by Tom Acitelli
The team from the Association of Brewers (now the Brewers Association) before a Great American Beer Festival in the mid-1980s. Daniel Bradford is center, with beer; Charlie Papazian is on the left, standing. COURTESY OF DANIEL BRADFORD
It had come to this in a few short years: gold, silver, and bronze; professional panels; convention halls. The American craft beer movement by 1987 was finally touching nearly every region of the country—even distant Alaska and the Deep South, which meant Hawaii and the Great Plains couldn’t be far behind. Each successive start-up seemed more routine. It was still a challenge from a business standpoint; the industry had seen several closures. Entrepreneurs as disparate as Geoff and Marcy Larson in Juneau and Dan Kenary, Rich Doyle, and George Ligeti in Boston couldn’t get banks to back them, and the founders of Boulder Brewing and New Amsterdam, two thousand miles apart, sought refuge in the plush arms of venture-capital firms. Still, the business model of a craft brewery seemed, in less than half a generation, a plausible one. It might sound crazy, except it wasn’t in practice. There were paths to emulate; people to go to for advice, for supplies, for equipment, for brewmasters; timed gatherings of the tribe like the GABF and the now-separate homebrewers competition; media from trade publications to regular columns in major newspapers, with some of the coverage waxing as poetic as any baseball writing. And now there were style guidelines, molds for subsequent generations to bend to or, as often as not, break. The play that opened in that pivotal year of 1978 was wrapping its early acts. The scenes to come would prove just as interesting for the audience.
For now, though, exeunt Americans. Let the curtain rise on the Spanish Steps in Rome.
*The GABF had not entirely escaped organizational flubs. The following year, 1988, several breweries were left out of the program, and the medals did not arrive in time for the awards ceremony. Per Vince Cottone, “Movement in the Right Direction,” American Brewer, fall 1987; Maureen Ogle, “First Draft Follies: Early History of the American Homebrewers Association and Brewers Association, Part 8.”
†Interesting enough, the twelve original categories did not include one for India pale ale, which has become the beer style for which American craft brewers have become most famous for interpreting.
PART III
UNHAPPY MEALS
Rome | 1986
On Monday, April 21, 1986, on the 2,739th anniversary of the founding of Rome by the sons of the God of War, thousands of Italians gathered before the Spanish Steps to receive their heaping plates of penne pasta cooked flawlessly al dente in giant skillets. The skillets sizzled near a stage where politicians and celebrities railed against the “degradation of Rome” and the “Americanization” of their country’s culture. Many in the crowd in front of the stage wore T-shirts or carried posters with pictures of Clint Eastwood with the message, CLINT EASTWOOD, you SHOULD BE OUR MAYOR, written underneath. The actor and director, recently elected mayor of the California town of Carmel, had made it a point to crack down on the proliferation of fast-food restaurants. The protesters were trying to do the same. Four weeks earlier, the largest McDonald’s in the world had opened a block from the eighteenth-century Spanish Steps; it had 450 seats and was the eighth fast-food restaurant to open in the area in recent months. Worse, it was owned by a Frenchman! Moreover, it replaced a popular local coffee bar and cafe, as perfect a symbol as there could be for the protesters’ fears that a certain homogeneity was set to devour Italian cuisine. The city council had entertained the notion of shutting the McDonald’s down because of what it called a “degradation of the historic center” of the Eternal City. The fashion designer Valentino sued for the same end, claiming the joint, which abutted his headquarters, caused “significant and constant noise and an unbearable smell of fried food fouling the air.”
The McDonald’s survived. It did brisk business, its hundreds of chairs often all filled, its location, the chain’s 9,007th worldwide, a hangout for Italian youth in particular, not to mention the ceaseless stream of tourists. The eat-in and the earlier efforts to shutter the restaurant had captured imaginations, however, including that of Carlo Petrini. He was, in that inimitable Italian way, both a left-wing journalist and a noted wine expert from the country’s north. Petrini had been part of the crowd outside the McDonald’s on its opening day chanting, “We don’t want fast food, we want slow food!” The protests gave him an idea.
SECOND CAREERS
Brooklyn | 1986
Shortly after mayor Ed Koch pulled a tap and hoisted a mug on May 13, 1986, to officially mark the opening of the New Amsterdam brewpub, Matthew Reich received three visitors in rapid succession. The first was Jim Koch, who had recently launched Boston Beer Company and its well-received flagship lager; he wanted to talk brewpubs and distribution with Reich. The second and third visitors were Tom Potter and Steve Hindy, who wanted to open a brewery in Brooklyn. Though the idea made historical, almost spiritual sense—before Prohibition the borough had as many or more breweries than Milwaukee or St. Louis—Reich did not welcome the intercity competition and the meeting did not end with wishes of good luck. Still, Potter and Hindy by 1986 were committed to returning brewing to its one-time American capital.
Hindy in particular had taken such a winding route to the idea that turning back no longer seemed an option. A goateed native of an Ohio River town between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati who went to college at Cornell, Hindy worked as a reporter at small newspapers in Upstate New York and northern New Jersey. He figured he’d hit the jackpot financially with a $20,000 salary at the Associated Press bureau in Newark in the late 1970s. But one day on the New York City subway, thinking about a change of scenery, he decided to study Arabic (his surname came from a Lebanese great-grandfather) and eventually put in for a transfer with the AP to covering the Middle East. It was, in its way, invigorating. He lived for two years in Beirut and three in Cairo; he was kidnapped and shot at and along the way covered international crises like the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the Iranian Revolution, and the Iran-Iraq War.
One October day in 1981, he was standing on a grandstand in Cairo next to a colleague from the Washington Post, taking in a military parade, another flexing of Cold War-funded muscle by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. French-made Mirage jets streaked overhead; spectators craned their necks to look. Just then, a truck towing an artillery piece halted before the grandstand and several men from it dressed in military uniforms strode forward, led by a lieutenant. Sadat rose as if to receive his salute—and instead was met with a grenade. The men fired semiautomatic weapons and lobbed more grenades, killing twelve, including Sadat, and wounding several times more. Hindy and his colleague were not among the victims, but the invigoration of the Middle East beat was wearing on him, as he explained years later:
Most correspondents, including me, were rogues and adventurers addicted to the big story. Most were divorced, getting divorced, or getting remarried. Most drank too much, or took drugs, or stopped drinking and became real psychos. We all started out thinking we knew who the good guys were and believing we were on their side…. But the more wars I covered and the more I learned of the roots of conflict, the less sure I became of who the good guys were—and the less sure I was of the nobility of my role.
When the AP offered an assignment in the Philippines covering what would be the last torturous years of Ferdinand Marcos’s regime, Hindy said no and returned to the States with his family. He also took with him a curiosity regarding a hobby that had roots going back millennia in the Middle East. A friend of his in Cairo had homebrewed while working in Saudi Arabia, where Western companies might provide employees with instructions for homebrewing to circumvent the kingdom’s ban on alcohol, with the ingredients coming through the diplomatic post. Hindy was taken with the dark, rich, and hoppy beer produced.
When he settled back in the United States in 1984—in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, which was far from the fashionably hip enclave it is today but still safer than Beirut—Hindy gave homebrewing a sh
ot. He got a copy of Charlie Papazian’s recently published The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, studied it, gathered some ingredients, and thought fondly of the beers he had tasted in Europe, the Bavarian lagers in particular. He settled in for the day in his family’s two-bedroom apartment on Eighth Street … and promptly brewed himself right into a disaster. To top off the bottles, Hindy used a crude metal gadget called a hammer capper, which was exactly that: a bottle-capper powered by a hammering motion. He ended up smashing thirty of the forty-eight bottles on that first batch, making a terrific mess, even frightening his family into gathering at the other end of the apartment. To his credit, Hindy took a deep breath, recalled Papazian’s mantra—”Relax, don’t worry, have a homebrew”—and tried again. He got better and better at homebrewing, sharing his concoctions with his new colleagues at Newsday, the Long Island newspaper where he was assistant foreign editor, and with his Park Slope neighbors. One of those neighbors—the thirstiest, in fact—was a mustachioed assistant vice president at Chemical Bank named Tom Potter. Potter had bought the apartment downstairs in 1985; he and Hindy, and their families, became fast friends. The two men would drink Hindy’s homebrew in Potter’s backyard on summer weekends, watching the Mets on a black-and-white television swing their way improbably to a World Series win in 1986.
All the while, something stuck in the back of Hindy’s mind. He had subscribed to Zymurgy, and he had learned about Jack McAuliffe’s former operation at New Albion and about Fritz Maytag’s expanding one at Anchor. He knew, too, of Matthew Reich’s successful New Amsterdam launch via F. X. Matt (local media loved it) and of William S. Newman’s eponymous brand in Albany. The craft beer movement was real to Hindy, albeit from a distance. He was an ex-foreign correspondent now working the domestic side of the beat. What did he know about starting a brewery? He mentioned the idea to Potter, a recently minted Columbia MBA. That was as far as the planning went.
Then, as was his wont, one rainy day Hindy went for a jog through nearby Prospect Park. He passed another runner wearing an old T-shirt that read, in classic Victorian font, BREWERIES OF BROOKLYN. He ran into the guy again on the other side of the park and this time asked him about the shirt.
“Oh, this,” he said. “It’s a book I wrote. It’s been out of print for ten years.” The guy was Will Anderson, a collector of arcane brewing odds and ends who had taken upon himself to chronicle Brooklyn’s beer history just as the last breweries in the borough closed in the mid-1970s.
“I’d like to talk to you,” Hindy said. “I’m starting a brewery in Brooklyn.”
“Yeah,” Anderson said. “You and everybody else.”
The chance encounter with Anderson refocused Hindy on opening what would become the Brooklyn Brewery within two years, with Potter as his partner and the New York City borough of more than two million as both customer base and marketing tool.
DAVIDS AND GOLIATHS
Boston | 1986
Jim Koch wasn’t sleeping. He and Rhonda Kallman were working around the clock growing the Boston Beer Company. They had moved well beyond the thirty original accounts they thought they needed for the business to succeed; their flagship lager was being distributed to around two thousand spots on the East Coast and in West Germany, home to some of the most sacrosanct soil in the beer universe; the three-year-old lager, too, had already captured a handful of plaudits from Charlie Papazian’s organization in Boulder. Samuel Adams Boston Lager had topped the consumer preference poll at the Great American Beer Festival in 1985 and 1986 and then won the gold medal in the continental pilsner category in 1987, the first year of the blind-tasting panel of professional critics and brewers. As for the consumer preference poll, Boston Beer nabbed that in 1987 too, this time with what the company cryptically called “Festival Lager” at the GABF and which Koch later unveiled at a press conference as Boston Lightship. Though heavier in texture and taste, it was clearly introduced to compete with light beers as well as thinner-tasting imports like Heineken and Beck’s; it marked the craft beer movement’s first foray into the hitherto verboten light beer market. Boston Lager was even being distributed to the White House, Camp David, and Air Force One! Koch had arranged the deals himself through an old colleague at the Boston Consulting Group, who knew the head of the White House Mess. Secret Service agents would show up at a distributor, pick several cases at random for security, and be on their way.
Jim Koch outside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The writing on the photo reads, “1986 IN THE WHITE HOUSE FRIDGE!!!” COURTESY OF THE BOSTON BEER CO.
Closer to home, Boston Lager was available on draught for the first time in 1987, and Kallman’s homemade signs had been replaced by slicker ones that carried news of the GABF wins along with the beers’ availabilities. They even had a warehouse—appropriately enough, the old Haffenreffer facility in Jamaica Plain, the last regional brewery to close in the Boston area in 1964. And a truck! More than one! Koch’s Plymouth Reliant station wagon and Kallman’s orange Vega with the white interior had become now part of the backstory of a successful start-up. Koch found himself in a position perhaps only ever otherwise occupied by Fritz Maytag at Anchor, and then only intermittently: he was a comfortable commercial success in American craft beer. He had worked off Matthew Reich’s idea—via Joseph Owades, who also worked with Koch—and cranked up the production to eleven. Koch should have been sleeping like a log.
It was the multimillion-dollar bids that kept him awake. A goal had been from the company’s founding to build a physical brewery and to stop relying on contract brewing through the Pittsburgh Brewing Company. Koch, who by now was running all the business operations except sales, had raised $3 million from industrial bonds and venture capital to purchase and to begin renovating the old Haffenreffer site in the inner-city Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain. He ordered $2.7 million in equipment, including thirty tanks, and began telling people he planned to open a 225,000-barrel operation in the first half of 1988—the largest craft brewery in America. Then the renovation bids started coming in. They were millions over what he had funding for—costs to get the brewery up and running could run to as much as $14 million. It was enough to sink the whole company if things didn’t work out. Koch, ever the consultant, stepped back. Jeez, he thought, I’m almost forty, and I just wrote off more than I’ve made in my whole life. Riskier yet, the new brewery would not necessarily have made his beers any better. He opted to continue contract brewing, with the Jamaica Plain site used for storage, a small test brewery, and tours. Koch would continue to focus his considerable energies on marketing the beers.
Armed with a Harvard Law-trained mind and a masterful publicist in Sally Jackson of Boston, Koch was by now one of the more vocal proponents not only of his own brand but also of the little guys, so to speak, on the American brewing scene. He could be relentless when painting this David-versus-Goliath tableau. Take this testy segment on PBS’s normally staid MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour in August 1986. Reporter Paul Solman in a voiceover introduced a blind taste test that Koch organized at a Boston restaurant. The tasters? Local bartenders. The contestants? Koch’s signature lager and major imports like Heineken and Beck’s.
Solman [voiceover]: Koch charged that the imports have been adulterated for the American market with corn, sugar, and preservatives. As a result, he claimed, these beers couldn’t meet the standards Germans apply to their own domestic beers. While his competitors were understandably reluctant to play into his hands, they simply couldn’t let Koch’s charges go unchallenged. Philip Van Munching, importer of Heineken:
Van Munching: His contention in his ads that Heineken is outlawed in Germany for using illegal adjuncts certainly sounds dramatic. Well, the truth is rather boring…. [T]he German law that Jim Koch cites is a trade restriction. They want … to protect their smaller breweries. Well, that’s fine. But to call it a purity law and state somehow that our beer is impure, other beers are impure, is ludicrous.*
Koch: What I’m doing is obviously very risky. I’m directly attac
king very powerful, entrenched interests—imported beers and imported brewers, beers that sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of beer here. And I’m pointing the finger directly at them and saying they’re a fraud.
Boston Lager won that day’s taste test; Heineken placed fourth.
*Philip Van Munching never really got over confronting Jim Koch. After he left the beer business when his family firm was bought out, Van Munching wrote a book about his experiences, with a chapter called, “Sam Adams: Brewer, Patriot, Pain in the Ass.”
FIVE HUNDRED MILES IN A RENTED HONDA
New Ulm, MN | 1986-1987
Pete Slosberg and Mark Bronder and other early investors met often at the Jew and Gentile Deli in Mountain View in those six months after the Palo Alto Brewing Company went so eventfully bankrupt. They had bottled and shipped hundreds of cases of Pete’s Wicked Ale—and, as with the last batch in late 1986, the cases had moved briskly off area retailers’ shelves. The brown ale Slosberg had stumbled onto trying to mimic Samuel Smith’s Nut Brown Ale was popular with consumers and respected by critics (it would take the silver in the ales category at the 1987 Great American Beer Festival). But it was a scarce commodity growing scarcer. They needed another place to brew it.