Home : Alcoholic Beverages : Beer :

Beer-Drinking Effect

Even as bud’s pitch-dog Spuds MacKenzie was leading major beer makers in an ever more frenzied dance of fads and marketing gimmicks designed to sell ever blander drinks, a countertrend was developing —a sidebar to the yuppie food revolution of the 1980s. Some beer drinkers, tired of a steady diet of near-tasteless lagers and one or two imports with only slightly more emphatic flavor, were discovering an alternative.

A new crop of American micro- and specialty “craft” brews were aiming to redraw the beer map, traditionally divided between “domestics” and “imports,” as a choice between “mainstream” (bland) and “sophisticated” (not bland). Ultimately, the most commercially successful would be the Boston Beer Company, founded in 1985, and its Sam Adams Boston Lager brand, whose patriotic label with its faux-colonial design suggested a return to the honesty and integrity of traditional New England craftsmanship. It struck just the right note in the Reagan eighties, when patriotism was making a comeback and movements to preserve America’s cultural heritage were scoring noteworthy victories.

Much of it was, needless to say, hype—not so much anti-fad as an anti-fad fad. The Boston Beer Company did not actually brew its own beer but had it made according to a proprietary recipe at a large regional brewery in Pennsylvania. (This followed an arrangement made a few years before by the New Amsterdam Brewing Company, whose beer was produced at the large F. X. Matt brewery in Utica, New York, in what had once been traditional ale country. Matt now also brews for the Brooklyn, Dock Street, and Massachusetts Bay breweries.) As Boston Magazine wrote of Sam Adams soon after its appearance, “[Boston’s] beer is currently made and bottled in Pittsburgh, a perhaps forgivable eccentricity for a beer named after a man who never drank a lager and who was not a brewer at all.”

But drinkers didn’t really care about authenticity; they cared about flavor, and Sam Adams Boston Lager had it, as did specialty-brew competitors like Pete’s Wicked Ale. In this, the commercial craft brewers were building on, and cashing in on, a trend that had begun in the West in the late seventies: a new generation of flavorful American ales, carefully brewed in small batches with all malt and no additives, by a group of dedicated amateurs, many of whom had started as home-brew hobbyists. Inspiration may have come from Fritz Maytag, of the washing-machine-and-bluecheese family, who took over San Francisco’s old and ailing Anchor Steam and in 1975 created the first of the new breed, Liberty Ale, in commemoration of the bicentennial of Paul Revere’s ride. Huge in flavor, intensely aromatic, and bursting with the delectable bitterness of hops, it bore the same relation to subtle, understated European beers as California wine did to French. And like California wine, it went great with the spicy new American cuisine.

Stuff

Maytag was followed by a few visionary small craftsmen who built the first brewpubs (breweries built to serve a bar on the premises) and microbreweries (Micros are defined as breweries producing fewer than 15,000 barrels a year. For perspective, in 1997 total domestic beer production was 192 million barrels; Boston Brewing, the leader in the tiny category of craft or specialty beers, produced almost 1.4 million.) The first micro was established in 1976 at Sonoma, in California wine country, and it made a Scottish-inspired ale called New Albion. Boulder Brewing, set up in a goat shed in 1979 by a physicist who first brewed porter with homemade equipment, is the oldest still in business.

America’s first brewpub opened in an old opera house in Yakima, Washington, in 1982, and soon the Northwestern cities of Portland and Seattle, with their proximity to barley and hops fields and a climate that demanded something more substantial than a light thirst quencher, would have more breweries than any other American city. The most famous, and now one of the biggest, is probably Seattle’s Redhook Ale, started by a former Starbucks executive and a former winemaker in an old trolley barn.

Small craft brewing grew very rapidly in the 1980s, spreading eastward as it did. Although American microbreweries now offer a wider range of styles than any other country can boast, the movement has remained essentially ale-centric, for several reasons. For one, many were started by home brewers who could not afford, even if they had wanted it, the expensive cooling and storage equipment required for lagers. For another, many of the early entrepreneurs were inspired by Britain and the Campaign for Real Ale that began there in the early 1970s. Most of all, though, in America lager still meant Budweiser and Miller, and ale wasn’t lager.

By the early and middle 1990s micros and craft brews were the fastest-growing beer segments. The majors, plagued by declining sales for their flagship brands and a general feeling among consumers that “big” was “bad,” got into the act. Miller’s Red Dog, produced at something called the Plank Road Brewery, which happened to use the same production lines as Miller High Life and Miller Lite, was the first response. It was quickly followed by Anheuser-Busch’s Red Wolf and Coors’s Killian’s Red. (Originality in product naming is apparently something beaten out of you in business school.) There were suddenly so many new “craft” beers of unidentifiable origin and uncertain quality on the market that the category saw a shakeout in the late nineties. Many companies failed, and many consumers switched to imported brands with names they could recognize.

Things appear to have calmed down again, and the micro- and craft-beer segment seems to be settling in at a market share of about 3 percent, a small number that doesn’t suggest the truly astonishing variety of styles and flavors offered to consumers by the 1,600 or so brands now available in various parts of the country.

Craft-Brewed Beers

A six-pack of survivors, craft-brewing pioneers toast hard-won success.

It was MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz who introduced the notion of the Butterfly Effect - proposing that the flap of a butterfly's wings in Beijing might set off a tornado in Texas. This chaos theory nugget, simply put, suggests that small acts can lead to big things.

As this pertains to the world of brewing - let's call it the Beer-Drinking Effect - the prime example is a glass of suds a graduate student named Fritz Maytag was sipping in 1965 in a San Francisco joint called the Old Spaghetti Factory. Maytag (yes, great-grandson of the appliance company founder) was drinking an Anchor Steam when the restaurant owner let it slip that the company that made the beer, Anchor Brewing Company, would be closing its doors in the near future.

The rest is modern beer history. Maytag stepped in and saved the company from extinction, refashioning it from a primitive antique into the quintessential small-scale all-malt brewery that it remains today. Because of that one fortuitous beer, a once-dismal U.S. trend began to reverse itself. From a low of 42 breweries in the late 1970s, all churning out virtually the same watery lagers, the U.S. is today a country with more than 1,400 breweries, producing the most stylistically diverse beers on the planet.

There was something in the air, true, that led from Anchor's rebirth to the first microbreweries to the first brew pubs. "But we're happy to make the point of admitting that we did it," says Maytag, "with a combination of brewing tradition and the most modern brewing equipment available. But it wasn't easy." Actually, it wasn't until 1971 that the first modern Anchor Steam beer appeared in bottles. In 1977, the first microbrewery opened, the New Albion Brewery in Sonoma, California, but, like many of its successors, it didn't last.

Only a handful of microbrewing pioneers are still at the helm of the companies they started - now entering their second or third decade - because no matter how romantic a business brewing may seem to a fan, down in the trenches it's a bruising battle, and everyone has a living-on-the-edge story.

David Geary, of the eponymous D.L. Geary Brewing Company in Portland, Maine, says, "It absolutely is a tough business; always has been and always will be:" In the last decade alone, 1,701 breweries have opened (brew pubs included), yet 901 have closed - that's about two closures for every five openings.

Geary sold his first Geary's Pale Ale in 1986, and he says, "There's no secret or mystery to the way you succeed. You start with good products, a good plan to market them, and you adapt and grow as market conditions change. A certain amount of dumb luck helps, too. When I think back 19 years, I'm stunned we were able to muddle through," Geary continues. "We were flying blind, without a lot of direction then, so we had to make it up as we went along.

Larry Bell, who founded the Kalamazoo Brewing Company in Michigan in 1983 says, "There were a few times when it looked like [our] whole enterprise might go down. I remember sitting down with a bankruptcy lawyer at one point with tears in my eyes. He said he'd take my case for $2,500. I said, `If I had $2,500, I wouldn't be here.’ But I always thought that whatever happened on the West Coast would happen here five to 10 years later," he goes on to say. "Sure enough, about 1990, people started getting into better beer. And by then, we had already made our mistakes."

Marcy Larson, who, with husband Geoff, opened the Alaskan Brewing Company in Juneau in 1986 says, "There were a number of times that if we'd sneezed, we would have gone bankrupt. We inadvertently did it right by not expanding too quickly; we were limited to what we could do early on, and that conservative-growth goal kept us out of mischief."

Charlie Papazian, president of the trade organization Brewers Association in Boulder, Colorado, recounts some of the vast changes he's seen since the early days in Microbrewed Adventures, due out this fall from Harper Collins. "But what remains the same now," he says, "is that those who survive have a certain spirit, a knack for carving their own special niche and special way of doing things. If the passion is missing, they will soon be missing, because I haven't yet seen anyone who has lasted simply on marketing premises, who isn't really behind what they're doing.” Papazian thinks the efforts of megabrewers to put out some all-malt specialty products seem halfhearted at best. "They don't really have the mind-set to think small.”

Craft-brewed beers are, generally speaking, all-malt products, compared with typical American lagers, which use up to 40 percent rice or corn adjuncts. The typical American lager still dominates the beer market by far, though it shows little growth. Craft-beer production has increased annually for 35 consecutive years.

But though the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company is now the 10th-largest brewery in the U.S. (at almost 600,000 barrels in 2004), founder Ken Grossman laughs when asked if he foresaw such growth after the first year's production of 500 barrels in 1981. "I was quoted in an article that if we could only make it to 10,000 barrels we'd have it made. Even 15,000 barrels seemed like a huge amount of beer then. Fritz [Maytag] once said he was never going to go past 50,000 barrels. But when he went up to 100,000, I asked him about it. `I got divorced and had to double production,' he said.”

Maytag demurs: "Well, I may have once said that divorce is the hidden engine of growth. But we were past 100,000 barrels at one point, and it was just too much. We deliberately cut back. I love being small so we can turn on a dime, knock off in the afternoon, and go to the ball game if we want. I could see that Ken wanted to get as big as possible, and I said to him, `I don't know - we may both be right."

As far as the lover of fine American beer is concerned, that's happily just how it has turned out - they're both right. Still independent and still run by at least one founder, each of these pioneering microbreweries increased production in 2004. Each usually offers tours and tastings at the brewery, but call ahead for schedules.

Jonathan Stern. Top 10 Ways to Make Beer Better. . November 2006. Tom Bedell. A Six-Pack Of Survivors. American Way. July 1, 2005.

top of page

back a page