Travels with Barley (13 page)

The big brewers like Anheuser-Busch, Pabst, and Schlitz managed to survive Prohibition by switching to products like nonalcoholic near beer, candy, soft drinks, baker's yeast, and ice cream while gangsters such as Al Capone made tens of millions of dollars in illicit profits commandeering breweries through fraud or strong-arm tactics and brewing the real thing for the black market. (We catch up with Capone's brewing strategies in the next chapter in a visit to a bar he once owned.)

Prohibition had scarcely ended when the nation was plunged into World War II and the big beer companies honored the nation's call for sacrifice and dedicated 15 percent of their production to the beer needs of the U.S. servicemen—an act of shrewd patriotism if there ever was one. Propitiously, the beer can had been introduced in 1935 and perfected by wartime, making mass quantities of beer ever easier to stack, ship, and store. Hordes of young men (and women) came back from the war with an appreciation for mass market beers like Budweiser, Pabst, and Schlitz that they simply didn't have before.

Wherever craft brewers are gathered these days, you can foment a lively debate about the ascendancy of American Standard lager merely by pointing out that much of the rest of the world drinks lager, too. But many craft beer people and their disciples are convinced that Americans drink mostly Bud, Miller, and Coors because a) in the thirteen years of Prohibition, with only near beer or bad bootleg beer on the market, Americans actually forgot how full-bodied ales and lagers tasted; and/or b) returning veterans, remembering that cold Pabst on that sweltering day on the beach at Guam, came home with sentimental fondness for the stuff; or c) wartime beer was actually watered down to appeal to the masses of working women who had thronged into the nation's factories in the absence of men. (This debate
does not
take place in the halls of Bud, Miller, or Coors, who see the ascendancy of American Standard as proof that they make great beer.)

The postwar rise of television and the growing ability of beer companies to reach a national audience would set off yet another round of the Lager Wars and roil the beer markets as much as the arrival of lager did 100 years before. An irony is that small regional brewers were the first to use the newfangled medium of television to advertise their products but these early attempts were local, somewhat primitive, and inexpensive. Narragansett Beer sponsored the first-ever broadcasts of a major league baseball game in 1945, bringing the Boston Red Sox to a sparse audience huddled before black and white TVs. But by 1975, when Miller Brewing launched its Miller Lite campaign to a huge and relatively sophisticated national audience, TV beer advertising was well on its way to becoming a $1 billion a year game that only the big boys could afford to play well and with stamina.

Does it work? Well, Miller's sales rocketed from about seven million barrels in 1975 to over 31 million barrels in 1978—the most intense boom in sales in recorded beer history. Moreover, even the Beer Geeks stand in awe of the ability of Big Beer to use its huge financial reserves to bring to life creative ad campaigns that not only sell beer but roll like tsunamis through popular culture. One example is Anheuser-Busch's hilarious and stunningly popular “Whassup?” commercials that first aired during the 2000 Super Bowl. The skit, starring real-life moviemaker Charles Stone III, simply had Stone, who is African-American, and a few of his black friends holding cans of Bud and talking on the phone, greeting each other with the verbal high-five, “Whassup?”

The commercial, Stone told me, was actually built around a kind of video résumé he'd made for himself a year before. And it wasn't exactly a safe play for Anheuser-Busch, even from a marketing standpoint. Whites consume 77 percent of all beer in America; blacks only 10 percent. Yet the commercial was the highest rated of any at the Super Bowl and it and its derivations still enjoy a spectacular afterlife on the Internet, where they are replayed again and again (for free) in the U.S. and scores of other countries.

It was during the mid-1970s that Miller, Anheuser-Busch, and that once middle-of-the-pack regional brewer Coors began to make their gains that now give them 80 percent of the American beer market—Bud, now 50 percent, Miller about 20 percent, Coors about 10 percent—virtually all of it at the expense of regional players who just couldn't spend to compete. To put this in perspective: in 1947, Anheuser-Busch was only the fourth largest brewer in the U.S.; Schlitz, Pabst, and Ballantine & Sons held the top three spots respectively. Familiar names like Schaefer, Rheingold, Falstaff, Blatz, and Hamm's helped fill out the top ten. The spread among the top ten then was such that
any of them
could have theoretically emerged as a contending brand for the top spot. Yet not a single one of those companies survives today, save Pabst, which, as noted earlier, soldiers on as a contract brewer of relic beers and a shadow of its old self.

Of course, it would be simplistic to lay this
all
at the feet of mass marketing. Anheuser-Busch, as you'll see in a coming chapter, is a ferociously shrewd and competitive company. Miller, though struggling for the past decade, built its empire on clever branding and chutzpah: its risky Lite Beer gambit paid off handsomely and put a huge fright into the Anheuser-Busch Goliath. Coors craftily took advantage of its status as a kind of regional cult beer in the 1960s to ramp itself up into a national player.

Moreover, competitors were sunk by more than clever and expensive advertising. Nervous antitrust regulators through the 1980s blocked or delayed some proposed beer mergers that might have saved big second-tier players like G. Heileman & Co. and Stroh Brewing Co., and perhaps might even have allowed Pabst to remain a real competitor. Blunders were made, the most colossal by Schlitz, which was in a neck-and-neck race with Anheuser-Busch to lead the American beer market in the 1970s. Whether out of greed or panic, it chemically shortened its brewing cycle and went to a recipe ever heavier with adjuncts, all with the hope of speeding up production and shaving a buck a barrel off its costs. The result was a beer, from all accounts, that tasted like tin, and coagulated, if stored improperly, into a kind of gelatinous snot. By 1980, Schlitz was on the auction block.

But while the Bud Blitzkrieg was winning the Lager Wars, a funny thing happened—some upstarts, tired of the same old beers, opened a kind of guerrilla front, producing ales (and some odd and well-hopped lagers) in a return to a tradition that was both subversive and would've warmed Matthew Vassar's generous ale-making heart. As stated earlier, Fritz Maytag fired the opening shot in 1969 by acquiring full ownership of the Anchor Brewing Co., and by 1971 he was brewing a head-turning beer called Anchor Steam; Jack McAuliffe's New Albion followed suit in 1976. New Albion could have just as easily been called a minibrewery as a microbrewery, but as Maytag pointed out, during an interview at his San Francisco brewery, micro was a word suddenly being bandied around by dazzling new tech upstarts like Intel and Apple Computer that were springing up in a place soon to be called Silicon Valley. McAuliffe intended his beer to be to old-line lager what the microchip was to the vacuum tube.

In 1982, Bert Grant, an expatriated Scotsman, opened the nation's first modern brewpub in Yakima, Washington, bringing back and even reinventing super-hoppy beers in the IPA tradition. By 1984, Jim Koch had founded his Boston Beer Co. and the Samuel Adams label. Given the lager taste spectrum at the time, Koch could without exaggeration apply the label “Extreme Beer” to his first products.

By 1995, regional lager companies were still failing but the number of U.S. breweries, counting microbreweries and brewpubs, had radically reversed itself and spurted upward to 500. As of this writing, they number more than 1,500 and craft brew sales in 2003 reached a record retail volume of about $3.8 billion. That's still peanuts to Bud and even to SABMiller. But in a rousing speech to an Association of Brewers Conference in 2003, Kim Jordan, head of Colorado craft beer maker New Belgium Brewing and the AOB's elected chairperson, told the minions of Little Beer that there was no reason they couldn't capture 10 percent of the U.S. beer market—about triple their current market share—if they continue to mix innovation with rigid quality standards and aggressive marketing.

While even some craft brewers think this figure is ambitious, the larger point is that the Ale Genie has gotten out of the bottle and the Lager Wars simply aren't that interesting anymore because, in reality, Anheuser-Busch has won. The Big Three, as they have in the past, will continue to duke it out—by ad spending or hardball distribution tactics—over market share. They will put out a new beer here and there; they will buy a craft brewer here and there; they will make alliances with foreign brewers here and there. (Indeed, as this book was being put to bed, Coors announced plans to merge with Canadian brewing giant Molson.) But beer's creative and passionate center seems clearly to have shifted to the little guys, for when the beer guru Michael Jackson extols America as “the most interesting beer scene in the world,” he isn't talking about the 170 million barrels of American Standard lager that the Big Three produced in 2002.

Or as Randy Mosher, a Chicago beer writer, historian, and homebrewer told me, “Bud does what it does very well and it will continue to do that very well. But when it comes to what's truly
interesting
about beer today, it's completely out of their hands.”

I expected I might get an argument or two about this as I headed back down the River of Beer.

I left La Crosse in overcast and a cool drizzle and headed down State Highway 35 without a clear destination in mind. The gloom of the day couldn't hide the verdant, expansive beauty of the countryside as the highway hugged the river for the most part. Steering down a winding bluff, I watched a two-mile-long freight train chug up a bluff on the distant shore. At Genoa, Wisconsin, I stopped briefly to admire one of the biggest locks on the Mississippi (one of twenty-nine locks and dams on the river) and at 1:00
P.M.
I pulled into the parking lot of Coaches Family Restaurant in Prairie du Chien.

I ordered the fried catfish lunch, though a kindly waitress informed me that the Flavor Crisp Fried Chicken was the pick of the menu. It was a perfectly fine fried catfish meal, though the highlight of my time at Coaches was listening to the local radio station over the restaurant's sound system. When an advertisement for a Prairie du Chien funeral home pitched its services as “celebrating the end of your loved one's life,” I knew I had arrived at a place of wry humor if not savvy marketing. (“Uncle Joe's finally dead?—Call us to plan the party!”)

Prairie du Chien, population 6,000, turned out to be a very old and historically significant town, though, driving in, much of it looked as if it had arrived yesterday. I passed strip malls and semi-modern factories and a huge modular home sales lot, and large clusters of occupied modular homes. A cavernous superstore and warehouse for Cabela's, the national hunting and fishing catalogue retailer, anchored the outskirts.

Modern appearances aside, I learned that the French explorers Marquette and Jolliet first ran into the Mississippi River here in 1673 after adventuring down the Wisconsin River with the help of Native American guides. But the town's real claim to fame was mixed up with an episode that had at least an oblique beer connection. In the summer of 1900, the Ringling Brothers Circus, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, and a clutch of tourist trains called the Great Railroad Excursion all converged on Prairie du Chien. This surge of mass entertainment brought 30,000 visitors, many of them deeply committed beer drinkers, to the sleepy little town, apparently taxing the patience and tempers of the locals. By the time William Cody and his bunch arrived in August, some of the townspeople had had it; a small riot broke out between locals and some of Bill's fellows, with shots being fired and property being damaged. Buffalo Bill himself had to come galloping down the street on his impressive stallion and in full Wild West regalia to restore order.

My catfish lunch over and contemporary beer pickings looking slim, I moved on, crossing the river to Marquette, Iowa, and heading south on scenic Highway 340. Soon the river divided itself into two channels and I found myself in Dorothy Country, with endless, rolling cornfields on one side of the road and endless, rolling soybean fields on the other. Rain splattered my windshield and dark, menacing clouds boiled up on the distant horizon in a huge and glowering sky. It looked like one of those places that could easily hatch tornadoes (or the Wicked Witch of the West). It was extremely scenic, in an unsettling kind of way.

Two hours later the pastoral countryside melted into the sprawling fringes of Dubuque, population 62,000, where a welcoming sign said “Help Keep a Good Thing Growing.” As I drove deeper into the city, the sprawl surrendered to what looked like a solidly working-class burg, faded and tattered in places, but with sections that suggested stability if not exactly prosperity; rows of tidy houses with American flags flapping from the eaves of front porches; white, clapboard churches; redbrick buildings housing barber shops and hardware stores. I also saw eighteen-wheelers parked up in yards; I passed Hawkeye's, a motorcycle salvage shop; a used CD—and record-trading place; and a half-dozen old-fashioned beer joints that looked like the painters hadn't been by in a couple of decades. A homeless man staggered down the street in front of one of them.

Dubuque looked like a town that had seen better days.

But then I knew, having helped cover the fringes of the American farm crisis in the 1980s for the
Journal
, that Dubuque was among the Midwestern towns that had taken the brunt of a sharp rise in interest rates and collateral collapse in commodities prices that had driven thousands of debt-laden family farms out of business. The town and county had been trying to claw its way back ever since.

I soon found myself downtown in Old Dubuque, a few square blocks of handsome redevelopment that provided a glimpse of the city's earlier glory. It had been founded in the 1780s by Julien Dubuque, a French Canadian fur trader who had also launched the region's once prosperous lead mining industry. Farming and farming-related manufacturing arrived after fur and lead ran their course. After driving around a bit, I parked at the river, where the impressive and new National Mississippi River Museum loomed up, a picture of Mark Twain auspiciously adorning the entrance. Next door, as though attached, was the glittery Diamond Jo Casino and Riverboat. If this seemed an odd juxtaposition, it wasn't—Dubuque, since the farm bust, had decided to hitch its economic wagon to tourism and casino gambling, or so I learned later at a downtown visitors center. The town's new motto was: “Masterpiece of the Mississippi.”

I'm not a fan of casinos but I do like museums, so I paid the $8.75 admission fee (which seemed steep) and went in for a gander, thinking perhaps I would stumble upon Dubuque beer lore. It was money well spent, for not only did I immerse myself in gee-whiz river facts (the Mississippi sends 2.3 million cubic feet of water
per second
into the Gulf of Mexico and transports 472 million tons of cargo annually), but I also got a great beer scoop. During a twenty-minute movie on river history, I learned that in the late 1800s the steamboat
Ophelia
of Dubuque “took a large party to Guttenburg” about thirty miles upstream, toting “50 half-barrels of lager and 1,200 pounds of ice” to keep the beer cold. Not an ounce of beer remained as the
Ophelia
returned to Dubuque and, as the wobbly passengers disembarked, “two men fell overboard.” And later, a fellow museum browser with whom I chatted briefly about my beer quest asked if I knew who Dubuque's most famous—well, infamous—bar owner, brewer, and sometime resident happened to be?

I said I had no idea.

He said, “Al Capone. He owned the Julien Hotel in town and used to hide out there when things got too hot for him in Chicago. He'd drink at the bar. ”

I recalled passing the Julien, a grand if faded-looking hostelry, as I drove through downtown. I wasn't really sure, until I heard of Scarface Capone's connection, that I was staying in Dubuque for the night.

Given this discovery, I decided another walking tour was in order, tempted as I was to drive back to explore the dive bars I'd seen on the way in. So I checked into the Holiday Inn a couple of blocks from the Julien and struck out after dark. My first stop was the Blackwater Grill and Bricktown Brewery just a couple of blocks away. A brochure I'd picked up someplace said it was Dubuque's “only authentic brewpub restaurant,” and “food first” was still my beer quest motto.

The Blackwater was a visually arresting place—soaring ceilings, floor-to-ceiling windows, hardwood floors, and richly paneled walls. Gleaming copper brew kettles sat encased in a glass-paneled room right in the middle of the main dining room, so you could watch the brewing in action. I sat near one of the tall windows and quickly picked the dinner special—a fried walleyed perch sandwich—from the menu and ordered a pint of the pub's seasonal Oktoberfest, described as a medium-hopped amber ale. Food and beer were delicious but, with tables stuffed with families, couples, and clusters of tourists all chowing down and chatting away, I paid up and headed for the Julien, where I hoped the bar setup would be more conducive to talking to people.

I was soon in animated conversation with Krissy Hogue, a young New York transplant who had moved to Dubuque about a year earlier to be closer to her mother. She was holding down bartending chores at the Julien's Riverboat Lounge. The 144-room hotel had been built in Victorian style over the shell of an existing hotel in 1854 and had been called the Julien Dubuque (after the city's founder) for most of its life until a fairly recent name change had made it the Julien Inn. It used to be the most elegant place in town; it was when Capone controlled it during the Prohibition years of the 1920s. These days, it seemed a bit like parts of Dubuque itself—faded but proud. The cheap rooms went for $49, a bargain even in Dubuque.

Capone's Riverboat Lounge was a large, airy space that had a 1970s feel about it. It had clearly been built big enough to handle sold-out hotel crowds and partying local swells, too, but neither was present on this night. The long bar that Krissy waited on was busy but the rest of the cavernous space was mostly empty, though she assured me that the regular Tuesday night karaoke crowd would fill up some of the tables soon. This wasn't a craft beer place; it served Bud Light, Miller Lite, and Old Style (one of Pabst's resurrected beers, remember?) on tap. A hand-lettered sign on the wall behind the bar announced a recent innovation: “We Now Have Bottled Beer.”

I asked Krissy about the Al Capone connection; she knew the bare bones of the story but, being a conscientious bartender, was preoccupied helping to resolve the anxieties of an Asian businessman who was sitting a few stools to the left of me, nervously sipping a beer. He was a Julien guest and had just gotten a cell phone call from his wife in Chicago telling him that she had gone into labor with their first child. He'd explained to Krissy in halting English that he had flown into Dubuque from Chicago earlier in the day and was wondering whether there still might be flights out tonight. She couldn't find him a flight but within ten minutes she'd arranged a $210 cab ride.

He got up to leave and then announced, “It's going to be a girl!”

By this time, pretty much everyone within earshot had been following this mini-drama. The bar erupted in well wishes and the clank of beer glasses, and off he went.

Krissy got busy serving up $1.25 glasses of Old Style draft when, as promised, the karaoke crowd and their audiences filtered in, mostly groups of youngish women and a few kids. They arranged themselves at separate tables and took tightly scripted turns singing songs by Madonna, ABBA, Cher, and the like, with a break now and then for some solitary male who would barge up, as if on cue, and break out into some hard-rock anthem by ZZ Top or that ilk. It was all delightfully wretched—I think that's what karaoke actually means in Japanese—until a very pale, thin, prim, and grandmotherly-looking woman in a dress better suited for church than for the bar walked slowly to the mike. I was expecting a hymn but she grabbed the mike and sang the hell out of Patsy Cline's “I Fall to Pieces,” then segued into a killer version of “Crazy.” She sounded so much like Patsy she even quieted the blabbermouths at the bar.

When the wannabe Madonnas returned to the mike, I turned to the guy to my right and spoke up in admiration at his drinking style—I'd noticed he'd ordered two beers at a time and was drinking them in a two-fisted manner.

“Oh, that,” he said. “That's the tradition here among regulars.”

His name was Jimmy and he was a cook at the hotel. Usually, he said, he gulped down four beers this way after knocking off work; then he went home to help his third-grade kid with his homework. Tonight, he was on his way to a wedding reception in the Julien's ballroom upstairs. (In fact, the Julien, he told me, had the only official ballroom in all of Dubuque.)

“Who's getting married?” I wanted to know.

“Hell, I dunno,” he said. “But I cooked all their food so I'm going anyway. They've ordered twenty kegs of beer. That's a lot of beer, pal.”

I told Jimmy about my beer book and asked if he had any advice.

“Take your notes early in the evening,” he suggested.

I laughed and Jimmy, clearly a wise man, went off to party in the ballroom.

I turned to my left and met another Jim a few stools down: “Jim Massey,” he said, offering his full name. We struck up a conversation. He was a longtime Dubuque resident and knew the Capone connection.

“Yeah, Dubuque was a wild place back then,” Massey told me. “Capone would hang out in East Dubuque, which is just across the river in Illinois, but he spent a lot of time over here, too. He'd hide his car at what used to be a Skelly station [a gas station chain long out of business] at fourth and Locust, down in the basement. The building is just down from my house and I've been in it many times. That basement is big enough to hold several cars.”

I'd always been under the impression that Prohibition and speakeasies were all about illegal whiskey and bathtub gin. But, in fact, the Capone gang made tens of millions of dollars annually illegally brewing and bootlegging beer and making underground tavern owners offers they couldn't refuse to sell it. Capone's brand was Sieben's, an old established Chicago brewery founded and owned by a respectable family of that name. Some Capone histories have him owning the brewery outright but the real story seems to be that Capone and his henchmen controlled it through a lease to some third party who had promised the Siebens they intended to make nonalcoholic beer. One thing was clear: whenever illicit tavern keepers tactlessly turned down Capone's generous suggestion that they start carrying Sieben's beer, they were viciously beaten and their places trashed. Word got around and Sieben's became a very popular brew. (A grudge involving Capone's beer operations, it turns out, was ultimately responsible for the so-called St. Valentine's Day Massacre in which Capone thugs gunned down seven rival thugs by posing as cops and shooting their victims in the back. The February 1929 executions shocked even jaded Chicagoans and marked the beginning of the end of the Capone era.)