The Audacity of Hops
Page 31
Dogfish Head’s Chicory Stout.
When the brewpub opened, Dogfish Head was the smallest brewery, craft or otherwise, in the United States, brewing ten gallons at a time in a system rigged from three kegs and heated by propane burners, three times a day, five days a week. Its first offering was a straight-ahead pale ale using the four ingredients of barley, hops, water, and yeast in those European traditions. Then, during that first year, the brewpub pivoted toward the likes of Chicory Stout, which it debuted as a winter seasonal. It, too, had barley, hops, water, and yeast; it also had Saint-John’s-wort, a plant sometimes used to treat depression; organic Mexican coffee; roasted chicory, a plant that can be ground down into a coffee substitute; and licorice root. In other words, it had ingredients that would have been unfamiliar—anathema, really—to a Bavarian brewer of the nineteenth or even twentieth century. These ingredients produced a dark, peppery beer with hints, not surprisingly, of roasted coffee and chocolate; it was, as one reviewer put it, perfect “if you only want to have one or two stouts.”
Part of it was boredom with the status quo; part of it the possibility for experimentation; part of it another way to stand out in an increasingly crowded pack whose production was growing by double-digit percentages yearly. Whatever the ultimate reason, Calagione’s Chicory Stout was one of the opening salvos in extreme beer and extreme brewing, though neither term would come into vogue for years yet. What characteristics defined extreme beer? Strength: they were typically higher in alcohol per volume than your pales ales, IPAs, and ambers. Richness, too, could be a defining feature; as with the Chicory Stout, extreme beers tended to be very busy on their back ends, brimming with hitherto unimagined ingredients or with unimagined amounts of those ingredients. Hops would become a favorite tool of extreme brewing, with Dogfish Head pioneering a method for frequently adding hops—sometimes once a minute for two hours—to the boiling wort. Finally, because of the first two characteristics, extreme beers were simply exotic to the American palate, even a palate that may now have spent an intimate twenty years with craft beers. They tasted stranger, their packaging even looked stranger, than anything out there, the explanations of their origins and the adjectives that might flow from tasting them unlike anything the beer consumer, in the United States or elsewhere, had ever encountered. The definition of extreme beer seemed destined to mimic the popular one for obscenity: people knew it when they saw it.
Boston Beer was perhaps the first brewery in the nation to present extreme beers as exactly that, beginning in the late 1980s with its interpretations of the strong German lager style called bock and then its Utopias line, some bottles of which, it was suggested by Jim Koch, should be aged like—gasp!—wine. Koch would explain it this way when extreme beer had become a staple of the American craft beer movement: “The world doesn’t need one more pale ale or more good porter or hefewiezen. There’s enough of that. Craft brewers have to continue to brew unique, distinctive, even surprising beers.”
For the time being, extreme beers did not really have a name or a niche. The vast majority of craft beer produced and consumed in the United States was, as we have seen, on the milder, more traditional side, with Koch’s own Boston Lager claiming a sizable share. But Calagione was just twenty-five when his brewpub opened, young enough to have grown up around craft beer’s wider availability and after the movement’s first shakeout in the 1980s. As a newcomer, he took to the possibilities offered by extreme beer for experimentation and innovation on a scale not seen since the heyday of Belgian beer in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when styles now common worldwide were developed by the isolated equivalents of late-twentieth-century start-ups. Still, for all the enthusiasm engendered by these potential avenues, it remained to be seen whether roasted chicory and Saint-John’s-wort in unusual packaging could be a successful financial route; extreme beer might just be a particularly innovative way to go broke. Things were uncertain enough already.
The Dogfish Head brewpub grew in popularity despite its location, its growth powered in no small part by the live music that Calagione booked and the general ambiance of a spot that had embraced “Off-Centered Ales for Off-Centered People” as its slogan. Calagione expanded the brewhouse thirtyfold to keep up with demand for the beers, consigning the original, ten-gallons-at-a-time system to lore. And then in 1997, a year after the brewpub began bottling that first pale ale, he moved the packaging from the restaurant to a space seven miles away, in Lewes.
Small as it still was, Dogfish Head ran smack into Anheuser-Busch’s 100-percent-share-of-mind campaign. At least two distributors told the brewery they did not want to distribute its brands anymore, and when Dogfish Head, now on its way to producing five year-round beers and garnering $1.6 million in annual sales by the decade’s end, tried to distribute beyond the Mid-Atlantic, it ran into similar reticence. When a distributor pressured by Anheuser-Busch wouldn’t take his brands, Calagione would approach another big distributor in whatever particular market, only to be told he had too many craft brands as it was. In those cases, he would hunt for smaller distributors and count on word of mouth among consumers to stoke demand, as it had done in Rehoboth Beach.
Or he would have some fun with his company’s size. Goliath might have the major distributors and the ad men, but David held an increasing fascination with consumers, from Wall Street to Main Street. On the morning of August 24, 1997, a Sunday, Calagione climbed into an eighteen-foot scull he had spent $1,500 making and drifted into the currents of Delaware Bay with a six-pack of his pale ale beside him. He spent about four hours rowing the seventeen nautical miles from Rehoboth Beach to Cape May, New Jersey, to deliver the first Dogfish Head to be distributed outside Delaware. There were only a handful of people to see him disembark, however, and the publicity stunt seemed like a clever flop. Then jeansmaker Levi Strauss learned about the journey and contacted him to appear in an ad campaign photographed by Richard Avedon. The theme? Plucky entrepreneurs.
THE TOTAL PACKAGE
Petaluma, CA | 1995
Tony Magee knew that everyone in craft beer knew the origin of Oktoberfest. The king of Bavaria threw a two-day festival for his newly married son, the crown prince, in October 1810. Ever since, the Germans, and eventually people worldwide, have marked the occasion each year with their own festivals resplendent in copious amounts of beer and German food. Oktoberfest beers grew from the original festival as well, and Magee’s brewery, Lagunitas, was about to debut its own interpretation in October 1995. But first it needed a label, one that would stand out among the other Oktoberfest beers offered by American craft brewers (Jim Koch’s Boston Beer had perhaps America’s bestselling Oktoberfest interpretation, a lager it introduced in 1989). Magee’s backgrounds in music composition and print sales dovetailed nicely as he pored over ideas for what might make a marketplace splash but was also out of the ordinary for a typical Oktoberfest. His was a hoppy amber ale, while most others were lagers on the sweeter side. He wanted a label that stood out both visually and editorially; packaging could be, he realized, as experimental as the stronger beers his brewery was turning out.
It was a realization that other craft brewers, especially the newer ones, were coming to across the country as they eschewed the educational and direct packaging of their pioneer predecessors as much as they eschewed their recipes. The label of a bottle of Anchor Brewing, Sierra Nevada, or Boston Beer—even the more irreverent Pete’s Brewing—might tell the origins of the beer and the ingredients as well as the pride the brewery took in presenting the product. The accompanying imagery would be equally simple and often the same through a brewery’s various styles, little altered except for the ingredients and the packaging’s colors, with maybe an addition or omission here and there. These labels were straightforward—they had had to be in an era when most consumers would have been unfamiliar with what was staring back at them from the grocery store shelf. Too cute or too arcane and it wouldn’t matter how good the beer was inside the brown bottle (which could itse
lf be unfamiliar enough). The imagery on Anchor’s label for Liberty Ale, revolutionary for its use of Cascade hops, shared the anchor, barley, hops, and “San Francisco” from the label for the brewery’s steam beer (but, unlike the steam beer label, it also had an eagle behind the anchor). It read:
San Francisco’s famous Liberty Ale was first brewed on the 18th of April, 1975, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Paul Revere’s historic ride. It is virtually handmade by the brewers of Anchor Steam Beer in one of the smallest and most traditional breweries in the world. Liberty Ale is made with the finest barley malt; fresh, whole hops; top-fermenting yeast; pure water; and the natural methods that reflect our exceptional respect for the ancient art of brewing. It is “dry hopped,” a classic ale tradition, and slowly completes its fermentation in sealed vats in our cellars. This unique process creates Liberty Ale’s distinctive bouquet and uncommonly delicate, entirely natural carbonation.
Here was Magee’s label for the Oktoberfest, Lagunitas’s first seasonal:
The original derivation of the word “Oktoberfest” was actually the phrase, “Ach! Tuber Fest!” This antiquious expression refers back to the Dark Age reign of Sir Loin of Boef, during which there existed a brisk European trade in captured Irish slaves. The prevailing Germanic Lords imported Irishmen to work in their central European potato plantations. These Irish slaves were notorious for their endurance in drinking festivals under the new moon and during the potato harvest. They would brew up huge batches of a unique fermented alcoholic Potato Beer. The Irishmen eventually introduced their German masters to this unusual beer-like beverage. The harvest parties centered around this brew, hence the term “Tuber-fest.” The slaves were finally freed during the European potato blights of 1252 and 1257. Years later malted barley was substituted for the spuds of old and, well, the rest is history. Honest….
Literally every phrase and sentence on Magee’s label was factually incorrect (and “antiquious” wasn’t even a word); nevertheless the brewery got calls from credulous consumers asking if this was the true story of Oktoberfest. Magee couldn’t help himself. He liked the idea of a backstory. He was familiar with the J. Peterman clothing catalogues (before they were immortalized on the television show Seinfeld), and he liked the idea of standing athwart the movement toward talking about beer as if one were discussing wine. He did more creative writing for other Lagunitas brands, and soon the brewery was pioneering not only an IPA as its flagship but also some of the zanier names in the already rapidly expanding craft beer lexicon: Dogtown, Bug Town, Hairy Eyeball Ale, Equinox Ale, the Lagunator. The last, released over the holidays, spoofed the recently released Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle The Terminator, complete with a dog in sunglasses and the tag, “I’ll Be Bock.” It didn’t matter to the brewery that the beer was a brown ale and a bock is a type of lager—it worked. It helped the seasonal sell well in an ever-more-crowded marketplace.*
These beers were rolling out of a new brewery; a moody septic tank at the original location had forced Magee’s hand. “In putrid tones,” he remembered, “it told me we had to leave, and quickly. The septic tank also called the neighbors. It called the busy street in front of the brewery, the playground behind us, and then it called the county.” So he rented space in an old industrial garage about twenty-five miles north in Petaluma, a stone’s throw from Highway 101. The move represented an expansion and a step up. He was able to replace the increasingly rickety seven-barrel electric brewhouse once meant for Russia with a newer one fabricated by the same John Cross who had imported Grundy tanks from the United Kingdom, though the fight against the tyranny of fast growth remained.
The label for Lagunitas Sucks Holiday Ale Brown Shugga’ Substitute, what might loosely be called an American strong ale. COURTESY OF LAGUNITAS BREWING COMPANY
Here was how it was working financially for Magee and other start-up craft breweries in this age of multimillion-dollar IPOs and Big Beer takeovers. Lagunitas was still self-distributing all-draft when it moved to Petaluma. Such a brewery might sell a keg to a distributor for sixty-five dollars. Because there were two kegs to one barrel, a fourteen-barrel system, probably the bare minimum to seriously compete and grow, could generate around $1,820 in sales wholesale. The same fourteen-barrel system, however, might generate around $2,960 wholesale via bottles. But bottling beer introduced an entire new set of costs, including the glassware, the caps, and especially the bottling line, which, as we’ve seen, could run into thousands of dollars even secondhand. Plus, this was the era of price wars between craft brewers, in particular Boston Beer and Pete’s Brewing, as they amped up for and went through their IPOs. So it was not a given that a six-pack of freshly minted bottles would sell at, say, $5.99 when a competitor’s in the same display was selling for $4.99. For his part, Magee decided Lagunitas had to price itself at the higher end to send a message that it intended to play with the bigger brands.
Add to this worry over pricing and expansion the actual start-up costs, which never seemed to go away, even after years of growth. Debts had to be paid down, and investors had to be paid up. Even a new location, a new approach to labeling, a new set of styles that might revolutionize the industry, a hospitable local environment like San Francisco or New York that seemed to manufacture new consumers by the day—none of it was enough for a financial respite. Meanwhile, every time a start-up turned around, it was liable to find a fresh competitor, often one with more capital. The only saving grace for startup craft brewers at this point seemed the promise of the industrywide double-digit growth continuing into the late 1990s. Thank God for that.
*The marketing material for the Lagunator, a dark brown ale, included the explanation, “We brewed this Special Ale to celebrate the darkness and depression that mar the holiday landscape” That was not included on the packaging.
BOOS
Boston; Pittsburgh | 1996
The crowd of craft brewers and brewpub owners booed David Geary. He didn’t care—he felt what he had to say needed saying. It was that Association of Brewers’s conference in May 1996 in Boston, a three-hour drive from his craft brewery in Portland, Maine, the oldest in New England; there were at least three thousand attendees, many of whom had already been fretting openly about the impacts of the wave of IPOs on the industry and the incursion of Anheuser-Busch into Redhook, including the plans for the one-hundred-thousand-square-foot brewery in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, halfway between Boston and Portland. Nerves were frayed, minds were troubled; the industrywide growth was all well and good, but there was a feeling that something had to give. How much craft beer could the American consumer stomach? No one really wanted to hear what Geary ended up saying.
First, he praised Goliath. Budweiser isn’t bad beer, he told the crowd; it’s great beer.
Boos.
“Listen to me,” Geary went on, “you would kill to have the consistent quality that they have. You may not like the style, but it’s not bad beer.”
More boos.
Then Geary grabbed some salt. He dumped it on a wound that had been festering for ten years.
We have to stop saying that Jim Koch was an importer, Geary said, an interloper. He’s not.
The dig had followed Koch since the launch of Boston Beer in 1985, when it was brewed by the Pittsburgh Brewing Company. After more than a decade of explosive growth, steady revenues, and an epic IPO, more than 99 percent of Boston Beer’s Samuel Adams line was still brewed outside of Boston, the brewery in the city’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood little more than window dressing for tours and tastings and further branding (though it was also used for small batches as well as research and development). Boston Beer now contracted not only with Pittsburgh Brewing but with Stroh’s in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania; Blitz-Weinhard in Portland, Oregon; and a Gambrinus-owned brewery in Germany for the European marketplace; and the bocks brewed in Jamaica Plain might age in vats at a winery in Northern California. The company traded 961,000 barrels in 1995, including in Europe, for net sales of $151.3 million, m
any times its nearest competitors.
All the while, there was Koch in the papers, on the radio, and sometimes even on the TV, talking in folksy tones about history’s Samuel Adams and his roots in Boston, and the city’s own roots in brewing. (The stuff about Samuel Adams grated on some nerves, too, as Adams was not himself a brewer but the son of the owner of a malting house, a business he quickly ran into the ground after his father’s death.) Koch, by ceaselessly recounting these details, as well as his own family background in brewing, crafted what Geary called, not without admiration, “a mythology.” It worked. The media repeated it; consumers took to it; it ballasted a brand that went in a few years from experimental bottles on ice in Koch’s briefcase and Rhonda Kallman’s oversized Lancôme bag to the biggest small-time beer ever. How could you argue with so much Americana, from the patriot on the label to the imagined brewers in their overalls boiling amber waves of grain and one man’s devotion to honoring his familial calling at the expense of a cushy job in a big skyscraper?