Pittsburgh besides). They built a space in an industrial park in Portland’s more rugged western reaches and hired Alan Pugsley, a lanky, spectacled Englishman from Manchester. A biochemist by education and a brewer by training, Pugsley was gaining a reputation as a top brewing consultant in the United States in much the way another biochemist, Joseph Owades, had a generation earlier. Pugsley was most noted for helping popularize the so-called Ringwood yeast, which was used to make clear, crisp English ales. He set about under David Geary’s direction to develop just that sort of ale for the new brewery’s flagship.
Pugsley poured a glass for Geary after the first batch was completed in the early autumn of 1986. Geary brought it to his lips. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew this whole start-up brewery in the wilds of an old port city had to work—he didn’t really have, or particularly want, a Plan B. And for the brewery to work, the beer had to be good. Quality counted. That was, Geary knew, the price of admission to the industry. He closed his eyes and took a sip.
“Ah.” Geary smiled. “D. L. Geary’s Pale Ale.”
Pugsley smiled back, relieved.
The first six-packs and kegs of D. L. Geary hit Portland shelves and bars shortly afterward. The brewery would score its biggest distributive coup when the supermarket chains Hannaford and Shaw’s agreed to stock the beer, beginning in 1987.
D. L. Geary was soon joined in New England by Catamount Brewing Company, which became Vermont’s first brewery since Prohibition when it started producing an English-style pale ale in early 1987 in an old meat warehouse in White River Junction. The brewery was started by ex-PE teacher and longtime homebrewer Stephen Mason, bluegrass musician Alan Davis, and businessman Stephen Israel with $750,000 from thirty-two investors and a Small Business Administration loan.
In the Midwest, Larry Bell’s Kalamazoo Brewing Company was joined by an operation out of St. Paul, Minnesota, birthed by that most American variety of angst: the frustrations of a middle manager. Mark Stutrud was an intermittent homebrewer by night and on the weekends; by day he was a clinical social worker in a large hospital, a role he would describe as “classic middle management with a lot of responsibility and no authority.” He saw two ways out: graduate school or medical school. And then a third way emerged through his hobby: he began in the early 1980s to read about craft beer pioneers. The bug had bitten. In July 1984, he incorporated with Minnesota the Summit Brewing Company. It would become the first new brewery in the Twin Cities since Repeal in 1933, joining only a handful of regionals and Big Beer outlets in the entire Gopher State that either survived Prohibition or opened afterward. Stutrud raised $500,000 by selling thirty thousand shares to twenty investors, including a local ad agency, which helped with promotion (the marketing budget was about five dollars per barrel). Summit set up shop in an old truckparts warehouse on University Avenue in St. Paul, and Stutrud bought a Bavarian brewhouse with a capacity for six thousand barrels annually. The first kegs of pale ale and porter hit Minneapolis and St. Paul bars in September 1986, retailing at about $1.50 a glass. They were quickly joined by drafts from the James Page Brewing Company, a homebrew supplier and craft brewery started by a Minneapolis lawyer. The Twin Cities, which had begun the year without any breweries, closed it with a pair of them.
Twelve hundred miles down the Mississippi, in a town of barely one thousand souls on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, two more homebrewers, Rush Cummings and Jim Patton, started Abita Brewing Company. It was named after the small town of Abita Springs, where the artesian water was supposed to be some of the purest around and could therefore go right into making the brewery’s first two lines, all draft, no bottles: an amber lager and, to placate the potential masses in a region where it was hot at least ten months of the year, a golden-colored lager. With a Munich-trained brew-master, Mark Wilson, and incorporated in April 1984, Abita became but the second craft brewery in the South, behind the Chesapeake Bay Brewing Company started in 1982 by Jim Kollar and Lou Perrin. It was also the only other brewery in Louisiana after the Dixie Brewing Company out of New Orleans, which dated from 1907 and which, with a production level barely one-third of its 1985 capacity, was in the same straits as other struggling regionals—as one reporter put it, they were “like ghosts in a Pac-Man game.”
Joining Chesapeake Bay and Abita in the South was a most unlikely entrant in our story of the American craft beer movement. Uli Bennewitz was a trim, young Bavarian who came to the States in the late 1970s to manage vast farmlands for European and American clients. He had studied agriculture, was interested in it, and was good at what he did; it kept him busy. Then his brother called from England. A brewery near Munich was looking to expand and wanted to rid itself of a five-barrel, electric-powered system that it used for test batches. Bennewitz had complained to his brother about the poor quality of American beer—nothing like the German bock, helles, and pilsner they grew up on. Why not buy the set and have it shipped to his home base in North Carolina? Bennewitz did just that, and thus he planted the seed for the South’s first brewpub and eventually one of the largest brewery-restaurant hybrids in the United States.
Bennewitz partnered with a retail store for the space and set about creating what was known as a brewpub—not that he knew that. To him, the small-scale operation was just a chance to meld fine German-style beers with German-style cuisine. He also did not know that the Tar Heel State did not allow you to serve the beer you brewed on-site. He thought the “ABC” that people suggested he check with was some sort of school-related thing (it was not—it was the Alcoholic Beverage Control commission). The law would have to change, which Bennewitz set about pushing with the help of a state senator and a cooperative ABC. The change in hand, he and his partners, with brewers imported from West Germany, opened the Weeping Radish in Manteo on July 4, 1986. That brought two more revelations: they should have brewed ales, which Bennewitz discovered were all the rage in the nascent craft beer movement (ales would have taken significantly less time to make); and the lagers they did brew, including a helles, a schwarzbier (or dark lager), and a pilsner, were not to the liking of American palates, particularly those of the neighbors. North Carolina’s first commercial brewery since Repeal in 1933 was a Stroh’s brewery in Winston-Salem in 1970, followed by a Miller plant in Eden eight years later. The vast state—the longest east of the Mississippi—was a fecund environment for Big Beer, not to mention fast food. “If we had had Budweiser and sold chicken wings,” Bennewitz realized, “we would have had a chance with the locals.”
Uli Bennewitz at Weeping Radish. COURTESY OF WEEPING RADISH BREWERY
As it was, the Weeping Radish was packed in the summers and dead in the winters; customers on average came from at least two hundred miles away, from Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the like, often for their first sight of a working brewery. That it churned away on the North Carolina coast, in a remote area best known as the testing grounds for the Wright brothers’ flights, only added to the allure. The brewpub, named for the Bavarian practice of salting white radishes to dehydrate them, produced four to five hundred barrels annually those first couple of years. They moved as much as they could during the summers and picked back up again with the brewing around Christmas.
HERE, THERE, AND EVERYWHERE
Denver|1987
Daniel Bradford thought they were about to set a world record. It was the first year, 1987, that the Great Am
erican Beer Festival used a single draft system for all the entries—perhaps the largest single draft system ever devised. There were 120 beers from seventy breweries for the two-day festival, which had recovered from the 1984 debacle that nearly croaked the whole thing.* Bradford went to the Merchandise Mart in Denver the Saturday morning before the festival for that day started. He was alone with the single draft system, alone in the hall as the sun streaked through the bank of windows, shining bright light on the best beer in America. He was alone with the best beer in America.
He liberally sampled several, and it hit him then: the growth in the movement, the growth in the industry. It was something now decidedly different than the planning sessions in Charlie Papazian’s living room. It was an increasingly professionalized segment of a distinct part of American cuisine. As if to put an exclamation point at the end of that realization, Bradford recalled that this would be the first GABF with a blind tasting panel of professionals: two brewmasters from Big Beer, one craft brewer, three beer writers, and Charlie Papazian as president of the Association of Brewers. Attendees could still vote in consumer preference polls, but the panel and its parameters signaled a shift. The GABF had come up with criteria for twelve different categories, defining for the first time at the festival what constituted a porter, what constituted a wheat beer, and so on.† Like with the popularity contests of previous years, there would be three winners in each—but this time, a la the Olympics, each would be awarded a specific medal rather than a numerical ranking. And the panels were meant to be exacting and unforgiving; if, for instance, an entry did not pass the initial smell test for a particular style, a judge would nix it from the competition without so much as tasting it. The panels meant that relative unknowns could win big right out of the box; they didn’t need the brand recognition that might have helped others over the hump in the consumer preference polls. In its very first GABF, for example, Mark Stutrud’s Summit out of St. Paul won the gold in the porter category.