Travels with Barley (14 page)

Sieben's went on to brew beer legally until 1967, when it, too, became a casualty of the Lager Wars; it has since been torn down. About all that remains is a recipe, floating around among home brewers on the Internet, called “Al Capone's Prohibition Beer.” It purports to be an actual lager brewed at the time Capone controlled Sieben's; Beer Geeks have taken to it because it's a lager made not just with malt, but with rice and soybeans.

As far as Massey knew, Capone behaved, comparatively speaking, like a gentleman when in Dubuque, though he was awfully fond of the strip joints in East Dubuque. Massey said both Dubuques were relatively tame today, compared with even thirty-five years ago, when he worked as a Dubuque cop before signing up with John Deere Co., the farm machinery maker. He'd spent twenty-nine years as a security guard at Deere before retiring in September 2001. But back when he walked a beat, Dubuque as a beer town and all-around drinking town was hard to beat. “You realize Dubuque didn't get liquor by the drink until 1963,” Massey told me. “The bar owners didn't want it—there was a lot more money in it if you didn't have to buy a license. [Licenses, as an aside, are strictly limited in numbers and often have to be acquired from existing license holders for tens of thousands of dollars.] The state would come in now and then and knock down an illegal tavern and they'd have to pay a $300 fine. But they'd be back in business the next day.”

Massey stopped to sip his beer, then went on: “Dubuque was a factory town, very blue-collar, and you wouldn't believe the number of bars. There was one just across the street from here and just around the corner within one block between Main and Locust there were five taverns. It was unbelievable… . But then, you know what they say about Dubuque. It's half Irish, half German, and all Catholic.” (One other thing I heard Dubuquers say about Dubuque: that as a city it ranked second
in the world
behind Munich in per capita beer consumption. But I was never able to independently confirm that accolade.)

Dubuque had at one time or another supported at least twenty-two breweries, Massey said, but all had eventually folded, the last one, Dubuque Brewing and Bottling Co., closing in 1998. It was a decent-sized regional brewer—100,000 barrels annually—famous for its Dubuque Star label. The brewhouse still sat over on the riverfront, not that far from the Mississippi River Museum. It was shuttered now and had been picked over by the breweriana people but, “years ago,” Massey told me, “you could go down there and go in and have a beer they called Big Star.”

The more I talked with Massey the more I liked him. He was a self-confessed barfly with a keen sense of humor, a thinking man's drinking man who liked history and understood that all history is local, in a way. He was a youthful sixty, but had seen enough in his time to make connections to the global events that were crashing like slow waves on his own town and his own life. Of Dubuque's up-and-down economic fortunes, he said, “Look, John Deere, where I worked all those years, at one time had 16,000 people here. Now there are about 3,000. They used to be a manufacturer. They used to make their own motors. Now John Deere is an assembly plant. They buy all the components and parts from all over the world and put them together here.”

Does that mean that Dubuque jobs have gone overseas? “Yeah,” said Massey, “but that's the way everybody does it now.”

Jim had a lot to say on beer, too, and his views reflected one strain of thought I heard often on the River of Beer among thinking lager people, who drank from the taps of the Bud juggernaut and even accepted its inevitability, yet lamented Big Beer's slaughter of the regional brewers of a kind that used to spice up the beer-drinking landscape. “I used to drink Blue Ribbon way back when,” Massey said. “I finally came around to Bud. I drink Bud Light and Coors Light, mostly—face it, Bud, Coors, and Miller are all that's left pretty much. For years, I wouldn't drink Bud because they were too big. But everybody carries the beer. Now, as you can see, I'm drinking Coors tonight, not Bud, because tonight I'm mad at Bud again—for putting all the little breweries out of business. But, what the hell, you can't beat 'em.”

On a personal level, Massey told me he had been single for many years, had seven adult children and fourteen grandkids. He now lived downtown just a few blocks from here in a renovated 1880s house with a woman quite his junior. He called her Sweetie; they'd been together eight years. She collected antique baby dishes and toys and “I collect Dubuque stuff and antique beer advertisements. Our house looks like a museum.” Sweetie's other preoccupations, he said, were “baking cookies and drinking pop” and going for daily 3:00
A.M.
, seven-mile runs with her three dogs, then walking another six or seven miles in the afternoon. Massey himself far preferred bar-hopping and beer-drinking to pop-sipping and jogging. The Julien, he said, was often his first stop on his more or less daily route.

Jim, I noticed, seemed to be able to put away prodigious amounts of beer with impunity. I was trying—whether out of pride or politeness, and maybe some of both—to keep up, but realized I wasn't much of a match. Of course, I had to remind myself that I was in the Midwest and thus a place, by reputation at least, that had me drinking with the big dogs. (It was only later, checking per capita consumption by state, that I learned Iowa actually ranked a disappointing sixteenth in the nation, with a 35.5 gallon per capita average. On the other hand, Wisconsin, which I'd just left, at least was in the top five—fourth to be precise, at 39.7 gallons per capita. A state I'd have never guessed—New Hampshire—ranked first at 44.8 gallons per capita.)

Jim announced there were other places he wanted to take me, Paul's Tavern especially. At some point, after resolving most of the problems of the world (and spending a sobering moment contemplating how we would spend the first anniversary of 9/11, which in a jolt I realized was tomorrow), we barged out into the night and into Paul's, just a couple of blocks away.

Massey was right; no serious beer joint hunter should miss Paul's. It was loud, boisterous, and crowded with a literal boatload of revelers who had come by excursion boat from the Quad Cities downriver (the Quad Cities being two Iowa and two Illinois towns clustered together on opposite banks of the Mississippi—Davenport, Iowa, perhaps being the best known). Paul's had the extra benefit of having kept some lucky taxidermist in work for a long, long time, since the heads of almost every big-game animal known to man were stuck up on plaques along the walls, glassy eyes staring from all directions. It also had 85-cent “scoops”—pint-plus-sized drafts of Old Style—and, boy, the Quad Cities gang was knocking them back like returning marathoners swarming a Dixie Cup water cooler.

Paul's also had Maria. She was a willowy blond bartender with a big smile, a skimpy halter top, and a very short skirt who waved us over as soon as she saw Jim.

“Hey, Jimmy,” she yelled, “I got something to show you!”

We pushed our way through the crowd and up to the bar.

Maria smiled, then giggled. “It's nothing weird or anything—not really,” she said.

Then—tah-dah!—Maria reached down to her splendidly bare midriff and pressed on her navel.

Well, actually, she pressed on her brand-new navel ring.

Well, actually, see, what it was … was this small, glittering, uh, metal penis that snapped up to the ready position each time she pressed down on some mechanism to which it was quite cleverly attached.

For full effect, Maria pressed down.

Many, many times.

The Quad Cities bunch was falling down in uproarious laughter at this, and I would've, too, had I been able to close my mouth.

Marie poured us scoops, even though I don't think we asked for them, and I sprang for the buck-seventy, plus a big tip, being on expenses and all. Then Jim and I fought our way into a semiquiet corner to contemplate Maria's adornment. We sipped our beers and I couldn't say yet whether Paul's was the Perfect Beer Joint. But I had to admit that I'd just had a near Perfect Beer Joint Moment.

Massey and I did make it to one other place, the Busted Lift. It was quiet and civilized. It had about one million beers, all of them craft beers. It had an extremely beer-knowledgeable bartender and it had beer-savvy owners who came over to greet us and lavish us with information. I later looked it up on the Web and every Beer Geek who had ever visited it seemed to give it five stars.

Alas, we had been there but a bit when Jim looked at me and I looked at him and he said an astonishing thing. He said, “I'm full. No more beer. I'm going home.”

Off he went, and I realized Jim was a wise, wise man. I headed for the Holiday Inn shortly thereafter.

Milton, Del.
—Michael Jackson, a normally voluble man with the enviable job of roaming the globe tasting this and that beer and who, to date, has sampled, who knows, thousands of them, is temporarily speechless. Machinery hums and clanks in the background and the earthy-warm aromas of hops and beer permeate the air. Jackson stands, beer mug in hand, in the high-ceilinged brewhouse of the Dogfish Head Craft Brewery here contemplating one of the biggest beers he's ever had.

Beer Geeks will forgive me while I explain to everyone else that I don't mean the size of his beer mug. Jackson, the legendary British beer writer who has come to the brewery at the invitation of its owner and founder, Sam Calagione, is cogitating his sampling of Dogfish Head's 120 Minute IPA, drawn directly from a tap on its finishing tank. The beer is still about three weeks away from bottling but, brewed in the hoppy India Pale Ale style, has already achieved an astonishing alcohol level of about 19 percent alcohol by volume. And on one major spectrum on the flavor meter—a hops-measuring indicator called International Bittering Units or IBUs—it stands at 125 IBUs.

Think about it this way: a middle-of-the-range IPA is about 6 percent to 8 percent ABV and maybe 30 IBUs; most mass-produced American lager is about 5.5 percent ABV, with IBUs ranging from 8 to 22; Michelob Ultra, Anheuser-Busch's recent low-carb light beer that it has pitched to women, rings in at 4.1 percent alcohol and only 4 IBUs.

In beer taste terms, 120 Minute IPA is nuclear fission in a glass yet, here's the kicker: it still tastes like beer and not booze, as some high-alcohol beers have a tendency to do. It is but one example of a growing phenomenon at the outer edges of the craft beer industry: Extreme Beer.

We have diverted once again from our narrative to enter one of the inner sanctums of the Extreme Beer movement.

“It's very drinkable,” Jackson, after a long pause, says to Calagione, 120 Minute IPA's creator and, in the words of his employees, the brewery's mad wizard. A few minutes later, Jackson, sampling another Dogfish offering out of a tank—a dark, raisin-based ale improbably named Raison D'Etre that comes in at a mere 8 percent ABV—shakes his head and laughs.

“This is outrageous,” he says in the measured, cheerful way he often speaks. “It's outrageous that these beers are that good and that drinkable—and strong enough to remove everybody's socks.”

He turns to Calagione and says, “You'll finish up in jail, you know. They will erect stocks all up and down the Eastern Seaboard. They'll get you for doing this.”

Calagione, laughing, says, “I hope you're right.”

A man of restless energy, insatiable curiosity, and quirkily ambitious brewing goals, Samuel Anthony Calagione III, thirty-four years old, is unquestionably among the Young Turks pushing the boundaries of beer in the Extreme Beer movement, which isn't merely about making ultra-strong beer but about redefining what beer could be. As for Jackson's comments, Calagione is—temporarily—flattered, since resting on laurels isn't a Calagione trait. He is the great-grandson of Italian immigrants; his grandfather worked in a shoe factory before starting a small vending machine business in Boston that paid the way for Sam's father to go to college and on to medical school. His father is an oral surgeon and entrepreneur, adding a scientific bent to the blue-collar pluckiness he got from his grandfather.

Calagione points out that 120 Minute IPA, continuously hopped during a 120-minute boil by a proprietary robotic gizmo he invented called Sir Hops Alot, isn't done fermenting and was conceived with loftier ambitions than the 19 percent ABV already achieved. “We were thinking 24 percent or 25 percent would be nice,” Calagione says, but he expresses doubt, despite resorting to brewing voodoo that he won't fully reveal, that it will get that high. He's used several pitches of proprietary yeast strains and though he won't say what the strains are, he quips, “If you looked at the yeast under a microscope, you'd see lots of leather skirts, whips, and chains.” He then turns to his lead brewer, Bryan Selders, and says, “What do you think it'll come in at, Bryan?”

Selders guesses it'll be closer to 20 percent than 24 percent. (It actually will get bottled at 21 percent—and sell for $8.99 retail for a 12-ounce bottle.)

No matter that 120 Minute IPA is already the strongest beer of its style ever measured on the River of Beer since science gave Beer Geeks the ability to track things such as alcohol level and IBUs. Calagione knows that one beer stands between him and one of brewing's more peculiar but nonetheless coveted trophies—bragging rights to having made the strongest beer in the world.

That beer is Jim Koch's Samuel Adams Utopias MMII, a fact that can't be doubted because it is enshrined in
The Guinness Book of World Records
. Released by Koch's Boston Beer Co. in November 2001, it shocked the beer world by coming in at 48 proof—24 percent ABV. All the more remarkable is that only a decade ago, most beer experts believed that 15 percent ABV, given that brewers for decades had relentlessly pushed existing strains of beer yeast to their limits, was a brewing wall that couldn't be surmounted without, say, throwing beer into a pot still or perhaps freezing it in finishing tanks. The Germans, among others, make an 80 proof beverage that is distilled from beer, but it survives with little semblance of beer taste. And distilling beer in the U.S. is technically illegal without a permit, as is freezing, which is considered simply another form of distillation. In that process, water and alcohol separate into ice and liquid respectively. By drawing off some of the ice, and leaving the alcohol intact, a brewer could greatly boost ABV levels. But, legalities aside, both would amount to an uncricket way to achieve an ABV record.

In 1994, Koch, working with his own proprietary strains of yeast over multiple fermentations, fired the first shot in the ABV wars by blasting through the 15 percent brewing mark with a dark ale called Triple Bock at 17.5 percent that had been three years in the planning and making. As if that weren't enough, Koch threw down a gauntlet to other craft brewers by declaring that he had brewed a beer that consciously crossed the line between beer, wine, and spirits; a beer that, after brewing, he had aged for eighteen months in used oak whiskey barrels before bottling; a beer that he said had “the complexity of a fine cognac, vintage port, or an old sherry” and that “should be sipped from a small snifter in a two-ounce serving.”

Calagione was barely out of Pennsylvania's Muhlenberg College then and didn't enter the craft brew fray until the summer of 1995, when he and his wife, Mariah, his high school sweetheart, opened a brewpub near the beach in Lewes, Delaware, twenty miles from Milford, Delaware, where Mariah grew up. But in a few short years, the pub would prove so successful that the Calagiones would find themselves expanding into the full-fledged, fast-growing craft brewer that Dogfish Head has become. Sam was already drawing crowds to the pub by putting together adventurous seasonal concoctions like Punkin' Ale (brewed from real pumpkin) and style-bending offerings like Chicory Stout (an ale with touches of chicory and Mexican coffee) when in the fall of 2000 he made his first major public splash in the beer world. That's when he undertook the brewing of Midas Touch from the 2,700-year-old recipe (recall the history chapter) that Dr. Patrick McGovern, the University of Pennsylvania Museum archaeological chemist, had roughly figured out from intricate biochemical analyses of residue found in the tomb in central Turkey thought to be King Midas's.

McGovern had already heard of the small Delaware brewery whose motto is “off-centered ales for off-centered people.” So he approached Calagione with the recipe, hoping that he would make a small batch for a funerary feast that researchers had planned to honor Midas. McGovern was certain that his concoction, sorted out using things like mass spectrometers and gas chromatographs, was an elixir of beer, wine, and mead made with numerous exotic ingredients, but he had no clue as to the proportion of each.

This was exactly the kind of challenge that motivates Calagione, who spent weeks trying to sort out the ancient brewing mind, the ancient brewing climate, and the appropriate modern equivalents of ancient brewing ingredients. The test batch caused such a stir that by 2001 Dogfish Head was commercially brewing Midas Touch Golden Elixir, which included very unbeerlike portions of white muscat grapes, honey, and saffron. Calagione decided to put it in a 750-milliliter wine bottle, complete with a cork, with a suggested retail price of $14.

Midas Touch, at 9 percent ABV a strong ale and, like Koch's Triple Bock, a decided hybrid on the beer spectrum, wasn't a direct riposte to Koch. But in 2002, after Koch had wowed the beer-drinking world with his 24 percent Utopias (which he sold in 3,000 numbered and signed 24-ounce mini copper brew kettles for $100 a bottle), Calagione jumped into the strong-beer ring, first by pushing his raisin ale, Raison D'Etre, to a whopping 21 percent (and renaming it Raison D'Extra). Then he popped out a brew called Worldwide Stout that came close to dethroning Millennium with an ABV reading of 23.04 percent. (Calagione, in fact, could claim Worldwide was the strongest beer in
production
since millennium was a one-off product.)

Imitation is certainly a form of flattery here, for Calagione admires Koch on one level, particularly the way he publicly stirred up the craft brew movement and helped precipitate an unprecedented round of research among yeast makers aimed at developing strains that may one day push the ABV limit even further. But Calagione also climbs into the strong-beer ring like an underrated boxer who believes he has a good chance to deck the champ. This is all a more formidable challenge since Boston Beer is the undeniable behemoth of craft brewers with annual revenues of more than $230 million; Dogfish Head is still of a size to be classified as a true microbrewery.

This rivalry (mostly good-natured, with a few barbs thrown here and there about whose concoctions are more faithful to beer) has gotten little attention in the wider world. But among the Beer Geeks this is juicy stuff. In May 2003,
Beverage Business
, a trade magazine, devoted a four-page spread to the ABV jousting titled “The Race for the
Überbeer
is Upon Us.” It quoted one admiring but worried craft brewer who feared the craft segment of the industry was sliding into “strong beer hysteria” given the number of copycats that Koch and Calagione had spurred. Meanwhile, among the Beer Geeks, the home-brewers, and the Yeast People, debate swirls: How have Koch and Calagione gotten so much more kick out of beer yeast than brewers in the past? Are they pushing exotics like champagne, wine, or even distiller's yeasts to get to these staggering alcohol levels?

Koch, for his part, demurs, saying only that the imputed 15 percent wall of yore was always more “of a mental issue than a technical one” and allowing as how he'll probably take the 24 percent ABV to 26 percent or 27 percent one day soon. And both Koch and Calagione took pains to tell me that their goals weren't merely to dazzle by proving yeast could be pushed to produce unbelievably high ABV levels. “We've learned a lot about high-alcohol fermentation but, more important, about creating wonderful flavors in high-alcohol malt fermentations,” Koch wrote in an e-mail. “If the beverage is unpalatable, who cares how high the alcohol level is.”

I went to see Calagione for the first time well before I began my trip down the Mississippi after learning of his connection to the King Midas project. At that point, I hadn't actually fixated on the concept of Extreme Beer, which turned out to be a kind of stealth phenomenon kicking around the craft brew world that was just beginning to be articulated as a movement. (As this was being written, the world's second-ever annual Extreme Beer festival had just been convened in Boston.) It's impossible to say who invented the term but the first reference I could find to it in this context was by Koch in a 1994 interview with
Management Review
magazine to describe his Triple Bock.

As noted, microbreweries had sprung to life with the original goal of rescuing America's early brewing legacy, with its zesty ales and throngs of rival regional brewers, from a lager-soaked and vastly consolidated beer landscape. Now, after putting some 1,500 new breweries or brewpubs into business and pumping at least 10,000 individual new beers onto the market, some brewers had grown bored with that original mission and decided that it was time to take beer to the next level. Others saw the seeds of counterrevolution—craft beer itself, in the view of some craft brew rebels, had begun to move too far toward the mainstream with lighter styles (Samuel Adams now has a light beer, for example) that craft beer revolutionaries once mocked.

And it was clear that ultra-strong beer was itself just one manifestation. Midas Touch was but one of scores of examples of how beer was growing so startlingly bold and exotic that it was, in fact, beginning to make early craft brew seem mainstream. Fritz Maytag at Anchor Brewing could say without hesitation that his original ales, given that almost all beer back then was pale lager, could be considered extreme for those times. But certainly not now; when I interviewed Maytag at his San Francisco brewery in the summer of 2003, he marveled at the creativity and audacity sweeping the craft brew movement today and said, given such competition, “It's not easy to be amazingly creative anymore.”