Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (39 page)

A New England man, Larry McCavitt, acknowledged the shift in tastes when he launched a short-lived crusade to promote “real” beer with a Committee for Real Ale, modeled after the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), a grassroots British movement to save English beer from corporate takeover. At its peak, the CRA numbered but two hundred members, most in the New England area, but a California wing alerted the northeasterners to the existence of Fritz Maytag’s small brewery.

Beer lovers like McCavitt, import madness, the demand for the authenticity of the local—all of these things kept Fritz Maytag going during his first difficult decade. He invested in new brewing equipment and began selling the beer in six- rather than four-packs. But otherwise he stuck to his original game plan: to make a quality beer from four ingredients. The customers, he believed, would come. In 1975, a decade after he wrote the check that had made him a partner in the brewery, he finally turned a profit. Two years later, California-based
New West
magazine ranked thirty beers, foreign and domestic. Anchor Steam came out on top.

T
OGETHER, THESE
cultural trends—food scares, environmental concerns, and disaffection with big corporations—transformed Americans’ attitudes toward beer. But the times also boosted the popularity of homebrewing, and that hobby in turn inspired millions of Americans to rethink their ideas about beer and, equally important, provided a training ground for some of the finest brewmasters of the late twentieth century.

Homebrewing had fallen from favor since its glory days during Prohibition, in part because it was illegal, thanks to an accidental bit of poor wording written into repeal laws in the 1930s. But in the 1960s it had staged a comeback, for many of the same reasons that Fritz Maytag was succeeding. Michael Lewis had first-hand knowledge of homebrewing’s resurgence. Lewis, a biochemist in the Department of Food Science and Technology at the University of California, Davis, specialized in brewing yeasts and processes. He’d joined the faculty in 1964 and immediately suffered an inundation of homebrewing enthusiasts who bombarded him with phone calls and letters, each one wanting to know why his or her beer had gone bad or what kind of yeast to use. In 1965, Lewis began teaching the craft through the university’s extension program, cautioning his students not to sell their wares and to avoid discussing their illegal hobby
too
openly, just in case.

But in the early 1970s, a new breed of enthusiasts grabbed hold of homebrewing. “[N]ow that growing your own (food, dope, hair, younameit) is hip,” wrote the author of an essay widely reprinted in alternative newspapers, “it’s time to resurrect the Dope of the Depression—Homebrew.” Homemade beer inspired “good vibrations” and a “pleasant high.” Unlike the rest of the “plastic, mass-produced shit” of modern America, homebrew represented “an exercise of craft” and empowered the “politically oriented” to retaliate against “Augustus [
sic
] Busch and the other fascist pigs who [were] ripping off the Common Man.” “If you’re looking for a cheap drunk,” added the beer adviser, “go back to Gussie Busch. But if you dig the good vibes from using something you make yourself, plus an improvement in quality over the commercial shit,” brew on, brothers and sisters, brew on.

There is no way to measure the number of Americans who embraced homebrewing in the early and mid-1970s, but by the summer of 1973 there were enough that the Treasury Department issued a formal warning advising Americans to “leave the beer-making to the brewers.”Treasury’s warning was a bit bizarre, even laughable, given that Senator Sam Ervin was a few blocks away conducting the Watergate hearings into gross illegalities on the part of the Nixon administration.

Peter Brehm, who owned Wine and the People, a winemaking and homebrewing supply store in Berkeley, knew something was going on. His sales had soared. But Brehm and his employee Byron Burch wearied of answering the same questions over and over—many of them prompted by errors written into the few available how-to books. Both men were also troubled by the facts of homebrewing circa 1974: First, most customers aimed at quantity rather than quality; and second, most homebrewers knew nothing about hops and how to use them.

Burch decided to write his own book. But he wanted to provide more than the standard “buy a can of Blue Ribbon malt and a packet of yeast,” so he felt a visit to an actual brewery might be useful. He phoned Anchor Brewing in hopes that someone there would agree to answer questions. To his surprise, Fritz Maytag answered the phone. Of course!, the brewer responded; come for a visit. Maytag had good reason to assist Burch and other serious homebrewers. What the nation, or at least the Bay Area, needed were serious, well-educated beer enthusiasts who could appreciate what Maytag had to offer. Homebrewers fit the bill. Burch spent three hours exploring the brewery with Maytag, who answered questions and offered advice. The brewer attached but one caveat to the aid: Please, he said, don’t credit me in the book, explaining that federal agents had been around warning professional brewers not to consort with the lawbreaking amateurs.

Burch borrowed $5,000 to print
Quality Brewing: A Guidebook for the Home Production of Fine Beers.
It was the first American homebrewing book to focus on accuracy, technical detail, and quality ingredients; the first to provide substantive information about yeasts; and the first to include a detailed discussion of hop varieties and the way in which hops could enliven the homebrewer’s art. It also included the usual sop to the law: According to the Internal Revenue Service, Burch reminded readers, home-brewing was illegal, but “this interpretation is somewhat dubious, and enforcement is nonexistent.” Besides, he might have added, we’ve got a president and various higher-ups who’ve been breaking the law right and left. Times are tough; homebrew is cheap. Have fun.

The Maltose Falcons were having fun. It is a measure of home-brewing’s appeal that the first American brewing club sprouted in the most unlikely of places: suburban Los Angeles. Organized in 1974, the club was the brainchild of Merlin Elhardt, who developed a passion for German beer while stationed in Europe during and after World War II. Elhardt was a homebrewer’s brewer: He ground his own malt and pitched a yeast smuggled out of the Tuborg brewery in Denmark. The Falcons’ membership reflected homebrewing’s widespread popularity: A utility lineman and a college student, a church deacon and a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA, a teacher and an artist. They tasted each other’s wares, discussed techniques, and swapped yeasts and recipes. “Most of us,” said one member, “are into the taste of beer, not the ‘buzz.’ ”

Patrick Baker, who owned a Connecticut homebrewing supply shop that catered to both wine- and beer-makers, also turned to beer in the early 1970s. He started hosting Saturday-morning “Beer Doctor” sessions at his store, but in 1975 he and others supplemented them with a monthly meeting at night, which, in a nod to the Treasury and Justice departments, they dubbed the “Underground Brewers’ Club.” Dozens of other clubs followed. By 1978, homebrewing had become so mainstream that the Carter administration finally legalized it.

That was the same year that the hobby gained its own national organization, thanks to Charlie Papazian. Papazian had discovered homebrewing in the early 1970s during his college days at the University of Virginia and continued to brew after graduation, when he moved to Boulder, Colorado. There he developed a minor reputation around town as a guy who served up good times and good beer, and the staff at the Community Free School asked him to share his skill one night a week. Papazian jumped at the chance. He loved to teach and relished the fellowship and community that homebrew inspired.

But Papazian was an entrepreneur at heart. He wrote and self-published a homebrewing pamphlet, a short, breezy affair that touted homebrewing as an easy, fun-filled venture. He sold copies to students enrolled in his brewing classes, but he wanted to find a larger audience for it and fashion a career out of his passion for beer. He found plenty of role models and inspiration close at hand in Boulder, a city that, in the 1970s, oozed entrepreneurial passion. Mo Siegel had created a profitable empire out of herbal teas; by the late 1970s, his Celestial Seasonings company boasted $9 million in sales. Green Mountain Grainery, which sold health foods like granola and trail mix, operated in a smaller local market, but each year it pulled in well over $1 million. The Naropa Institute sold ideas and religion, and owned entire blocks of Boulder real estate. Creating odd businesses was itself a kind of religion in Boulder, a town where “everybody,” mused one observer who visited in the late 1970s, “believes like crazy in something or somebody.”

Two events set Papazian’s ship on course. In January 1978, he read Michael Jackson’s
World Guide to Beer,
a glossy book on beer styles written by an English journalist. In the space of a few hours, Papazian’s knowledge about brewing and beer and their possibilities “expanded by leaps and bounds.” But Jackson’s work also empowered Papazian to perceive “community” as a larger, more complex entity than he had found in his homebrewing classes at the Free School. Then there was Jackson himself: an otherwise ordinary guy making a living from beer. The second event presented itself in October 1978, when President Carter signed the legislation that legalized homebrewing.

That was enough for Papazian. Out there, he sensed rather than knew, were beer lovers like himself, men and women who enjoyed not just the flavor of homebrew, but the pleasure and fellowship it inspired. In December, he and a friend, Charlie Matzen, founded the American Homebrewers Association and mailed off about a thousand copies of a homebrewing newsletter they’d written called
Zymurgy.

Against all odds, the group thrived. Each issue of
Zymurgy
was fatter than the last, thickened by an array of advertisements, mostly for homebrew supply shops, new magazines like
Home Fermenter’s Digest
and
All About Beer,
and instruction manuals like Patrick Baker’s 1979 publication,
New Brewer’s Handbook.
News about homebrewing clubs filled several pages of each issue.

Homebrewing would ultimately serve as a breeding ground for microbrewing, nurturing the skills and ambitions of many of the people who later laid the foundation of that new brewing industry. But in the 1970s, that consequence was not yet obvious. Homebrewing was but one manifestation of a profound transformation in American beer culture. A line had been drawn: small, pure, and foreign versus big, toxic, and domestic. Beautiful Davids versus Grotesque Goliaths.

T
HAT SUCH A LINE
existed was lost on corporate brewing. In the 1970s, the industry’s giants were concerned not at all about homebrewing, Fritz Maytag, or “real” beer; they were too busy dreaming up new “segments” and providing more of the same bland lager they’d been making for thirty years.

Certainly the suits-and-ties at Philip Morris were oblivious, caught up as they were in their own vat of woe. The tobacco giant had gained complete control of Miller Brewing in 1970 when it bought Harry John’s 47 percent share for an astonishing $96 million. But the company was performing badly and they longed to see a return, preferably in profit rather than headache, on their gamble.

John Murphy to the rescue. By his own admission, Murphy, who had trained as an accountant and lawyer and risen through Philip Morris’s ranks to the office of executive vice-president, knew nothing about beer—except how to consume it, he being, also by his own admission, “an Olympic-class beer drinker.” But PM’s leadership was less interested in Murphy’s beer gut than in his gut instinct, and as far as he was concerned, beer was first cousin to cigarettes: Both were agricultural products—barley and tobacco—processed within an inch of their lives in automated factories and sold in highly competitive markets. Selling beer, Murphy concluded, was about the same as selling smokes: Give customers what they want, do it efficiently and cheaply, and break the other guy’s knees while you’re at it.

Murphy, a gregarious guy with a hulking build and a cool self-confidence, arrived in Milwaukee in 1971 and began weeding Miller’s genteel but stodgy management. Next, he reduced the hops and barley in Miller High Life as a way of wooing the otherwise uncommitted, and started selling it in seven-ounce containers, an enticement for women. He dumped the “country club” tone of the company’s ads and bombarded the nation’s eyes and ears with a new campaign based on “Miller Time”: “If you’ve got the time, we’ve got the beer.” The ads needed a few months to soak in, but in 1973, sales lurched forward—29 percent that year, another 31 percent the next. Miller Brewing moved from seventh place to fifth.

Having grabbed his competitors’ throats, Murphy delivered his knockout punch: Miller Lite. Murphy purchased the Lite brand in 1972 from Meister Brau, the Chicago conglomerate that introduced the beer in 1967, and pondered its possibilities. Sure, diet beers had failed before. Who remembered Gablinger’s except as a total flop? But that was then and this was now and John Murphy was John Murphy, and “[a]fter all,” he said, “we’re not in the brain-surgery business.” In the hands of a skilled marketer and wedded to the right advertising campaign, low-calorie could be the next new segment, and if Miller created the segment, it would also control it.

Miller Lite made its national debut in February 1975 escorted by a passel of “convincing beer-drinking personalities” like Mickey Spillane, the tough-guy novelist; Rodney Dangerfield, the not-so-tough comic; and an assortment of former baseball, basketball, and football players. One series of TV spots featured two “teams” chanting their respective mantras: “Tastes great,” roared one side; “Less filling,” responded the other. In another ad, football player Bubba Smith demonstrated Lite’s “easy-opening” cans by ripping the top off one. In another, Dangerfield hung out in a tavern “so tough that the hatcheck girl is named Dominick.”

Was Miller Lite a success because of its humorous ads, or its contribution to good health at a moment when organic produce and jogging had become popular? It didn’t much matter. Murphy unloaded five million barrels of Lite during its second year on the market. Company sales rose 43 percent in 1976, pushing Miller from fourth place to third. And in 1977, a year in which Miller Brewing sold 25 million barrels of all its brands, Miller knocked Schlitz out of second place. “I’ve been in this business 20 years,” marveled an Atlanta wholesaler, “and I’ve never seen anything like this acceptance.”