The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (27 page)

After the mash, we went into the storage room where Peter Lennox made tea for the four of us. We discussed beer, sports, and politics and I felt very comfortable. At one point the Laird called my name from outside and I could see George and Ian become tense about the prospect of being caught away from their duties. It surprised me somewhat. I guess I thought this whole estate was a storybook affair, but it's clear that it's a business, and a large one at that.

Back in Portland, Geary and his wife embarked on a fundraising tear. In a year and a half, they raised $300,000, including from the doctors who had been Geary's clients. Everyone thought it was a cool idea. Other than the odd bottle of Samuel Adams, there just wasn't local beer on the shelves or from the taps in Maine (and Samuel Adams Boston Lager was being brewed in Pittsburgh besides). They built a space in an industrial park in Portland's more rugged western reaches and hired Alan Pugsley, a lanky, spectacled Englishman from Manchester. A biochemist by education and a brewer by training, Pugsley was gaining a reputation as a top brewing consultant in the United States in much the way another biochemist, Joseph Owades, had a generation earlier. Pugsley was most noted for helping popularize the so-called Ringwood yeast, which was used to make clear, crisp English ales. He set about under David Geary's direction to develop just that sort of ale for the new brewery's flagship.

Pugsley poured a glass for Geary after the first batch was completed in the early autumn of 1986. Geary brought it to his lips. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew this whole start-up brewery in the wilds of an old port city had to work—he didn't really have, or particularly want, a Plan B. And for the brewery to work, the beer had to be good. Quality counted. That was, Geary knew, the price of admission to the industry. He closed his eyes and took a sip.

“Ah.” Geary smiled. “D. L. Geary's Pale Ale.”

Pugsley smiled back, relieved.

The first six-packs and kegs of D. L. Geary hit Portland shelves and bars shortly afterward. The brewery would score its biggest distributive coup when the supermarket chains Hannaford and Shaw's agreed to stock the beer, beginning in 1987.

D. L. Geary was soon joined in New England by Catamount Brewing Company, which became Vermont's first brewery since Prohibition when it started producing an English-style pale ale in early 1987 in an old meat warehouse in White River Junction. The brewery was started by ex-PE teacher and longtime homebrewer Stephen Mason, bluegrass musician Alan Davis, and businessman Stephen Israel with $750,000 from thirty-two investors and a Small Business Administration loan.

In the Midwest, Larry Bell's Kalamazoo Brewing Company was joined by an operation out of St. Paul, Minnesota, birthed by that most American variety of angst: the frustrations of a middle manager. Mark Stutrud was an intermittent homebrewer by night and on the weekends; by day he was a clinical social worker in a large hospital, a role he would describe as “classic middle management with a lot of responsibility and no authority.” He saw two ways out: graduate school or medical school. And then a third way emerged through his hobby: he began in the early 1980s to read about craft beer pioneers. The bug had bitten. In July 1984, he incorporated with Minnesota the Summit Brewing Company. It would become the first new brewery in the Twin Cities since Repeal in 1933, joining only a handful of regionals and Big Beer outlets in the entire Gopher State that either survived Prohibition or opened afterward. Stutrud raised $500,000 by selling thirty thousand shares to twenty investors, including a local ad agency, which helped with promotion (the marketing budget was about five dollars per barrel). Summit set up shop in an old truckparts warehouse on University Avenue in St. Paul, and Stutrud bought a Bavarian brewhouse with a capacity for six thousand barrels annually. The first kegs of pale ale and porter hit Minneapolis and St. Paul bars in September 1986, retailing at about $1.50 a glass. They were quickly joined by drafts from the James Page Brewing Company, a homebrew supplier and craft brewery started
by a Minneapolis lawyer. The Twin Cities, which had begun the year without any breweries, closed it with a pair of them.

Twelve hundred miles down the Mississippi, in a town of barely one thousand souls on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, two more homebrewers, Rush Cummings and Jim Patton, started Abita Brewing Company. It was named after the small town of Abita Springs, where the artesian water was supposed to be some of the purest around and could therefore go right into making the brewery's first two lines, all draft, no bottles: an amber lager and, to placate the potential masses in a region where it was hot at least ten months of the year, a golden-colored lager. With a Munich-trained brew-master, Mark Wilson, and incorporated in April 1984, Abita became but the second craft brewery in the South, behind the Chesapeake Bay Brewing Company started in 1982 by Jim Kollar and Lou Perrin. It was also the only other brewery in Louisiana after the Dixie Brewing Company out of New Orleans, which dated from 1907 and which, with a production level barely one-third of its 1985 capacity, was in the same straits as other struggling regionals—as one reporter put it, they were “like ghosts in a Pac-Man game.”

Joining Chesapeake Bay and Abita in the South was a most unlikely entrant in our story of the American craft beer movement. Uli Bennewitz was a trim, young Bavarian who came to the States in the late 1970s to manage vast farmlands for European and American clients. He had studied agriculture, was interested in it, and was good at what he did; it kept him busy. Then his brother called from England. A brewery near Munich was looking to expand and wanted to rid itself of a five-barrel, electric-powered system that it used for test batches. Bennewitz had complained to his brother about the poor quality of American beer—nothing like the German bock, helles, and pilsner they grew up on. Why not buy the set and have it shipped to his home base in North Carolina? Bennewitz did just that, and thus he planted the seed for the South's first brewpub and eventually one of the largest brewery-restaurant hybrids in the United States.

Bennewitz partnered with a retail store for the space and set about creating what was known as a brewpub—not that he knew that. To him, the small-scale operation was just a chance to meld fine German-style beers with German-style cuisine. He also did not know that the Tar Heel State did not allow you to serve the beer you brewed on-site. He thought the “ABC” that people suggested he check with was some sort of school-related thing (it was not—it was the Alcoholic Beverage Control commission). The law would have to change, which Bennewitz set about pushing with the help of a state senator and a cooperative ABC. The change in hand, he and his partners, with brewers
imported from West Germany, opened the Weeping Radish in Manteo on July 4, 1986. That brought two more revelations: they should have brewed ales, which Bennewitz discovered were all the rage in the nascent craft beer movement (ales would have taken significantly less time to make); and the lagers they did brew, including a helles, a schwarzbier (or dark lager), and a pilsner, were not to the liking of American palates, particularly those of the neighbors. North Carolina's first commercial brewery since Repeal in 1933 was a Stroh's brewery in Winston-Salem in 1970, followed by a Miller plant in Eden eight years later. The vast state—the longest east of the Mississippi—was a fecund environment for Big Beer, not to mention fast food. “If we had had Budweiser and sold chicken wings,” Bennewitz realized, “we would have had a chance with the locals.”

Uli Bennewitz at Weeping Radish.
COURTESY OF WEEPING RADISH BREWERY

As it was, the Weeping Radish was packed in the summers and dead in the winters; customers on average came from at least two hundred miles away, from Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the like, often for their first sight of a working brewery. That it churned away on the North Carolina coast, in a remote area best known as the testing grounds for the Wright brothers' flights, only added to the allure. The brewpub, named for the Bavarian practice of salting white radishes to dehydrate them, produced four to five hundred barrels annually those first couple of years. They moved as much as they could during the summers and picked back up again with the brewing around Christmas.

D
aniel Bradford thought
they were about to set a world record. It was the first year, 1987, that the Great American Beer Festival used a single draft system for all the entries—perhaps the largest single draft system ever devised. There were 120 beers from seventy breweries for the two-day festival, which had recovered from the 1984 debacle that nearly croaked the whole thing.
*
Bradford went to the Merchandise Mart in Denver the Saturday morning before the festival for that day started. He was alone with the single draft system, alone in the hall as the sun streaked through the bank of windows, shining bright light on the best beer in America.
He was alone with the best beer in America.

He liberally sampled several, and it hit him then: the growth in the movement, the growth in the industry. It was something now decidedly different than the planning sessions in Charlie Papazian's living room. It was an increasingly professionalized segment of a distinct part of American cuisine. As if to put an exclamation point at the end of that realization, Bradford recalled that this would be the first GABF with a blind tasting panel of professionals: two brewmasters from Big Beer, one craft brewer, three beer writers, and Charlie Papazian as president of the Association of Brewers. Attendees could still vote in consumer preference polls, but the panel and its parameters signaled a shift. The GABF had come up with criteria for twelve different categories, defining for the first time at the festival what constituted a porter, what constituted a wheat beer, and so on.
^†
Like with the popularity contests of previous years, there would be three winners in each—but this time, a la the Olympics, each
would be awarded a specific medal rather than a numerical ranking. And the panels were meant to be exacting and unforgiving; if, for instance, an entry did not pass the initial smell test for a particular style, a judge would nix it from the competition without so much as tasting it. The panels meant that relative unknowns could win big right out of the box; they didn't need the brand recognition that might have helped others over the hump in the consumer preference polls. In its very first GABF, for example, Mark Stutrud's Summit out of St. Paul won the gold in the porter category.

The team from the Association of Brewers (now the Brewers Association) before a Great American Beer Festival in the mid-1980s. Daniel Bradford is center, with beer; Charlie Papazian is on the left, standing.
COURTESY OF DANIEL BRADFORD

It had come to this in a few short years: gold, silver, and bronze; professional panels; convention halls. The American craft beer movement by 1987 was finally touching nearly every region of the country—even distant Alaska and the Deep South, which meant Hawaii and the Great Plains couldn't be far behind. Each successive start-up seemed more routine. It was still a challenge from a business standpoint; the industry had seen several closures. Entrepreneurs as disparate as Geoff and Marcy Larson in Juneau and Dan Kenary, Rich Doyle, and George Ligeti in Boston couldn't get banks to back them, and the founders of Boulder Brewing and New Amsterdam, two thousand miles apart, sought refuge in the plush arms of venture-capital firms. Still, the business model of a craft brewery seemed, in less than half a generation, a plausible one.
It might sound crazy, except it wasn't in practice. There were paths to emulate; people to go to for advice, for supplies, for equipment, for brewmasters; timed gatherings of the tribe like the GABF and the now-separate homebrewers competition; media from trade publications to regular columns in major newspapers, with some of the coverage waxing as poetic as any baseball writing. And now there were style guidelines, molds for subsequent generations to bend to or, as often as not, break. The play that opened in that pivotal year of 1978 was wrapping its early acts. The scenes to come would prove just as interesting for the audience.