by Tom Acitelli
King’s eventual successor at the BAA,* chosen in a search led by association chairman Rich Doyle of the Mass. Bay Brewing Company, was, on the other hand, steeped in craft beer: Daniel Bradford, Charlie Papazian’s right-hand man in starting the Association of Brewers and its Great American Beer Festival nearly twenty years prior. The AB and the BAA had complemented each other now for that long, with the latter throwing its muscle into lobbying and other political activities and the former now industry famous for its festivals and conferences. With Bradford helming one and Papazian the other, the two appeared headed toward a merger as the new century dawned. They would need the firepower. Some were calling the shakeout just the beginning of the end. “At the end of the day, five or six big microbrewers will survive, in my view,” Vijay Mallya told a reporter. “The rest of them will be the brewpubs. Everybody in between, according to my view, is going to go. They’ll either get bought, or they’ll have to close down, or they’ll have to merge; they’ll have to do something. They cannot stay where they are.”
*Gary Galanis served in the position for a year before moving on to a job with Guinness.
“MCDONALD’S VERSUS FINE FOOD”
Manhattan | 2000
There had been 1,127 entries from 370 breweries in thirty-seven countries. The Japanese had fared particularly well, tying the vaunted Germans with 8 percent of the medals at the 2000 World Beer Cup, despite until recently having a beer culture as homogeneous as America’s before 1980. American breweries and brewpubs accounted for 63 percent of the entries and swept two-thirds of the medals. The biennial World Beer Cup was a de facto brewing Olympics started by Charlie Papazian’s Association of Brewers in 1996 in Vail, Colorado. It had grown to become arguably the most prestigious beer awards in the world, not least because the United States was now recognized as the undisputed comer in brewing, shakeout or not.
The AB arranged a panel after the awards ceremony at the Marriot Marquis in Manhattan’s Times Square. Michael Jackson, the redoubtable critic from Yorkshire, and Carlo Petrini, the founder of Slow Food from northern Italy, spoke of American craft beer as an unstoppable thing, a part of the brewing marketplace ipso facto. “Mass marketing is a declining dinosaur,” Jackson told the audience. It must have been an odd yet reassuring pronouncement to hear, given the rollback in craft beer growth and market share the last few years. “The natural dynamic is to drink less, but drink better,” Jackson continued. “There are no longer masses of workers exiting steel factories in Pennsylvania and coal mines in northern England, ready to wash away the day’s work with cases of Pabst Blue Ribbon and the like. Most workers sit at computer screens. They still get thirsty, but not for Pabst Blue Ribbon. They want something better-tasting.”
Jackson was right about the shift in the American workforce. The cliff that America’s manufacturing sector had been barreling toward for decades finally showed itself in 2000. The total number of manufacturing jobs in the United States began a decadelong slide from more than seventeen million to fewer than twelve million; by the start of the new century, there would be, for the first time since records were kept, more white-collar workers than blue-collar, though there were fewer of these as well, fewer of the workers sitting behind the computer screens. The tech bubble on Wall Street had burst in spectacular fashion, and unemployment was creeping upward as the nation’s economy sank into recession. The go-go 1990s were over; other industries were joining craft beer in the doldrums. How long might the doldrums last? Petrini pointed to something. It was idealistic, a throwback—but then, he had started a movement that reveled in the ideas of preindustrial consumption. “Craft beer is not a niche,” Petrini explained. “It is fulfilled by people. Small production requires culture, and the culture of beer is to know the difference.” Did people know the difference? Yes and no. “For most people, there is not a difference in beer. In some countries, there is only one type of beer and many people know only this type. Others are looking for a better-tasting product, and the two can’t get along.”
And the people wanting the better-tasting product won’t know what they’ve lost until it’s gone, according to Steve Hindy, the Brooklyn Brewery cofounder who was one of two Americans on the panel (Papazian was the other). The craft brewery closings the last few years had left a void in the “beer culture,” something a nation didn’t necessarily get back once it was lost. “The culture of beer will be lost,” Papazian warned, “unless the masses understand that it is a cultural item.” Jackson pointed to the consolidation that we’ve seen in the brewing industry of his home country; the genuine culture of the British pub, the subject of Jackson’s first book a quarter-century ago, was in danger of disappearing. “It’s equal to McDonald’s versus fine food, or generic Chablis versus fine wine,” he said. “Beer culture is a part of the world of food and drink. It’s not just a commodity in cans and bottles, but has value as an agricultural product with good ingredients.” Alas, it might prove impossible to get people to think of it that way, especially American consumers who absorbed the Big Beer assault of the 1990s and didn’t quite trust what the newer brands said on their labels. Jackson, whose oeuvre was the Rosetta Stone for whatever beer culture there was or could be, sighed at the challenge. “I still see people buying and swilling terrible beer. I sometimes think that my job is like farting against a gale, but I just keep moving forward.”
CRAFT BEER LOGS ON
Boston; San Francisco; Atlanta | 1999-2001
On February 9, 1999, the three-year-old website BrewGuide.com published this:
Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.
Chico, California
Known for using insane amounts of hops with all of their brews. Definitely West-Coast style, and catering to the hop-heads of the world. Porter
Category: Porter
Presentation: 12oz brown twist. Standard SN label with a sky blue label. No freshness date.
Appearance: Rich dark brown (true Porter colour) with tan, creamy head.
Smell: Earthy malt aromas with some aromatic hop presence.
Taste: Upfront there’s a semi-acidic twang (black malt) with a citrusy hop flavour, followed by some malt sweetness and a dry/ burnt aftertaste.
Notes: An excellent West-Coast interpretation of a Porter.
We can glean a lot from this ninety-seven-word review about the state of what Michael Jackson, Steve Hindy, Charlie Papazian, and other pioneers were calling “beer culture.” First, its medium: BrewGuide.com was the product of two brothers, Todd and Jason Alstrom, who grew up in and around Springfield, Massachusetts, and got into craft beer in the late 1980s through Boston Beer and Pete’s Brewing brands. They tried their hand at homebrewing—an early attempt involved pounds of sugar for a brown ale that clocked in at more than 14 percent alcohol by volume—and both partook freely of European lagers and ales during the years Todd was stationed by the Air Force in England (Jason visited as often as he could—he wasn’t underage there). When Todd returned to the States in 1995, the American craft beer movement was hopping, as we’ve seen, with more brands and styles than he could have dreamed of in his salad days. To help make sense of the new scene, Todd penned his first beer review on a napkin at the end of a dinner with his parents on August 22, 1996, in Northampton, Massachusetts. He gave 3.88 stars out of 5 to the Steel Rail Extra Pale Ale from the Berkshire Brewing Company, the western Massachusetts brewery started two years before by homebrewers Christopher Lalli and Gary Bogoff. Todd’s brother took up the habit, too, and together they launched BrewGuide.com in late 1996, using Todd’s background in code writing and web design.
It was a propitious time to be involved in both websites and craft beers. In 1989, an English programmer named Tim Berners-Lee created what he christened the World Wide Web. Launched in January 1992, it busted the Internet, for decades largely the provenance of academics and governments, wide open, its templates for the masses and global interconnectivity ready to transform how people shared information. The number of websites quickly exploded, especially a
fter Marc Andreessen, inspired by Berners-Lee, figured out in 1993 how to make uploading graphics and photos to the web easy with his browser Mosaic. BrewGuide in 1999 could have an entirely different look—graphics, including a blocky, black-and-yellow logo—and a much wider audience—anyone with access to a web browser—than the Home Brew Digest in 1989, with its pictureless, black-and-white e-mails between college students.
We can also tell from BrewGuide’s Sierra Nevada Porter review that there was now a standard way of talking about beer, whether you were a returning judge at the Great American Beer Festival or a guy on his computer just getting into something other than yellowy, mass-produced pilsner. Beer was to be evaluated, à la Michael Jackson, on its appearance, taste, and smell, even on its packaging. More than that, it was to be understood within how well it hewed to the style it claimed to be, the styles brought back to modern life by Jackson in the 1970s and further delineated for an American audience by the GABF when it adopted categorized, judge-awarded medals in 1987. A porter was an “excellent” porter only if looked, smelled, and tasted like an excellent porter. But the review also tells us that it was now understood that styles could be broken down further. It was like terroir with wine: it mattered where the beer came from, not because, as with wine, the geographic origin of the ingredients could define the taste, but because the geographic origin of the brewer could. Thus the Alstroms could type about a definite “West Coast-style … catering to the hop-heads of the world.” It was a given that the informed craft beer consumer knew what defined the West Coast style (and that there were enough American craft breweries now to make knowing the geography worthwhile).
A couple more things. The labeling battle of the previous few years between Anheuser-Busch and Boston Beer surely influenced the reference to “no freshness date.” Consumers cared because it seemed something they should care about now. And finally, the adjectives: “earthy,” “rich,” “creamy,” “citrusy,” “dry/burnt.” It was unusual when the program for the first GABF in 1982 described a beer’s aroma as “flowery.” Now such perspicacious tongue rolling was expected, even important. There were hundreds of different beers out there now, even after the shakeout—more than the United States had seen in nearly a century. They came in all sorts of different styles, some of them dormant for generations, from breweries big and small. You needed all the verbiage you could muster to explain the differences. It was surely one of the ironies of the American craft beer movement that, just as it hit its biggest challenge—the shakeout of the 1990s—more people than ever were offering their opinions on what brewers were doing wrongly or rightly.
The watershed for craft beer online, however, was less editorial page and more news section. RealBeer.com was launched in 1994 by Mark Silva, who first encountered the web while working at an advertising and marketing firm. By the winter of 1995, he and his wife, Darci, a television producer, had quit their day jobs and hit the road in service of research for RealBeer.com; physical visits and phone calls were the norm, after all, not only in the pre-web age but through its infancy. Credit cards maxed, a bit worse for wear some days, the couple trolled around the country in a ten-thousand-pound, thirty-four-foot trailer, with $20,000 worth of computer equipment and America’s better trailer parks for temporary addresses, visiting breweries and brewpubs and snapping thousands of photos. After two years on the road, Mark Silva set up shop in San Francisco, California, with Pat Hagerman as a business partner and the site’s president (Hagerman’s brother had introduced him to RealBeer years earlier after seeing it on a brewery tour).
The pair set about growing it as a one-stop shop: “Everything you could ever want to know about craft beer can be found here, and more!” For the web at the time, RealBeer was remarkable aesthetically, crisply organized, and easy to navigate, with inviting graphics and idiot-proof engines for searching for breweries or for factoids through what it called the “Library.” You could click through to the musings of beer writers and critics, including newer names like Gregg Glaser and Will Anderson. Crucially for the site’s business model, there were also ways to connect quickly and easily with various beer-related products: sign up for a ten-week brewing apprenticeship from the American Brewers Guild, the training school cofounded by UC-Davis’s Michael Lewis in 1994; buy a CD-ROM of Michael Jackson’s series The Beer Hunter; or send a gift subscription to newer publications like Brew Your Own magazine and Southern Draft Brew News. You could even take a year-by-year virtual tour of the Great American Beer Festival; distant were the days of hearing about it secondhand from a snail-mailed homebrewing club newsletter or print publication. If only for its exhaustive list of craft breweries and how to find them, Silva and Hagerman’s RealBeer was the most important informational advance of the craft beer movement since those first newsletters from the likes of the Maltose Falcons.
Print was not dead yet, though. Two brothers-in-law who liked to homebrew, Tony Forder and Jack Babin, mocked up a four-page dummy of a beer newspaper in Forder’s northern New Jersey attic; Forder, who had a background in reporting and editing, and Babin, whose experience was in sales and marketing, pitched it to brewers at a beer festival in Boston in 1992. A proper, twenty-four-page inaugural edition of what they called Ale Street News dropped that summer; the paper would grow to be the nation’s largest-circulation beer publication, with three bimonthly regional editions: New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Midwest/West. A couple of years before Forder and Babin’s mockup, Tom Dalldorf bought control of the California Celebrator, a bimonthly newspaper started by Bret and Julie Nickels out of Hayward in 1988. Dalldorf would serve as editor as well as publisher, growing what he renamed the Celebrator Beer News from thirty-two newsprint pages to an average of sixty glossy ones by 2000, after peaking at eighty during the craft beer boom, and expanding its coverage nationally and internationally.
Dalldorf, a blues musician with a wry sense of humor, also set himself up as a sort of sidekick for Michael Jackson. The pair set out in 1995 on the “Iron Liver Tour,” a two-week jaunt to every craft brewery and brewpub then in California; the same year saw the debut of the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit parody showing brewers wearing trunks and boots in their brew-houses. (These newer publications could have unintended consequences. One of Dalldorf’s writers, Nico Freccia, founded the 21st Amendment brewpub in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood in 2000, with Shaun O’Sullivan, an assistant brewer at the Triple Rock Brewery in Berkeley, California. John Hickenlooper had had his craft beer epiphany there a decade before; the two met in a UC-Davis brewing course.)
Both Ale Street News and the Celebrator Beer News would establish online presences, but the web push started with RealBeer and the BrewGuide (which changed its name to BeerAdvocate in 2000), plus a third competitor. Bill Buchanan started RateBeer out of Atlanta in May 2000 to provide “a forum for beer lovers to come together and share their opinions of beer and breweries.” Overwhelmed by the user traffic, Buchanan quickly turned the operation over to Joe Tucker, who had helped redesign the site that first year. A UC-San Diego graduate who spent much of the dot-com boom of the 1990s in Silicon Valley, including a stint as a computer-game developer, Tucker set RateBeer on a strict course of user-generated reviews. Anyone could log on and opine; the volume of negative or positive reviews that a particular brewery or beer got decided its rankings. As Tucker saw it, it was a democratization for beer that gelled with the ethos of the industry, where the traditional marketing favored by Big Beer was avoided, even mocked. The sober assessments of RateBeer’s reviewers were more akin to Jim Koch’s radio spots about barley, hops, and the Reinheitsgebot than Rodney Dangerfield’s commercials for Miller. For instance, Anchor Steam, the oldest brand in the movement, would be reviewed forty times by different consumers by late April 2001, drawing a score of 3.71 stars out of 5 and assessments like this: “Banana notes in the aroma. Flavor is mainly dry with a refreshing bitter finish. A good beer for the warm season.”
BeerAdvocate and RateBeer both quickl
y grew to include tens of thousands of reviews of thousands of beers and breweries. Their success inspired the formats and inclusive styles of dozens of imitators, especially web forums for homebrewing clubs that might have before taken the form of an e-mail listserv in the style of the Home Brew Digest. It was like nothing the brewing industry, whatever the sector, had ever seen: the masses weighing in, and frequently. Sometimes that led to legal threats over bad reviews, and both sites struggled at first to draw advertising (print publications like Ale Street News and the Celebrator Beer News, both free to readers, had a relatively easier time of it, as the medium was much better understood by advertisers). But once the floodgates of consumer beer reviews had been opened, it was impossible to dam them. Ironically enough, both websites would father print arms, including compendiums of their reviews and, in the case of BeerAdvocate, a glossy magazine.
Many of the consumer-reviewers were homebrewers—many more, in fact, than there might have been at any point in American history. Homebrewing was by 2000 legal in every state except Alabama, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Utah. There were at least seventeen hundred homebrewing clubs throughout the forty-four states where it was legal (and, though we can’t be certain, surely some in the half-dozen holdouts). Some states, California and other Western redoubts in particular, had such active homebrewing scenes that they spawned their own large-scale homebrewing competitions and web-based networks. Nationally, the inaugural National Homebrew Competition, the brainchild of Charlie Papazian and Charlie Matzen, had drawn thirty-four entries in 1979; the number had swelled nearly eightyfold by 2000, with more than three thousand judges evaluating 2,668 homebrews in twenty-eight categories. The competition was so big that preliminary rounds now preceded the final national verdicts.