The Audacity of Hops Read online

  “Everyone who cares about good beer owes Tom Acitelli a huge thanks: his history of American craft beer is lively, substantive, and thoughtful.”

  —Maureen Ogle, author of Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer

  “[Tom Acitelli]’s thorough research into the craft beer revolution tells a great story and shows how a ragtag yet purposeful group of passionate individuals can build an industry. He did an amazing job capturing the characters, improbable tales, and astounding passion that make up the craft brewing community.”

  —Ken Grossman, founder, Sierra Nevada Brewing Company

  “The Audacity of Hops chronicles the rich history of America’s craft brewing revolution with deft portraits of the resourceful pioneers, the innovative brewers, and the intrepid entrepreneurs who are changing the way the world thinks about beer.”

  —Steve Hindy, cofounder of Brooklyn Brewery and coauthor of Beer School

  “Tom’s narrative threads moments of insider anecdote with a historian’s vision of what makes growing, outsider movements so dynamic, meaningful, and, in our case, delicious. An important achievement.”

  —Jeremy Cowan, author of Craft Beer Bar Mitzvah and proprietor of Shmaltz Brewing

  “This book is a delightful read, painstakingly researched, often humorous, and filled with stories that breathe life into the birth of our industry.”

  —David L. Geary, president of D. L. Geary Brewing Company

  Copyright © 2013 by Tom Acitelli

  All rights reserved

  First edition

  Published by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated

  814 North Franklin Street

  Chicago, Illinois 60610

  ISBN 978-1-61374-388-1

  Cover and interior design: Jonathan Hahn

  Cover photographs: Michael Halberstadt

  Typesetting: PerfecType, Nashville, TN

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Acitelli, Tom.

  The audacity of hops : the history of America’s craft beer revolution / Tom Acitelli. — First edition.

  pages cm

  Summary: “Charting the birth and growth of craft beer across the United States, Tom Acitelli offers an epic, story-driven account of one of the most inspiring and surprising American grassroots movements. In 1975, there was a single craft brewery in the United States; today there are more than 2,000. Now this once-fledgling movement has become ubiquitous nationwide—there’s even a honey ale brewed at the White House. This book not only tells the stories of the major figures and businesses within the movement, but it also ties in the movement with larger American culinary developments. It also charts the explosion of the mass-market craft beer culture, including magazines, festivals, home brewing, and more. This entertaining and informative history brims with charming, remarkable stories, which together weave a very American business tale of formidable odds and refreshing success”— Provided by publisher.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-61374-388-1 (pbk.)

  1. Beer—United States. I. Title.

  TP573.U5A25 2013

  641.2’3—dc23

  2013002264

  Printed in the United States of America

  5 4 3 2 1

  To my parents

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: America, King of Beer

  Turin, Italy; Paris; Washington, DC | 2009-2010

  PART I

  THE LAST SHALL BE FIRST

  San Francisco | 1965

  DO IT YOURSELF

  Dunoon, Scotland; Fairfax County, VA | 1964-1968

  BEER FOR ITS OWN SAKE

  Okinawa, Japan; Portland, OR | 1970

  EDEN, CALIFORNIA

  Davis, CA | 1970

  TV DINNER LAND

  San Francisco | 1970-1971

  LITE UP AHEAD

  Munich; Brooklyn | 1970-1973

  “BREWED THROUGH A HORSE”

  Los Angeles; Chicago | 1973-1978

  THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BEER

  San Francisco | 1974-1978

  CHEZ MCAULIFFE

  Sonoma, CA | 1976

  THE BARD OF BEER

  London | 1976-1977

  LONG DAYS, LONGER

  ODDS Sonoma, CA | 1976-1977

  PART II

  TIPPING POINTS

  Boulder, CO; Washington, DC | 1978

  “SMALL, HIGH-QUALITY FOOD PLACES”

  Sonoma, CA | 1978

  THE BEARDED YOUNG MAN FROM CHICO

  Chico, CA | 1978

  THE FIREMAN AND THE GOAT SHED

  Novato, CA; Hygiene, CO | 1979-1980

  THE WEST COAST STYLE

  Chico, CA | 1979-1981

  MAYFLOWER REFUGEE

  Boulder, CO; Manhattan | 1981-1984

  HOW THE BREWPUB WAS BORN

  Yakima, WA | 1981

  THE FIRST SHAKEOUT

  Sonoma, CA; Novato, CA | 1982-1983

  “THAT’S A GREAT IDEA, CHARLIE”

  Boulder, CO; Denver | 1982-1984

  THE THIRD WAVE BUILDS

  Manhattan; Virginia Beach, VA; Portland, OR; Hopland, CA | 1982-1984.

  THE LESSON OF THE NYLON STRING

  Newton, MA; Boston | 1983-1984

  “THIS CONNOISSEUR THING”

  Manhattan | 1983-1985

  BECAUSE WINE MAKING TAKES TOO LONG

  Belmont, CA | 1985

  MORE THAN IN EUROPE

  Boston; Kalamazoo, MI | 1983-1986

  BEER, IT’S WHAT’S WITH DINNER

  Washington, DC; Portland, OR | 1983-1987

  VATS AND DOGS

  San Francisco, CA | 1986-1987

  TO THE LAST FRONTIER AND BACK

  Juneau, AK; Baltimore; Boston | 1985-1986

  WEEPING RADISHES AND SCOTTISH LORDS

  Portland, ME; Abita Springs, LA; St. Paul, MN; Manteo, NC | 1985-1986

  HERE, THERE, AND EVERYWHERE

  Denver|1987

  PART III

  UNHAPPY MEALS

  Rome | 1986

  SECOND CAREERS

  Brooklyn | 1986

  DAVIDS AND GOLIATHS

  Boston | 1986

  FIVE HUNDRED MILES IN A RENTED HONDA

  New Ulm, MN | 1986-1987

  NEW YORK MINUTES

  Brooklyn; Manhattan | 1987-1988

  THE REVOLUTION, TELEVISED

  San Francisco; Cleveland; Chicago | 1987-1990

  A MANIFESTO AND ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

  Venice, Italy | 1990

  THE VALUE OF GOLD

  Utica, NY | 1991

  “THE TYRANNY OF FAST GROWTH”

  Baghdad, Iraq; Marin County, CA | 1991-1994

  FINDING ROLE MODELS, DEFYING LABELS

  Philadelphia; New Glarus, WI; Burlington, VT; Fort Collins, CO | 1991-1993

  GHOSTS AROUND THE MACHINES

  Washington, DC | 1993

  CHERRY BREW AND NAKED HOCKEY

  Manhattan | 1992-1993

  IN PRIME TIME

  San Francisco | 1994

  CRITICAL MASS

  Durham, NC | 1995

  THE POTATO-CHIP EPIPHANY

  Kailua-Kona, HI | 1993-1995

  THE BREWPUBS BOOM

  Denver; Palo Alto, CA | 1993-1995

  SUDS AND THE CITY

  Brooklyn | 1995

  ATTACK OF THE PHANTOM CRAFTS

  Denver; St. Louis | 1994-1995

  “BUDHOOK” AND THE BULL BEER MARKET

  Seattle; Portsmouth, NH; Frederick, MD | 1995-1996

  LAST CALL FOR THE OLD DAYS

  Hopland, CA; Portland, OR; Portland, ME | 1995-1997

  BIG BEER’S BIGGEST WEAPON

  Merriam, KS; Chico, CA | 1996

  THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S CO
AT

  Brooklyn | 1996

  TO THE EXTREME

  Rehoboth Beach, DE | 1995-1997

  THE TOTAL PACKAGE

  Petaluma, CA | 1995

  BOOS

  Boston; Pittsburgh | 1996

  THE MOVEMENT’S BIGGEST SETBACK

  New York; Philadelphia | 1996

  LUCKY BASTARDS

  Los Angeles; San Marcos, CA | 1996-1998

  A TALE OF TWO BREWERIES

  White River Junction, VT; Philadelphia | 1996-2000

  THE GREAT SHAKEOUT

  Nationwide | 1996-2000

  VICTORY ABROAD, DEFEAT AT HOME

  Palo Alto, CA; Boston | 1997-2000

  PART IV

  PLOTTING A COMEBACK

  Atlanta | 1998-2000

  “MCDONALD’S VERSUS FINE FOOD”

  Manhattan | 2000

  CRAFT BEER LOGS ON

  Boston; San Francisco; Atlanta | 1999-2001

  GROWING PAINS AGAIN

  Brooklyn; Cleveland | 2000-2003

  STILL THE LATEST THING

  Guerneville, CA; Oklahoma City, OK; Houston | 2002-2005

  CRUSHING IT

  Lyons, CO | 2002

  WITH GUSTO

  Manhattan; Boulder, CO | 2003-2005

  A GREAT PASSING

  London | 2007

  BEER, PREMIUM

  Durango, CO; New Orleans | 2006-2008

  EXIT THE GODFATHER

  San Francisco | 2009-2010

  BIG CROWDS AND THE NEW SMALL

  Santa Rosa, CA | 2010-2011

  “THE ALBION BREWERY”

  Sonoma, CA; Denver | 2011-2012

  Epilogue: More Than Ever

  2012

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Prologue

  AMERICA, KING OF BEER

  Turin, Italy; Paris; Washington, DC | 2009-2010

  It was the last week in October 2010, cloudy and cool, and hundreds of thousands of people were streaming toward the Olympic Village in Turin, a united Italy’s first capital in the 1860s and the ancestral home of the nation’s royal family until after World War II. History had everything and nothing to do with the reason the crowds were gathering: Salone del Gusto, the biannual trade show and tribal gathering of Slow Food, the international movement that grew out of a 1986 protest in Rome over Italy’s first McDonald’s. Slow Food’s show, like the movement itself, was a middle finger to homogenization and mass production. It meant to highlight locally produced, communally enjoyed foodstuffs: cheeses, fish, jams, oils, meats, nuts, legumes, wine, honey, bread—and beer.

  The last one was a bit of a surprise to me. The surprise was not that there was beer at the show, but that most of the beer came from Italy, a nation known more in the same breath as France for its varied wines. These included the drier Barolo and Barbera of the north; the heavier, lusher central Italian wines like the Montepulciano in Abruzzo; and the sweeter Nero d’Avola and Marsala of Sicily. Italian beer, though? Whoever heard of the porters of Florence? Or the pale ales of Bologna? The pilsners of Reggio di Calabria? Wrong part of Europe, signore, surely—it was supposed to be all blandly industrial Peroni and Moretti. But there they were: Italian-made craft beers, tasting in their complexity and depth very much like the American-made ones I could find back home in Brooklyn.

  I would learn that those American craft beers had had a profound influence on the nascent Italian craft beer movement in the 1990s and 2000s, as had American beer figures at that 2010 Salone del Gusto like Sam Calagione, a brewer whom I recognized from an epically detailed New Yorker profile published two years before, and Charlie Papazian, an author whom I had just seen at the Great American Beer Festival (GABF) in Denver the previous month. They were on a panel together about American influences on Italian beer, where their observations prattled through several near-instantaneous translations into dozens of earphones in a college classroom-like setting.

  It was a curious thing: American influence on another country’s beer. I knew enough about the topic already to know that that was not a small thing: America had never been anyone’s influence on beer … unless it was to mimic the engineering behind the watery lagers of what I’ll call Big Beer: Budweiser, Coors, Miller, and others. These were admirable engineering triumphs, with millions of bottles and cans tasting the same no matter where they were made or how far they were shipped. But these beers did not influence the ones at Slow Food. Those beers were American craft beers—and American craft beers had never been bigger. Nor had the beer culture that had grown up around them.

  That same European trip, I discovered what’s considered the best beer store in Paris. Here, in the capital of another traditional wine country, the store’s owner told me in frank English that he would be willing to trade bottle for bottle his European beers for any American ones I might be able to bring over on subsequent visits. He knew plenty about American craft beer, including the popular styles and the brewers themselves, but couldn’t readily get them in France. He motioned resignedly to a far corner of the store where, in and around wooden crates, rested several bottles of only one American craft brand. There was, he explained, demand for so many more.

  The year before my trip, all of America was enveloped in a heated debate surrounding beer: the White House Beer Summit. It sprang from the arrest of Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his home by Cambridge, Massachusetts, police sergeant James Crowley. President Obama had commented on the arrest in Gates’s favor, and the commentariat demanded a sit-down between the parties, plus vice president Joe Biden. The president chose to hold the meeting over that most sacred of national drinks, beer, and the debate soon pivoted to not only what the parties would say when they sat down at the White House but also what they would drink. They had so many choices.

  It is impossible to overstate how far beer in America has come in just the last two generations. The nation’s five biggest breweries by 1970 together produced nearly half of all of America’s commercially available beer. That number would crest 85 percent by the 1990s, though the number of breweries in the market share would actually shrink. Big Beer’s brew was deliberately insipid and inoffensive, what one craft brewer explained as “alcoholic soda pop.” It was engineered, to wallop and not to wow, in gigantic factories: Anheuser-Busch’s headquarters in St. Louis grew to cover the equivalent of sixty city blocks, or roughly 125 acres. It was also phenomenally popular. By the middle of the twentieth century, Americans were drinking an average of twenty-one gallons of beer per person per year, up from around eighteen gallons before Prohibition. A sizable part of this success was not only the engineering but other technological advances such as the Interstate Highway System, the aluminum can, and the television. It was also, though, due to a largely no-fault divorce between consumers and foodstuffs. Beer had once been an intensely local thing: hundreds of breweries in dozens of cities dotting the landscape before Prohibition in 1920, shipping their fare not that far from where it was brewed. These regional breweries, and even smaller local ones, died off one by one as beer, like other American industries after World War II (accounting, snack foods, media, computer manufacturing, soda, you name it), experienced a convulsion of consolidation.

  By 1965, there was one craft brewery in the entire United States: Anchor Brewery in San Francisco. The reach of its beers, though, did not extend beyond California. It would have no company, either, for years—a veritable culinary freak show in an increasingly homogenized American food landscape. Then, within thirty years, the number of American craft breweries increased more than 500 percent. Not only that, but these breweries were widely acknowledged—even by the Northern Europeans, who were the heirs to just about every beer style we know—as the most innovative, if not the best, in the world. Simply put, within two generations, America came to dominate the way we think, drink, talk, and write about beer.

  This book will explain how that happened. It will not only tell the history of the America
n craft beer movement from 1965 to the present; it will also place the movement within larger social and business contexts, including ones that it took a lead in developing. It will show the very development of the term “craft beer,” which is the product of a “craft brewery.” (This type of brewery includes any small, independently owned brewery that adheres to traditional brewing practices and ingredients. Craft breweries are distinct from larger regional and national breweries, which often use nontraditional ingredients and brew on a much vaster scale.)

  This book is not a tasting or style guide nor a guide to breweries (there were more than two thousand in the United States by June 2012, more than at any time since the 1880s), and it is not a history of American beer before the craft beer movement arose. Instead, it is a book on how this movement, with the odds stacked against it, survived and thrived to dominate the world’s conception of beer and to change the American palate forever.

  It is a story populated by quintessential American characters: heroes and villains, hippies and yuppies, oenophiles and teetotalers, gangsters and G-men, men in kilts and men in suits. It is a story of advances and retreats, long nights of the soul and giddy moments of triumph. Further, the story’s scope demands that each chapter be delineated by geography. America’s a big place, and its craft brewers have done big things.

  Note: The reader does not have to be intimately familiar with the brewing process. Here it is in a nutshell: cracked grains that have been roasted (or, in the brewing lingo, “malted”) are boiled to bring out their sugars; during the boil, other ingredients, including hops and spices, are added; then, after the product of this boiling (called “wort”) has cooled, yeast is added, which eats through the sugars during fermentation, converting them to ethyl alcohol, the intoxicating element of beer. There are perhaps thousands of brewing yeast strains, and they give different beers different flavors. Yeast strains also, more often than not, dictate a beer’s style. There are dozens of styles, though the reader does not have to be familiar with those, either. They are explained in the book when necessary.

  PART I

  THE LAST SHALL BE FIRST

  San Francisco | 1965

  On a breezy, warm day in August 1965, Fritz Maytag walked into the Old Spaghetti Factory on Green Street in San Francisco’s trendy North Beach neighborhood and ordered his usual beer: an Anchor Steam. Fred Kuh, the restaurant’s owner, ambled over.