Widmer Brothers Brewing
929 N. Russell, Portland, OR
1985—Kurt and Rob Widmer were operating on Lovejoy Street when they loaded their first kegs for sale into a used 1970 Datsun pickup truck they bought from their father, Ray. This was self-distribution at its most basic, although hardly uncommon for craft brewers getting started (see next entry). Rob and Kurt are well past making their own deliveries, but they’ve still got that truck. It’s parked out of the way at the brewery and one day may be on display.
Great Lost Bear
540 Forest Ave., Portland, ME
1986—Dave and Weslie Evans, along with Dave’s cousin, Chip MacConnell, opened the Bear in 1979. When Geary’s Brewing was founded in 1986, it became apparent that six draft lines weren’t going to be enough. “We talked about taking Sam Adams off (one of the six lines), then they rented a bus and took us down to Boston for a tour…. We ended up adding taps (to 24) instead,” Dave Evans said. To keep new beer flowing, Evans and MacConnell would head to neighboring states to pick up kegs from smaller breweries. “It was semi-legal,” Evans said. Evans also remembers when Alan Pugsley (who set up the Geary system and later co-founded Shipyard Brewing) would drive up from Kennebunk with beer in the trunk of his “big old Chrysler.”
Noc Noc
557 Haight St., San Francisco
1987—David Keene and friends hatched the idea to open a beer bar while drinking in this small, cave-like Haight-Ashbury bar. They ended up buying Miss Jenny’s Hair Salon next door and the Toronado was born. The Noc Noc has upgraded its beer menu in the years—enough that you might have a beer in this Haight “dinosaur” before stepping next door to the Toronado, where it’s hard to imagine a better beer selection. A bit of graffiti on a bathroom door at the Toronado once read, “Dave is God.” Then another customer added, “Dave is better than God.”
DeFalco’s
8715 Stella Link, Houston
1989—Much of the history of the Dixie Cup Homebrew Competition revolves around DeFalco’s, although this isn’t where the homebrew store was located when the annual galas started at the Orange Show in 1984. DeFalco’s was still on Morningside in 1987, and the event was in the parking lot when Fred Eckhardt made the first of what have turned into annual pilgrimages. He held his first Fred Tasting in 1989, pairing beer and chocolate, in the defunct Gulf Freeway Best Western, and the first Dixie Cup commemorative beer was brewed in 1990. Old Fred, an unhopped, very strong “Renaissance style” beer, was handed out in 187-milliliter bottles. The 21st Annual Dixie Cup last October drew 1,138 entries.
Tule Lake
Northern California
1989—When Jackson’s Beer Hunter series appeared on the Discovery Channel (and later on PBS), a new audience saw beer as something beyond “Tastes Better, Less Filling.” In the North American segment of the six-part series, Jackson took an overnight bus trip with Anchor Brewing employees to Tule Lake, where they saw barley harvested that would be turned into malt for Our Special Ale, Anchor’s Christmas beer. “The value is unbelievable, because it gives us an identity with our Christmas ale that relates to an actual farm,” Maytag told Jackson as they sat by a campfire. “It gives our company something that is hard to duplicate.”
