The Audacity of Hops

by Tom Acitelli

  While Firestone Walker would expand twice within six years, eventually relocating farther north to Paso Robles, California, the Benzingers and Korbel would turn back to wine full-time in the same period. The former simply converted its brewing equipment to wine making. In Korbel’s case, however, there was a handoff: The winemaker in 2002 sold its Russian River brand to Cilurzo and his wife, Natalie. The couple, along with partners Jerry Warner and Jim Muto, reopened Russian River as a seven-thousand-square-foot brewpub in downtown Santa Rosa, California, in April 2004 after investing $750,000 in startup costs, including $75,000 for old brewing equipment from a defunct North Carolina operation. The reborn Russian River, like the old Korbel-controlled brand, produced fifteen hundred barrels annually at first but grew its production to slake demand, especially for its Pliny the Elder, a double IPA named after the Roman naturalist that won the gold medal for Imperial or Double India Pale Ale at both the 2005 and 2006 GABF. (Pizza Port had captured it again in 2004, the category’s second year; through 2011, with one exception, California breweries won every gold and silver medal in the category—West Coast style, indeed.)*

  The Cilurzos were part of what we might call the craft beer movement’s fourth wave. It was one of relative youngsters—the Cilurzos and Jeremy Cowan were barely into their thirties by the new century—not really old enough to have known an American beer scene without Samuel Adams or Sierra Nevada, without sincerely earnest debates over style at BeerAdvocate or RateBeer. Despite their ages, it was also a wave populated by those tested, sometimes even broken, by the shakeout of the late 1990s. They were, then, cognizant of being part of a wave, of something that might either continue to crest or to crash messily. They often proceeded accordingly, this new batch of craft brewers, keeping their distribution close to home and their eyes on innovation. This innovation might come through different styles, or it might simply come through geography: the movement, now at least a generation old on the West Coast and getting there on the East, could still seem like the latest thing in the middle of the country.

  When the Bricktown Brewery opened in downtown Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in the fall of 1992 as the Sooner State’s first-ever brewpub, patrons would invariably ask Luke DiMichele, the UC-Davis-trained brewmaster, “You brew the beer right there?” The novelty lingered through the next decade, to when Rick and Shaneen Huebert opened the first start-up brewery in Oklahoma since voters endorsed statewide repeal in 1959, in a sixty-five-thousand-square-foot space in Oklahoma City’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. The Daily Oklahoman carefully explained the Hueberts’s eponymous operation to its readers in May 2004: “Huebert Brewery produces about 45 barrels of beer every two weeks…. The facility is capable of producing fifteen barrels at a time. Brewers use the barrel as their standard of measurement, and 330 bottles can be made from one barrel.”

  When Saint Arnold Brewing Company released a golden ale called Fancy Lawnmower in the summer of 2002, the oldest craft brewery in Texas had to explain the joke: “‘Lawnmower beer,’” according to the August 7 food section of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, “is a term used by some microbrew fanciers seeking to denigrate the watery, industrially produced, mainstream lagers that most American drinkers happen to prefer.” That such a lead would run in a Texas newspaper was a testament to the craft beer movement’s growth in what had become by 2000 the second most-populous state in the union. A lot of that craft beer growth was due to the efforts of two thoroughly disgruntled investment bankers in Houston, Brock Wagner and Kevin Bartol, who chucked their day jobs to open Saint Arnold in the summer of 1994, near the Hempstead Highway in Houston. They put in half a million of their own money and raised $400,000 more, visiting most of the craft breweries then in existence (this was right before the boom), soliciting advice, and knowing full well the Lone Star State was the land of actual watery lawnmower beers, not craft ones.

  Texas may have had nearly sixty breweries in the decade after the Civil War, but then it underwent its own miniwave of consolidation as Big Beer precursors like the early Anheuser-Busch barged in and the number of breweries sank to the single-digits before 1900; after a post-World War II spike, the number stayed that way, with six breweries in operation in Texas by the early 1980s. Most of these were owned by outside forces, including Anheuser-Busch’s 126-acre Houston plant, which could produce 3.2 million barrels annually, and Miller’s in Fort Worth, which could produce more than twice as much. Even the locally beloved Lone Star brand was owned by G. Heileman out of La Crosse, Wisconsin. The original reception, then, for Saint Arnold in 1994 ranged from incredulity to ignorance, with Wagner and Bartol, homebrewers since their days at Rice University, pressing on through guerilla marketing and a radio ad a few years in that Wagner estimated boosted sales roughly 0.0001 percent.

  Lost in all the consolidation was the steady fact that Texans liked to drink beer: about thirty gallons per Texan per year in the 1980s and 1990s. Eventually, Saint Arnold tapped into this thirst, thanks in part to favorable media coverage and word of mouth, as well as Houston’s own population growth via newcomers from elsewhere (the city in the 1980s surpassed Philadelphia as the nation’s fourth-largest). The brewery, which resolutely stuck to Texas in its distribution, was pushing the production limits of its original location, closing in on ten thousand barrels annually. Wagner, who bought out Bartol and other investors in 1998, found himself happily planning for an expansion in a new Houston location.

  On March 19, 2005, Don Alan Hankins, the founder and brewmaster of Olde Towne Brewing Company, was on hand at the Costco in the Birmingham suburb of Hoover to explain his amber ale to fellow Alabamans. He and assistant brewer Darren Evans-Young even had some literature on it. Alabama was part of a handful of states that still had anachronistic, even punitive, restrictions on beer, whether prohibiting homebrewing, capping alcohol content, or limiting the sizes of bottles to no more than a pint—in Alabama’s case all three. Hankins’s Olde Towne sold its beers in twelve-ounce bottles by the case. The day at the Hoover Costco was particularly productive: the store moved thirty-one cases of Olde Towne Amber. Hankins was especially pleased that more than twenty cases went to people who had never heard of his year-old operation, the Yellowhammer State’s oldest craft brewery.

  Around the time of Hankins’s good day at Costco, forty-four hundred miles away Garrett Marrero was filing with Hawaii to open a small brewpub in Lahaina on the island of Maui. Opened later that year with wife Melanie Oxley, the Maui Brewing Company was locavore all the way in its production and ingredients, a rare enough combination still in the craft beer movement and unheard of at that point beyond the contiguous forty-eight states. Hawaii’s biggest brewery, the Kona Brewing Company founded by Cameron Healy and Spoon Khalsa in 1994, and now run and co-owned by Mattson Davis, had been brewing on the mainland since 1998 as well as on the Big Island, becoming one of the ten largest craft breweries in the country; like Sierra Nevada and New Belgium, Kona’s growth never really slowed during the shakeout. Marrero, a longtime homebrewer and former investment consultant who split from San Francisco to the islands after a trip to Maui in 2001, and Oxley strove to brew all their beer in Hawaii with only Hawaiian-raised ingredients (even the packaging was local) and seemed to rarely miss an opportunity to remind consumers of that. Given its location and its owners’ fervency, Maui Brewing pushed the locavore envelope in American craft beer farther than it had ever been pushed.

  *The GABF in 2009 renamed the category “Imperial India Pale Ale” The only exception was also a West Coast brewery: Hopworks Urban Brewery of Portland, Oregon, which won the 2009 gold.

  CRUSHING IT

  Lyons, CO | 2002

  Along with geography and style, innovation in American craft beer now came through packaging. By this we mean not necessarily the garrulous labels of the likes of Tony Magee’s Lagunitas or Sam Calagione’s Dogfish Head, though those were increasingly the norm in the movement: bright, bibulous vignettes trying to make sense for consumers of increasingly boundary-pushing beers. Inst
ead, we mean the actual physical contraptions for storing craft beer: namely, cans.

  Cans had a negative connotation in the beer culture. Cans were the purview of everyone’s paunchy uncle or dad, pounding Big Beer brands by the case during yard work or while watching the big game in the Barcalounger, anachronistic throwbacks to every cheesy commercial that ended with a burly, hairy hand plucking a sweaty beer can out of a buddy’s cooler or, better yet, from a crisp mountain stream. Bottles, on the other hand, evoked a certain romance, inviting comparisons to fine wine, which was always bottled (only the cheap hooch was boxed) and conjuring images of dusty old-world brands on worn wooden shelves in dusky Belgian monasteries and English pubs (though both institutions were farther away now than ever from small-batch brewing).

  Beyond the perception, craft beer consumers and brewers had concerns about the potential seepage of metals into canned beer, ruining the flavor, even causing health hazards. Never mind that technological advances since the Newark, New Jersey-based brewer Gottfried Krueger introduced the first tin beer cans in January 1935 had largely eliminated this threat. Still, cans just seemed … off. Besides, with prices starting at around $250,000, canning machines were another big capital investment most craft brewers simply couldn’t make.

  Enter again, in our tale, the Great White North. In 1999, Calgary, Alberta-based equipment manufacturer Cask Brewing Systems introduced a manual canning machine that could can two twelve-ounce beers at a time and that was small enough to fit on a tabletop. The machine was originally targeted to brew-on-premises retailers, though the American shakeout might be called the true mother of this invention. As the brew-on-premises trend fizzled in both Canada and the United States, Cask Brewing Systems shifted its focus to American craft breweries. The company knew that many needed to up sales to survive but might be wary of any more big capital investments anytime soon; at no more than $10,000 a pop, the manual canner could cut through the price anxiety. After all, a small operation in Canada’s Yukon Territory had become, in 2001, the first craft brewery in North America to can its beer using the manual canner.

  American craft brewers proved more skeptical. Cask Brewing Systems reps pitched the machine at the 2002 Craft Brewers Conference in Cleveland and were told it was the “dumbest idea” and that “nobody will put their craft beer into aluminum cans.” In the late 1990s, Jim Koch’s Boston Beer briefly allowed its cream ale sold in the United Kingdom to be canned;* Pete’s Brewing canned its Summer Brew through the Minnesota Brewing Company and then Stroh’s, both in St. Paul, in the mid-1990s; and, around the same time, the Minneapolis-based James Page Brewing Company, which the founder sold in 1995, canned some of its beer under contract at August Schell in nearby New Ulm. Otherwise, any hopes of canning American craft beer seemed perpetually crushed.

  Then a brewpub twenty miles north of Boulder bought one of Cask Brewing Systems’s manual canners and in true Colorado fashion (given the goat-shed birthplace of the Boulder Brewing Company in 1979) got to work with it in an old nearby barn. Dale Katechis had gotten into craft beer in the late 1980s while a student at Auburn University after getting a homebrewing kit for Christmas. In the craft beer desert that was Alabama and much of the South, he stood out, known for making hoppy homebrews and driving two hours northeastward to Atlanta to stock up on Pete’s Wicked Ale. After earning a finance degree, Katechis left for Colorado, worked at a backpack manufacturer, and bartended on the side before opening his Oskar Blues Cajun Grill in Lyons (population 1,400) in 1997. At the urging of a new business partner, he added the brewery component two years later. A recipe born in Katech-is’s college bathtub, Dale’s Pale Ale, became the brewpub’s flagship; that and other recipes proved popular enough that pretty soon Katechis was looking at packaging options. A bottling line, even used, might cost in the low six figures; same for a canning line. Both would take up precious space. The manual canner from Cask Brewing Systems was the breakthrough. Katechis’s canning of Dale’s Pale Ale in six-packs, beginning in the old barn in the fall of 2002, rocked the craft beer movement—after the laughter died down. Katechis and brewmaster Brian Lutz found themselves in an explanatory slog.

  The critics: Why can?

  Katechis: We like pushing the envelope and stretching the boundaries. We like hearing about something that can’t or shouldn’t be done and then doing it. That’s what craft brewing is supposed to be about.

  Was it better than bottles?

  Katechis: Unlike bottles, cans eliminate the risk of light damage and oxidation to our beer.

  Lutz: Cans are far more environmentally friendly than bottles, they’re much easier to recycle. They also make it easier for outdoor enthusiasts to take great beer into the back country, in the canoe, the ski pack, anywhere they want to.

  Dale’s Pale Ale. COURTESY OF OSKAR BLUES BREWERY

  OK, but what about that metallic taste? Won’t the aluminum ruin the beer? You’re getting your cans, after all, from the Ball Corporation, the biggest can manufacturer in the country, the guys who supply Coors over in Golden?

  Katechis: The cans’ glass polymer lining ensures the beer never contacts metal.

  Once craft brewers absorbed this fact, the demand for canners grew. Cask Brewing Systems eventually found itself with a backlog of orders from American craft breweries; the company developed other canner models, larger and faster ones that were still priced competitively against bottling lines (a five-at-a-time canner introduced in 2004 and also adopted by Oskar Blues cost about $45,000). Within eight years, more than one hundred craft operations would be canning beer. As for Katechis’s brewery, its production jumped from three-figure annual barrelages to twenty thousand, and its distribution wove its way out of Colorado, to both coasts and higher-end grocery chains like Whole Foods, as well as to high above the Earth: Shortly before Christmas 2002, about a dozen years after Katechis got that homebrewing kit, Oskar Blues inked a deal with Denver-based Frontier Airlines to carry Dale’s Pale Ale on all flights. It was the first time a commercial airline carried beer canned in a craft brewery;* Frontier cited the lighter-than-glass packaging as key in its decision. More than anything, the numerous plaudits that the canned Oskar Blues brands won in subsequent years, including medals from the Great American Beer Festival and glowing results from a New York Times blind taste test, put to rest any lingering doubts over canning craft beer.†

  As the number of craft breweries and brewpubs began to expand rapidly after 2002, innovations like canning, the double IPA, and the opening of operations in farther-flung corners of the nation became more and more pronounced in their influence. More innovations were coming, too. So were more big changes.

  *The brewing and canning was done under license by Whitbread from 1996 to 1999, with “modest production” (per Boston Beer Company).

  *At times in the late 1990s, Continental Airlines carried Pete’s Summer Brew, and Northwest Airlines carried James Page beers, both of which were contract canned in Minnesota.

  †Dale’s Pale Ale topped twenty-three other pale ales sampled by the tasting panel (per Eric Asimov, “Crisp, Complex and Refreshing,” New York Times, June 29, 2005).

  WITH GUSTO

  Manhattan; Boulder, CO | 2003-2005

  Shortly after the turn of the century, Garrett Oliver was at a party in Manhattan’s West Village hosted by Rob Kaufelt, the owner of New York institution Murray’s Cheese. As often happened in small talk, someone asked him what he did. He said he was the brewmaster at the Brooklyn Brewery, an intriguing job description that usually prompted follow-up questions. His interlocutor in this case was a literary agent, and the two fell into talking about books about beer. Oliver mentioned that he had wanted for a while now to write a book about beer and food. He had recently begun hosting beer dinners at the brewery in Williamsburg and elsewhere, and he had seen what he called the “aha moment” spread across hundreds of faces as they realized the potential in pairing the right beer with the right food. Imagine codifying that somehow and sharing it with a mass aud
ience. “The beer is here,” Oliver explained, “the food is here. Why aren’t people putting two and two together? I feel literally bad for people who don’t know the combination of beer and food.”

  The conversation would lead to the publication by HarperCollins in 2003 of The Brewmaster’s Table: Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer with Real Food, an effort to educate the general public about exactly what the subtitle implied: what beer went best with what foods. It was not new territory. Jack Erickson had written and published the 146-page book Great Cooking with Beer in 1989; Lucy Saunders’s 154-page Cooking with Beer: Taste-Tempting Recipes and Creative Ideas for Matching Beer & Food had come out seven years later; Candy Schermerhorn’s 86-page Great American Beer Cookbook, published in 1998, included a foreword by Michael Jackson; and there had been myriad shorter pieces within other beer books before and since, as well as extensive writing by Jackson, perhaps most prominently his 1983 piece for the Washington Post on which beers to pair with which parts of a Thanksgiving feast.

  What set Oliver’s book apart was not simply its heft (384 pages) but its holistic approach. It was not just a way to enhance the dining experience by complementing that Thai dish’s spiciness with the bitterness of an IPA; it was instead a manual on how to weave beer into one’s lifestyle, how to, as Oliver put it in the introduction, use beer to amplify the “symphony” that eating should be: “Great beer from around the world is now available everywhere, and, unlike wine, it’s an affordable luxury. You can enjoy it literally every day. Once you discover traditional beer, your ‘food life’ will be transformed into something fascinating, fun and infinitely more enjoyable.”