Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (42 page)

Together, McAuliffe and Fritz Maytag represented two sides of the new brewing coin. Maytag had demonstrated that there was a viable market for a new kind of beer—or, more accurately, a new market for an older style of full-bodied beer made from barley and hops, a kind of beer that had not been made in the United States for well over a century. McAuliffe provided penniless entrepreneurs and ambitious homebrewers with a model of how to build a small, functional, affordable brewhouse. Together, these two men and their breweries, and the sea change in attitudes toward beer, provided the building blocks for a new era in American brewing.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Something Old, Something New

I
N
1978,
THE NUMBER
of breweries in the United States plunged to its all-time low: eighty-nine plants owned by a mere forty-one companies. Beers made by the top five brewers—Anheuser-Busch, Miller, Schlitz, Pabst, and Coors—dominated coolers at grocery stores and gas stations. By the year 2000, those forty-one companies would balloon to nearly fifteen hundred, and two of the breweries in the top ten would be companies that had not existed back in 1978. Grocery store beer shelves would groan under a cornucopia of new beers, including ales, stouts, and porters, beer styles that had not been seen in the United States for a century, except as imports. Americans would drink freshly made beer at brewpubs, or tour one of the thousand-plus breweries, where the owners, who were often the brewmasters too, greeted guests with a smile and a beer. Americans would enjoy more varied and higher-quality beers than at any time in the nation’s history.

T
HEY DID SO BECAUSE
of people like Ken Grossman, who founded Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., and was perhaps the most talented brewmaster of his generation. In 1964, ten-year-old Ken’s focus of interest in his otherwise ordinary suburban Los Angeles neighborhood was a house a few doors down from his own. His best friend, Greg Moeller, lived there, and Greg’s dad, Calvin, a metallurgist, ruled over that great Shangri-La of boys everywhere: a basement laboratory. But this was no ordinary lab. Moeller devoted his to the alchemy of liquor, mixing up batches of wine, sake, and beer. The basement brewery’s marvelous aromas and the science and magic of homebrewing lured the boy into a lifelong passion. Grossman was surely the nation’s youngest and shortest assistant brewer, working alongside the neighborhood master, absorbing wisdom as only a child can do.

In junior high, Grossman converted his own basement into a brewhouse. He befriended the owner of a local homebrewing supply shop and joined the Maltose Falcons. A high-school teacher with the wisdom to see the hobby as a strange but useful path to science encouraged the teenager to subject his beers to laboratory analysis. Ken’s parents indulged their son’s interest. By his own admission, he was a bit of a wild child, and, things being what they were in the late 1960s, Mr. and Mrs. Grossman no doubt concluded better a brewhouse than a bong in the basement.

Besides, their son enjoyed other interests, although some of them were just as strange. He built a house in the backyard—no “isn’t that cute” weekend project but a functioning miniature house, complete with code-approved plumbing and electricity. He developed an enthusiasm for bicycling and, Ken Grossman being Ken Grossman, taught himself everything there was to know about bicycle mechanics and maintenance. He joined his older brother and his friends on biking trips, usually camping expeditions along the coast or up into the Sierras. One trek landed them in San Francisco, where they stopped by Anchor Brewing. Ken was impressed that there was an American beer out there with as much complexity and depth as those he was making on his own.

In the spring of 1972, Grossman picked up his high school diploma, packed his brewing equipment and bicycle tools into a VW microbus, and headed north with a vague plan to attend college and the more immediate goal of escaping Southern California’s freeways. Destination: Chico, a small town nestled between two national forests, Plumas to the east and Mendocino to the west. He settled in, taking classes at a nearby community college and at California State University, Chico, working at area bicycle shops, and a few years later opening a homebrew supply shop. There were plenty of customers, including students and professors from the university and local doctors and lawyers. Hippies “came down out of the hills” in search of cheap ingredients for making cheap booze. He taught classes to the hobbyists who were more interested in quality than price.

And pondered the notion of starting his own brewery. The obstacles loomed large for a young man with no money and a weird idea. Sure, Fritz Maytag had done it, but the older man enjoyed the pleasure of a fat bank account, and besides, there weren’t any other Anchor-sized outfits standing around empty, waiting to be bought.

But in 1978, Grossman visited New Albion. Later, he could not remember much about the beer except that it was “hoppy.” He only had eyes for the brewery. New Albion, with its Rube Goldbergian labeler and its three-barrels-lashed-together fermenter, was a dream come true. Here, he knew, was the shining brewery on a hill, the model for high-quality, small-scale brewing. If McAuliffe could do this, so could he. McAuliffe had little money and neither did Grossman. McAuliffe knew how to weld, hammer, saw, cut, and fit. So did Grossman. McAuliffe cobbled together salvage and scrap; Grossman could do that, too. In short, there was nothing about McAuliffe’s accomplishment that lay beyond his own grasp or skill.

Why not seize the moment? He told his friend Paul Camusi, also a homebrewer, about his vision. Count me in, said Camusi.

Grossman sketched a design for a ten-barrel brewery, a manageable size but large enough to turn a profit—and to avoid the brewer’s Catch-22. The wife of a friend helped the pair write a business plan. But the bankers laughed, so Grossman and Camusi borrowed from family and friends, $50,000 all told. Grossman had befriended the faculty in the chemistry department at a nearby community college and they granted him access to laboratory facilities. He enrolled in vocational courses that provided entrée to forklifts, drill presses, and the like. The pair made numerous trips to Davis to consult with Michael Lewis, who was no longer surprised when young men showed up announcing their intention to build a brewery.

In 1979, they rented a three-thousand-square-foot metal building outside Chico. Grossman and Camusi gutted the structure, installed drains and wiring, poured floors, and put up new interior walls, phoning McAuliffe when they needed advice. Grossman drove his 1957 Chevy all over northern California and into Oregon and Washington, stopping at every scrap yard, dairy, and farm to pick through piles of discarded pumps, pipes, and tanks. They scrounged bottles from defunct breweries in Southern California. Maytag was building a new brewery and no longer needed the old pressure filler that he’d bought from Sieben Brewing back in 1966. He sold it to Grossman, in whom he recognized a kindred spirit.

The first $50,000 ran out and Camusi and Grossman borrowed that amount again. Now they had to succeed: Everyone they knew and loved was on the line with them. Deep into the project, they realized their building was too small. Grossman’s uncle, an architect, drew plans for an addition, and the partners took them to city hall. Their addition was five hundred square feet, the clerk told them, and any project that size or larger required payment of a fee. Grossman drew a line across the back end of the plan. “We’ll build it to here,” he said, “499 square feet.” No fee necessary.

A friend designed the labels: a furled banner reminiscent of New Albion’s and sheaves of barley framing a central image of fir trees, a winding river, and in the background, the Sierra Nevadas, the brewery’s namesake. Grossman drove to Oakland to tell Byron Burch about his plans and to show the local homebrewing “guru” the artwork. Burch and Nancy Vineyard marveled at the labels, whose colors and images “jump[ed] off the page.” Vineyard admitted to feeling “a little bit jealous.” Here was a friend making the leap into every homebrewers dream: commercial brewing.

Mostly the dream consisted of endless hours of work and worry, which ramped up several notches when, in November 1980, Grossman and Camusi finally inaugurated their brewvats. Like most of that first generation of new brewers, they decided to make ale rather than lager, and, like Maytag and McAuliffe, to use but four ingredients: malt, hops, yeast, and water. But even with this road map in front of them, the pair soon realized that commercial brewing presented potholes, pitfalls, and detours for which homebrewing had not prepared them. Brewing five gallons at a time was one thing; trying to achieve that same quality in ten barrels was another matter. Their first batches failed. Eleven of them, to be precise.

While they struggled to tame their yeast, they tackled the last step: determining where to sell the beer and how to get it from brewery to retailer. They knew, thanks to Maytag and McAuliffe, that distribution would be their biggest challenge and their greatest danger. They talked to local distributors, but the middlemen wanted an impossibly large piece of the pie, too much for two young men already neck-deep in debt. Grossman and Camusi would deliver their own beer. Which meant they also had to line up their own retail accounts. In between brewing beer, scorning regular sleep and meals as only the young can, they visited every restaurant and tavern in Chico, trying to persuade other small entrepreneurs to take a chance on their beer.

Finally, glorious day, a perfect brew emerged from their vat, one they could duplicate. In March 1981, the first bottles of Sierra Nevada landed in stores and taverns in and around Chico. The pair sold 950 barrels of beer that first year, and twice that the next.

G
ROSSMAN AND
Camusi were leaders of a larger wave of small breweries that opened at about the same time, most of them in northern California and other parts of the western United States, nearly all of them following the McAuliffe—Grossman model. Tom DeBakker, a Marin County firefighter and devoted homebrewer, opened DeBakker Brewery in 1979; his best year was 1980, when he sold eighty barrels. Charles and Shirley Courey opened the doors of Cartwright Brewery in Portland, Oregon, in early 1980; two years later, a sheriff’s deputy padlocked the door. Jim Schleuter, who studied at UC Davis under Michael Lewis, quit his job at Schlitz and founded River City Brewing in Sacramento in the summer of 1981. He rolled out one thousand barrels of beer in 1983, but that was not enough to offset his losses. The brewery entered bankruptcy in early 1984. Charles Rixford, a Berkeley homebrewer, operated Thousand Oaks Brewing out of his basement; he, too, lasted but a few years.

Of the early starters, only three enjoyed any longevity. In 1979, two University of Colorado professors founded Boulder Brewing in a goat shed outside the namesake city; their creation would survive the century. Bert Grant started selling his eponymously named ales, stouts, and porters in Yakima, Washington, in early 1982. In August of that year, Paul Shipman and his partner, Starbucks founder Gordon Bowker, poured the first Redhook at Jake O’Shaughnessey’s restaurant in Seattle.

Why did so few succeed and so many fail? Camusi and Grossman believed that too many would-be beer magnates failed to understand the basics of commercial brewing: Quality beer comes from quality equipment, and sanitation must reign supreme. Failed to understand, too, that, as Grossman put it, “[h]omebrewing and brewing at this scale are pretty much unrelated.” More often than not, he complained, homebrewers tried to go commercial “on a shoestring, and with such low technology and understanding of producing a high quality beer” that they produced foul swill. “It’s the few that put out a marginal product that discourage us and may give the whole small brewing industry a bad image,” he said. “I don’t want to knock homebrewers,” Grossman added, “some homebrewers make excellent beer, but the technology of operating a bottling line and dealing with such large volumes make it a different process.”

Another pair of homebrewers heeded the warning and in so doing pioneered another component of new brewing, combining craft brewing with an American-style pub to create the brewpub. Michael Laybourn and Norman Franks had met in the early 1970s in Mendocino, which was fast becoming a refuge for hippies, dropouts, and escapees from the growing congestion and high rents of the Bay Area. There they taught at an alternative school, cooking up batches of wine and beer in science class so that the kids could understand the fermentation process. In the mid-1970s, the pair left teaching to start a construction company specializing in solar systems and remodeling. But homebrewing had become a passion, and that plus their entrepreneurial bent led them to think seriously about transforming their hobby into a commercial venture.

They visited New Albion and talked to McAuliffe. They listened when he warned them of the Catch-22 and understood that the retail side of brewing posed more dangers than anything that might infect the brewvat’s contents. But they were also inspired by the new state law that allowed brewers to retail their beer on site. They envisioned a brewery with an attached tavern and garden where people could drink quality beer and enjoy life: a new generation’s version of the pleasure gardens owned by the German émigrés of yesteryear.

The location—Hopland, about sixty miles north of Sonoma in Mendocino County—proved an inspired choice. Mendocino County was populated by a mix of ranching families who raised cattle and horses, winemakers, and a growing population of hippies and organic gardeners, courtesy of what Don Barkley described as a “tremendous migration of back-to-the-landers.” The hops fields that once dominated the region were gone, replaced by vineyards. Fetzer Winery had established operations in the county, including a wine tasting room in the old high school in Hopland. The town itself was tiny—just a few hundred people—but it sat on Highway 101, the ribbon of road that runs from Los Angeles north to the Oregon border. Every day, twelve to thirteen thousand cars zoomed past.