The Audacity of Hops

by Tom Acitelli

  Back east, around the same time James Bell was erecting his billboards about blondes barely thirty-five miles away, two childhood friends, Ron Barchet and Bill Covaleski, were preparing to launch what they called the Victory Brewing Company in an old Pepperidge Farm cracker factory in Downing-town, Pennsylvania. Covaleski learned homebrewing from his father, and he gave Barchet a kit for Christmas in 1985. The two eventually fled their corporate jobs to study and work in brewing, including spells in Munich and at the Baltimore Brewing Company, a brewpub started by Dutchman Theo DeGroen in 1989. Their brewpub would open the day after Valentine’s Day in 1996, with forty-two seats, a seventy-foot-long bar, and a brewhouse that produced twenty-five hundred barrels that first year.

  While Barchet and Covaleski were training for what would become Victory, serial entrepreneur Alan Newman and Bob Johnson, who worked in the mail order business before turning to brewing, were putting the finishing touches on their Magic Hat Brewing Company in Burlington, Vermont. It would start production in late 1994 and expand into a new brewery in South Burlington within three years, by which time it would be one of eighteen craft breweries in the state. It was a stunning, decadelong march from the first one, Catamount Brewing Company in 1987, especially considering that Vermont had fewer than six hundred thousand residents.

  Finally, in Fort Collins, Colorado, about an hour’s drive north of Denver, Kim Jordan was passing her Fridays thusly: she would call customers in the morning and see what beers they needed; she would spend the afternoons distributing it by way of her Toyota Tercel station wagon, picking up her son from first grade along the way; he would do his homework in the passenger’s seat while she finished deliveries in the early evening; then it was home for dinner; later she ran out again for a Kinko’s run to make marketing materials like table tents. The rest of the workweek, she kept her day job as a social worker; her husband, Jeff Lebesch, kept his as an electrical engineer. In whatever free time he could create, however, he was the brewmaster for the New Belgium Brewing Company, which the couple started in 1991 out of their basement using old dairy equipment that Lebesch had rejiggered and around $60,000 in start-up costs. They did only bottles at first, in part so as not to compete with two other craft operations in Fort Collins, both then all-draft: Odell Brewing, started in 1989 by brother and sister Doug and Corkie Odell and Doug’s wife, Wynne, in an old grain elevator downtown; and CooperSmith’s brewpub, also downtown and opened shortly after Odell. Lebesch and Jordan’s idea sprang from trips to Belgium in 1989 and 1991, where they bicycled about, imbibing what was the world’s most diverse beer selection. Their production would near thirty thousand barrels annually by 1994—or about what the 130-acre Anheuser-Busch plant just north of Fort Collins could churn out in a week.

  New Belgium was the first craft brewery to stake its reputation on Belgian-style beers, including a rich, malty ale in the style of the Trappist monks of Belgium called Abbey Ale and a mildly bitter amber ale they called Fat Tire in honor of the bicycle trips. While it may not have been surprising that they went the Belgian route, it was not auspicious, either. Never mind that the beers were nothing like the watery lagers of Big Beer, they were also out of step with the more popular craft brands, like Pete’s Wicked Ale, a brown ale; Sierra Nevada’s hoppier pale ale; and Samuel Adams Boston Lager. So out of step were they that initially New Belgium literally defied categorization at the Great American Beer Festival down in Denver, failing to fit into any designated styles. In 1993, the festival added a catchall “Mixed, Specialty” category, and New Belgium’s Abbey promptly won the gold. It was around that time, too, that Jordan ceased doing the distribution. Pregnant with their second child, she realized it probably wasn’t best to be performing the door-to-door unloading.

  Lebesch and Jordan were not models for James Bell in Philadelphia—nor were any of these other newer arrivals in the early 1990s. He instead took as his model Jim Koch, who made building a craft beer company seem if not easy at least fun in a pugnacious way, with his public takedowns of imports and his lessons on hops and barley. Bell was so confident he could mimic this model that he was planning to make his brand an export as well as a domestic: Red Bell Blonde Ale would be marketed as Buccaneer Gold in the Cayman Islands. The beer (or beers, as the dual brands would have it) was a light-bodied golden ale modeled on the German style Kölsch. Bell contracted with Lion to produce as much as seven thousand barrels annually, and he planned to offer the beer on Philly-area shelves at less than what a case of imports would cost (or a case of Samuel Adams); Red Bell would retail for under nineteen dollars a case. Its namesake was prepared for three years of losses but eventually expected to turn a $200,000 profit at a 38 percent return on investment. “If we can get people in Philadelphia emotional about the beer,” Bell explained, “it will fly.”

  *The Careys would adopt “Drink Indigenous” as their brewery’s motto.

  GHOSTS AROUND THE MACHINES

  Washington, DC | 1993

  The nation’s “center of attention,” as the front page of the New York Times put it, shifted to CNN’s Washington studios on Tuesday, November 9, 1993. That evening, in front of what would turn out to be the largest cable television audience of the twentieth century, vice president Al Gore and Texas billionaire Ross Perot were to debate the North American Free Trade Agreement on Larry King Live. NAFTA, heavily supported by the Clinton administration and Wall Street, would open up trade with Mexico and Canada, ostensibly lowering prices on consumer goods and boosting companies’ bottom lines to spur more job creation. Opponents like Perot, as well as a sizable chunk of the nation’s organized labor, worried NAFTA would mean the loss of American jobs to Mexico, where labor costs were significantly cheaper than in the United States. Perot had colorfully described the prospect as “a giant sucking sound” during the recent presidential race. The agreement was expected to come to a congressional vote before the end of the year. The debate took on the portentous aura of a major sporting event; only one side, it was assumed, could emerge the winner in the ring of public opinion. Not surprisingly, it turned contentious at times. The two men basically called each other liars, like in this exchange early on:

  Perot: Do you guys ever do anything but propaganda?

  Gore: Isn’t it your business also?

  Perot: Would you even know the truth if you saw it?

  Gore: Oh, yes, I—

  Perot: I don’t believe you would. You’ve been up here too long.

  NAFTA did pass, and President Clinton signed it into law before the new year—not before the controversy loosed a national reckoning over America’s manufacturing sector. Once the envy of the world, providing job security for tens of millions of Americans and goods that were sold domestically and exported to dozens of countries, the sector as of late had been frighteningly contracting. Industries previously thought impervious to major job losses were confronting them and the concomitant losses in disposable income and tax revenue from displaced workers. Steel, automobiles, textiles, furniture, industrial machinery, even the hardware of the computer industry—all were seeing jobs go elsewhere, partly because of greater automation but mostly because of companies chasing cheaper labor and proximity to recently stronger markets like Eastern Europe and South America. Between 1979 and 1992, the year before the NAFTA debate, America lost more than three million manufacturing jobs. And they weren’t coming back; there simply weren’t enough being created to overtake the losses, and all the growth was in the professional and service sectors, a trend that would continue into what was being called, hopefully, the Second American Century.

  Soon enough, the Gore-Perot debate would recede into memory, and the manufacturing sector’s ills would be overshadowed by the go-go economic optimism spurred by what was about to become one of the most bullish stock markets in American history. Dozens of stocks from a new technology were about to become the surest things. As odd as it seemed, this boat would lift craft beer, too.

  CHERRY BREW AND NAKED HOCKEY

 
Manhattan | 1992-1993

  Sam Calagione kept going. He had sterilized two dozen twenty-two-ounce bomber bottles by heating them in his apartment oven for twenty minutes—and they had promptly stuck to the rug he placed them on. No time to stop, though; bacteria could wrest the better of his first five-gallon batch of homebrew and sour everything. He poured the beer, a pale ale infused with cherries, into the bottles; capped them; and then dragged them and the rug they were stuck to toward a dark corner to age. A week later, he cut the bottles loose from the rug, melted remains sticking to the bottoms of each, and put them in the refrigerator. A tasting party shortly thereafter proved the so-dubbed Cherry Brew a success and straightened Calagione’s circuitous route toward craft beer.

  It was one that commenced as these things sometimes do: with copious amounts of Big Beer poured down teenage throats. Calagione was a wild child growing up in the north-central Massachusetts town of Greenfield. For one thing, he had a side gig at his tony prep school selling to classmates beer that he had finagled from what he would remember as “sympathetic western Massachusetts libertarian hippies.” Such endeavors—and others that included naked ice hockey and sitting cross-legged atop a Winnebago going sixty on its way to crash the prom—got him kicked out of school weeks shy of graduation. His father, an oral surgeon who made wine at home, was not amused. Still, Calagione managed an English degree from Muhlenberg College in Allen-town, Pennsylvania, and went to New York City in 1992 to study writing at Columbia, with some acting on the side (muscular and tall, with a square jaw and thick, dark-brown hair, Calagione had done some postcollegiate modeling, too).

  It was in Gotham that he graduated from Big Beer to craft. He got a job waiting tables at a Mexican restaurant a couple of blocks from the gates of Columbia in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of upper Manhattan. While the restaurant could morph into one of the neighborhood’s rowdier college bars by nightfall, not everyone was clamoring for Corona: the restaurant was one of the few in the city then with a menu, albeit small, of fine beers, including craft brands like Sierra Nevada Bigfoot Barleywine and Anchor Liberty Ale as well as choicer imports like Chimay Red, brewed in a Trappist monastery in southern Belgium. Calagione befriended the restaurant owner behind the menu, Joshua Mandel, and that led not only to the Cherry Brew but also to an encyclopedic knowledge of craft beer. He became blissfully insufferable on the subject; the Cherry Brew tasting provided him one such soapbox:

  The beer was the hit of the party. More than that I had created something unique that people enjoyed. I had given people something that, at that moment, they really needed. That evening I spent as much time as my friends could stand talking about all the different beers in the world, the ingredients used in making them, and all of the small breweries that were popping up around the country.

  Later in the evening, as the Cherry Brew flowed and Calagione settled from his soapbox, thoughts crept across his young mind. He likely would never write the Great American Novel. He could, however, produce an interesting beer that others might enjoy. That was artistry in itself, one that could reward risk taking and coloring outside the lines as much as any other medium of expression. Yes, of course it could! Calagione stood up and declared to those still in his apartment: he would become a brewer.

  The next day, head foggy but memory clear, he walked several blocks from his apartment in Chelsea to the main New York Public Library in Midtown, its stone lions standing stern guard against ignorance on either side of the entrance, and began reading up on brewing. Crucially for the craft beer movement and for himself, Calagione had little idea what he was doing, both business- and brewing-wise. He knew enough about the ingredients of beer to lay down a basic formula for a little zing to walk on (in the case of his first batch, which he made with Mandel, cherries).

  Calagione was not nearly far enough removed from his restless youth, however, to sit intellectually still for strict recipes. It was the Winnebago and the naked hockey and the underage-beer-selling racket all over again—rule-breaking time.

  IN PRIME TIME

  San Francisco | 1994

  Pete Slosberg had not counted on the cop. One of the executives who ran the ad agency that Pete’s Brewing had hired, Goodby, Silverstein, and Partners, had told him to show up at a red-draped table that was set up on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco and stick a radio piece in his ear. Slosberg did what he was told and sat down at the table beneath a sign that read, in blocky letters, PICTURE WITH THE REAL PETE $1.00. Two rows of bottles of Pete’s Wicked Ale stood to his right. Slosberg, never a natural salesman, was wearing a dark short-sleeved shirt in breezy, cool weather, adding to the discomfort of the odd setup. The executive from the ad agency began talking in his ear, telling him what to call out to unsuspecting passers-by as the cameras rolled.

  “Morning! How’d you like a picture taken with the actual Pete, maker of Pete’s Wicked Ale?”

  Nothing. Just an awkward shake of the head.

  “How would you like your picture with the real Pete?”

  “No.” “No!” “Nah.”

  The conceit of the commercial was clear: you might be able to recognize a Clydesdale at quick glance or identify a Miller commercial blindfolded just by its opening banter, but the namesake and cofounder of one of the fastest-growing companies in the United States—beer or otherwise—was practically invisible.*

  If there was any doubt, enter the cop. Or that’s what Slosberg thought. Unbeknownst to him, it was an actor dressed as a cop. He stood over Slosberg and asked him if he was serving anyone the beer. Did he have a permit for the table? How long was he going to be in the middle of the sidewalk anyway? Slosberg stammered some explanations as the earpiece fell stone silent. The commercial ended with the actor/cop sauntering away, wishing Slosberg a good day and swinging two bottles of Wicked Ale next to his holster.

  The ads—which also included one where Slosberg, again at a red-draped table on a sidewalk, autographed photos that were then hastily crumpled and tossed by their takers—aired in 1994 in major markets like Seattle, Boston, San Francisco, and Minneapolis during prime-time hits like Seinfeld, Northern Exposure, and Melrose Place. They were watersheds for craft beer: the movement’s first national television advertising campaign. And though relatively low-budget—Pete’s account with Goodby, Silverstein was $1 million and Anheuser-Busch eventually hired them away with a $31 million offer—they were impactful, both financially and creatively. Stuart Elliott, the longtime advertising reporter for the New York Times, named the Pete’s campaign as one of the year’s top ten, right up there with pushes for Nike, Ikea, Bud Light, and McDonald’s; the same article also listed campaigns for Budweiser and Bud Dry as among the ten worst. Financially, the spots were helping lift Pete’s to $44 million in profits in 1994. The company, which was now led day-to-day out of Palo Alto by former Seagram marketer Mark Bozzini, would by the end of the year sell 2.5 million cases of beer in forty-one states, no small feat for an operation that distributed just ten thousand cases in 1988, mostly in the West.

  For all the money and the plaudits, the ads’ conceit still spoke to fundamental tenets of the American craft movement that went all the way back to Fritz Maytag at Anchor in the 1960s: independent and traditional. Slosberg and Mark Bronder’s Pete’s Brewing, along with Jim Koch and Rhonda Kallman’s Boston Beer, were growing exponentially compared to their competitors; Boston Beer was by now actually America’s fourteenth-largest brewer, period. Together, not even ten years after each of their starts, the two companies accounted for well over one-third of all craft beer produced in the United States, and they were the only ones with widespread advertising. But Boston Beer and Pete’s always felt the need to pay more than lip service—and gladly so—to the ideas that they were small, independently run operations compared with Big Beer and that they brewed with only classic ingredients as dictated by old-world norms.

  The two sometimes competed to seem the most David against the Goliaths. In the run-up to the thirteenth annual Great A
merican Beer Festival in Denver in 1994, Koch and Slosberg argued through the media the merits of medals and debated the reasons for their brands’ success. The GABF, which would draw twelve hundred beers from 265 breweries (up from 207 the year before), was prepared to bestow 102 medals in thirty-four categories, a far cry from the consumer preference poll that had stood alone at the earliest festivals. To Koch, whose Boston Lager and Boston Lightship swept four of the final five consumer preference polls, the medals were well and fine (Boston Beer had captured seventeen so far).* But the quality alone moved his beers—which meant that his marketing, including radio spots with his voice that had been airing for years, mattered little as well. “Industry writers can’t get it out of their heads that it’s not marketing that makes you buy a beer,” he told the Denver Post. “It’s because you like the taste. The people who will survive are the brewers who have the highest-quality standards.” The medals mattered a little more to Slosberg, who noted to the same paper that Koch’s indifference to marketing didn’t stop him from advertising. “It’s the judgment of your peers, it’s an accomplishment,” Slosberg said of the GABF medals. “We like to think people are impressed by medals.”

  No matter how they moved so much beer in an industry still dominated by the likes of Anheuser-Busch, Miller, and Coors, the sizes of Boston Beer and Pete’s were together the single, biggest boost to craft beer since perhaps the legalization of homebrewing at the federal level in 1978. Simply put, the two were able to put craft beer in front of more consumer eyeballs than any other thing or combination of things. It was not just the radio ads or the national television spots: there were bar and restaurant promotions manifested in thousands of cozies, stickers, coasters, sandwich signs, banners and boards; T-shirts and glassware; stunts like Koch sitting over a dunking booth filled with Boston Lager or Slosberg in a tub of bottles of Wicked Ale; Slosberg presenting Pete Wilson with a Pete’s jacket in front of reporters at his inauguration as California’s governor; Boston Beer in the White House Mess and on Air Force One (the youthful new president, Bill Clinton, was said to prefer Samuel Adams); holiday tie-ins, like Pete’s advice for surviving Valentine’s Day through beer (“Skip the fattening desserts and instead indulge in a good beer with your valentine”); and both Slosberg and Koch holding forth to audiences big and small—or to a single reporter—on the nuances of craft beer and the brewing process. They both subscribed to the idea that a rising tide would lift all boats, that greater consumer knowledge about craft beer meant greater sales for everybody in the industry, themselves included. Their efforts were not universally appreciated. “I resent it,” Bill Owens of the now-legendary Buffalo Bill’s brewpub in Hayward was known to say. “Those people are just top-notch salesmen.”