The Audacity of Hops

by Tom Acitelli

One evening in July 2006, Ray Daniels, Randy Mosher, and Lyn Kruger were awaiting their orders at a basement bar known for its beer selection in Durango, in southwestern Colorado. Daniels worked in the marketing and publishing wings of the Brewers Association and had written books on homebrewing; Mosher, too, had written extensively on homebrewing and was on the inaugural board of the BA; and Kruger was a trained microbiologist who was the president and COO of the Siebel Institute, the august Chicago brewing school where Mosher and Daniels also taught. Their beers arrived. One, a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, ordered precisely because it might, due to its popularity, be one of the fresher beers at the bar, looked cloudy and, worse, tasted sour and buttery—not at all the way Ken Grossman or his brewers in Chico, California, intended. The trio knew this was likely evidence of draft lines that had not been cleaned in a while. They called it to the server’s attention.

  “No,” she told them, “this was how the beer always looks and tastes.”

  Well, they replied, that is not the way the beer is supposed to look and taste.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “There’s nothing I can do.”

  They asked to speak to the manager; the manager never came. Daniels, Mosher, and Kruger paid their bill, did not tip, and left their beers on the table. They would never return to the bar.

  For Daniels, it was the last straw—and the catalyst for an idea he’d been batting around in his mind for a while: a training program for everyone standing between a brewer and his or her consumers. It would be similar to programs that certified wine sommeliers, some of which had been going since the 1950s, and would be geared precisely toward service workers such as the one in that basement bar in Durango, training people on how to store, serve, and talk smartly about beer before a consumer plunked down the money for it.

  Daniels, like many who had come to the industry in its second, third, and fourth waves, had led a bit of a roving professional life, studying biochemistry at Texas A&M, earning an MBA from Harvard, working in pharmaceutical marketing, and, then, on a business trip to Washington, DC, in the late 1980s, having a Samuel Adams Boston Lager. It changed his life. Sporting a goatee that would turn salt and pepper in the new century, with eyes that collapsed into squints behind rectangular lenses when he explained anything libationary, Daniels became the sort of lovable beer geek who insisted on proper ways to pour different beers and threw himself into homebrewing in 1989. He published a well-received book on the topic in 1996. By 1999, he was working for the Association of Brewers, commuting between Boulder and Chicago.

  Daniels suspected, then, that he had the credibility to pull off a certification program. Still, he shopped the idea around the industry, soliciting advice and getting mostly positive feedback. So, in the summer of 2007, working out of his home in Chicago, where a stainless-steel kegerator sat in the living room, he devised a syllabus as well as bought the requisite website names and filed for trademarks. He picked “Cicerone” as the name of his certification program—it could be translated from Italian as meaning “tour guide”—and made the syllabus available online for those who wanted to take the multiple-choice certification exam, which covered the proper care of beer, the history of beer styles, and what differentiated those styles. The first exam, to become a “Certified Beer Server,” was administered over the web to a little more than a dozen people on January 3, 2008; each had paid forty-nine dollars. There were questions like:

  Which of the following flavors is NOT a sign of stale beer?

  a) Papery

  b) Cardboard

  c) Banana

  d) Sherry

  Draft beer lines should be cleaned every fourteen days.

  a) True

  b) False

  The methods for lager brewing began in what city and were established by what year?

  a) Munich, 1900

  b) Pilsen, 1842

  c) Munich, 1600

  d) Vienna, 1700*

  Daniels quickly developed two higher levels of certification, “Certified Cicerone” and “Master Cicerone,” which not only required longer, more detailed exams but tasting tests, too, and were to be administered in person rather than over the web. He left the Brewers Association to administer the program full-time. The first Certified Cicerone exam was given in April 2008, with all seven examinees coming from the brewing industry, including brewpubs, and paying $345 each. The first Master Cicerone exam—a two-day, twelve-hour affair—was administered later in the year at a cost of $595. In its first three years, Daniels’s program designated 1,400 certified beer servers, 120 Certified Cicerones, and a grand total of one Master Cicerone (out of seven who had attempted the exam): a salesman named Andrew Van Til at a Kalamazoo, Michigan-based distributor, who finished in early November 2009. “It was probably the most mentally exhausting two days of my life,” Van Til said. He recognized the upside of the designation: “The whole status of beer is elevated when you have people recognized as experts who can drive education.” Over the next few years, hundreds of Daniels’s successful examinees like Van Til would filter through the industry, to distributors, to breweries, to fine restaurants in big cities, to higher-end retail chains, to the corner pub.

  Expertise was the name of the game now. The craft beer movement, as we’ve noted, was becoming more professionalized than ever and, following the rebound after the shakeout, more confident. This was no longer an industry for voyeurs or toe-dippers. This was completely serious. In 2003, Garrett Oliver flew to New Orleans to talk about beer-food pairings before the more than three hundred attendees of the Cheers Beverage Conference, an annual gathering of representatives from the wine, spirits, and beer worlds as well as concerns like Chili’s and Red Lobster. The attendees were incredulous. “I run a big place, we’ve got twelve hundred stores,” one told Oliver. “You want to know what my beer program is? I take the top fourteen beers in sales in the United States—and that’s my beer program. You guys with your craft beer, you must be joking.”

  “All those top fourteen brands,” Oliver replied, “taste the same. There’s no point in having the rest of them.” He pressed on. “Do you serve Wonder Bread in your restaurants?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Why not?” Oliver said. “Wonder Bread’s the top-selling brand of bread.”

  “Well,” the attendee said, “our customers, they come out to our restaurants, they expect something better.”

  “Oh,” the brewmaster said, “you’re saying your customer doesn’t expect something better when it comes to beer.”

  The attendee shrugged. “I don’t think so.”

  A few years later, Oliver drove the same point in early-morning talks to distributors—this time with different results. “There are some of you here who have been doing this for twenty or thirty years,” his standard stump speech would run, “and you’re watching the world change around you, and you say you’re three or five years from retirement and you don’t have to learn about craft beer. I’m here to tell you that I respect what you’ve done, but you are not going to make it. You are not going to make it. You do not have three years; you’re going to be fired.” It was not something anyone wanted to hear. But what did the owners of the distributors typically say to Oliver after the talks? “Thank you, that was a great talk.”

  The confidence was not mere braggadocio—there were numbers. Craft beer sales were up an estimated 5.8 percent by volume in 2008 over 2007, according to the Brewers Association, and more than 10 percent by dollar amount sold ($6.34 billion versus $5.74 billion); the number of craft barrels produced in 2008 was 8,596,971, a quarter-million more than in 2007. Most auspiciously, the movement cracked 4 percent of market share nationally—the first time, it was thought, that that had ever happened (though over the years different regions of the country, particularly the Northwest, had seen market shares double, perhaps triple that).

  These healthy numbers were especially important because of two trends ambling along with them in the last half of the first decade of the twenty-first ce
ntury. First, breweries were expanding, both physically and productively. In November 2006, Greg Koch and Steve Wagner quietly opened a 385-seat brewpub in Escondido, California, just a few miles from the original brewery ten years ago in San Marcos and alongside a new brewhouse capable of producing fifty thousand barrels annually of their Stone Brewing brands like Arrogant Bastard. Around the same time, across the country, Sam Calagione’s Dogfish Head was arriving on shelves in Georgia, the first new state added to its distribution in more than two years, bringing its total to more than twenty. In late 2002, Calagione added a one-hundred-thousand-square-foot brewery in Milton, Delaware, to keep up with what became triple-digit annual percentage sales growth for brands like 90 Minute IPA and 120 Minute IPA (they were exactly what they sounded like: India pale ale with hops added every minute for however long the brewing took). In Colorado, in the summer of 2008, the first twelve-packs of New Belgium’s Fat Tire Amber Ale in cans began appearing—the brewery had become the largest yet to embrace canning, this time with a machine that could fill fifty to sixty cans a minute.

  These breweries expanded among a second trend: rising operation costs. The Brewers Association estimated it cost nearly 40 percent more by the end of 2008 to operate a craft brewery, particularly a smaller one with limited distribution, than it had at the end of 2007. The rebound in the number of craft operations meant the usual elbowing for retail space and tap handles, though now there was a new wrench: raw materials and ingredients cost more.

  That one particularly definitional American beer ingredient, hops, had become especially prone to scary price spikes. As recently as the late 1990s, a brewer could call a hops supplier directly and place an order; there was a surplus nationally into the next decade. Within a few years, many of the larger craft breweries started getting their hops through long-term contracts with suppliers; this ensured they got their loads of Cascade, Centennial, Columbus, Chinook, and others, with the onus of supply falling on the suppliers. Smaller operations often did not have these long-term lock-ins, and a hops shortage in 2007 and 2008 hit them especially hard. The previous decade’s surplus had driven hops prices down and then hops farmers out of business or into other crops. That was bad enough. Then a huge warehouse fire in Yakima, Washington, in October 2006 destroyed about 4 percent of America’s hops supply. Finally, calamitous weather overseas, including droughts and hail storms, tightened the supply further, as did a strong euro against the dollar, which meant European brewers could get American hops for a song.

  It was the perfect storm of bad luck. America’s hops supply in 2007 dropped to its lowest level since the mid-1980s, and prices shot up. Hops that might have traded in the States for ninety-nine cents an ounce tripled in price after 2006, some reaching seven to eight dollars an ounce (or five to six euros). Jim Koch’s Boston Beer, the nation’s biggest craft beer concern, tried to fill the void, especially for smaller breweries without those long-term dealer contracts, by selling tens of thousands of pounds of its own hops at below-market prices; the first round of bidding in March 2008 drew 212 brewers, and a second one was planned for that November. Ultimately, until American hops yields recovered starting in 2009, brewers and brewpubs were often simply forced to pass along the rising costs to consumers; prices went up on pints, bombers, six-packs. It became one of the ironies of the growing-again movement that the interpretations on European styles that had made American craft beer so popular, like the double IPA, had made it that much more expensive to compete against European counterparts.

  Judging by the sales growth of not just 2008 but also subsequent years, one can see that American consumers were willing to pay that premium. Craft beer became regularly talked about as “an affordable luxury,” a status symbol of sorts just as early pioneers like Matthew Reich at New Amsterdam had envisioned: yuppies drank it then; now their hipster children did. Gone was the iffy product of the pre-shakeout years; ascendant were breweries with quirk and history, run by experienced hands, some of whom were routinely described as “rock stars,” complete with groupies in several cases (though not necessarily in the carnal sense). The movement took to new social media platforms like Facebook, launched in 2004, YouTube, launched in 2005, and Twitter, launched in 2006, in droves.

  By the summer of 2009, at least 170 breweries and brewpubs would have regularly updated Twitter feeds. Many times, that number of consumers and publications would have feeds by then, too, with craft beer groups no longer delineated largely by geography, as in the homebrewing clubs of yore, but by style preferences (hopheads here, fans of cask ale there) and common traits (several groups dedicated to spreading the craft beer gospel among women in particular sprung up). One could now while an evening following the tweets of Jason and Todd Alstrom of BeerAdvocate as they reviewed beer after beer in a sitting, or get updates on upgrades at Tony Magee’s Lagunitas, or follow Greg Koch as he toured behind a new book about Stone, or see what the Brewers Association was lobbying Congress for on behalf of the industry. One could also take those seemingly ceaseless arguments and counterarguments about tastes and styles to social media; it never seemed to get old.

  The new-media platforms created an intimacy and an immediacy that could translate into sales (“like” your favorite brewer!), and, especially for the smaller startups, offered low- to no-cost marketing. They also offered a way to integrate quickly and cheaply the movement as a whole into others, like the locavore and Slow Food movements. Tweets and Facebook updates could be used to direct consumers to food-beer pairing dinners; to festivals dedicated to local foodstuffs, including the products of area breweries; to new partnerships between brewers and area farmers, cheesemongers, and the like. Suddenly, it was all one big virtual universe with faces put to names and personalities to brands.

  Of course, the very ease with which the movement slid into social-media use only highlighted its natural stomping ground. Craft beer had become one of the accoutrements of the modern American elites, though, crucially, not necessarily elitist—unlike, say, fine wine or French cuisine. Following the spate of very public tetchiness that preceded the shakeout, the movement personality-wise now seemed positively serene. As Paul Philippon, a one-time philosophy professor who started the Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery in Farmville, North Carolina, in the summer of 2004, memorably put it in a speech at the 2010 Great American Beer Festival: “The national brewing community is asshole-free.”

  The highbrow London-based magazine the Economist used craft beer as a way to describe the hipper and more mobile inhabitants of twenty-first-century America: “They drink wine and boutique beers (and can discuss them expertly) but only in moderation, and they hardly ever smoke cigarettes.” No less a social barometer than the New Yorker cottoned to craft beer with a 9,775-word piece in its annual food issue right before Thanksgiving 2008. Written by Burkhard Bilger, whose work included a book on the more eccentric eating and drinking habits of southerners and a magazine piece on the Madagascar gem trade, it starred Sam Calagione as he pursued ever more extreme beer. It also swept in all the major trends in the movement over the past four decades, from the first saplings of growth to the late 1990s shakeout to a counterrevolution against extreme beers, represented by Garrett Oliver. The piece was perhaps the most important mainstream magazine article on craft beer since William Least Heat-Moon’s “A Glass of Handmade” in the Atlantic Monthly twenty-one years before. The last section of Bilger’s article was set at the Great American Beer Festival in 2007, the first year it sold out of tickets. About twenty-eight thousand attendees paid fifty dollars a pop to sample more than eighteen hundred beers over three days.

  Wandering through the hall in the hour before it opened I saw signs for beers called Goat Toppler, Chicken Killer, and Old Headwrecker, Incinerator, Detonator, Skull Annihilator and Obamanator. Many were double IPA’s that seemed to be competing for the highest IBU rating. But others were faithful recreations of ancient recipes, or else beers invented whole cloth. “When you’re making an extreme beer, it’s like pushing beyond th
e sound barrier,” Jim Koch told me. “All of a sudden, everything is silent. I remember when I first tasted my Triple Bock. It dawned on me that beer has been around for thousands of years, and I am tasting something that no brewer has ever tasted. It was inspiring, beautiful, almost reverential.” Even Garrett Oliver seemed to be bowing to the trend. His booth featured two wonderful bottle-fermented ales and a pale ale called BLAST!, with eight kinds of English and American hops. “No, this is NOT a double IPA,” a sign beneath the tap read. “Even if you believe in those.”

  In his last on-camera interview in August 2007, a couple of months before the GABF, Michael Jackson said one of his motives for writing so extensively about beer when no one else was doing so was to preserve “threatened traditions.” Had he lived to read Bilger’s article, to scroll through the tweets, to amble again amid the GABF or any number of other beer festivals every year, to peruse the forums of RateBeer and BeerAdvocate, to see the passion in the converts and the confidence in the veterans, he would have surely been pleased that America’s beer traditions were far from threatened anymore. Instead, they represented a major culinary achievement that was now an undeniable part of the nation’s popular culture. Still, the movement that Jackson had so inspired had seen its ups before—and its downs. As Bilger’s article noted:

  For all its success, craft beer has yet to reach the mainstream. Ninety-six percent of the market—about sixty-seven billion bottles a year—still belongs to non-craft beers and imports. Oliver remembers talking to a brewer at Anheuser-Busch a few years ago, when sales of Michelob had fallen to about a third of a billion bottles a year. “He told me, ‘I wish that brand would just die.’ And that one beer was the size of the entire American craft-brewing industry.”

  *Answers: C; true; C. These were examples of questions that might be on the certified beer server test, although not necessarily questions that did appear on the test.