Travels with Barley (24 page)

When I broached the subject of the Perfect Beer Joint, Brenda practically jumped up and down for the Meow. After I heard her story, I could see her point.

“We just got married—one month and two days ago,” she said. “We met on the Internet. Can you believe it? It's the third time for both of us. Third time's the charm, right? Yeah, we were down here at the Meow one Friday night and I needed a change so I said, ‘Hey, why don't we go to Vegas?' And Paul said, ‘Yeah, why don't we? Let's get married. Let's go right now!'”

Brenda stopped to catch her breath, then said: “Well, there were all these people in the bar around us and they said, ‘Yeah, that's a great idea. Go do it now!' So off we went to the airport. We got to the airport and there were no flights out.”

Paul chimed in: “That's the way we make decisions—we just say, ‘Right now, let's go! Let's do it!'”

They stayed with friends out by the airport that night and, not losing courage, flew out to Vegas the next day. It was a Saturday but “the courthouse is open 24/7 so there was no problem there,” Brenda explained.

They spent three blissful days in Vegas—well, after a kind of rough start. They ended up in the most expensive hotel in town the first night and “boy, did they skin us,” Brenda said.

“Oh, man. We were living downtown, ba-by!” Paul said, doing a remarkable imitation of the goofy movie spy, Austin Powers.

They checked into a slightly more modest bed-and-breakfast the next night, breakfast including $1 bottles of St. Pauli Girl, a nice German lager. “Basically, the way I look at it,” Paul said, looking at Brenda in admiration, “3,000 miles and $3,000 later, we were married.”

“And, yeah, the plot was hatched right here at the Meow,” Brenda said.

After a while, I left the Kreitzes to their numerous Meow buddies to meet an old Missouri journalism school classmate and her husband for dinner. I circled back later, still hoping to catch some Bud workers, but the Meow was mobbed instead with college kids doing their best to make the Busches richer than they already were. I called it a night; it had been a long day on the River of Beer.

For complicated reasons, I decided to hang around St. Louis the next day and around 5:00
P.M.
found myself back at the bar. Surely, beer workers drank beer to start the weekend? But after essentially canvassing every person in the joint, there still wasn't a Bud worker to be found. Curious.

I did, though, make the happy acquaintance of the Grassers, Chris and Mary, who were seated at the bar, Mary sipping $1.50 screwdrivers, Chris drinking $1 Bud Lights. They were a retired couple living in a downtown high-rise apartment and they were exactly the kind of mirthful people you hoped you'd meet in beer joints. They'd been married for thirty-four years and had no children, so a lot of their social life revolved around what they called “making the rounds” in Soulard, which was their favorite neighborhood.

In fact, they told me that they made the rounds pretty much every night and had been coming to the Meow at least two nights a week for the past ten or fifteen years. They had clearly scouted out the lay of the drinking land hereabouts and seemed to have intricate knowledge of which bars had what drinks on special at any given time. They ticked off six or seven that were part of their regular circuit, but the Meow was a constant because, as Chris told me, “it's the cheapest place in town.”

“Look at this screwdriver,” Mary said, tapping her tall glass. “It's a big strong drink.”

I asked Mary if she would nominate any of her regular places as the Perfect Beer Joint. She laughed and said, “Well, I don't know, Ken. I like them
all!
”

Mary went on to tell me that to some extent she was fond of bars because in her younger days she had spent many years working as a cocktail waitress in the Jefferson Hotel downtown at a time when the Jefferson, which is no longer a hotel but a retirement home, was one of the top hotels in St. Louis. “And, let me tell you, I made tons of money—just tons of money. I was getting $100 a night just in tips. Of course, I looked a little better then than I do now.”

I looked at Mary and she looked all right to me: slender, well dressed, one of those women of indeterminate age. Chris, too, looked like the fit golfer he would later tell me he was. (“I play golf,” he'd confided, “so I can go to the nineteenth hole.”)

Mary said, “Now, guess how old I am?”

I cringed, then blurted out fifty-five.

She threw her head back and laughed. “Seventy. I'm seventy years old, can you believe it? And I don't color my hair, either!”

Mary told Chris she was ready for another screwdriver and he ordered one.

She turned to me and said, “You know, when we first started talking I didn't mind talking to you. But now I'm more interested 'cause we're talking about me!”

The Grassers seemed keen to help me on my quest and they began going over the bar prospects nearby when it suddenly dawned on them that they hadn't told me about Pam.

“Oh,” Mary said. “You've gotta go see Pam. She works over at Gladstone's and everybody in Gladstone's loves Pam.”

“A lot of the guys are in Gladstone's because of Pam,” Chris said.

For about the next ten minutes, the Grassers filled me in on Pam's charms—her friendliness, her way with customers, her sense of humor, how she never forgets anybody's name. As they talked, I realized that they were articulating a phenomenon on the River of Beer that I'd witnessed many times over and was loosely beginning to think of as the Beer Goddess phenomenon. It was hardly rocket science but there was an undeniable connection between the healthy and robust sale of beer (and liquor) and the presence of friendly and winsome young women.

As to almost make my point for me, a younger, somewhat disheveled acquaintance of the Grassers sidled up next to them at the bar to say hello. I didn't catch his name but when I posed my Perfect Beer Joint question to him, he blurted out, “Girls, girls, girls!”

About that time, Mary looked at her watch and consulted with Chris. They both realized that Pam was working at Gladstone's this very day at this very minute, but that she was likely getting off soon and, really, it would be a tragedy if I missed her, and thus we should run over there right away. So we quickly settled up at the Meow and went barging out into the street, where we collected our separate cars and drove to Gladstone's just a few blocks away.

The Grassers found parking and were getting out of their car. I circled the block unsuccessfully trying to find a space of my own and as I came around in front of Gladstone's again, I saw a woman leaning into a double-parked pickup truck talking to a man with a ponytail. And there were the Grassers on the sidewalk, animatedly pointing at me and then pointing at her and, well, I knew in an instant that was Pam.

Pam!

Now, let it be recorded that Pam from a distance, even to my dispassionate journalistic eye, did seem to be an exceedingly handsome and imposing woman. So I pulled up somewhat sheepishly and rolled down the passenger-side window and Pam, smiling, came over to say hello and to apologize for the fact that, worthy beer scribe that she was sure I was, she was late to pick up her five-year-old son and couldn't hang around to talk.

But, leaning into my window and looking at me with great seriousness, she said that if beer was what I was interested in, well, “You come back and I'll show you what I've got. I'll give you a sample.”

Boy, did she smile.

And then she walked away into the sunset.

And I knew I'd just had another nearly Perfect Beer Joint moment. And I wasn't even in a beer joint.

Boston, Mass.
—Dennis Buettner, a late-blooming student of beer culture and a would-be beer entrepreneur, has come with a laptop loaded with a video pilot of an idea whose time he's sure has arrived: Beer TV. An earnest, energetic, sandy-haired man with the demeanor of a natural salesman, he is walking around, with the laptop on and open, showing the pilot to almost anyone he can buttonhole. The short segment features a comely interviewer following around a handsome and cheerful beer truck driver discussing the joys of beer delivery.

Buettner's beer claim to fame thus far has been to set up a Web site for another quixotic idea of his, the United States Beer Drinking Team, which he admits he started as a lark when thinking about how much he loved beer during a slow night shift at work. Now he envisions the USBDT as beer's premier consumer representative, not to mention a hugely marketable list of beer drinkers and enthusiasts that every beer company and bar owner in America would love to tap. And he is convinced, in an era when cable TV can support multiple programs about house makeovers, that Beer TV is a no-brainer.

“Wouldn't America's 90 million beer drinkers all be potential viewers?” asks Buettner, who works on his beer aspirations while working three evenings a week for NASA. He just needs backers.

So Buettner (pronounced Bitner) has come here, to an upscale Marriott Hotel in downtown Boston this weekend, because he correctly divines that beer money and beer power and beer influence will be present in abundance—potentially a good thing for a beer entrepreneur seeking exposure and funding. The people who want to get distribution and exposure for Three Stooges Beer are here, too, along with a gaggle of others peddling things like the Icefloe system, a series of chemically activated beer chillers that ostensibly let you serve cold draft beer out of a keg in, say, the Sahara Desert without the need for ice. About 3,000 people will attend this event, many of them in positions to bankroll Dennis Buettner, take a flyer on Three Stooges lager, or buy up large numbers of Icefloe instant beer chillers.

I've diverted from our narrative to attend the 2002 annual meeting of the National Beer Wholesalers Association, a besuited gathering of that influential beer tribe that serves as the broker between the beer makers and the beer retailers. As noted earlier, the nation's 2,300-odd beer wholesalers are the middle rung of the Three-Tier System, created in the wake of the Twenty-first Amendment as a way to curb the pre-Prohibition excesses of the big beer companies by taking the distribution of beer (and wine and spirits as well) out of the hands of the makers and putting it into the hands of broker-distributors heavily regulated by the states.

The distributors gather at these meetings to talk about political, economic, and technical issues vital to them. But they also attract the company of the high-powered members of the other two tiers, most notably the upper echelons of the management of Anheuser-Busch, SABMiller, and Coors off whom the vast majority of beer distributors make their money. August Busch IV and Pete Coors will be in attendance as will be John D. Bowlin, president and CEO of SABMiller. The wholesalers will also get their first close look at the corporate types from London-based South African Breweries who engineered the $3.6 billion acquisition of Miller in May of 2002 (and perhaps intend to remake it; indeed, Bowlin, since the reporting of this event, has left the company). Beer moguls from the clutch of remaining regional lager makers like Yuengling, Latrobe, and Pabst will be around; even Jim Koch of Boston Beer will come to hobnob, though the craft beer presence will be small. This is Big Beer's stage and, under the NBWA's direction, it is determined to put on a sophisticated, useful, and glittering extravaganza for its hardworking, moneyed, and well-connected throngs.

Thus, it has gathered various beer economists, prognosticators, and consultants on arcane matters such as beer warehouse design to parse beer's economic, technical, and political climate at daily seminars. Tucker Carlson, the political commentator, has been brought in to supply the big-name speaker. Workshops by day will give way to lavish schmooze-fests by night, when the beer makers take over various Marriott ballrooms and transform them into stage sets meant to resemble speakeasies or elegant supper clubs. For if the craft beer segment of the industry lays claim to being the creative heart of American beer, the NBWA's annual powwow makes clear where the true center of beer money and beer power lies.

Beer wholesaling alone is a $30 billion annual business in America, employing more than 92,000 workers with a payroll of $3.4 billion. But that in itself is but a fraction of the beer economic pie. The beer industry as a whole, beyond generating almost $75 billion in retail sales and $27.6 billion in annual taxes, directly employs about 830,000 workers in breweries, warehouses, and satellite operations; it pays them annual wages of $14 billion. Most brewery jobs in the United States are union jobs, making beer industry workers among the best-paid factory laborers in the nation. In 2003 statistics compiled jointly by the NBWA and the Beer Institute, Big Beer's other powerful trade association, the beer industry also creates another 800,000 indirect jobs among retailers, advertising and market research concerns, and suppliers such as hops and barley growers. Big Beer marshals these statistics as one way of saying to its perceived enemies that when you mess with beer, you're messing with a vital and deeply American industry. And beer, unlike, say, textiles, computer chips, and running shoes, doesn't outsource its beer making to India so that it can ship ever-cheaper lager back to America; it has kept most of its jobs, and spends most of its money, at home.

But one of the true indicators of Big Beer's clout is the socioeconomic position of its 2,300 licensed distributors. As the NBWA likes to point out, beer wholesalers reside in almost every congressional district in the United States and they run locally owned small businesses that on average generate $11.8 million in annual sales and employ about three dozen people. Or put another way: they are a well-informed, well-organized collective of grassroots millionaires of the type who sit on local chamber of commerce and hospital boards, and who tend to know and have the ear of their elected politicians. They can be mobilized with breathtaking speed through the NBWA's e-mail and fax channels. And they are armed with up-to-date data and political intelligence by the NBWA, which was formed in 1938 and carries water for the industry on issues like its perennial “drink responsibly” campaigns, and extraneous matters that crop up from time to time—recall the NBWA's co-sponsorship of the beer-and-health seminar.

But the NBWA's real job is to plump for beer-friendly legislation in Washington—the recent, if only temporary, repeal of the estate or death tax was in part an NBWA victory on an issue vital to the family-dominated beer wholesaling business—while guarding the industry's flank against onerous legislation, and what it considers to be its two major perils. The first is new taxes; the industry feels it has never fully recovered from the sales wallop it suffered in 1991 because of a doubling of the beer excise tax from $9 to $18 a barrel (about 32 cents a six-pack)—an act that set off the greatest beer sales slump in thirty years. With beer now back on something of a roll—2003 was the eighth consecutive year that shipments from brewers and importers to wholesalers had increased—new taxes are considered anathema. Indeed, the NBWA has lobbied vigorously for
repeal
every year of the 1991 excise tax increase, though so far without success (mostly because it hasn't been able to get the sixty votes it needs in the Senate).

Big Beer views as its second major peril the multiheaded specter of what it calls the neo-prohibitionists, a loose collection of think tanks and advocacy groups that are perennially battling beer over issues such as underage drinking, beer advertising (especially its impact on underage drinkers), and drunk driving laws. These groups, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA), the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), among them, don't consider
themselves
neo-prohibitionists; they prefer the term public watchdogs. MADD, as reported earlier, has been the force behind a federal mandate, shored up by a congressional threat to withhold federal highway funds to states, to lower the threshold for driving-under-the-influence from a blood alcohol level of .10 to a level of .08—a change that the National Highway Transportation Safety Board says statistically could save 500 lives a year. The highway funds pressure has worked: as of this writing, only five states, Colorado, Delaware, Minnesota, New Jersey, and West Virginia, were holding on to the higher limit.

But that hasn't stopped the NBWA from relentlessly pressing its contrarian's message—that the federal “blackmail” of the states to gain .08 standards by withholding highway funds is a violation of the Twenty-first Amendment, which cedes such matters to the states; furthermore, that even MADD knows that it's the high-blood-alcohollevel drivers who cause the preponderance of
fatal
traffic accidents, not the .08 crowd, thus the move diverts attention and enforcement resources away from the core problem.

Even in what seems like a losing cause, the NBWA's pugnacious president, David Rehr, has publicly challenged MADD, accusing the group of playing footsy with the liquor industry—gaining hard liquor's acquiescence on the .08 issue in exchange for hard liquor's support of a MADD push on Congress to
increase
the excise tax on beer. And Rehr, who has a Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University, wasn't content simply to verbally joust. The NBWA in both 2002 and 2003 would get more than 220 members of the House of Representatives to cosponsor a bill to
roll back
the federal excise tax—a bill that it knew it had little chance of passing in the Senate, where beer's clout is somewhat more tenuous. But the idea was to put groups like MADD on notice that they faced a daunting challenge of passing a new excise tax hike in the House. Indeed, not for nothing these days is the NBWA—especially when it acts in tandem with its sister group, the Beer Institute, whose members are mainly the big and middle-sized beer makers—consistently ranked among the top ten most powerful lobbying groups in Washington. (When I ran this by Dean Wilkerson, MADD's executive director, he told me Rehr's reasoning on the .08 issue was flawed, since statistics have shown that
any
stiffening of drunk driving laws also has a trickle-down effect on the number of heavy-drinkers on the road because such laws make people “think about taking that next drink.” Furthermore, he denied any tit-for-tat deal with the spirits people on taxes, saying what Rehr described as collusion was merely the liquor industry's pragmatic interest “in talking to us about an issue [the .08 legislation] of mutual concern.” A spokesman for the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, the lobby group for the nation's liquor makers, echoed that view. And as for taxes, he added that, while liquor excise taxes are already substantially higher than excise taxes on beer, “we nonetheless don't favor increased excise taxes on spirits, wine or beer.”)

Still, the NBWA's clout and aggressive persona are a matter of great pride to Rehr, forty-four years old as of this writing, who came to its helm in 2000 after having served as the organization's vice president of government affairs starting in 1992. He'd been recruited from the National Federation of Independent Businesses, a small-business, anti-big-government lobby group, after the 1991 beer excise tax hike—a development that had caught the NBWA flatfooted and with a sense that it had little clout in Congress. Rehr had cut his lobbying teeth fighting (and defeating) people like Dan Rostenkowski and the Democratic leadership over efforts by the Clinton administration to impose new health care regulations on small businesses, which Rehr's constituents considered punitively expensive. He arrived in the corridors of Big Beer with the belief that the excise tax looked an awful lot like the kind of sin tax battering that the tobacco industry was taking and, if left unanswered, might soon result in a landslide of unfavorable taxes and regulations punishing beer.

“But we
aren't
tobacco,' says Rehr who, despite his often combative rhetoric exudes a kind of boyish charm. ‘Our product is something we're proud of, something that millions of Americans enjoy responsibly, and something that studies show that if consumed in moderation actually is good for you. Tobacco was always out there hiding in the weeds. We are determined not to hide at all—and not to let our product become ‘denormalized' and equated with tobacco or drugs.” (Or, Rehr would add later, liquor.)

Indeed, long before Rehr joined the NBWA, Big Beer, as well as the liquor and wine industries, had publicly acknowledged that their products could be abused, and all had launched expensive public service campaigns aimed at curbing excessive drinking, underage drinking, and drunk driving. Beer's most strident critics see these campaigns as self-serving and ineffectual. (And, indeed, as this book was going to press, tort lawyers filed a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit against the big beer makers that, like a similar suit filed against tobacco companies, accuses them of willfully trying to lure underage drinkers to beer with cynical advertising campaigns.) Still, the beer industry estimates it spends tens of millions of dollars a year on responsibility programs that do things like remind its customers of the value of a designated driver or admonishing high school kids to “make the right choices and enjoy after-prom celebrations without alcohol.” That's in sharp contrast to the tobacco industry's decades of obfuscation and denial in the face of mounting evidence that smoking posed enormous and predictable health risks. Beyond that, Big Tobacco's political power center always lay in three Southern states—the Carolinas and Virginia. Contrast that to the NBWA's claims that its member-distributors inhabit almost every congressional district in America.