The Audacity of Hops Read online

  Eckhardt stayed in the Marine Reserves after 1945 and was called up in October 1950 for service again as a flight radio operator, this time throughout the Pacific, including back in Japan, where he encountered that Danish Tuborg. During this period he also earned a degree at the University of Washington in Seattle, joining tens of thousands of veterans on a GI Bill-infused march that would transform so many existing industries, including the increasingly homogenized brewing industry, and invent so many others. For his part, Eckhardt left the Marine Reserves in 1958, the same year he finished college in Seattle and moved from there back to Oregon as a partner in a Portland photography studio. He had dabbled in photography in the Marines and then had worked with a studio that did child photography door-to-door; the studio was hoping to branch out to Portland, and Eckhardt went with it.

  His new city had a population of just over 372,000, sitting in the temperate valley of the Willamette River, which bisected it. And while by 1965, the year after Eckhardt arrived, Portland would have 316 barber shops, 30 movie theaters, 24 funeral homes, and—important for him—76 photography studios. Like most American cities, it would have one or no breweries. In Portland’s case, it was the Blitz-Weinhard Brewery, a brick amalgam spanning four blocks on the edge of the industrial Pearl District and employing up to 220 people brewing as many as thirty-one different beers.

  Blitz-Weinhard’s history—and its ubiquity in the Portland area at the time—offers a good example of America’s regional breweries. Founded in 1856 by Henry Weinhard, a twenty-six-year-old immigrant from the Württemberg region of present-day Germany, it was still run by the family—Henry’s great-grandsons Frederic and William—but was on its way, like other regional breweries in that era of industrial consolidation, toward being acquired by Big Beer (which happened via Pabst in 1979). For the time being, though, the brewery was a point of civic pride, the nexus of Oregon’s bestselling beer and a link to its more rugged past. Indeed, Weinhard had made his way westward ninety years before from Cincinnati, which was itself developing a busy brewing scene powered by like-minded German immigrants, to Portland because there were no breweries to slake the thirst of the dockworkers and lumberjacks.

  Still, Blitz-Weinhard, particularly its flagship lager, was, like Tuborg, more akin in flavor and production to Big Beer than to what we would now call craft beer. Olympia beer, brewed in Tumwater, Washington, was big in Portland, too, and Coors out of Colorado was considered exotic. For a budding beer snob like Eckhardt, these beers weren’t going to cut it; something had to be done. Like Navy nuclear mechanic Jack McAuliffe, with his plastic trash can half a world away around the same time, the former Marine radio operator turned to homebrewing. It was, as it was for McAuliffe in Scotland, a rather daunting task: supplies, particularly grains and especially yeast strains, were difficult to come by (homebrewers often substituted bread yeasts and batches made entirely with grains were rare, with syrups as the main substitutes); instructions were often arcane, if not also archaic, highly technical in their explanations, and, Eckhardt figured, more useful to commercial brewers than to homebrewers. But he plunged forward, and by 1968 he was not only producing passable batches of lager but also teaching homebrewing and wine making at Wine Art of Oregon, a supply shop near I-84 that served as a meeting place and clearinghouse for Portland homebrewers. There were fifteen to twenty students per class, and they worked off instructions that sprang from books that themselves sprang from overseas or from the Prohibition era: books like Englishman C. J. J. Berry’s Home Brewed Beers and Stouts (1963) and the second edition of Carl Nowak’s Modern Brewing (1934).

  Eckhardt eventually developed an ace up his sleeve, though. He had been self-publishing a journal titled Amateur Brewer, which sought to connect and inform homebrewers with techniques and each other. For Amateur Brewer, in the spring of 1968 he visited the only craft brewery in America: Fritz Maytag’s Anchor. The brewery was then on Eighth Street, between Brannan and Bryant Streets in San Francisco’s South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood. The same location Maytag had walked to from his apartment three years before to buy 51 percent of the failing brewery for the price of a used car. And, like Maytag, Eckhardt had been introduced to Anchor years earlier at Fred Kuh’s Old Spaghetti Factory. “You should try it,” a friend had suggested. “It tastes like homebrew.” It couldn’t possibly, Eckhardt thought. The American beer he had encountered after the Marines was all so bland, so homogenous—it didn’t even approach that Tuborg he tasted a decade before in Japan. But why not? Eckhardt ordered the only beer on tap at Kuh’s place and was impressed. “I could brew beer like this at home,” he thought.

  And there he was, a few years later, at the source. Maytag and Eckhardt struck up a rapport, with the brewer sharing his time and expertise generously and his visitor shooting photos of the equipment: the brew kettle; the mash kettle; the primary fermenter, which to Eckhardt looked like “a small swimming pool,” its surface yellowy white and alive with the churning yeast, devouring the sugars unleashed by the earlier boiling soak of the cracked grains. This type of brewing had been done for centuries, but it was rarely done on this scale anymore—not in the United States, at least. We do not know the exact thoughts passing through the minds of Maytag and Eckhardt as they toured Anchor’s brewhouse, with its worn wood floors, copper kettles, and walls of red and white brick; neither man, after all, thought to record them, as they were not aware of the specialness of their meeting. How could they have been? It had been years since Maytag’s acquisition now, and no other craft brewers had come after. There was nothing to indicate to either man that they were at the start of something—if anything, it felt like the end.

  Eckhardt did take it upon himself soon after the visit to try to induct at least one more person into the movement. Charles McCabe, who wrote an oftentimes acerbic column for the San Francisco Chronicle called “The Fearless Spectator,” had complained about the quality of American beers. Eckhardt wrote in to set McCabe straight on the tradition right in his own backyard. From then on, McCabe became a champion of Maytag’s little outfit, a cheerleader in what was then one of America’s largest and most influential newspapers. Here was one rhapsody on April 20, 1970:

  If you happen to feel patriotic, Steam is the ONLY American beer. Other beers in this country have been named after the middle-European cities where they gained their fame ….

  Yet Steam had as much to do with the building of San Francisco and Northern California as the Christian virtues, good stout Levi’s, shovels, and the saving presence of whores. When people really drank Steam, there were 27 breweries in San Francisco alone. Hundreds dotted the Mother Lode Country. Now, as stated, it is made in but one place here.

  Eckhardt returned to Portland with his Anchor photos and his feedback from Maytag, and he spun the two together into a slideshow for his home-brewing students. One slide would show how a brewing step—say, mashing the grains—was done at home; the next would show how it was done in a small brewery (Anchor); and so on, alternating slides to give an idea of how efforts in the kitchen might translate into the commercial realm. It was an extra mile Eckhardt went for his students. Jack McCallum, Wine Art’s owner, thought he could go even further.

  “Why don’t you write a book?” McCallum asked his friend one day. Eckhardt was known to be good with recipes, with the sort of organization needed to build something from some things.

  “Geez, write a book?” Eckhardt replied. “Who am I to write a book?”

  McCallum dropped the idea, only to bring it up again later. This time, Eckhardt reconsidered. Why not? he thought. Eckhardt bought a gallon of rose wine and drank it as he hammered out on a new typewriter what the book’s subtitle plainly called “A Handbook for Americans and Canadians on Lager Beer.” But it was more than that; it was a manifesto. The last paragraph of the introduction reads more like a palatal call to arms than a jumping-off point for a collection of recipes:

  After Prohibition, it remained illegal to make homebrew (it still is) and so ev
en then there was no light to be shed on the subject. Now more than 35 years after the end of Prohibition we are just beginning to explore the possibilities of home brewing. Beermaking began in the home long before it became commercial, and now we can take it back to the home. The commercial brewers in this country have tailored their product to the lowest common denominator. There are almost no quality beers made in this country, so if you want good, old-country style beer you must make it yourself. Even the German beers imported into this country are being made to the so-called American taste. Pabulum and pap for babies. You actually can make beer just as good as the great European master brews in your own home. This book is only a start.

  In the following forty-eight pages, in conversational prose that would not be unfamiliar to a twenty-first-century blog reader, Eckhardt spelled out the vocabulary of lager beer; the equipment and ingredients needed for brewing its various styles at home; the steps involved, including troubleshooting; and the care in aging and serving it postfermentation (there was even a short section on making your own bottle labels). The recipes he recounted sprang from a recipe that Wine Art had been giving to customers. It was a Canadian one, highly technical, and, to Eckhardt, poorly organized. He broke it apart and put it back together around several different lager styles—light, Bohemian pilsner, Vienna, Bavarian, and more—along the way writing of beer in personal and personable terms, a rather novel approach in a period when the nation’s five biggest breweries produced nearly half its beer. Here was Eckhardt on the illegality of homebrewing: “We should all work to have the law changed so that there is no doubt about the home brewer’s rights alongside his winemaking brother.” Here he was on alcohol per volume:

  There are those who think that a beer should be relatively high in alcohol. This is not reasonable, after all, why do you drink beer? If all you want is inebriation, drink hard liquor. Beer is a convivial beverage between friends, to be drunk for its own sake, as a friendly thing, not a drunking thing. Five to six percent is plenty of alcohol, your friends won’t laugh if your beer clobbers them.

  Published through McCallum’s Wine Art in April 1970, A Treatise on Lager Beers was an earnest salvo, one that steered future craft-brewing pioneers, who decades later would be able to still recall its influence on them. But it was also a fifty-eight-page paperback sold locally in a midsize city with a single brewery unknowingly on its way into the perpetually parched maw of Big Beer. Plus there was that title with the word “treatise” that so bothered the author but that enamored McCallum, who suggested it as a way of lending gravitas to a subject many would not believe worth the weight. The word did not seem to hurt the book, though. It sold enough to warrant second through fifth printings by July 1972 (it would over the next forty years warrant two more printings and sell over one hundred thousand copies), and Eckhardt earned pennies on each. It was never much, and he would remember it mostly as just a lot of fun. Like Fritz Maytag and the Anchor Brewery he had visited and photographed, Eckhardt’s book seemed terminally anachronistic—the isolated whimsy of an American who liked good beer and who was discovering it was increasingly hard to find.

  EDEN, CALIFORNIA

  Davis, CA | 1970

  Michael Lewis was abundantly aware that, in 1970, he was one of a kind in the United States: its sole full professor of brewing science. And he was further aware that the four-year degree program in brewing that he was helping craft at the University of California, Davis would be unique as well. The decade before had been a fortuitous one for the English transplant, one of happy accidents and potential realized. And it all started with a terrible time in Buffalo, New York.

  Lewis, a witty Brit with a ready grin, fresh from finishing his PhD in microbiology and biochemistry at the University of Birmingham in central England, arrived in Buffalo in 1960 to discover not only for the first time in his life apocalyptic winters, but also that the facility where he was to work had burned down. It set the tone for an unfulfilling couple of years, punctuated by feelers to potential employers. He wrote, for instance, to Herman J. Phaff, a food sciences professor at UC-Davis and a world-renowned pioneer in wine yeasts. At that time, Phaff replied that he had nothing for the twenty-something researcher. But before he was to leave Buffalo for England, Lewis wrote him one more time, and Phaff replied in March 1962 that he had just gotten a grant from the brewing industry and Lewis’s background was perfect for it; he should come to California and do a postdoctorate. The next month, Lewis and his wife piled their belongings (including a cat they had rescued) into their Simca, the French compact he had bought brand-new for twelve hundred dollars, and drove into New Jersey; then they turned westward along what would become Interstate 80 but which was then Route 40. The car broke down twice, including an unplanned three-day sojourn in Wyoming during inhospitably cold weather, before the couple reached the Rockies and began to crest toward a California that was itself rapidly changing.

  The state had grown steadily since the turn of the century, but its population really began to boom during the Great Depression as downtrodden Americans, like those depicted in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, headed westward in search of work, California as much an idea of opportunity as a reality. Then manufacturing jobs spiked during World War II, with factories for munitions and other wartime necessities like aircraft swelling the population even more; from 1940 through 1960, California added more than nine million residents and in 1963 displaced New York as America’s most populous state. With the new residents arrived a stereotype of an entire California lifestyle, one of leisure buoyed by stable jobs in growing industries, rapid housing development, perpetually sunny beaches, Disneyland, fast cars on clean new highways, and a feeling of boundary-pushing that one could not expect on the older East Coast, certainly not in Buffalo, New York. The very symbol of soaring twentieth-century commerce, the airplane found its perfect environment in California; the state’s wide-open vistas and benign weather made it the perfect place to build and test them. By 1935, Boeing was the only airplane manufacturer on earth without a California address.

  For California’s newest resident, the descent through the Sierra Nevada Mountains into the central valley was like entering Eden. Lewis saw palm and grapefruit trees, and the job under Phaff at UC-Davis promised research opportunities that he knew could not be had elsewhere in the United States. He turned out to be right. In 1964, he developed the university’s first brewing classes and research program. By 1970, Lewis, then barely out of his twenties, and a faculty colleague, wine-chemistry expert Vernon Singleton, were charged by Chancellor James Meyer to craft what would become the nation’s first bachelor’s degree in fermentation science, with concentrations in wine making and brewing—and he would become America’s only professor of brewing sciences for the next two decades. Lewis and other faculty culled the beer-concentration curriculum from existing courses on oenology and food microbiology. They added to these classes standard-fare scientific vertebrae like physics, chemistry, engineering and mathematics, which, along with courses in business, formed a strong but flexible backbone for what would become a phalanx of American brewers over the next forty years. Before the UC-Davis program, if an American brewer (as opposed to, say, a Belgian or a German one imported for his expertise) said he went to brewing school in the States, it invariably meant he had taken classes at the venerable Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago. Now, with the first BS degrees in fermentation science offered in 1971, American brewing expertise was beginning to be redefined. UC-Davis alumni set out for jobs in Big Beer—the only game in town, save for Anchor, seventy-five miles to the southwest on I-80. And, more important for our story, the university’s brewing research served as a beacon for entrepreneurs. In fact, in 1974 Michael Lewis would sit down with a Navy veteran in his late twenties who told him he planned to open his own brewery in an old warehouse nearby. Could Lewis direct him to some research on the subject?

  Before Jack McAuliffe paid that visit, though, a chance order at a dinner in Munich on the o
ther side of the world would profoundly alter the beer world’s chemistry and make efforts like his and those of Fritz Maytag all the more difficult. Craft beer as a movement in America remained, for the time, largely academic.

  TV DINNER LAND

  San Francisco | 1970-1971

  Mark Carpenter needed a change—or at least a place to work where he could figure out what that change should be. A tall, lanky native San Franciscan in his early twenties with a heavy beard, he knew the telephone company, where he was working, was not such a place. What about that brewery on Eighth Street? He and some friends had toured it earlier in 1971—almost entirely for the free beer at the end—and Carpenter thought that might be just the spot, and an interesting one at that. He went there one day in September and told the office manager he was looking for a job. She found Fritz Maytag, who happened to be there that day and not out on sales calls or traveling for research. He and Maytag talked; Maytag introduced him to Gordon MacDermott, a 1968 Anchor hire who then ran the brewery’s day-to-day operations. Carpenter, a restless soul when he entered the brewery that day, left with a positive feeling. He knew he had nailed it; he knew he had the job. He did. The brewery called him, and he started work on September 30.

  The Anchor that Carpenter stepped into was in transition. By February 1969, Maytag had bought out the “pipe-smoking dreamer” Lawrence Steese and was the brewery’s sole owner. It seemed to be perpetually stuck in start-up mode, however, producing with a crew of five or fewer employees, including Maytag, about a thousand barrels of draft beer a year via a fifty-seven-barrel system (keep in mind that in 1970, Anheuser-Busch, the nation’s biggest brewer, opened in Merrimack, New Hampshire, what was the state’s first brewery since 1950, with an annual capacity of 1.8 million barrels). One thousand barrels a year meant actually brewing only about once a month; the other days were spent on other chores, like cleaning and repairing the brew-house. With its one pump, copper kettles, and nearly constant need of maintenance, it resembled a nineteenth-century operation more than the sleeker engineering triumphs of Big Beer embodied in that Merrimack plant (in fact, it had no refrigeration or stainless-steel pipes or tanks when Maytag first bought it). It was, according to one visitor on the tours that Maytag would personally lead, “a crude and primitive, old brewery.”