The Audacity of Hops Page 3
The second was “independent.” For Maytag’s Anchor, this was easy early on: the brewery was a money loser for years and persisted in producing a product strange to most consumers—who would ever want to buy him out? Besides, its independence was part of Anchor’s marketable charm. It was the plucky, back-from-the-dead (many times), little brewery in what one journalist described as “a dump of a building,” a local curiosity crafted deliberately by hand. The hands increased at only a glacial pace—the number of employees would barely rise above fifty even three decades later—and Anchor splashed “Made in San Francisco since 1896” prominently across each bottle in block-black letters, trading on local lore and enticing consumers to think about their beer in terms then increasingly uncommon: as the carefully created product of a certain time and a certain place. Made only in X since Y—it was the antithesis of mass production, where history matters little and place even less.
Finally, the Brewers Association in 2005 defined a craft brewer as “traditional.” Here, Maytag’s influence in setting the movement’s ground rules was unmistakable. When he bought control of Anchor in 1965, the brewery was occasionally resorting to corn syrup in its recipe, a cheaper way to goose the alcohol content and to play with the flavor. Maytag returned the steam-beer recipe to all barley malt, reaching back through the decades to Anchor’s nineteenth-century roots; it was a pricier approach that introduced greater uncertainty into the brewing. A few degrees the wrong way in the boiling part of the brewing, a mismatch of malts, or a wrong measurement of the same, and the batch was ruined; its ruination, in fact, likely only to be discovered after weeks of fermentation, the unusable rotted fruits of many hours of labor the money-losing operation could never get back. To Maytag, though, that was the point. He set up a little place in the Eighth Street building that he called “the lab,” and it was exactly that: a place to tweak Anchor’s recipes, to find what ingredients worked and in what proportions. It was also where the beer was made more palatable for distribution; one of the first triumphs of Maytag’s team was preventing the draft beer from souring before it made it to local restaurants and bars. Another was finding a way to bottle the beer for shipment without loading it with preservatives. By the start of the 1970s, both would be accomplished.
Still, Anchor failed to turn a profit, despite literally no competition from other craft breweries. And yet the barely thirty-year-old Maytag kept at it—small, independent and traditional. He had grave doubts, but he was genetically hardwired to be stubborn when it came to starting a new business. Plus, he absolutely loved the idea of making a product locally for local consumption—what would one day be labeled “locavore.” It was a love he got from his father, who had crafted the famous blue cheese. “I saw the pride with which my father reacted when people would ask him, ‘Have you anything to do with that blue cheese?’ I saw that, and I saw I had a chance of developing a food product that could do the same.” He had a sense that the demand was out there, beyond San Francisco, a sort of commercial Manifest Destiny in reverse, a movement rolling eastward, back toward his native Iowa, all the way to the Massachusetts where he was schooled, back to a time when geography mattered in food and people took the time to care about what they ate and drank. “We had a feeling that we had a better mousetrap and the world would lead a path to its door.”
Maytag had no idea how many Americans would want him to be right.
*Some states, such as Pennsylvania, even inserted themselves into the three-tier system as retailers.
DO IT YOURSELF
Dunoon, Scotland; Fairfax County, VA | 1964-1968
The tugboat dragged the nuclear submarine alongside Jack McAuliffe and his fellow technicians aboard the Navy’s first nuclear submarine tender, the USS Simon Lake. They were in Holy Loch, an inlet of the River Clyde on the Scottish coast, about thirty-five miles northwest of Glasgow. The technicians had had their breakfast chow, shaken off their hangovers from tippling in pubs in the nearby town of Dunoon, and were setting about another workday amid a typically damp, foggy morning in the mid-1960s, repairing the tubular champions of US Cold War policy in action: the Polaris subs.
Launched in 1960 and eventually numbering forty-five, the subs were each equipped with sixteen nuclear missiles and the capacity to cruise underwater for up to three years, though the typical deployment was a still-onerous sixty days beneath the surface. Usually that surface bobbed within twelve hundred miles of major cities in the Soviet Union, the Polaris having been designed as a fast-strike force, each capable of unloading the nuclear-arsenal equivalent of either Britain or France in quick rounds. It was within this Cold War bubble, with its daily shadow of Armageddon, where McAuliffe, then barely out of his teens, plied his skillful trade. For, while the one-hundred-man Polaris crews were among the most trained and disciplined of the Navy’s sailors, the maintenance crews aboard the Simon Lake were arguably the branch’s most technically blessed. The submarines’ “effectiveness will depend on precise maintenance,” according to a Time magazine profile of the launch of the first two Polaris subs, the George Washington and the Patrick Henry, the week of Thanksgiving 1960.
Heady responsibilities for a kid from Fairfax County, Virginia. But McAuliffe knew his stuff. The Navy had trained him for thirty-eight weeks on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. There McAuliffe finished second in his electronics class, and the Navy let him pick what he wanted to do. He chose what he called the antennae shop at Holy Loch, repairing and refitting Polaris subs for those sixty-day deployments with fresh crews. He and his fellow mechanics were not necessarily sure how the subs ran, but they knew how to fix them.
Before the Navy, McAuliffe had led a bit of a peripatetic life, thanks to a father in the federal government and a boyhood fascination with how things got put together. He was born in 1945, two years after his father, John, was drafted into the FBI because he had just completed a master’s degree in German and the United States was two years into World War II. Also fluent in Spanish, John McAuliffe was first stationed in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas, where Jack was born, serving as an interpreter at the American embassy at a time before the CIA existed, when the FBI engaged in international espionage. The McAuliffe family moved after the end of the war, when Jack was six months old, to another South American assignment, this one with the State Department in Medellín, Colombia, where John ran a State Department center that advised Colombians who wanted to study in the United States. It was while doing this that the elder McAuliffe began to help develop the textbooks and the methodology that would become the English as a Second Language programs, opening further career opportunities. He moved his family once more, to Fairfax County, Virginia, for an ESL-related job through American University in Washington, DC, when his oldest child was in the third grade.
By the time the McAuliffes moved in, Fairfax was much more country than city—barely one hundred thousand people spread over 395 square miles, its population set to quadruple between 1950 and 1970. It was there young Jack developed an avocation that would reverberate down through the next quarter-century, into every homebrewer’s kitchen and craft brewer’s bottling line, into the very cuisine of the country: he started tinkering with things.
Perhaps it was when his mother taught him to sew when he was only three years old—in part to keep him busy—though wherever it came from, it was in full bloom by his teen years. McAuliffe was particularly fascinated with the joining of metals. So in the tenth grade, he apprenticed himself to a local welder. He would jump off the school bus in the late afternoons, tool around the shop for no pay, doing the grunt work, absorbing systematically how welding happened, and sometimes getting to go out on jobs. It was Jack’s responsibility to get everything set up while the welder, Clay, chatted with the customer. Perhaps most important, this included coaxing forth the acetylene pressure from torpedo-shaped tanks—he had his own oxygen acetylene kit—and when everything was set, calling out, “Clay, we’re ready to go!” Then the razor-like spit of red-blue flame would work it
s magic before the apprentice’s goggled eyes. Chemistry, physics, mathematics—it was all there, joining together some things to make something.
After high school, McAuliffe tried college for a year, didn’t like it, and, in 1964, followed his father into the service, volunteering for the Navy. After the thirty-eight weeks of technical training on Treasure Island, he was assigned to the USS Simon Lake, which, after loading up on weapons during a six-month docking in Charleston, South Carolina, headed across the Atlantic to Holy Loch and the Polaris subs. It took eleven days at fifteen knots.
We do not know—and McAuliffe does not remember—whether he, while in training in San Francisco, ever visited the pre-Fritz Maytag Anchor Brewery at Eighth and Brannan Streets, or tasted any of its drafts in local haunts like Fred Kuh’s Old Spaghetti Factory. We shouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t. Though it wasn’t bad by the standards of the time, Anchor’s steam beer in 1964 was still American-made beer, and American-made beer was by and large still very much haunted by Prohibition, the ghosts of its storied past disquieting smaller breweries across the land as the likes of Anheuser-Busch and Miller got bigger and bigger and developments like the pull-tab for aluminum cans (first introduced by Pittsburgh’s Iron City Brewing Company in 1963) and the Interstate Highway System drove consumers farther and farther from where the beer they drank was produced. So neither San Francisco transplant—not the restless heir of the home-appliance empire nor the precocious child of the trilingual G-man—would have had cause, really, to care about locally produced beer in that last full year before the American craft beer movement began. Their paths would finally cross a few years later, in the same city, though under much different circumstances and with far-echoing effects on that very movement.
In the four years between his departure from and return to San Francisco, in the free time he had away from repairing the Polaris subs, inside a little gray stone cottage in the town of Dunoon, in a move both prosaic in that men had been doing what he did for millennia and profound in that what he did would alter the American palate, Jack McAuliffe began to brew his own beer. He did it more from necessity than anything else, and he was confident from the get-go that he could do it. The confidence sprang from a young life working with his hands as dictated by his brains, whether toward the joining of metals or the repairing of nuclear armaments. It also sprang from a legal sea change in Great Britain around the time McAuliffe sailed into Holy Loch.
In April 1963, Reginald Maudling, the chancellor of the exchequer (the British equivalent of treasury secretary), did away with an eighty-three-year-old law that required a license—and a concomitant small fee—for homebrewing any amount of beer. Suddenly, the English, the Welsh, (some of) the Irish, and the Scots could brew what they wanted and however much they wanted; and, not surprisingly, as would happen in the United States twenty years later, a retail industry arose to service them. At first, the enthusiasm for homebrewing far outweighed the quality of the end results. Not that it mattered too much. It’s unlikely anyone was ever prosecuted for not paying the shillings; and homebrewing was rare in a Britain still feeling the effects of wartime austerity. Sugar was rationed from 1940, after the start of World War II, until 1954, and other homebrewing ingredients were supremely difficult to come by. Hops were usually sold at wine-making stores in large, open-topped buckets, and they were unnamed, dry, and flavorless. Malt extracts came in tins. Nobody really knew what they were doing: any how-to books were highly technical, and institutional knowledge barely existed. Britain, after all, had no old-timers who could tell you about the bathtub beer they had made during Prohibition. Instead, homebrewing on the isles often made a mockery of the kingdom’s grand tradition of fine ales and lagers. “Many times I added lemonade to improve the taste of a thin, high-alcohol beer due to high rates of granulated sugar,” Bill Lowe remembered. He was in the Royal Navy then, serving mostly on submarines. Decades later he would be a judge at beer festivals and a founder of the Northern Craft Brewers Craft Brewing Association in England. “It was impossible to obtain named varieties of hops, grains, and yeasts until around 1980.”
McAuliffe got the idea to homebrew while running errands in a Boots drug store in Glasgow in late 1966. It had occurred to him that once he returned to the States, the beer he’d discovered in Scotland would be almost wholly unavailable. Oh, man, what am I going to do? he thought. His eyes surveyed the store’s shelves and settled upon another echo of Maudling’s legal change: The Big Book of Brewing by Dave Line. Line was an electrical engineer and one of the first to explain homebrewing in plain English. While most books that touched on homebrewing were heavy on mechanical jargon, aimed more at commercial brewers than amateurs, Line wrote simple, step-by-step instructions for creating clones of classic English styles right in your kitchen. The equipment would today seem dated and many of the recipes laughingly basic—no grains, just malted barley and hop syrups, with dry, somewhat listless yeast—but in the early 1960s they were revelatory.*
Bang! McAuliffe thought. That’s how I’m going to do it—I’m going to make my own beer like the beer I have here! He bought Line’s book and a homebrewing kit for a pale ale from a display underneath it. He also bought a plastic trash can.
Back at the cottage in Dunoon, McAuliffe stoked the kitchen’s coal-burning fireplace (gas or electric heat were not options) and got to work boiling the admixture of water and syrups to create what brewers call “wort,” or unfer-mented beer. He then let the wort cool, tossed in the yeast, aerated it by wiggling the pot, and cleaned out the trash can. Able to hold five gallons, it would serve as the fermentation vessel for this first new batch of the American craft beer movement. McAuliffe at first left the can open at the top (what brewers call “open fermentation”). For the later stages, he capped it with a plastic airlock to let out carbon dioxide, a by-product of fermentation, and to keep out oxygen, which could doom the wort to bacterial infection. The brewing took a few hours. After a couple of weeks of fermentation, McAuliffe bottled what could now be called beer in used swing-top bottles and aged it a further two weeks.
The beer disappeared, as did subsequent batches—McAuliffe remembers no complaints. In fact, not only were his fellow American servicemen delighted by the reproduction of the ales they’d enjoyed in Dunoon’s pubs, but the Scots themselves also liked McAuliffe’s kit-driven concoction; the neighbors put it away as thirstily as the compatriots. It was likely the first time since Prohibition that American-crafted beer had influenced foreigners. An old trajectory had begun to reverse itself.
*Line’s book would not be published in the United States until 1974, and it may not have been published commercially in the United Kingdom until around that time. But both McAuliffe and others in the craft beer movement recall seeing copies of the book before then. Line died in 1979.
BEER FOR ITS OWN SAKE
Okinawa, Japan; Portland, OR | 1970
Fred Eckhardt loved the book, of course—he just didn’t care for the title, A Treatise on Lager Beers. Something about the highfalutin word “treatise” with its thirteenth-century etymological roots and its academic pretensions, rankled him. The compact, fifty-eight-page paperback, after all, was meant to be an accessible guide to homebrewing the most popular type of beer on the planet; it was not meant to turn off would-be hobbyists with superfluous jargon. That was the last thing Eckhardt, the book’s author, wanted to do. At forty-three, with a compact, muscular frame born of years in the Marines and a handlebar moustache that would become a trademark, he saw himself as an evangelist of good beer—the sorts of flavorful, robust ones he had had amid overseas deployments, including during the Korean War in the early 1950s. It was then, as a flight radio operator stationed in what is now Osaka International Airport in Japan, that Eckhardt tasted the mildly bitter pale lager Tuborg, out of Denmark, the first good beer he ever had.
Though Tuborg was—and remains—more akin to the likes of Budweiser than to what we would call craft beer, it was for Eckhardt a far cry from the beer his
father had made in Everett, Oregon, twenty years before. That was standard Prohibition hooch: one can hops, ten gallons of water, several pounds of sugar, translating into roughly ten gallons of very strong—and very not good—beer. At age six, with Prohibition the law of the land, Eckhardt and a friend, at their fathers’ prodding, had a glass of the beer; the aftertaste lingered through the decades and colored his perception of what beer could be. He took that perception with him, out of Oregon and to the Pacific Theater during the waning days of World War II in 1945, when Eckhardt was part of the American occupation of a vanquished Japan and stationed on the southern island of Okinawa.
To him, the Japanese beer at the war’s end was pathetic, though it came in interesting packaging to mark the interesting times. He and his fellow Marines at the Yokosuka Air Base were allowed a ration of six beers weekly in cans—a new technology vis-à-vis beer, one so nascent then that the cans Eckhardt and his comrades drank from might seem exotic today. Their tops were conically shaped, with metal caps, the same kind used for bottles, sealing the opening—a sort of hybrid of today’s cans and bottles. The beer on Okinawa, however terrible in retrospect, was welcomed by the Allies: rations of tomato juice or what servicemen remembered as an “Aussie can of chocolate milk of some sort” were substituted when beer supplies didn’t arrive. “Wretched stuff,” thought the Oregon-raised San Francisco native barely out of his teens.