The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution (33 page)

T
he billboards began popping up
in the Philly area in the fall of 1993. “Philadelphia Is Putting Blondes Behind Bars,” they read, a deliberate double entendre to grab the more lascivious minds in the City of Brotherly Love. The “blondes” actually referred to bottles of a new beer that would be hitting shelves and bars that same season. Called Red Bell Blonde Ale, it was the brainchild of a twenty-eight-year-old ex-college football player named James Bell. “I know bonds and stocks,” Bell, an executive at a securities brokerage, told a reporter that October. “I'm starting to know beer.”

He was an exuberant frontman for a brand that had investors, including Philadelphia Eagles safety Ray Ellis, before they even had a prototype to taste. Bell amassed more than $200,000 in start-up money and used $60,000 of that for the promotional push, which included not only the cryptic billboards but also radio ads, tasting parties, and PR (another slogan rolled out: “Put a blonde at your table”). The idea, the red-haired frontman explained, was to make Red Bell “the next Sam Adams.”

And why not? Jim Koch and Rhonda Kallman's Boston Beer Company seemed as ubiquitous as any consumer product introduced in America in the last quarter-century. The company brewed 275,000 barrels in 1992 and was now distributed in nearly every state and the District of Columbia. The days of Koch and Kallman going door-to-door to cold-pitch skeptical merchants on Samuel Adams Boston Lager seemed so utterly distant as to have passed into folklore; Bell was not even of legal drinking age when the pair was doing that. Besides, nowadays, there were more than two hundred craft breweries and brewpubs in the United States, with more in the pipeline.

And what growth! Sales volumes for these breweries and brewpubs were jumping by double-digit percentages annually, leaving them, as the
New York Times
noted, “heady as prom queens with their local popularity.” The public's
pivot to health foods and exercise, and to a growing willingness to pay a little bit more for what it considered fresher, more local products, only buoyed the confidence of fresh arrivals like Bell. You could make a killing in craft beer, whether you were an old hand like F. X. Matt, set in your century-old ways, or a newcomer to the industry like, well, like everybody! Hadn't Ken Grossman worked in bicycle shops before he started his homebrewing supply store in Chico and then cofounded Sierra Nevada? And hadn't Sierra Nevada's sales grown every year since the company's commercial launch in 1981?

Never mind the cautionary tales told by recent flops like Jersey Premium Lager. Another contract brew—like Red Bell, through the Lion Brewery in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania—it was started five years earlier by two Brooklyn wine salesmen and headquartered in Bordentown, New Jersey, thirty miles north of Philly. It captured quite the buzz upon its debut, selling its first thirty-five hundred cases in six weeks. But it was out of business by the time Bell had his idea, as was William Penn, another contract-brewed brand distributed in the Philly area. As for other defunct craft breweries—if Koch and Kallman's early Boston Beer Company was folklore, then Jack McAuliffe's gravity brewing system in Sonoma, California, was science fiction. Who even believed it these days?

Anyway, there had been sturdier additions to the movement in just the last couple of years. Dan and Deb Carey had moved to New Glarus, in southern Wisconsin, to open a craft brewery named after the town in the spring of 1993, with the initial capacity to make three thousand barrels annually. Its line of beers, particularly a cherry-infused Christmas ale, had proven extraordinarily popular since. Dan Carey was one of Michael Lewis's pupils at UC-Davis and later studied at the Siebel Institute in Chicago; he went on to apprentice at a small brewery near Munich and then work as a production supervisor for Anheuser-Busch near Fort Collins, Colorado. Deb Carey grew up in Milwaukee, studied graphic design and marketing while at college in Montana, and raised the $400,000 for the brewery as a gift to her husband. The couple founded the brewery largely as a reaction to the homogenization they saw all around them; foodstuffs from mass producers (including Dan Carey's onetime employer Anheuser-Busch) struck them as boring. “It's like eating fast food every night of the week,” he would tell people. It was time to join the change.
*
On nearly the same latitude as New Glarus, though more than twelve hundred miles away, Alan Pugsley had teamed with Fred Forsley in early 1994 to start a new brewery near the busy waterfront of Portland, Maine, called
the Shipyard Brewing Company. Its origins actually dated from 1992, when Forsley, a Gray, Maine, native and real estate entrepreneur, opened the Kennebunkport Brewing Company and the Federal Jack's brewpub above it in that coastal town, with Pugsley consulting on the equipment setup and the beers.

Out in Colorado, ranchers George Stranahan and Richard McIntyre were partnering in a new brewery in Denver, in an old laundry building at Broadway and Market Street, that would capitalize on the success of Stranahan's Flying Dog Brewpub, which opened in Aspen in 1991. Stranahan was a polyglot—a rancher, a physicist, a photographer, an artist, an Ohio-raised heir to the Champion Spark Plug fortune—and nothing illustrated this more than where he got the name for his brewpub: from a painting of a flying dog in a hotel room in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, after climbing K2. Flying Dog's brands would become particularly noteworthy for label illustrations by the English artist Ralph Steadman and musings from legendary writer and local resident Hunter S. Thompson.

Back east, around the same time James Bell was erecting his billboards about blondes barely thirty-five miles away, two childhood friends, Ron Barchet and Bill Covaleski, were preparing to launch what they called the Victory Brewing Company in an old Pepperidge Farm cracker factory in Downing-town, Pennsylvania. Covaleski learned homebrewing from his father, and he gave Barchet a kit for Christmas in 1985. The two eventually fled their corporate jobs to study and work in brewing, including spells in Munich and at the Baltimore Brewing Company, a brewpub started by Dutchman Theo DeGroen in 1989. Their brewpub would open the day after Valentine's Day in 1996, with forty-two seats, a seventy-foot-long bar, and a brewhouse that produced twenty-five hundred barrels that first year.

While Barchet and Covaleski were training for what would become Victory, serial entrepreneur Alan Newman and Bob Johnson, who worked in the mail order business before turning to brewing, were putting the finishing touches on their Magic Hat Brewing Company in Burlington, Vermont. It would start production in late 1994 and expand into a new brewery in South Burlington within three years, by which time it would be one of eighteen craft breweries in the state. It was a stunning, decadelong march from the first one, Catamount Brewing Company in 1987, especially considering that Vermont had fewer than six hundred thousand residents.

Finally, in Fort Collins, Colorado, about an hour's drive north of Denver, Kim Jordan was passing her Fridays thusly: she would call customers in the morning and see what beers they needed; she would spend the afternoons distributing it by way of her Toyota Tercel station wagon, picking up her son from
first grade along the way; he would do his homework in the passenger's seat while she finished deliveries in the early evening; then it was home for dinner; later she ran out again for a Kinko's run to make marketing materials like table tents. The rest of the workweek, she kept her day job as a social worker; her husband, Jeff Lebesch, kept his as an electrical engineer. In whatever free time he could create, however, he was the brewmaster for the New Belgium Brewing Company, which the couple started in 1991 out of their basement using old dairy equipment that Lebesch had rejiggered and around $60,000 in start-up costs. They did only bottles at first, in part so as not to compete with two other craft operations in Fort Collins, both then all-draft: Odell Brewing, started in 1989 by brother and sister Doug and Corkie Odell and Doug's wife, Wynne, in an old grain elevator downtown; and CooperSmith's brewpub, also downtown and opened shortly after Odell. Lebesch and Jordan's idea sprang from trips to Belgium in 1989 and 1991, where they bicycled about, imbibing what was the world's most diverse beer selection. Their production would near thirty thousand barrels annually by 1994—or about what the 130-acre Anheuser-Busch plant just north of Fort Collins could churn out in a week.

New Belgium was the first craft brewery to stake its reputation on Belgian-style beers, including a rich, malty ale in the style of the Trappist monks of Belgium called Abbey Ale and a mildly bitter amber ale they called Fat Tire in honor of the bicycle trips. While it may not have been surprising that they went the Belgian route, it was not auspicious, either. Never mind that the beers were nothing like the watery lagers of Big Beer, they were also out of step with the more popular craft brands, like Pete's Wicked Ale, a brown ale; Sierra Nevada's hoppier pale ale; and Samuel Adams Boston Lager. So out of step were they that initially New Belgium literally defied categorization at the Great American Beer Festival down in Denver, failing to fit into any designated styles. In 1993, the festival added a catchall “Mixed, Specialty” category, and New Belgium's Abbey promptly won the gold. It was around that time, too, that Jordan ceased doing the distribution. Pregnant with their second child, she realized it probably wasn't best to be performing the door-to-door unloading.

Lebesch and Jordan were not models for James Bell in Philadelphia—nor were any of these other newer arrivals in the early 1990s. He instead took as his model Jim Koch, who made building a craft beer company seem if not easy at least fun in a pugnacious way, with his public takedowns of imports and his lessons on hops and barley. Bell was so confident he could mimic this model that he was planning to make his brand an export as well as a domestic: Red Bell Blonde Ale would be marketed as Buccaneer Gold in the Cayman Islands. The beer (or beers, as the dual brands would have it) was a light-bodied golden
ale modeled on the German style Kölsch. Bell contracted with Lion to produce as much as seven thousand barrels annually, and he planned to offer the beer on Philly-area shelves at less than what a case of imports would cost (or a case of Samuel Adams); Red Bell would retail for under nineteen dollars a case. Its namesake was prepared for three years of losses but eventually expected to turn a $200,000 profit at a 38 percent return on investment. “If we can get people in Philadelphia emotional about the beer,” Bell explained, “it will fly.”

*
The Careys would adopt “Drink Indigenous” as their brewery's motto.

T
he nation's “center of attention,”
as the front page of the
New York Times
put it, shifted to CNN's Washington studios on Tuesday, November 9, 1993. That evening, in front of what would turn out to be the largest cable television audience of the twentieth century, vice president Al Gore and Texas billionaire Ross Perot were to debate the North American Free Trade Agreement on
Larry King Live.
NAFTA, heavily supported by the Clinton administration and Wall Street, would open up trade with Mexico and Canada, ostensibly lowering prices on consumer goods and boosting companies' bottom lines to spur more job creation. Opponents like Perot, as well as a sizable chunk of the nation's organized labor, worried NAFTA would mean the loss of American jobs to Mexico, where labor costs were significantly cheaper than in the United States. Perot had colorfully described the prospect as “a giant sucking sound” during the recent presidential race. The agreement was expected to come to a congressional vote before the end of the year. The debate took on the portentous aura of a major sporting event; only one side, it was assumed, could emerge the winner in the ring of public opinion. Not surprisingly, it turned contentious at times. The two men basically called each other liars, like in this exchange early on:

Perot:
Do you guys ever do anything but propaganda?

Gore:
Isn't it your business also?

Perot:
Would you even know the truth if you saw it?

Gore:
Oh, yes, I—

Perot:
I don't believe you would. You've been up here too long.

NAFTA did pass, and President Clinton signed it into law before the new year—not before the controversy loosed a national reckoning over America's manufacturing sector. Once the envy of the world, providing job security for tens of millions of Americans and goods that were sold domestically and exported to dozens of countries, the sector as of late had been frighteningly contracting. Industries previously thought impervious to major job losses were confronting them and the concomitant losses in disposable income and tax revenue from displaced workers. Steel, automobiles, textiles, furniture, industrial machinery, even the hardware of the computer industry—all were seeing jobs go elsewhere, partly because of greater automation but mostly because of companies chasing cheaper labor and proximity to recently stronger markets like Eastern Europe and South America. Between 1979 and 1992, the year before the NAFTA debate, America lost more than three million manufacturing jobs. And they weren't coming back; there simply weren't enough being created to overtake the losses, and all the growth was in the professional and service sectors, a trend that would continue into what was being called, hopefully, the Second American Century.