The Audacity of Hops

by Tom Acitelli

  If Oliver’s words sounded like Folco Portinari’s 1990 Slow Food manifesto, it was no accident. By 2003, Oliver was very familiar with that tract, which saw the understanding and resultant appreciation for good food and drink as essential for the “slow, long-lasting enjoyment” of life. He had learned about the Slow Food movement in the late 1990s from a flier about its biannual trade show in Turin, Italy, called Salone del Gusto, and wrote movement cofounder Carlo Petrini directly, asking how he could get involved. Petrini wrote back that the next Slow Food event was a cheese festival in Bra, a town in northern Italy’s wine country.* Why didn’t Oliver come up with something for that? The brewmaster then connected with Rob Kaufelt, and the two flew to Italy on different flights, each with a suitcase full of cheese should one or the other get stopped by security (Kaufelt did, though he and his cheese still made it). The Americans were a hit in Turin.

  From there, Slow Food asked Oliver to get involved in setting up the movement in the United States, which became Slow Food USA in 2000, the same year Petrini declared from Midtown Manhattan that American craft beer was the purest expression of Slow Food’s principles; Oliver found himself on its board and later on the board of the entire international body. Oliver’s partner at the Brooklyn Brewery, Steve Hindy, had also been involved in Slow Food early on, serving as a judge for its 2002 international awards, which included traveling to Bologna, Italy, to help present the top award to a beekeeper from rural Turkey. After that, Hindy went to his first Salone del Gusto in Turin and was pleased to find “an astounding gathering of artisan food producers—tiny producers of traditional cheeses, game, vegetables, fruits, breads, wines, beers, liquors, oils, vinegars, and all manner of prepared foods. It was nourishing just being in the presence of so many like-minded people.”

  Salone del Gusto in Turin, Italy, the biennial trade show for Slow Food. This one in 2000 marked the second attended by American craft brewers. COURTESY OF SLOW FOOD INTERNATIONAL

  Two years before, Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head had attended Salone del Gusto as a panelist, the happy convergence of travel funds from the state of Delaware as well as an interest by the movement in his and other American craft beer (the Association of Brewers helped defray the shipping costs of craft beers). Calagione, like Hindy, was pleasantly surprised by what he found in Slow Food. With its rebellion against fast food in all its iterations and effects, Slow Food, Calagione saw, was “exactly in step with what we were revolting against at Dogfish—which was bland, industrialized, monochromatic beer.” The Association of Brewers had been sending representatives to Salone del Gusto since the second one in 1998; Charlie Papazian, in fact, stepped in then to lead a Belgian beer tasting when Michael Jackson’s Alitalia flight was delayed, and Papazian later lectured on artisanal brewing. By the 2004 Salone del Gusto, American craft brewers. who made it to Turin, usually through the Association of Brewers, were being treated like rock stars by their Italian hosts, peppered with compliments and questions.

  Along with the Slow Food movement, Oliver’s book reflected Jackson’s work—every beer writer’s effort did, really—and The Brewmaster’s Table could be read as an American update on The World Guide to Beer.* Oliver wrote lovingly detailed descriptions of the various European beer styles, country by country, often interwoven with his own first encounters with them. Of course, he also gave a thorough tutorial on how to pair food with beer, and he did so in a conversational, almost conspiratorial tone no one had effected before at book length. Here was Oliver writing about pairing beer with after-dinner food, like sweets:

  Quit chuckling and listen up, because I’ve got a secret for you—beer is brilliant with dessert. In fact it’s unbeatable. I once hosted a beer luncheon attended by New York’s top sommeliers…. As dessert was served, I issued a challenge—that none of the guests could think of a single wine that could match these desserts as well as either of the beers I was serving…. My challenge was a bit unfair—wine never stood a chance. I served my own Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout, an Imperial stout with a huge complex dark chocolate and coffee flavor, and Lindemans framboise, a sweet Belgian lambic fermented with outrageously fragrant raspberries…. The sommeliers conceded my challenge, and they hadn’t even tasted my vanilla ice cream and chocolate stout float.

  There was also a fair amount of sprightly contempt for Big Beer throughout the book. In a section about proper storage and glassware (and years before the craze of young-adult books and movies about vampires!), Oliver wrote:

  Some American mass-market brewers do use clear glass bottles. They avoid the “skunking” problem by avoiding hops altogether; instead, they use chemically altered hop extracts that won’t react with light. How very appetizing. Somehow, this reminds me of Dracula, and the idea that you can’t see him in a mirror. The undead have many tricks at their disposal, so beware.

  Again, though, it was Oliver’s holistic approach to beer that would prove so influential, that would put an exclamation point on years of trying to convey to consumers a wider appreciation of craft beer. If Jackson’s writings put a craft beer bottle in someone’s hands, Oliver’s put that bottle next to a plate. So many would cite The Brewmasters Table as influential in their thinking of craft beer’s place in not only what they ate but often their daily lives as well. Charlie Papazian called it “a masterpiece.” Critics spoke of it in the same breath as Jackson’s World Guide. Mario Batali, the celebrity chef and restaurateur, wrote that the book whetted his formidable appetite “for more than ale and beer, but also for the whole lusty experience of true satisfaction at the table.” People just seemed to get it. As Oliver fervently noted, “Real beer can do everything. Mexican, Thai, Japanese, Indian, Cajun, and Middle-Eastern food, and barbecue, are far better with real beer than with wine. Even with traditionally wine-friendly foods, beer often shows superior versatility and flavor compatibility. The range of flavors and aromas in beer is vast—it’s deep and wide and tall, and it easily surpasses that of wine.”

  These were observations Jackson had been trying to get across for what seemed like ages—his “farting against a gale,” as he’d put it three years earlier. Now here they were spelled out with gusto and confidence by an American working in what had become, and what had survived to remain, the world’s most robust beer culture. No one could argue with Oliver: “The heady mix of a newly vibrant food culture, the wide availability of imported classic beers, and the emergence of excellent American craft brewing have made the United States the most exciting place in the world to enjoy the juice of the barley.”

  This success, tested it as it was by the shakeout, was a big reason for what became of the Association of Brewers and the Brewers Association of America: After a two-day meeting in October 2004 at the Boulder headquarters of the Association of Brewers, the two bodies announced a merger set for early January. It had been a long time coming. The BAA had been a formidable force in the entire American beer industry since its original efforts during World War II to ensure that brewers got their fair shares of coveted material, including tin and barley. It had then served as the main trade voice in lobbying the government through the ups and many downs of its members, which for decades included the majority of American brewers; of the twenty-eight breweries from thirteen states represented at what would be considered the BAA’s first meeting in May of 1942, only two were left by the late 1990s—and they were under different owners. Still, as the industry consolidated, regional breweries relied on the BAA more than ever, as did many of what became the regional craft breweries; and after he was picked as its president in 1999, Daniel Bradford, the first employee of the AB way back in the early 1980s, restored a sizable portion of the BAA’s oomph. But it was just Bradford and one other employee, and annual revenues of $395,000 versus the AB’s $2.6 million in revenues and twenty-three employees led by Charlie Papazian, Bradford’s old mentor. Plus, the AB had created a juggernaut in its Great American Beer Festival, which was now the world’s biggest beer festival outside of Europe; the biannual World Be
er Cup; the conferences and competitions of the American Homebrewers Association (which itself huddled under the AB’s umbrella); Zymurgy and New Brewer magazines as well as an emerging web presence; the Craft Brewers Conference, which seemed to happen at every major recent pivot in the industry; and a book-publishing arm drawing some of the top critics of the day. In addition, due largely to its in-house research institute, the AB was the eminently quotable source on so many statistics and trends in not only craft beer but also the wider American industry; a newspaper or magazine reader of the early 2000s might be forgiven for thinking the craft beer movement and the Association of Brewers were one and the same. As with American interpretations of European styles and Jackson to Oliver, this was another torch-passing moment that spoke to the strength of the movement.

  Besides, many of the nation’s most prominent craft brewers wanted a merger. The board selected to oversee the merger, culled largely from the boards of both associations, read like a Who’s Who of the past thirty years in American beer: Jim Koch of Boston Beer; Gary Fish of Deschutes; Steve Hindy of the Brooklyn Brewery; Kim Jordan of New Belgium; Ken Grossman of Sierra Nevada; Rich Doyle of Harpoon; Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head; Nick Matt of F. X. Matt; Brock Wagner of Saint Arnold; and the beer writer Randy Mosher, representing the homebrewers association. It just did not make sense anymore to have two organizations working toward the same goals, especially if the strengths of each could augment the other under the same letterhead. The BAA, especially under Bradford, had lobbying acumen; the AB, under Papazian, was the undisputed face of all non-Big Beer in America.

  Nerves frayed during the more than eighteen months it took to plan and execute the merger, but everyone was all smiles as it went through in January 2005, with Papazian as the first president of what was dubbed the Brewers Association (BA) and Bradford returning full-time to All About Beer magazine and its annual World Beer Festival, which Bradford and Julie Johnson launched in 1995 and now took place in cities around the South. (The Brewers Association would launch yet another festival three years after the merger called SAVOR, a sort of mini-Salone del Gusto, celebrating craft beer’s role with food and held in Washington, DC.) One effect of the merger came in a long-sought definition of just what a craft brewer was in America. The BA’s board, chaired first by Kim Jordan, voted in the fall of 2005 to define an American craft brewer as:

  Small: Annual production of 2 million barrels or less.

  Independent: Less than 25 percent of the craft brewery is owned or controlled (or equivalent economic interest) by an alcoholic beverage industry member who is not themselves a craft brewer.

  Traditional: A brewer who has either an all-malt flagship (the beer which represents the greatest volume among that brewer’s brands) or has at least 50 percent of its volume in either all-malt beers or in beers which use adjuncts to enhance rather than lighten flavor.

  The annual barrelage amount was based on the tax exemption dating from 1976, but the rest of it could have read like a checklist from Fritz Maytag’s earliest days with Anchor Brewing. Though no one at the Brewers Association actually attributed the definition to Maytag (and he was not on the board that approved it), the connection was unmistakable: His actions beginning forty years before regarding what went into Anchor Steam and how it was brewed set the tone for the industry that grew up afterward.

  *Bra is also Petrini’s hometown and Slow Food’s international headquarters.

  *Michael Jackson’s influence on Slow Food was acute. He wrote so much and so well for its magazine, Slow, that in the autumn of 2007 his work was translated into Italian and published as a book, Storie nel bicchiere (Stories in the Glass).

  A GREAT PASSING

  London | 2007

  On Tuesday, August 7, 2007, a typically partly cloudy summer day in the British capital, the Belchertown, Massachusetts-based beer importer Daniel Shelton rode the Tube from where he was staying to the west London home of Michael Jackson. He planned to interview Jackson on camera not so much about beer but “about him, his life and work, and what it was like for him now, living with Parkinson’s disease.”

  Jackson had suffered from the ailment for more than a decade, but only intimates were aware. He had kept it largely secret, though he was concerned that he had started to skirt what to him was an uncomfortable line of suspicion: the disease’s symptoms, including tremors and slowness of movement, might make his wider audience think he was drunk. The situation came to a head when Jackson blacked out at the Denver airport around the time of the Great American Beer Festival in 2006. He wrote about the experience for Daniel Bradford and Julie Johnson’s All About Beer in a column published in August 2007, titled “Did I Cheat Mort Subite?” (It was a play on the meaning of the last two words: “sudden death” in French as well as the name of a famed Belgian beer.) The first half of the column showed Jackson hard at his typical globe-trotting evangelization over the preceding year, his sixty-five years not seeming to slow him. He went on a trip to Turkey, two to Poland, and one long one to Italy to promote the new anthology of his writing about Slow Food (“to whom I was originally introduced by Charlie Papazian”), and he had plans for a fifth edition of his seminal guide to great Belgian beers. Then Denver, where his collapse had people concerned that his “profession had taken its most obvious toll”—that Jackson was drinking too much.

  I was not. I hadn’t had an alcoholic drink that day or the day before…. When I woke up, I was in a hospital bed. It was just like it is in the movies. I was surrounded by people in white coats, one of whom asked me: “What is your name?” When I replied, “Michael Jackson,” there was none of the usual sniggering. People in Denver know who Michael Jackson is. Nonetheless, he asked again…. “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince.” He looked at another of the white coats whom I later came to know as a neurologist. “I guess he’s OK,” he said.

  Then, addressing himself to me, he asked whether I was hungry, and what I fancied to eat. I suggested a large mimosa and a Denver omelet, though I think something less extravagant was eventually provided.

  It was vintage Jackson: witty, conversational, aware, specific, and appreciative in its culinary allusions. It would be the last column he ever wrote. Jackson died of a heart attack on August 30, 2007. The dialogue with Daniel Shelton, too, turned out to be the last on-camera interview he ever gave. It would have been just as affecting an experience without the mortal hindsight. Jackson, though frail and haggard looking, was typically gracious, inviting Shelton and a friend into his cluttered office, fortressed with stacks of papers and books. Its walls were plastered with plaques and awards, its shelves with rows of rare bottles. A big suitcase sat by the front door, as if ready at a moment’s notice for another trek. The only nod to real modernity was an opened laptop behind his desk.

  Jackson talked of the Belgian bus trip in the late 1960s that “changed my life…. I knew nothing about Belgium.” He talked of pitching his newspaper editor at age sixteen a series called “This Is Your Pub.” “So you’re asking me to finance you on a lawbreaking escapade?” the editor said to the underage cub reporter. “Yes.” The editor replied, “I like your style. Those are the kinds of reporters we want.” And of those first forays into writing about beer, confronting the drag of novelty with each early pitch, then discovering the satisfaction of having set the parameters all others operate within: “I write the way I write, and, at this point, people can take it or leave it.” The interview ended at a pub, where Jackson told Shelton he planned to write a book called I Am Not Drunk, to dispel any doubt about his Parkinson’s. The two made plans to meet again.

  Jackson’s death loosed a torrent of tributes across the pond. His was the biggest passing yet in the American craft beer movement, and recollections started rolling in almost immediately to craft beer websites and print publications, from those long established in the movement to those who might not have even been alive when The World Guide to Beer debuted in 1977. A healthy portion of the tributes were seasoned with recollections o
f having met the critic—in the restroom at a festival, at the airport, in a pub (seemingly a sort of accidental Everest for any American beer geek), during a dinner where Jackson was the star lecturer—and always of coming away with a sense of his warmth and generosity. A September 14 memorial service in London drew Americans like Garrett Oliver and Steve Hindy of the Brooklyn Brewery; Tom Peters of Monk’s Cafe, the Philadelphia pub that had hosted lectures by Jackson; Dave Alexander of Washington’s Brickskeller; Charlie Papazian; Daniel Bradford; and importers Charles and Rose Ann Finkel.

  A national toast was quickly organized for September 30 to honor Jackson and to raise money for the National Parkinson’s Foundation. Tom Dalldorf, publisher of Celebrator News and Jackson’s companion on their 1995 “Iron Liver Tour” of California breweries, led the toast at the Toronado, a San Francisco bar barely two miles from the original Anchor location where Fritz Maytag kicked off the movement Jackson was so instrumental in boosting. Dall-dorf spoke of how Jackson’s boosterism for the American movement annoyed his fellow Englishmen: “‘Michael, why don’t you ever write about English beers?’ And he said, ‘Because what they’re doing in America is so much more interesting.’” As for Maytag himself, he would say of the critic, “I think Michael Jackson did more for the brewing industry than anybody since Louis Pasteur.”

  BEER, PREMIUM

  Durango, CO; New Orleans | 2006-2008