Elsewhere in Europe, however, beer reigned supreme—after the 13th century, when Bohemian brewers managed to fine-tune the addition of hops, which preserved the beer, in turn allowing for production and export on a far greater scale.
Not everyone appreciated it. In England, for a time, there was something of a standoff between traditional unhopped “ale” and the newfangled hoppy “beer,” but by the 16th century, hops reigned supreme. This ascension was perhaps most notably reflected in the Reinheitsgebot, a “purity law” decreed in 1516 by William IV, Duke of Bavaria. This law mandated that beer be made only from water, barley, and hops (the addition of yeast was still about two centuries away).
All those eons of brewing helped lead to your favorite modern-day beers, but there are definitely drinkers who feel we may have lost a few things along the way—chief among them the experience of imbibing beverages blessed with the broader and more complex flavors that come from stuffing one’s brew with the grab bags of herbs and spices used thousands of years ago. To that end, some brewers have started pursuing modern re-creations of ancient recipes painstakingly pieced together using information gleaned from archaeological digs. Dogfish Head’s Ancient Ales line, assisted by anthropologist Patrick McGovern, includes beers such as Midas Touch (“based on molecular evidence found in a Turkish tomb believed to have belonged to King Midas”) and Chateau Jiahu (brewed with ingredients “unearthed from a 9,000-year-old tomb in China”).
Whether the old stuff tastes better or worse than your average 21st-century six-pack is totally up to your palate, of course.
BEERS THAT WENT FLAT
Nude Beer. The most brilliant ideas are often the simplest, and the Golden Beverage Company’s late, lamented Nude Beer is a perfect example of that principle in action. This ’80s-era brew came bottled with a label picturing a lovely swimsuited lass whose minimal attire was made out of the same flaky metal stuff that covers scratch-off lottery tickets…and would therefore vanish completely when rubbed off with a coin or fingernail. It was interactive, it required physical exercise, and it encouraged the appreciation of beauty; unfortunately, it also ran afoul of many local decency laws, making it difficult to distribute or effectively market in many areas.
Harley-Davidson Beer. It’s arguably a little unfair to include this brew here, given that it was only produced in limited quantities as part of the Daytona Week motorcycle festival, but whether or not it was intentional, Harley-Davidson Beer’s failure to take the nation by storm seems like a missed opportunity, a macho response to the beer culture of the time, in which light (or “lite”) beers were taking off and Bud Light was using pit bull Spuds MacKenzie as a mascot. This was especially true of the beer’s 1987 and 1988 editions, which came in cans emblazoned “HEAVY BEER.”
Hop’n Gator Beer. Taste is entirely subjective, and one man’s swill is almost always bound to be another man’s refreshing pleasure. That said, Hop’n Gator Beer sounds so disgusting that it’s hard to believe it was ever actually a thing. The brainchild of Gatorade inventor Dr. Robert Cade, this justifiably short-lived beverage blended Cade’s popular lemon-lime sports drink…with beer. Essentially a Gatorade shandy, it was only bottled for a few years, from 1969 through 1972. Years later, the Iron City Brewing Company tried bottling their own version (a citrus malt liquor) before being sued into submission by Gatorade.
Miller Clear. The clear drink fad of the early ’90s is chiefly remembered for spawning the persistent beverage punchlines—and marketplace flops—Zima and Crystal Pepsi. But if test market drinkers had just been a little more enthusiastic, we might have been treated to something even sillier: Miller Clear, a 4.6% ABV brew that The Independent described as looking like 7-Up and tasting “like a sweetened seltzer with the faintest touch of oily, medicinal hoppiness.” Miller execs steadfastly denied that they were trying to hop on the transparent-beverage trend, insisting it was simply the accidental result of some distillery tinkering that produced what the ad campaign somewhat perplexingly promised was “good beer-drinking beer.” Clearly, sales told a different story—like Crystal Pepsi, clear beer didn’t make it past 1994.
Miller Chill. This Mexican-style beer offered a “hint of lime” and “pinch of salt” to produce “great light beer from America and the chelada-style from Mexico.” Alas, despite being exhorted to “taste the thrill”—and, later, wooed with a rejiggered recipe that contained half as many carbs—consumers gave Miller Chill the cold shoulder in 2013.
Tequiza. One of the more high-concept experiments ever to tumble out of the Anheuser-Busch chute, Tequiza was billed as “beer with blue agave nectar and a natural flavor of imported tequila and lime.” This description was just misleading enough to lure wacky-product enthusiasts into purchasing a random six-pack in the mistaken belief that they’d be drinking tequila-laced beer. It was really just slightly citrusy pale lager, like a Corona, but with lime already in it. But that was enough to keep it lingering in stores from 1998 to 2009, at which point it was phased out in favor of the considerably more male-friendly Bud Light Lime.
THE PROPER GLASS
Which glass goes with which beer?
No matter what you’re drinking out of, though, don’t chill or freeze your glass! It might look like a classy move, but it has the nasty added effect of creating condensation, which dilutes your precious drink. (There is nothing wrong, however, with displaying your glassware in a special case under gallery lighting.)
Pilsner glass. Tall and tapered at the bottom, this long glass is good for highlighting the colors in one’s brew while also preserving the head. Pairs well with pilsners, obviously, but it’s also good for lagers, bocks, low-alcohol beers, and witbier.
Goblet. Not just an accessory for fairy-tale villains, the wine goblet is quite well suited for beer; in fact, many of them are made with bowls specially scored to help maintain a two-inch head on your drink. Next time you’re pouring a strong and hearty Belgian brew, try a wide-mouthed chalice.
Pint glass. Every good pint deserves a pint glass, which is why this rivals the mug for the most versatile beer vessel money can buy. Whether you’re holding the 16-ounce, the 20-ounce Imperial, or the German Becker style, it’s hard to go wrong with a well-made pint glass.
Weizen glass. Similar to the pilsner glass, but wider at the top to make room for wheat beer’s bigger head, this is what you want when you’re pouring anything that makes you think about those amber waves of grain, whether it’s hefeweizen or American wheat ale.
Flute. We tend to think of these guys as being solely for champagne, but their unique shape helps preserve the carbonation of your brew while blasting all those volatiles into your face to make for a more intense, sensory drinking experience. Good for lambics as well as a variety of other beers, including American wild ales, bocks, pilsners, and dunkel lagers.
Tulip. Not just for tiptoeing through, the tulip is also a type of glass, and one whose delicate-looking shape actually acts as a sort of trap for your beer’s volatiles—a fancy word for the hop oils and fermentation byproducts that add to the drink’s unique scent while leaving room for the head to linger. Good for lambic, all kinds of Belgian or Scotch ales, saisons, and double or Imperial IPAs.
Snifter. Again, we tend to think of this glass as being made for something else—sipping cognac or brandy, in this case—but its unique shape also works well for strong ales, with that wide bowl leaving extra room to swirl all those volatiles around while the tapered mouth helps keep them from wafting away too quickly. Good for barleywine, wheatwine, Belgian or American strong ales, and quads and tripels.
Stange. Kind of like a pilsner glass, it’s thin (its name means “stick” in German), and its narrow body is supposed to help preserve the flavor characteristics of less pungent brews. Lambic, rye beer, bock, pilsner, and altbier all pair well with this glass.
Wineglass. The bowl shape is perfect for leaving headspace, and a wineglass’s wide rim makes for a wonderfully aromatic experience if you’re drinking something that has a unique nose. Reach
for one of these standbys the next time you’re pouring a Belgian ale, a black or Imperial stout, Imperial IPA, barleywine, or wheatwine because the punchier brews thrive in a bowl.
THE CRAFT BEER REVOLUTION
You may not realize it, but right now might be the greatest time in history to be an American beer enthusiast. It’s a time of unparalleled choices in a growing market with room for everything from polite, mass-market lagers to bigger, bolder, and weirder flavors brewed down the street or across town in small batches by passionate beer craftsfolk.
It wasn’t all that long ago, let’s say about 25 years, that “American beer” meant pretty much one thing, and it wasn’t much to brag about; if you were a fancy beer drinker, you went for imported stuff. Today, the American beer industry is not only home to more small breweries than ever, it’s producing brews that influence global beer trends, instead of the other way around.
So how did we get to this point? It’s a fascinating story, and one that’s far bigger than we have space for here. But to get you started, here’s an overview of how America went from a bustling beer garden to a macrobrew wasteland…and back again.
MADE IN THE USA
As with many “distinctly American” phenomena, beer’s domestic rise was immigrant-driven. German immigrants in the late 1800s, in particular, helped make it as popular as—if not more than—prevailing tipples such as rum, wine, and whiskey. Between the Civil War and World War I, breweries proliferated across the U.S., and with modern transportation, storage, and refrigeration technologies still in their infancies, beer was a relatively local beverage, with brews generally available only in the areas where they were made. This could be frustrating for travelers who fell in love with a particular beer while passing through, but it also prevented market homogenization and made for a burgeoning and varied beer culture.
A MINOR SETBACK
By the turn of the century, Americans were drinking about 20 gallons of beer per capita annually. That business was largely laid to waste by Prohibition, which culled a huge percentage of breweries right out of the market.
That thinning of the herd wasn’t entirely Prohibition’s fault—a growing thirst for lagers had already put a number of brewers out of business in the 50 years leading up to the passage of the law. Prohibition and the Great Depression proved devastating. At the end of 1933, around 750 breweries were in business; by 1950, that number had dropped to roughly 400. By 1960, only 200 remained.
THE SILVER BULLET
Advances in refrigeration and packaging made it easier to ship beer longer distances, and the invention of the seven-ounce aluminum can by Bill Coors in 1959 represented another big step toward the kind of mass-market consistency promised by the major brewers. It also lured drinkers away from bars; by the end of the 1960s, more than 80 percent of all beer was sold in stores instead of on tap, and thanks to the advent of the supermarket and its attendant distribution system, it would only get easier for larger breweries to exert major influence over things like placement and cooler space.
A SOLID ANCHOR
All of this spelled doom for small breweries, and by 1965, there was only one left in the U.S.: Anchor Brewing in San Francisco. Anchor was well on its way to bankruptcy, too, when it received an unexpected reprieve from Fritz Maytag III, great-grandson of the Maytag Corporation founder, who’d found himself looking for something to do with his life (and his inheritance) after graduating from Stanford.
He found it in the struggling brewery, which he learned was near to closing when Frank Kuh, owner of the Old Spaghetti Factory (a major Anchor customer), told Maytag he should tour the grounds of the company before it shuttered. Although Kuh mentioned this mainly because he knew Maytag was a big fan of the beer, the visit ended with Maytag buying a 51 percent stake in the company and changing his life irrevocably.
FROM SCOTLAND WITH LOVE
While Maytag’s approach to reinventing Anchor—using quality ingredients, emphasizing tradition, avoiding growth for growth’s sake, and stubbornly clinging to staunch independence—would eventually inform craft brewing in general, it was slow going at first. The company took years to turn a profit, partly because there just wasn’t much of a market for what they were selling.
That’s the same problem that dogged Jack McAuliffe, who took his own shot at a craft brew revival around the same time that Maytag took over Anchor. A navy vet who’d developed a thirst for Scottish beer while on his tour of duty through Europe, McAuliffe picked up a book on homebrewing and made his own take. It turned out to be a hit not only with his fellow servicemen, but among the local Scots who sampled it. Emboldened, McAuliffe returned to California after his discharge and established the New Albion Brewing Co. in Sonoma, about 45 minutes north of San Francisco.
AMERICAN ORIGINALS
In terms of brewing, McAuliffe was hugely successful, producing an array of beers—including what he claims was the first American pale ale, as well as a porter and a stout—that lured local customers even as he struggled to cobble together a medium-size brewing operation.
After starting New Albion with repurposed dairy equipment and soda syrup drums, McAuliffe plowed his company’s cash back into an ambitious expansion plan, only to be frustrated by a dearth of suitable investors. By 1982, New Albion was bankrupt and McAuliffe was out of the beer business.
REVOLUTION IN THE AIR
By 1970, America’s five biggest breweries were responsible for half of the country’s beer, a number that would continue to climb over 80 percent by the 1990s…all while the number of breweries continued to decline.
But signs of life were stirring below. During the late 1960s in Portland, Oregon, beer enthusiast Fred Eckhardt started making a name for himself through the homebrewing classes he taught at a supply shop called Wine Art of Oregon. Perpetually needled by students to publish a book on how to make your own beer—something which, by the way, still wasn’t strictly legal—in 1969 he published Lager Beers: How to Make Good Beer at Home. A breezy, easy-to-read breakdown of the brewing process, it weighed in at less than 50 pages and reflected a growing desire for better beer.
GREAT AMERICAN PIONEERS
Homebrewing was finally made legal again in 1979, and while craft brewing still didn’t have much market muscle, it started to build a genuine buzz. In 1982, a Boulder, Colorado, hotel played host to the inaugural Great American Beer Festival, where 30 microbreweries showed off their wares, and by the mid-1980s, a smattering of new brewers—and brewpubs—popped up on the East Coast, mirroring what initially seemed like a Western trend.
Craft brewing’s story since then has been mostly onward and upward, although the industry hasn’t been immune from the occasional implosion, as occurred in the late 1990s, when a third of craft brewers went out of business, the byproducts of a bubble inflated by beers produced with too much venture capital and not enough heart. But that was a corrective, not a crumbling; percentage point by percentage point, craft brewing has encroached on Big Beer’s majority stake in the great American mug, to the point where, in 2014, craft’s aggregate sales outpaced Budweiser for the first time in history.
It’s an achievement that might sound more important than it is—we’re talking about Bud alone here, not Bud Light—which means that a whole bunch of companies now combine to outsell the third most popular beer in the U.S. It’s an achievement nonetheless, and indicative of how aggressively drinkers have started seeking out alternatives to the same old beer.
NEW DAY RISING
Over a 30-year span, the number of American craft breweries surged by over 500 percent, with some of those fiercely independent breweries approaching household name status, such as Lagunitas, Brooklyn Brewery, Stone, Long Trail, and Dogfish Head, not to mention Sierra Nevada, and, still, Anchor.
But even as sales rise, craft brewing remains a community, as exemplified by this postscript. Decades after he walked away from New Albion and drifted into cult hero status among brewers, Jack McAuliffe heard from Boston Beer founder Jim Koc
h, who’d purchased the New Albion trademark and offered to help him resuscitate his beer by funding an initial run and giving him all the profits to fix what Koch called a “karmic imbalance.” It was too little, too late for McAuliffe, who wasn’t interested in brewing as a career anymore, but his daughter was. Thanks to Boston Beer’s largesse, a well-preserved yeast strain, and that traditional American thirst for quality beer, the nation’s original pale ale is back on the market.
IT’S OKTOBERFEST!
• On October 12, 1810, Munich hosted the wedding of the future King Ludwig I to Princess Therese of Saxony-Hildburghausen. The public was invited to attend the festivities, held in a field outside of the city’s gates. Much beer has imbibed, and everyone had so much fun that it became an annual Bavarian tradition.
• Oktoberfest is the biggest annual “people’s fair” on the planet. It features rides, concerts, traditional German garb…and about 6.4 million people who consume 6.7 million liters of beer.
• Since 1810, Oktoberfest has been canceled 24 times due to decent excuses, such as wars and disease epidemics.
• Oktoberfest is held in September. Munich’s weather is better then, and the festival ends on the first Sunday in October.
BEER BY THE NUMBERS
Number of Breweries in the U.S. in 1990: 298
Number of Breweries in the U.S. in 2014: 3,200
As of 2013, the state with the most craft breweries is California, with 381. Washington, with 201, ranks second. In third place is Oregon, with 181. Mississippi ranks dead last, with a thirst-inducing four craft breweries.
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