Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (38 page)

But in the early 1970s, Americans were rejecting more than corporate food and drink. Disaffection with the establishment, once the province of long-haired hippies, had filtered out into the general population, thanks to the Vietnam war, crushing recession, and Watergate. Back in the late 1950s, nearly 80 percent of Americans said they trusted government; by the mid-1970s, only one-third would say the same. Many Americans believed that corporate executives lined their pockets with profits made from fleecing consumers with overpriced, poorly made products, that they perpetuated racism and sexism, and that they polluted the air, water, and food supply. The mistrust fertilized a rejection of anything large, corporate, and impersonal.

That explains the popularity of economist E. F. Schumacher’s claim that small is beautiful. It explains as well the phenomenal success of Stewart Brand’s
Whole Earth Catalog,
the bestseller filled with advice about how to buy, build, and use geodesic domes, tents, kayaks, maps, plows, axes, and bees that exemplified the moment. A “realm of intimate, personal power is developing,” Brand argued, including the “power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, share his adventure with whoever is interested.”

As a result, the sea change in the American diet first visible in the 1960s swelled to ocean-sized proportions. Inspired by Schumacher’s ideas, dismayed by corporate greed, and shocked by environmental damage, many shoppers rejected mass marketing and celebrated the small, the local, and the pure; they flocked to health food stores and food cooperatives stocked with additive- and chemical-free produce. Frances Moore Lappé’s
Diet for a Small Planet
appeared in 1971 and has never gone out of print. Robert Rodale, publisher of
Organic Farming &Gardening,
watched as his readership rose by 40 percent in 1971 alone. Bennett Cerf at Random House, about as mainstream a man and company as was possible to find, paid alicia bay laurel [sic], a member of a Sonoma County commune, a hefty sum for distribution rights to her ostentatiously hippie/alt-lifestyle guidebook,
Living on the Earth.

In Berkeley, California, Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in 1971 and urged gastronomes to cook locally: The farm stand down the road, she argued, offered food of higher quality than the stuff in the grocery store and money spent there supported a family rather than a corporation. She also inspired a generation of professional chefs who carried her ideas far from Berkeley. Bakers invested in hearth ovens and produced chewy, dense breads of a kind not seen since their great-grandmothers’ day.

Where food went, drink followed. Seattle resident Gordon Bowker launched his entrepreneurial career in 1971 with a coffeehouse called Starbucks. Within a decade, nearly every city of any size boasted at least one “new” coffee shop whose owners tutored their customers in the differences between Sumatra and Estate Kenyan, latte and cappuccino. So, too, Americans’ attitudes toward wine also changed. Since the end of Prohibition, the nation’s wine had consisted of cheap, generic jug drinks that leaned toward the sweet. That changed during the 1960s, in part because of people like Robert Mondavi, a member of a long-established California winemaking family. Mondavi first visited Europe in 1962 and there discovered wine’s complexity and flavor. In early 1966, he opened his own winery with the goal of creating excellent but affordable wines and teaching Americans that wine could and should be part of a quality life. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, dozens more wineries opened, mostly along the Pacific Coast.

A similar trend was occurring with beer. In the space of a few years in the early 1970s, small family-owned breweries that had struggled for years to hang on to what was left of their market became exemplars of all that was pure, good, decent, and delicious. Like Royko, other writers for national newspapers and magazines stumbled over each other in a race to find, taste, test, and rank the nation’s smallest, realest beers. Articles in the
Washington Post
and
U.S. News and World Report
introduced readers to Peter Hand and Ortleib. An essay in the
New York Times Magazine
praised Iron City of Pittsburgh and its Pennsylvania brothers: Yuengling of Pottsville, Koehler’s of Erie, and Stoney’s of Smithton. A writer for
Esquire
conducted that magazine’s “first-ever American regional beer survey,” and praised Pickett’s Premium from Dubuque, Iowa; Royal Amber from George Wiedemann of Kentucky; and Fyfe & Drum from Genesee Brewing of Rochester, New York.

The Leinenkugels in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, reaped their own rewards, and just when they needed it. In the early 1970s, students at nearby colleges in Wisconsin and Minnesota developed a passion for Leinie and Bill Leinenkugel became a bit of a celebrity with the collegians, who invited him to speak on campus. That, he decided, was his target audience. He bought cases of T-shirts and had them printed with the company logo. The board of directors scratched its collective head over that move. “Bill,” said one board member, “we’re in the beer business. Why are you making shirts for fifty cents and selling them for a dollar?” The answer was obvious: He wanted the “young people” to wear them. Walking advertisements, thousands of them.

In 1974, a Los Angeles newspaper touted the virtues of Leinenkugel and the beer finished second in a taste test sponsored by
Oui
magazine. Tom Paulus, a Skokie, Illinois, beer distributor, pleaded with Leinenkugel to let him sell the beer in the Chicago area. Leinenkugel resisted, arguing that Chicago was too far away and the risk was too great. Paulus disagreed. Leiney, he reminded the brewer, outsold anything else on campus at the University of Wisconsin. Leinenkugel yielded and Paulus loaded a semi and drove back to Chicago. The beer was gone in three days. “Some people,” a Chicago tavern owner told a reporter, “get hysterical when they find out I have it.”

Small also paid off for Harry Jersig, the owner of Lone Star Brewing in San Antonio, Texas. Jersig was doing okay; Texans drank about one million barrels of his beer each year. But Jersig was no fool. He knew that if Anheuser-Busch or Miller ever decided to get serious about Texas, he’d end up looking like an armadillo after its last trip across a highway. How to save himself? Enter Barry Sullivan, the vice-president for marketing that Jersig hired in the fall of 1973. Sullivan had learned the beer business working for the Narragansett brand owned by Falstaff, and had cut his marketing chops staging rock concerts throughout Narragansett’s New England territory, downplaying the beer, which was not even sold at the venues, and focusing on the music: Santana. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Led Zeppelin.

He applied the same formula to Lone Star in Texas, a state with an aggressive music scene—not old-fashioned Bob Wills—type stuff, but a new kind of country steeped in rock and roll and rhythm and blues. Sullivan gave free beer to the groups playing the Armadillo World Headquarters, a cavernous club—it could accommodate fifteen hundred people—that opened in August 1970. He hired those same players to record a one-minute Lone Star radio jingle, “Harina Tortilla.” When producers from public television began filming sets at the Armadillo and broadcasting them as the program
Austin City Limits,
Lone Star underwrote the project.

Outside the Armadillo, Sullivan focused on print and TV. His art director was about as far off Madison Avenue as it was possible to get: a skinny, bearded kid who dressed in shorts, T-shirts, and sandals and who fancied armadillos—he painted the Armadillo’s murals and designed its posters. One of his first Lone Star ads pictured a desolate landscape, where “everything was laid to waste and the only things that were left were [Lone Star] longnecks sticking out of the ground and armadillos running around.” The television commercials were just as goofy: A camera crew filmed real Texans as they engaged in “bizarre cultural rituals,” Texas style: seed-spitting and buffalo-chip-tossing competitions, an armadillo beauty contest, a “Cuero turkey trot.” Funny, irreverent, off the wall, they were perfectly suited to baby boomers who’d long since departed from their parents’ paths. Sales rose by one million cases in 1974. Lone Star, small regional beer
par excellence,
was hip.

But no brewery benefited more from the pure-real confluence than Coors Brewing of Golden, Colorado. For years the Coors brothers, Joseph and William, grandsons of Adolph Coors, who founded the brewery just west of Denver in the 1870s, had stuck to the family game plan: one beer, limited distribution, and minimal, almost simplistic marketing. Since repeal, the company had sponsored a few radio programs, but mostly it hung its sales, profits, and future on advertising that touted the “pure Rocky Mountain spring water” used to make the beer. In the early 1970s, the brothers spent about seventy cents per barrel on their ads as compared to the $2.50 or $3 spent by giant beermakers. They employed no brewmaster, preferring to trust science and their engineering talents, a passion for precision and machinery having been imprinted in the Coors DNA at conception. They used a strain of barley grown specifically for them and designed (and probably knew the precise dimensions of) much of the equipment in their plant. They manufactured their own cans and even some of their own trucks.

The beer itself was eccentric: The brothers eschewed pasteurization in favor of a filtering method, the success of which depended on keeping the beer at near-freezing temperatures. That explained their decision to limit sales to the western United States: It was the only way to make sure that distributors kept the beer properly chilled from warehouse to delivery truck to store and tavern.

For decades, the family had sold their lager in eleven states to folks who regarded it as nothing special, an ordinary beer that tasted particularly good in hot weather. That all changed in the early 1970s. Suddenly, or so it seemed, the family’s name was on everyone’s lips, and the beer in everyone’s mouths. Actor Paul Newman told
Esquire
magazine that Coors was the best beer in America. President Gerald Ford had cases flown into Washington and drank it every Thursday (Mexican food night at the White House). Ethel Kennedy drank Coors, as did members of the Miami Dolphins and Boston Red Sox. Consumers in Washington, D.C., and environs, where it was available only because some of Coors’s western distributors violated company policy and smuggled it east, paid $13 a case for the stuff (a mind-boggling $50 in 2006 currency).

The author of a 1975 book about beer praised Coors for its lack of additives. The beer was so pure, so clean, he told readers, that it “must be handled almost like milk.” “For many connoisseurs,” gushed a correspondent for
Time
magazine, “Coors is the Château Haut-Brion of American beers.”

Not surprisingly, Coors became the darling of young drinkers, and especially college students. Many had discovered Colorado’s mountains and rugged, earthy lifestyle, and they latched on to Coors, with its unpasteurized pure mountain water and its company president who wore jeans and boots and insisted on being called “Bill.” Members of a University of Florida fraternity collected $3,000 and dispatched a brother to Colorado to buy a truckload. Lots of kids were doing the same thing, but this particular kid and his cargo made the news when he got caught at a weigh station in Tennessee, where, because the load had entered the state untaxed, the attendant confiscated all four hundred cases. (No word on where the beer finally ended up.) The kids’ passion for Coors was evidence that the beer’s near mythic qualities had little to do with politics and everything to do with an image imposed on it from the outside: If only those kids, longhairs of left-leaning politics for the most part, knew that the brothers Coors, and especially Joe, embraced politics so far to the right that even conservatives shook their heads in wonder. (“Pleasure-loving parasites” is how Joe Coors described hippies.)

In 1965, Coors ranked just twelfth among brewers; by the early 1970s, it had climbed to fourth. At twelve million barrels, less than half the annual output at Anheuser-Busch, they had a long road to travel to catch up to the top three. The only way to do so was by going national, a route the family had resisted. But in 1975, company policy collided with the Supreme Court, which upheld a Federal Trade Commission ruling that found the company’s distribution policy amounted to price-fixing and restraint of trade. With Coors middlemen free to sell the beer anyplace they wanted, Joe and Bill took the company public. They still owned the controlling shares of stock, but the additional funds enabled them to build new breweries and play hardball with Busch and Uihlein.

It would not be easy. The Coors mystique stemmed largely from its lack of availability. Coors on a grocery shelf in, say, Nashville, lacked the panache and glamour of Coors smuggled out of Colorado in the trunk of a car. Nor did the Coors family politics sit well with others. Union organizers complained about being forced to take lie-detector tests, and teamsters in California, Coors’s most prized market, organized a successful boycott over a labor dispute. Latinos and gays boycotted, too, claiming the company practiced discrimination, an accusation that the Equal Opportunity Commission backed with formal charges. The company’s stock plunged as Joe and Bill Coors struggled to find their footing in this strange new terrain.

But if “local” beers like Coors were suddenly hip, imports were even hipper. American sales of German, French, Belgian, Mexican, and other foreign beers rose 88 percent in the first half of the 1970s. Import mania wasn’t hard to understand. As they had in the 1960s, adventurous baby boomers and the affluent middle-aged traveled abroad in record numbers, and they'returned home with a taste for European-style beers. Never mind that much of the imported beer was skunky from too much travel and not enough care; never mind that much of it was watery lager no better, and often worse, than the beers made by the American Big Brewers. All that mattered in the early 1970s was that imported beer, like homemade bread and organic gardening, allowed its drinkers to thumb their noses at the establishment, to assert their sophistication and worldliness. In that respect, there was not much difference between the import drinkers and those who, during the 1960s, drank Schlitz because the company’s advertising persuaded them that the beer bestowed an aura of prestige on those who consumed it. If beer had once been the province of the workingman and the saloon, it was now a badge signifying education and affluence.