The Audacity of Hops

by Tom Acitelli

  Jim Koch in the tasting room of the Boston Beer Company’s brewery in Jamaica Plain, Boston. COURTESY OF THE BOSTON BEER COMPANY

  Neither Slosberg nor Koch could get out from under the accusation that contract brewing was not really craft brewing. It was true that they had avoided the capital costs of starting a physical brewery, costs that were prone to rise with each expansion and ones that had already helped fell many a predecessor. Koch, for his part, had opened a brewery in early 1989 at the old Haffenreffer location in Boston for research and development as well as tours; he placed inside it the cornerstone from the old Louis Koch Brewery that he, his father, and Charlie Papazian had found in St. Louis. The Boston brewery, located as it was just off the region’s subway system and with powerful champions like Governor Michael Dukakis, who was at the ribbon-cutting, proved remarkably popular with visitors and helped revitalize a run-down area of the city (one of Boston Beer’s earliest neighbors was given to killing cats and mounting their bodies on stakes; it was that bad).

  But most of Koch’s beer was still brewed elsewhere, and all of Slosberg’s had been brewed thousands of miles away from the company’s nondescript offices since 1988, near Stanford University, although the company would talk about plans for a brewery, perhaps in Northern California. Still, in the early 1990s, there was absolutely no ignoring the sales success of Boston Beer and Pete’s and the impact of that success on the movement. It had upped the game just as more players joined—and more spectators than ever watched.

  *People did, in fact, stop during Slosberg’s session at the table; in fact, crowds gathered at some points. That was not the effect the ad agency was going for, and Slosberg was instructed through the earpiece to disperse them (per Slosberg, Beer for Pete’s Sake, 136).

  *The seventeen included the consumer preference polls.

  CRITICAL MASS

  Durham, NC | 1995

  In the summer of 1995, the Discovery Channel released a CD-ROM based on Michael Jackson’s series The Beer Hunter. The disc, which retailed for forty dollars, contained Jackson’s top twenty-four American beers (one-eighth were from Anchor), as well as history lessons on brewing that went all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia; there was even a section on “how hobbyists can set up their own home-brewing operations.” You could simply pop the disc into your computer—PCs only to start, available soon for Macintoshes—sit back, and watch the world’s leading beer authority explain the American craft beer movement with a mix of still photos and short videos. One more thing: you would need at least eight megabytes of RAM for it to run properly.

  The CD-ROM, though primitive by today’s standards, was light-years beyond the fifteenth-century technology behind Jackson’s seminal 1977 book, The World Guide to Beer. The disc illustrated not only the craft beer movement’s toe dipping into the computer age but also the confidence of producers and platforms like the Discovery Channel in the consumer market for such products. The CD-ROM, then, was not so much a natural progression for Jackson’s work—articles to book to software—but one in tandem with a growing awareness of craft beer. That awareness was shepherded not just by Jackson, the acknowledged master of the beer-writing medium, but also by his American counterparts (and fans) like Fred Eckhardt, who continued to write his regular columns for the Oregonian in Portland; Byron Burch, who updated his Quality Brewing for a 1994 reissue; Bill Owens, the brewpub owner who, throughout the 1980s and into the next decade, became a prolific chronicler of the brewing trade from a business perspective; and Charlie Papazian, perhaps the most well-known (and oft-quoted) American expert on the movement, whose Association of Brewers now published the New Brewer bimonthly as well as Zymurgy and whose The Complete Joy of Homebrewing would get its own CD-ROM in 1998. The regular newspaper reader, too, about now would have noticed the articles on the state of craft beer in America that seemed to coincide every autumn with the association’s Great American Beer Festival.

  Daniel Bradford, the marketing maestro behind so many of those articles from the early 1980s onward, had left the Association of Brewers at the start of the new decade. It and the American Homebrewers Association were growing rapidly, and Bradford figured he was not the person to be Papazian’s right hand anymore. Besides, he had gotten married. His wife, Julie Johnson, held a PhD in evolutionary biology—she had studied with Jane Goodall in Tanzania—and had accepted a faculty position at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina; the couple went east. Durham sat sandwiched between the North Carolina capital of Raleigh and the quintessential college town of Chapel Hill, equal parts a technology and teaching hub and a gritty city struggling with the decline of the tobacco and textile industries. And the beer sucked. For Bradford, who only a few short years before had stood lovingly alone amid the hundred or so best beers in America before that first day of the GABF in 1987, central North Carolina offered little in the way of libations—Uli Bennewitz had opened the Weeping Radish along the coast a few years earlier, but otherwise there were no other craft brewers in the longest state east of the Mississippi. Bradford enjoyed introducing himself to the couple’s new friends, many culled from the academic community surrounding Duke. What did he do? Well, he was the cofounder of the Great American Beer Festival. He was also, along with Johnson, the owner of a magazine called All About Beer. Bradford had stepped into a deal to buy the magazine from original owner Mike Bosak and threw himself into running out of his Durham house what was, largely by default, the premier glossy magazine for the craft beer movement (by default because there were no real competitors on the consumer side and because the magazine seemed to have succeeded despite itself). For one thing, Bosak had made a practice of selling ads on the cover; from the get-go, then, each issue’s editorial angles, reviews especially, were suspect. Bradford and Johnson stopped the practice, due partly to advice they got from beer writers like Randy Mosher.

  Mosher was part of a third wave of beer writers and critics that also included Stan Hieronymus, Jay Brooks, Lew Bryson, Don Russell, Alan Eames, Jack Erickson, Stephen Beaumont, Gregg Smith, Lucy Saunders, and Bill Brand. They came of age in the 1960s and 1970s; were introduced to better beer in the 1980s, usually through a friend or through happenstance and often via imports, not craft brands; had other jobs, usually related to writing; were all homebrewers or at least familiar with homebrewing; and were all enthusiastic about the growth in craft beer that they found themselves covering by the 1990s. They each became, like Jackson nearly two decades before and Eckhardt before that, part evangelist and part journalist.

  Mosher’s first big beer work was The Brewer’s Companion: A Source-Book for the Small-Scale Brewer, published in 1993; he did his research in the pre-Internet way, traipsing to libraries and exchanging photocopies with other brewing enthusiasts through the regular mail or at festivals. Hieronymus, a veteran newspaperman (when he started in the trade, the minimum wage was $1.25), turned to beer writing along with his wife, Daria Labinsky, in the early 1990s, after the two chucked their full-time gigs in favor of traveling the country while freelancing and running a newsletter about concert tours and festivals. By 1993, he was pretty much writing about beer full-time; he became editor of RealBeer.com, one of the first websites on the beat, the following year.

  Bill Brand was for years a reporter and then editor at the Oakland Tribune, and he covered considerably soberer subjects like the Unabomber and the Columbine school shooting. He started a newsletter called What’s On Tap in 1994, and it eventually became a column for the Tribune and other Bay Area papers.

  Jack Erickson was a former congressional aide and speechwriter who wrote on a variety of subjects before discovering England’s Campaign for Real Ale during a vacation. His Star-Spangled Beer: A Guide to America’s New Microbreweries and Brewpubs, published in 1987, was the first stab at a written history of the movement; in 1995, he launched The Erickson Report, a regular newsletter about the industry.

  Gregg Smith would also carve out a prominent role as a beer historian, and not just for craft ones;
his Beer in America, published in 1998, delved into the libation’s nation-building role in what the book’s subtitle called “The Early Years—1587-1840.”

  Lucy Saunders was a pioneer for women beer writers and one of the first overall to focus on the relationship of craft beer with fine food: Time-Life published her recipe and pairing guide, Cooking with Beer, in 1996.

  Don Russell was a corruption-scooping general-assignment reporter at the Philadelphia Daily News. He began writing a regular beer column under the moniker Joe Sixpack in 1996, after earlier attempts at beer writing convinced his editor there was an audience for it.

  A native of southeastern Pennsylvania who went into the Navy and was stationed for a time in New York City in the 1970s, Jay Brooks published The Bars of Santa Clara County: A Beer Drinker’s Guide to Silicon Valley, about the beer scene in his adopted Northern California, in 1991.

  Lew Bryson, who was also from southeastern Pennsylvania, worked as a librarian before turning to beer writing in 1995; like other scribes in the third wave (and like Jackson, who became a renowned expert on whiskey, and Eckhardt, who became the same on sake), Bryson would also write about liquor, particularly whiskey.

  A native of central Canada, Stephen Beaumont thought he knew everything about beer by his mid-teens, only to discover his ignorance while slinging drinks at a pub in midtown Toronto, Ontario; like his fellow beer writers after their own epiphanies, he would thereafter become a sponge for American beer arcana, at one point writing nine regular columns for eight different publications at the same time, with a particular focus, like Saunders, on beer’s place among food.

  Alan Eames’s path was the most peripatetic of the bunch. A one-time magician, he ran a successful art gallery in Manhattan, a liquor store in Massachusetts legendary for its beer selection in the 1970s, and later the Portland, Maine, pub Three Dollar Dewey’s, where he insisted on quiet, refined enjoyment of good beer, often buying the Sunday New York Times to spread among the tables and railings. The pub exercised immense influence on the etiquette of future beer bars: these were not to be loud nightclubs or lusty singles joints. He also did consulting for companies like Pete’s Brewing, Boston Beer, and D. L. Geary (David Geary was a regular at Three Dollar Dewey’s). All along, Eames wrote about beer, appearing on radio and television to explain his research—he would visit forty-four countries in swashbuckling pursuit of it, earning the sobriquet “The Indiana Jones of Beer.” His best-known work came in early 1995 with the publication of The Secret Life of Beer, a thunderstorm of trivia covering centuries of the drink.

  It was Jay Brooks’s approach, however, that best illustrates how the third wave of critics came at beer: in specific, drilled-down contexts. In the cases of Brooks, Bryson, Russell, and Brand, these were largely geographical; in the case of Hieronymus, who would write popular guides to Belgian beer, the context was stylistic. Gone were the sweeping logs of Jackson; unnecessary were the impartations of a wide yet long-forgotten body of knowledge provided by the likes of Eckhardt, Burch, and Papazian. People had a sense of what was going on now. It was time to sort out the additions and subtractions, all the changes that seemed to affect the craft beer movement every month. The new wave wanted to make sense of a movement that might now offer consumers and hobbyists several brands and vendors to choose from just in their hometowns; these critics could assist those who wanted to start homebrewing but couldn’t distill the wealth of instruction that had accumulated in the last several years. The options could be baffling and the information hard to get in these years just before the World Wide Web.

  Finally, the new critics were having fun. It was hard not to, and it was part of their branding (who wouldn’t want to get paid to write about beer?). Plus, they knew they were fairly early to the party, able to enjoy a vantage that would simply not be available to later arrivals. Beer in America had never had so many writers. Hieronymus’s New Beer Rules numbers five and six formed a kind of working rubric for everybody: “It is only beer,” and “The best beer was in the empty glass.” And here was Russell with some buddies on an “Ultimate Beer Run” on Super Bowl Sunday to a legendary suburban Philly beer store called Shangy’s, run by an Iranian-American family named Hadian:

  For the next 90 minutes, we wander the aisles, and Hadian answers every question. He tells us of the entrepreneur who imports only those rated as the best by beer guru Michael Jackson…. He even points us away from ordinary brews like Oldenburg of Fort Mitchell, Ken., advising us to try better brews from Weeping Radish of Roanoke Island, N.C., and Smuttynose of Portsmouth, N.H.

  He claims about 75 percent of his sales are specialty beers, but just then a customer walks in and asks for a case of god-awful Coors. “What can I say?” he shrugs. “The Philadelphia region is the biggest Coors Light market in the world.”

  Now it is time to make some tough decisions. We settle on 10 cases for about $380. We’d have bought more if Eric, in an uncommonly selfish act, [hadn’t] declined to give up his seat for three more cases of ale. But before we stomp on the gas, a quick question.

  “Hey, Nima. What’s Shangy mean?”

  He smiles. “It’s Iranian, for ‘happy.’”

  Ooooooo, beer!

  Bradford and Johnson’s newly acquired and editorially improved All About Beer joined two other glossy magazines, both published by brewpub legend Bill Owens: the higher-brow, graphically ambitious BeeR and the venerable trade quarterly American Brewer, which Owens acquired in 1986.* All three titles brought together the best-known beer writers, sometimes in the same issue, whatever their vintage. Eckhardt became a columnist at All About Beer, often penning first-person essays full of the sort of name-dropping earned from nearly thirty years covering beer; and Jackson was a regular contributor to All About Beer and BeeR, writing in his usual erudite fashion about beers both local and exotic. Burch showed up in both those titles, too, as did Bradford’s old boss, Papazian, either as a contributor on homebrewing or as a source on the industry, his Association of Brewers having become not only the coordinator of its grandest festivals and (not without controversy) the definer of its styles but also a lobbying force in state capitals and Washington.

  While barrels of ink were being spilt upon dead trees on behalf of brewing, breweries, and brewpubs by the mid-1990s, another medium was emerging that would prove infinitely more influential. When it came to craft beer, it would be democratic, dictatorial, illuminating, confusing, accurate to a tee and rife with errors all at the same instantaneous time. At first, it was cumbersome to read and nothing much to look at—Bill Owens’s art would most certainly not work with it. For consumers, there was a considerable barrier to entry, too, compared with the cost of a magazine or even a book. You had to have a computer or at least access to one—and that computer had to have access to the Internet. Still, for those who mastered it, the new technology provided a fount of fast information and exchange, rendering not only quaint but obsolete those paper newsletters of early homebrewing clubs like the Maltose Falcons—and, for those paying attention, it drew a bead on the print publications.

  The first Internet site for the craft beer consumer was started in late 1986 by Rob Gardner out of Fort Collins, Colorado. He set up and ran manually from his computer an e-mail newsletter, called The Brewsletter, that would grow by the decade’s close into the Home Brew Digest, a forum for homebrewers and beer enthusiasts worldwide. Gardner, to keep up with the subscriber volume, wrote code that could handle routine tasks like dealing with those subscriptions and sending out the digest; it had quickly moved beyond what could be run manually. Most of the subscribers were college students or staff (thus the access to Internet connections). And, difficult as it is to imagine, there were none of the graphical bells and whistles of today’s web; the digest was largely an all-text, black-and-white compendium of messages that Gardner had received or that had been e-mailed to the subscriber list. The site’s exchanges were also regularly reposted on other early Internet beer forums, like AOL’s Food and Drink Network
and brewing forums hosted by Prodigy and CompuServe. The exchanges usually followed a question-and-answer format, with someone from Massachusetts, say, sending in a list and someone from New York sending in a correction—as happened on Halloween of 1988, shortly after 5 PM Eastern time, when someone from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, wrote:

  Daniel Bradford in 1994, a couple of years after he and Julie Johnson took control of All About Beer magazine. COPYRIGHT THE DURHAM MORNING-HERALD co. USED WITH PERMISSION.

  Subject: nice list, changes needed

  hey thanks to jmiller for putting together that micro and brewpub list.

  Please note that Bill Newman’s brewery is now defunct. He contracts through F. X. Matt in Utica. You stand a better chance of getting a response by writing them. I know I long ago gave up waiting for him to return my calls.