Travels with Barley (16 page)

On the other hand, if you go to work for Dogfish, you can expect an expansive view of your job duties. Fred Mazzeo, the brewery's general manager, says that on his first day on the job he was whisked away into a cow pasture where he was required to interact with very large bovines while Sam choreographed a photo shoot as part of an advertising wordplay on the term “pasteurize.” Mazzeo's job was to don false cow teeth and one of those helmets with beer holders attached to a drinking tube, and mug, cowlike, for the camera.

Of course, Mazzeo might have seen this coming given the way Calagione hired him in 1997. Mazzeo had been working for a Wilmington brewpub chain and had pitched up at a beer tasting at the Wilmington train station on behalf of his pub. “There I was in my starched logo shirt and crisply ironed, corporate-obligatory khaki pants and here comes some sweaty, unshaven guy dragging a homemade beer cooler through the crowd. Murmurs of That's Sam' flutter through the throng. I had no idea who he was. He begins to set up in the cubicle next to me. His first words were ‘Can I borrow a wrench?' followed by ‘Do you have pliers?' and finally, ‘Got any cups?'”

Mazzeo debated whether he ought to help this obviously unprepared lout but out of pity came up with the wrench and pliers. As he turned away, distracted by something else, he heard a pop nearby and figured Calagione had tapped into his keg. He sure had, for when Mazzeo turned back to look, he got a faceful of beer from the fulminating keg that had already drenched Calagione himself.

Mazzeo says he was a flash away from anger when he tasted the beer that “dripped down my face and head and into my mouth. It was Chicory Stout and I realized it was far better than anything I was pouring.”

Out of this wet and sticky encounter came a job offer.

Selders has gotten the most unusual Sam assignment to date. Calagione, who does things like trying to convince the Ralph Lauren people that Dogfish should be designing an official RL Beer for them, decided the River of Beer had fallen woefully behind in its adoption of hip-hop. On a business flight with Selders one day, he saw Bryan fiddling with a small battery-operated gadget that turned out to be a drum sequencer; Selders brews up music as a hobby. He explained the machine to Sam and then forgot all about it.

A few months later, though, Sam, realizing there was a beer conference coming up that involved a battle of the beer bands, decided he wanted to rap. So he coaxed Selders into helping him put together and record a five-song CD under the pseudonym the Pain Relievaz. The title is
Check Your Gravity
, gravity being a technical term that essentially describes the progress of fermentation. The CD's theme is essentially the tension between Big Beer and the Beer Geeks.

Of course, putting out this CD was not quite enough for Calagione, who is also known for his movie-star good looks and true flair for another Calagionean concept that he describes as “beer as theater.” One night, at an event I attended, he dragged Selders to the Blind Tiger in Manhattan where, with the help of the very same battery-operated drum machine, they actually performed the album before a packed audience of delirious Ale Heads who—perhaps aided by Calagione's 120 Minute IPA that was on tap that night—went wild. The hit of the night was a song called “I Once Got Crazy with an A-B Salesgirl!”—a send-up of a bar encounter between an opportunistic ale drinker and a comely saleswoman for Budweiser. Never mind that the batteries on the drum machine died in the middle of the song. Sam, as Funkmaster IBU and doing a reasonable imitation of Vanilla Ice, stopped, started over, and carried on a cappella, hitting lines like: “I said what do you want? / She said a Budweiser / I said girl, you must be on more drugs / than my homeys down at Pfizer.”

“We are, no doubt,” Selders told me, “the finest Beer Geek hip-hop group of our generation.”

The evening of my first trip to Dogfish Head, Calagione and I later left the brewpub for a ten-mile drive down to Dewey Beach, a kind of raucous party enclave of the Delaware Shore where stood a lager bar called the Rusty Rudder frequented by the kind of people who populate Coors Light commercials. Sam steered us there because the bar nonetheless sold his Shelter Pale Ale and because a favorite regional band of his called Love Seed Mamma Jump was playing. Calagione, as he would in our numerous other meetings, showed a relentless curiosity about everything he heard and he spent about as much time peppering me with questions about how I'd come up with the notion of this book and pitched it to editors as I peppered him with beer questions. I was particularly curious about the brewing creative process and how he got ideas for new beers.

He told me about a new concoction that he was making that would be called Pangaea; its signature would be that it would include at least one ingredient from every continent on earth. The Calagiones have two children, Sam IV, who is four, and Grier, one, and Sam said he first got the idea when he was watching a dinosaur movie with his son.

“The movie depicted the original landmass, Pangaea, that existed before the earth broke apart into continents. This is right around the time of the bombing of Iraq, and France and Germany were calling us out on it. I'm not all that political but I thought it would be fun to make a beer that brought all of the continents back together.” The ingredients: Australian ginger, African sugar, Asian basmati rice, a South American grain, American hops, French barley, and bottled water from Antarctica. (A few months later, before Pangaea had actually gone into production, I got an e-mail from Sam jokingly bemoaning the fact that Anheuser-Busch had just announced it was putting out a new high-end lager in the Pilsner style called Anheuser World Select that was being brewed with ingredients from four continents. “Can you believe that?” he wrote jokingly. “The bastards are copping my idea!”)

Calagione, though, seemed most proud of his experimental work with hops, especially the notion of continuously hopping beer. He had a theory that if you added a small, constant stream of hops to the boil, instead of big dramatic doses at the beginning and the end, you might be able to ratchet up hop levels without raising bitterness. One issue was that there was no existing machinery to automate continuous hopping; it would have to either be done laboriously by hand or machinery would have to be improvised.

“The first time we tried continual-hopping,” he said, “was with the first batch of 60 Minute IPA that I brewed back in 2000. I used one of those goofy circa 1978 electrified vibrating football games, canted at an angle and rigged up with a five-gallon bucket of pelletized hops over our boil kettle. The hops would vibrate down the angled football game and into the kettle in a single-file stream.”

The improvised football hopper worked well enough to get them through the first batch; then the football game got wet and shorted out. But the taste of the beer convinced Sam he was on to something and sent him scurrying to design the pneumatic hops-feeder that he dubbed Sir Hops Alot. The 120 Minute IPA that Michael Jackson sampled from the Dogfish tanks is certainly an example of Extreme Hopping. Not only is it continuously hopped but “we go a step further by adding a pound of pellet hops to the primary fermenter every day for a month,” he told me.

This is kind of like a pizza maker taking the pie out of the oven every four minutes and throwing on another layer of mozzarella and pepperoni. But Calagione defends the hyper-hopping, “because, you know, life is short and all.”

Later that night at the Rusty Rudder, Calagione and I sat at an open-air table with a couple of his buddies we'd bumped into, sipping Shelter Pale and just getting acquainted. And I knew Sam was a real Beer Guy, and not just a Beer Geek, when, toward the end of the evening, with our cash rapidly depleting and an ATM nowhere in sight, we decided to extend the night by one more beer. So we pooled our pitiful reserves of pocket-crumpled dollar bills and loose change and ordered—what else?—two pints of the really cheap Miller Lite on tap.

And drank them, I must report, with great pleasure.

On the first anniversary of 9/11 I found myself, Styrofoam cup of coffee in hand, back on the Great River Road a full 100 miles south of Dubuque, motoring through towns with names like Blue Grass, Muscatine, Fruitland, and Wapello.

It was a pristine morning, the sky a pale blue, the sun dappling treetops painted in a serendipitous cloak of light and fog. The river was nowhere visible here, obscured by an elongated distant green line that marked the levee. But I'd seen it at sunrise from the decks of the
Diamond Jo
, the Twain-styled riverboat and casino that docked next to the Mississippi River Museum.

Despite my late night with Jim Massey, I'd pried myself awake in time to catch the
Diamond Jo
's two-hour early morning cruise in hopes of catching up with some early morning beer drinkers. But as I watched the boat fill with busloads of pensioners swarming for nickel slot machines and keno games, I realized this was probably a poor reporting bet. And it was—nary an ounce of beer touched a single lip, though I patrolled the
Diamond Jo
's various bars like a sentry in a war zone. (“Are you kidding?” one bartender told me when I plaintively wondered about the possible existence of a breakfast beer club. “This is the sarsaparilla cruise.“)

The
Diamond Jo
docked and I lit out for parts unknown.

The country I now traveled through was a mix of plains to the west and hardwood river bottoms to the east, and a road sign I stopped to read told me this was once prime Plains Indian country, Wapello, for example, being named for a great Fox Tribe chieftain who died in the 1840s. In the long, wide-open stretches between the towns grew great rolling rivers of corn and soybeans just beginning to yellow under an insistent late summer sun. Now and then some white clapboard farmhouse, a truck or tractor or combine parked in the yard, tumbled from the fields to break the immense folds of green and gold.

The weather held fair and where the road ran up in sight of the river, which was not often along this stretch, the Mississippi fanned out as dark and wild and sun-dappled as Mark Twain himself must've seen it. In fact, the river here historically had proved a little too wild and unpredictable for the locals. Louisa County, Iowa, of which Wapello is the county seat, lost more than 200 homes to flood mitigation efforts after the Great Flood of 1993.

I'd switched on the car radio and a National Public Radio station drifted in and out. All the programming was 9/11-anniversary-related but, being NPR, it was delivered in calm, modulated tones by speakers of serious purpose and was reflective and informative in a way that didn't seem sensationalistic or lurid. And there were no pictures. I hadn't consciously timed my beer quest to this distracting stroke of the calendar, though I wondered now if I'd done so subconsciously. When I'd briefly discussed the anniversary the night before with Jim Massey, we'd both agreed that the last place we wanted to spend the anniversary was in front of a TV, where the horror of that day would no doubt be replayed endlessly. The planes had struck the Twin Towers while I was in the air, flying from La Guardia to Atlanta. The
Wall Street Journal
's offices across the West Side Highway had been severely damaged and we would instantly be uprooted to joyless temporary quarters in South Brunswick, New Jersey; friends and colleagues had seen and experienced terrible things. A neighbor in the New Jersey village where I lived had been killed, leaving behind his kindly wife and three children. A dozen others in my town perished.

There was no chance I would ever forget any of that. Out here, at least, I could be plugged in without being overwhelmed. And it was reassuring, as the day wore on, that the day had gone uneventfully—that the chronic, low-grade, unspoken fear that the Bad Guys would try something else on the anniversary hadn't materialized.

When I'd lose NPR, I would switch over to a country music station or just switch off the radio and drive through the countryside in silence. The combination was mysteriously calming and I drove on and on, at the languid pace of a tourist, still with no particular destination in mind.

At Burlington, Iowa, a pretty town of 30,000, I passed houses with American flags at half-staff and a gas station with one of those portable signs out front that said, in plastic black lettering, “Never forget.' I saw people gathering on lawn chairs in front of a church. About a dozen miles below Burlington I saw a sign for a toll bridge across the Mississippi. This seemed like a good excuse to duck into Illinois.

I was glad I did when I saw the signs for Nauvoo, Illinois, about ten miles south. I'd never been there but I knew a bit about the place.

In the late ‘80s, as a reporter in the
Journal
's San Francisco bureau writing stories about the West, I did a major piece on the Mormon church whose world headquarters are in Salt Lake City, Utah. I recalled that Nauvoo had once been Mormonism's capital and sacred center, until the church's founder, Joseph Smith, got into a fracas with locals and wound up murdered by a mob that broke into the jail where he was being held under protective custody. Such hostility drove Brigham Young in 1846 to lead the remaining church members to Utah on a 1,300-mile odyssey by ox-drawn and hand-pulled covered wagons. Two years after that, a massive temple that Smith had overseen the building of in Nauvoo was torched by arsonists and Nauvoo's Mormon presence was all but eradicated. Still, the place loomed large in the church's colorful and often controversial history.

I'd expected to find a little town and it was; the population was 1,200 and for the most part it was an unostentatious, low-rise hamlet perched on a slow bend in the river, with a number of turn-of-the century buildings along its main drag. But two unexpected things caught my eye as I drove through. One was a humongous Mormon temple, so gleaming white that it had to be new, and that by an order of magnitude dwarfed everything else in town. The other was a small bar, looking as scruffy and friendly as a good-natured yard dog. It was just up the street from the temple and sported a conspicuous sign in the window that said, in part: “Nauvoo's House of Sin.”

I smelled a whiff of controversy and did a U-turn, parking near the bar, which was called the Draft House. I got out and walked over and read the sign in full:

Being both sinner and journalist, I felt compelled to go in.

It was about 3:30 in the afternoon and the only life in the place was a cluster of guys gathered at a long bar at the back of the joint. The front, in fact, looked more like a restaurant than a bar and that's pretty much what it was. I'd arrived, according to a sign inside, on Chicken Night. For five bucks, you could get half a fried chicken, all white meat if you wanted it, plus the fixings.

I made my way back and settled in at the bar where I met Don, Dan, and Jimmy, who were partaking in an afternoon lager break before heading back to various trades. This used to be a very American thing to do. Before World War II, beer was as much a part of the blue-collar workplace as coffee is today. Brewery workers in particular drank throughout the day and got free beer as part of their pay package. Liability and tort lawyers, not to mention changing views about workplace safety and comportment, have put an end to this practice.

It didn't take long to get the gist of what had prompted the Draft House sign. A Mormon in the town's planning department had reportedly denounced the Draft House in a public forum as a house of sin deserving of being closed down. (Mormons, at least the devout ones, don't drink or even partake of coffee, tea, or caffeinated soft drinks.) Sonja Bush, the woman who owned the bar, took grave exception and complained in the press and things had been frosty ever since, though the Mormon who had uttered the reputed slur had since left town (and, I would learn later, had denied saying quite that). As I sat and listened, though, it was clear that this wasn't just a spat over errant words.

The gleaming white temple I'd seen down the block, the men at the bar told me, had just opened in June after three years and $25 million in the making. It was 54,000 square feet and an exact replica of the temple that burned in 1848. Its construction had pumped a huge amount of money into the town but not without a number of conflicts, its size being only one of them. Local construction folk often bridled over Mormon overseers demanding everything be done in a “Utah way.” And since completion, about 250,000 devout Mormons had flooded into Nauvoo to see the temple and to visit the Joseph Smith Historie Site, a rambling compound sitting at the north edge of town. For the Mormons this was holy ground, the place of their prophet's martyrdom. But for the two thirds of the local residents who aren't Mormon (they are mostly Catholic), this was a matter of some ambivalence. True, all those visitors had been an economic boon, but some of them had come to town “acting like they owned the place,” Jimmy at the bar told me. “They think they do, but they don't.”

Mormons refer to members of all other religions, including Jews, as gentiles. And the guys at the bar had all heard stories of gentile Nauvoo shopkeepers being snubbed by Mormon visitors when they answered no to the question “Are you LDS?” (This is an abbreviation of Latter-day Saints, which is what the Mormons call themselves.) The subtext of the temple was a local worry that it might encourage large numbers of Mormons to move to Nauvoo, thus changing the character of the place (and not necessarily for the better, if you're a beer-drinking Christian or a bar owner).

To be fair, though, many religions inveigh against alcohol, have a clannish streak, and declare themselves to be the one true faith. And I'd spent a lot of time in Salt Lake City, which is dominated by Temple Square and, by population, is about half Mormon. I'd always found it reasonably open and cosmopolitan—not exactly New York or L.A., but on par with, say, comparable-sized towns in the Midwest. The Mormons hadn't exactly turned Salt Lake into Squaresville, and many Mormons I'd come to know had no interest in doing so.

Some of the local consternation, I learned, was tinged by a fair amount of skepticism about Mormon piety over Nauvoo. Non-Mormons generally read the history of Joseph Smith's sojourn here slightly differently than do the flock. Smith, in their most jaded view, was a charismatic megalomaniac who'd come from the East (New York State, actually) touting a fantastical, essentially occult religion that he said had been revealed to him in gold tablets, either by an angel named Moroni or, perhaps, based upon more recent interpretations, a white salamander. The tablets formed the basis of the Book of Mormon, which teaches that modern-day Mormonism descends from lost tribes of Israel who wandered into America in ancient times, keeping the true word of God alive.

The Book of Mormon foreshadowed that a prophet would come forward one day to restore the “Kingdom of God to earth” and, well, unsurprisingly, according to Smith critics, Smith took that job for himself. Before he ever got to Nauvoo, he had tried to set up theocracies in Ohio and Missouri and had been run out of both places. Nauvoo, critical historians say, was his third attempt and he had raised a militia of 1,500 well-armed men to see it through—a development greatly unsettling to the local non-Mormon population. When a nonMormon newspaper wrote a story critical of him and Mormonism, the Smith-controlled city council ordered the paper sacked and the presses destroyed. That Smith was later murdered by a mob enraged by this act is as incontrovertible as it is unconscionable. But in the view of some non-Mormons, Smith was hardly a saintly man plunking for religious freedom; he was a religious tyrant with an army. In the non-Mormon view, this all makes the new Nauvoo temple a curious monument indeed.

I was contemplating all this when Sonja Bush herself, the Draft House's owner, came in to get things squared away for Chicken Night, which she told me was their busiest night of the week. About two-thirds of the crowd would be families with kids though, true, there would be some beer drinkers among the lot. But she had worked at the bar for ten years and owned it (but not the building that holds it) for five and could recall no particularly sinful behavior, other than alcohol consumption and the occasional live performance of rock music, that might have set the Mormon city official off.

Now, as a good reporter, I'd already pumped the guys at the bar for any history of sordid misbehavior. And one of them did confess that once, perhaps one beer over the line, he'd gotten accidentally bumped into a big open garbage can in the joint but had been recovered with no injury save to his pride. And they did tell me that Chicken Night used to be All You Can Eat Chicken Night until some guy gobbled down ten chickens while barely sipping the one beer he'd bought from the bar, thus putting an end to All You Can Eat Chicken Night. But whether he was guilty of the sin of gluttony or simply exploiting a weakness in the interface of capitalism was a matter of perception.