We’re talking about breweries that have pushed the alcohol content of beer past 20 percent by volume, through the process of fermentation alone.

Just as enriching uranium 235 to build an atom bomb requires a considerable degree of technological prowess, so does coaxing yeast into frenzied acts of metabolism that nature never intended.

Both accomplishments carry a heightened degree of responsibility. Nuclear weapons could cause mayhem if they fell into the hands of terrorists. And super strong beers could also provoke mischief if unsuspecting drinkers downed them at the same rate they would a Bud or Miller. These leviathans of the malt beverage world have to be packaged, priced and marketed differently from normal beers. Drinkers have to be educated to enjoy them a few ounces at a time, the way they would an after-dinner shot of some fine brandy.

But there is one key difference: there are probably more nations with nuclear weapons than there are breweries that have surpassed the 20 percent ABV mark.

Alcohol is a byproduct of yeast’s digestion of sugar, and yeast can no more live in their own waste product than human beings could thrive in a room filled with carbon dioxide. The average brewer’s yeast cannot survive in a concentration of much more than 10 percent alcohol, states Neva Parker, lab manager for White Labs, a leading provider of yeast to craft brewers. At higher levels, reproduction halts, followed by failure of other metabolic functions. In the pre-scientific era, she doubts that even the most potent barley wines and doppelbocks measured more than 10-12 percent alcohol. Modern science, stresses Parker, can isolate and propagate strains that have a high tolerance for alcohol, and establish a brewing regimen to coax these yeasts into giving their all. But it’s a labor-intensive process requiring skill and patience.

Nowhere Beer

Boston Beer Co. has crossed the 20 percent threshold six times, once with Samuel Adams Millennium (a one-shot brand released in 2000) and four additional times with the 2002, 2003, 2005 and 2007 vintages of Samuel Adams Utopias. The 2007 release, measuring 25.6 percent ABV, earned a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records for the world’s strongest commercially available beer.

But why does Burton put his beer into oak barrels? “Well, beer used to be put in them,” he says. “But I really got the idea from wine and spirits—the flavors they get from wood can work in beer, too. And besides,” Burton adds, “it’s a lot more fun than stainless steel!”

It’s true that in the wine business, small oak cooperage is the norm: winemakers age wines, particularly reds, in 50 to 60 gallon oak barrels to improve their flavors. While some of this barrel-aging tradition is as much mystique as method, it’s undeniable that this technique has worked well for centuries.

The same method is used for spirits, particularly whiskey. All bourbon and Scotch is aged in oak barrels, usually made of American oak. Some brands are well known for using barrels that previously held wine, such as The Macallan, whose whisky is matured in sherry barrels, giving it a unique brandy-like taste.

But the question inevitably arises: since beer is so susceptible to bacterial infection, and sanitation is a fundamental part of any brewer’s craft, why put beer into vessels that can’t be sanitized? Why are brewers like Burton returning to old techniques that practically beg for problems?

The answer is that those “problems,” in the hands of a creative brewer, can also be the source of a complex range of beer flavors—startling flavors that are winning over American beer drinkers.

Unlike stainless steel, wood is naturally porous. Just as the slow evaporation and oxidation of wine in barrels can give it more concentration and body, the same can occur in barrel-aged beer. And for those who like sourness or “horse blanket” aromas and tastes in beer, wood is also the perfect medium for bacteria to flourish. The challenge for a brewer is to manage these processes to add a new dimension to their beers.

Perception was reality. Wine went with fine cuisine—usually French. Beer went with hot dogs. End of story.

We’re still fighting those images: Beer is down-to-earth, the accessible drink of the common man. Wine is perceived as elite, a social yardstick for measuring success. Think Homer Simpson versus Frazier Crane.

But the facts are these: wine in the United States is extending itself into more casual settings, similar to the place it holds in European wine cultures. And beer, thanks to the craft beer movement and the greater availability of fine traditional imported brands, is reaching up—in culinary terms, flavor diversity and presentation.

What happens when these two venerable beverages meet today in the same venues, across the same table? Well, there’s some honest competition, and a little friction that wasn’t there before. And, hopefully, a recognition that the two beverages have more in common than either beer drinkers or wine lovers have cared to admit.

When it comes to choosing the right beverage for a fine meal, the choices are much wider than they were 25 years ago, and they include both beer and wine options. Both beverages have their passionate advocates—as you’ll read here—but there is also an expanding middle ground. Increasingly, restaurants that take their food and wine seriously can—should—be expected to take their beer offerings seriously, too, and that means richer selections and choices for you.

Welcome to the (cordial) beer-wine spat. People who are knowledgeable about both beverages are now arguing about flavor, complexity and complementarity. If you learn from them, you have the chance to make selections that will take your next fine meal to special heights.

The End. See you. Good-bye, thanks for coming. There’s the exit.

…are they gone? Okay, you guys who stuck around to see the credits…you want to hear the real history of craft beer? Not a history of breweries and who bought who, and what city has the biggest bragging rights, but a history about the beer. That’s what beer culture is about, and when it comes down to you and the glass, do you really care what month the brewery opened?

Open up the cooler of any worthwhile beer bar, and you’ll see pale ale, IPA and its big brother Double, hefeweizen, porter and stout—The Dark Twins, some solid craft lagers, some barrel-aged beers, Belgian clones and maybe some of the nifty new sour ales. Each one has a history. It’s not a story of places and water and the discovery of new machines, like the history of European beer. These are New World stories: they’re about the beer, the brewer who made it and the people who liked it. Dig into that cooler and get the real history of the new beers.

From a Small Beginning

What people drank in the 1970s, when all this got started, was mostly something like Budweiser. People were drinking light lager beer from a regional or national brewery—remember, Coors was still a regional brewery at this time—with a few exceptions like Yuengling Porter and Genesee Bock. The mainstream has, if anything, gone lighter yet, as light beer grew to over half the general beer market, while temporary fads cycled through the beer-consciousness: dry beer, ice beer, low-carb beer and the slowly fading malternatives.

But a different, tiny flow branched off from the mainstream when Fritz Maytag bought into the Anchor Brewery in 1968. He wanted to make his beer more like what he thought beer should be, so he went to England to see how they did it. He didn’t like what he saw: added syrups and sugars, not all-malt. Maytag rejected that idea, and fired a shot across the bow of English brewing with Liberty Ale, an all-malt beer with an American hop: Cascade.

One man’s decision started a landslide of craft beer tastes. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale would take the same idea—a smartly hopped, drinkable pale ale—and make a widely-emulated craft brewing flagship out of it. According to the brewery’s long-time head of sales, the late Steve Harrison, “We just made an ale we liked, and we liked the aromatic qualities of the Cascade.”

Maytag didn’t just pioneer hoppy pale ales, either. He started—or re-started—the idea of holiday beers, special seasonal one-offs brewed for the winter holidays, with a beer called Our Special Ale. “I liked the idea of an ale brewed for a festival,” he says. “I called it a gift to our customers, not to make a profit. It has become profitable, but it wasn’t for years.” Other brewers followed the same path, and now a mad profusion of holiday styles—spiced ales, rye porters, barleywines, “winter warmers,” doublebocks—make a colorful display every December.

Up in Portland, Rob and Kurt Widmer found a new direction for wheat beer when someone made a request they couldn’t figure out how to meet. “Carl Simpson at the Dublin Inn asked us to do a third beer,” Rob recalls. The brewers only had two fermenters, and were making altbier and a wheat beer with the altbier yeast.

“We figured if we just didn’t filter the Weizen it would make a third beer,” Rob says. That simple, impulsive business decision was the source of the immensely successful American unfiltered wheat ale, still one of the most popular kinds of craft beer. The Widmers would sell it in draft for as long as they could—laying the foundations of the craft beer bar scene in Portland, along with Kemper’s lagers and Portland Brewing’s ales—then finally go to bottle in the face of burgeoning demand, a demand that spelled success for brewers like Pyramid and Redhook, too.

The other side of Portland’s craft beer scene was, and is, brewpubs. Brewpubs started out a lot like the Widmers: a couple fresh beers, this is what you get. Then they went through a “color beer” phase: golden ale, amber ale, and Something Dark, either a porter or a stout. There’s still some of that around. Brewpubs really hit their stride when places like BridgePort and the McMenamin’s pubs, and Big Time up in Seattle, stepped completely outside that model with IPAs, imperial stouts and barleywines. Brewpubs became and largely remain the experimental edge of American brewing, a brewing laboratory where beers can change on a weekly basis.

The Dark Side

Porter was taking hold on the other side of the mountains. “Porter” may sound like a traditional beer, but it was a shot-in-the-dark re-creation: porter had died out in England. Deschutes brewed up some in Bend, and growing demand sucked them into the Portland market. Black Butte Porter did okay, and no one else was making many dark beers. Brewery president Gary Fish took “a contrarian approach. The dark beer pie was a smaller one, but we could own almost all of it. It worked.” When brewers think about making a porter, Black Butte is often the success they think of.

If you like IPA, the India pale ale that some brewers tried to make “more authentic” by adding oak chips to simulate a long journey by sea (don’t hear much about that bone-headed trend any more, do you?), bow down to the memory of Bert Grant. Grant left an increasingly sissified Canadian brewing industry, hunkered down in the middle of hops country in Yakima, WA, and started throwing hops in his beer. We liked it, and brewers saw how easy it was to step up and vary the flavor of beer by simply adding a wad of hops. More wads followed, and IPA became a staple.

Meanwhile, Jim Koch in Boston, and Steve Hindy and Tom Potter down in Brooklyn, trying to decide what to build their new brewery business on, took a look at what beers were already the most popular in the world: why not brew a lager, but with more body and flavor? Once Koch developed a recipe for Samuel Adams Boston Lager, and Hindy and Potter got a recipe for Brooklyn Lager, they had to figure out how to brew it. Again, they had the same idea: get someone else to do it, someone who already had the equipment, the experience, the connections with suppliers: a contract brewer.

It was an idea and a practice that set off fifteen years of argument over whether “contract beers” were really microbrewed. “It was never a real issue to begin with,” Koch says. “Big brewers like A-B used it to damage the craft brewing industry and distract us from our common ground: brewing great beer.” In the end, that’s what the people decided. While geeks were waving their arms, and brewers were talking mean about each other, bottles of Sam Adams and Brooklyn flew off the shelves. You won’t hear geeks talk much about them, but the results are conclusive: people like craft-brewed lagers.

What people didn’t like was too many of them. Contract-brewing was valid, but it was also an easy way to make a quick grab at a “microbrew” market that was growing around 50 percent annually. Labels were slapped on regional breweries’ output willy-nilly: Hope, Nathan Hale, Trupert, Naked Beer, Red Bell, Red Ass, Bad Frog, Wall Street Lager, Three Stooges. There were the “gay beers,” Black Sheep and Pink Triangle; there were beers that were going to launch national brands, like Brewski and Wanker Light; there were beers with causes, like Rhino Chasers, which pledged to donate money to save the wild rhinoceros (not just a dumb idea, but the fake rhino horn tap handles were so heavy they broke beer spigots).

Behind these brands were marketing geeks, not beer geeks. None of them realized that there has to be a significant difference in the bottle; they thought people were really buying cute labels and quickly crafted minimal backstories. None of them are still around. People shudder when they think about the microbrewery ‘shakeout’ that occurred in the late 1990s. We should look on that time as one of beneficial hardship, of the classic Nitzschean type which did not kill us, making us stronger.

Hops, grapes and grains, with the occasional fruit, nut or spice thrown in for good measure. Brewers, winemakers and distillers—all doing their best to gain a greater share of the consumer’s stomach.

Sure, there were some giant multinational companies crossing the boundaries. But it was done in rigid corporate structures, with operating divisions and subsidiaries. It was not all that surprising when a liquor company like Seagram’s bought into wineries. Constellation Brands went from being just a wine producer to owning spirit brands, a brewery and the U.S. rights to a fast-growing imported beer by the name of Corona. Diageo, through acquisitions and mergers, amassed an empire that ranged from Guinness Stout to Captain Morgan Rum to Beaulieu Vineyards. And even America’s largest brewer, Anheuser-Busch, started playing in two fields by announcing last year that it was marketing spirits under the Jeckyll & Hyde label and importing Ku Soju, a 48-proof Korean spirit.

But now it appears we have entered the crossover era of craft producers crossing lines. Brewers are distilling. Vintners are brewing. Consumers are drinking.

Early craft beer pioneers have caught the bug. Fritz Maytag of the legendary Anchor Brewing Co. in San Francisco operates a winery and a distillery. Bill Owens, who founded Buffalo Bill’s Brewpub in Hayward, CA, and ran a couple of beer-related publications, is now the president of the American Distilling Institute. The ADI provides information resources and advocates for small distillers, plus hosts an annual Craft Distilling Conference.

“I don’t know if the potential volume for artisan distillers can match the growth of craft beer,” says Sam Calagione, owner of Dogfish Head Brewing in Delaware. “However, I don’t think the early craft brewers at New Albion or Sierra Nevada envisioned how large the craft brewing movement would become.”

Calagione is one of the pioneers who has decided that if brewing beer is fun and profitable, then distilling liquor also holds potential. “Our goal in opening the distillery was to further expand on our concept of off centered ales for off centered people,” Calagione says. “We don’t brew to style, we never have since we opened the brewery in 1995.”

Dogfish Head is sticking to that approach under distiller Mike Gerhart, who crafts rum aged in French oak with wildflower honey, a gin called Jin and a liqueur distilled from honey and flavored with maple syrup called Be. Dogfish Head’s Vodka Erotica is an exotic flavored vodka made with rose water, watermelon juice and a number of secret spices. If you show up at the company’s Rehoboth Beach pub you can even sample small batch specialty vodkas made with chocolate and vanilla beans.

Rogue Spirit

At Rogue Ales in Oregon, the brewing of extreme beers also led to the making of extreme spirits. Always up for a challenge, founder Jack Joyce said Rogue decided against making vodka in favor of starting with rum because “we figured if we could make rum, we could make anything.” Light rum and dark rum moved them to a rum flavored with hazelnuts and then to a spruce gin that contains 14 ingredients. Rogue is considering other products, perhaps a brandy, flavored vodkas and even beer schnapps.

“Beer is really hard to make. You have to deal with lower alcohol contents and a high level of sanitation. Booze is real forgiving along the way,” says Joyce. “The danger for any brewer going into distilling is if you don’t make great products it can reflect on your beer. Making great spirits requires a great palate. You have to balance the various ingredients along the way.”

In addition to its brewing and distilling licenses, Rogue also holds a permit for a winery, but has no plans to start crushing grapes.

“We have a bit of a brand problem, since someone else uses the Rogue name for wine. Plus there are 300 wineries in Oregon. We don’t think there is a need for another one,” Joyce says.

In Massachusetts, Jay Harman has become a triple threat in the drinks world. Starting with Nantucket Vineyards in 1981, then Cisco Brewing in 1995 and onto Triple 8 Distilling in 2000, he has seen each business up close and personal.

“It’s a juggling act. It’s seasonal where we are with tourists out here for eight to nine months, then we have three to four months to regroup,” Harman says. The company gets its grapes from Washington state vineyards, bringing in juice for the whites and crushing red grapes on site. The company brews a range of beers and uses honeybell oranges from Florida to make Triple 8 Orange Flavored Vodka.

Triple 8 has been raising money to fuel new brands by selling futures on 53 gallon barrels of single malt “Notch” whiskey. The futures that went for $3,000 a barrel back in 2000 now sell for $6,000. Harman uses Cisco’s Whale’s Tale Ale, minus the hops, as the wash to distill to make the whiskey, which is aged for at least five years in used bourbon casks. He predicts the 200 750-milliliter bottles that come out of each cask could sell for as much as $200 each.

Brett VanderKamp, president of New Holland Brewing in Michigan, started brewing beer in 1997 and added distilling in 2005, making a brandy, rum and whiskey.

“What is important to us is that New Holland is known as a great brewery,” VanderKamp says. “I think New Holland will always be a brewery that happens to have a distillery.”

Still, the company is getting creative with its distilling operation and is making some very interesting products. It started distilling and laying down whiskey using several grains in a mash that is double distilled to 115 proof. On the rum side, VanderKamp says New Holland is “dabbling” with small batches to determine the right mix of cane sugar and molasses, as well as trying different barrel combinations for aging, including used bourbon barrels. On the brandy side, the company distills its product five times and is selling juniper- and raspberry-flavored products.

The first portion of Amarillo hops he dropped in was already more than he’d usually use. He looked at perhaps 10-fold more in the remaining bags. Then he looked at the Americans. “How much?” he asked.

They didn’t hesitate, replying in unison: “All of it.”

If Roy didn’t already understand that these five American brewers who visited Belgium in March were different, he must have at that moment.

Brewers of New American Beers have been heading to the east side of the Atlantic for more than two decades to taste traditionally brewed beers and learn how they are made. Call it the inspired visiting the inspiration. Seldom, however, do they arrive with a large supply of their own beer and hand out samples to both brewers and consumers. Seldom do they end up with their photos accompanying stories on the front page of local newspapers, nor do they attract television crews who want to do interviews.

Dogfish Head founder Sam Calagione came up with the idea for the trip as part of “research” for his next book, Extreme Brewing (due from Rockport Publishers in the fall). It wasn’t hard to talk Tomme Arthur of Port Brewing, Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River Brewing, Adam Avery of Avery Brewing and Rob Todd of Allagash Brewing into joining him on the trip.

“We look forward to sharing our beers with them,” Calagione said before going. “We’re not saying our stuff is better than yours or anything like that. We want to recognize they are the Mecca.”

Delivering the keynote speech at the Craft Brewers Conference in Seattle several weeks after returning, Calagione made another point, “We knew we weren’t just representing the five breweries present but everyone in this room as we turned more and more people on to the amazing beers being made all across this country.”

Earlier in the same speech, Calagione drew an analogy between the revolution in American beer than began in earnest in the 1980s and changes in music—taking his electric guitar and electric backing band onto a folk stage—that Bob Dylan sparked in the 1960s.

It began as a reaction to the dumbing-down of mainstream beers, whose alpha acid levels are now about level with the human threshold, which is about 6 IBU (International Bittering Units). Like the recently starved, we eat our fill…then keep going. I used to think we’d get over it, but people often have trouble giving up their obsessions. In other words, massively hoppy beers (MHBs) are here to stay.

The lineage for these beers traces back to the pale ale family, deep gold to pale amber beers that originated in England around 1800. Back then, pale ales bound for India were dosed with additional hops as a preservative. Word got back to England and the style became popular there, as well as on our side of the Atlantic.

Resurgent home and craft brewers have latched onto pale ales and India pale ales (IPAs), reinventing them as we Americans tend to do. Balance, once a hallmark of the style, is jauntily tilted to the bitter side. The bad boy pine-and-citrus perfume of the uniquely American Cascade hop suffused the first beers to bear the American pale ale flag. Today, Cascade hops and its relatives are still touchstones for the style.

How Much is Enough?

To brew a beer that is hoppy to its very core requires some strategy. MHBs are bound by the physical limits of solubility of alpha acid (the bitter element in hops) in wort, yet brewers are still seeking ways to create ever-hoppier beer. This article will serve as a bit of a tutorial.

Hops contain three things of interest to brewers: aroma, bitterness and the preservative effects of tannins. As hops are normally added during the boil, there are trade-offs between aroma and bitterness. Alpha acid needs an hour or so of boiling to transform into a bitter, soluble form. But during that time, aromas waft away, so late additions to the kettle are also needed. Additions at 60, 30 and 5 minutes (or some variation on that schedule) are typical. Brewers at Dogfish Head have gone so far as to add hops continuously to their series of 60-, 90- and 120-minute IPAs, first with a hilarious arrangement that actually employed a vibrating tabletop football game (!), which has since been replaced with a more businesslike screw conveyor. Bottom line: adding hops to the boil is a great start, and will be your primary source of bitterness.

Somewhere between aroma and bitterness is something called “flavor,” which is not nearly as simple a term as one might think. Your tongue, of course, is capable of distinguishing tastes such as sweet, sour, salty and bitter, plus a couple of more recently added ones such as fat and umami (glutamate). But this limited capability doesn’t fully describe the sensations we experience. It turns out that aroma receptors in the top of the throat/back of the nose process aromas a little differently than other olfactory signals from the nose, and are involved in detecting familiarity and preference.

It’s hard to say exactly how we got ourselves into this predicament, but technology, marketing, taxation and war have all played important roles. In this country, anti-German sentiments stirred up by WWI followed immediately by Prohibition shredded much of what could be termed “beer culture” in America. Lacking a richer social context, beer followed the model of soda pop, a commodity product in branded packaging. In this form it utterly dominated much of the 20th century.

But, like the desert, if you peer into the cracks and crevices, the beer scene teems with life. Specialty shelves in American liquor stores now bulge with a variety of characterful and delicious products. And when one squints into the depths of the past, a nearly psychedelic profusion of startling beers appears out of the mist.

Peering into the Past

As early as ancient Sumeria, 6,000 years ago, many varieties of beer existed. We have written references to strong, weak, sour, sparkling, aged, fresh, black, red and light (whose name, ebla, literally means “lessens the waist”) beers. A profusion of medicinal and culinary plants was available, but the ancient brewers, like modern ones, were reluctant to give up all their secrets. We will have to wait for some future chemical discovery to flesh out the recipes.

Early beer is unquestionably connected to religion, ritual and even spirituality. It is no fluke, for example, that one word for alcohol is “spirits.” Everywhere there was beer, a god—or more likely, goddess—was attributed to it. In Sumeria, Ninkasi was her name. In ancient Egypt, the legend of Sekhmet tells the story of how a beer saved the world of humans from destruction. The Goddess of Destruction was on one of her rampages, but a timely swig of a beer laced with the stupefying narcotic root, mandrake, calmed her rage. Never mind that this beer would have reeked of garlic; such psychoactive beers were widely used for ritual (and possibly medical) purposes in the ancient world.

In 1957, archaeologists digging in the region of ancient Phrygia (now Macedonia) broke through a shaft and discovered an intact royal burial, complete with the remains of a grand funerary feast. The occupant of the tomb turned out to be no less than King Midas himself. The profusion of elaborate ware used for the drink attested to its central role in the ceremony.

Traces of food and drink recovered from these ancient containers remained mute for decades. Then, in 1997, a University of Pennsylvania researcher, Patrick McGovern, submitted some of the scrapings to chromatographic analysis. Chemical markers for honey, grapes and malt were all in evidence, the makings of a strange and wonderful beverage.

McGovern teamed up with Dogfish Head Brewery’s Sam Calagione to produce a beer to serve at a celebratory dinner recreating the king’s funeral banquet. The resulting beer was such a success that Dogfish Head continued to produce it as a specialty product. A pale orangish gold, with a perfumy nose of aromatic grapes, honey and a wisp of exotic saffron, Midas Touch has a delicate crèmant champagne quality.

Certainly, the West Coast has been ahead of the curve in craft brewing. Anchor’s Fritz Maytag rescued steam beer, that indigenous American specialty, from oblivion. Jack McAuliffe was a modern-day Moses, pointing others to the promised land but never entering it himself. (His New Albion Brewing Co., the first microbrewery, closed in 1982.) Sierra Nevada’s Paul Camusi and Ken Grossman proved that a small specialty brewery could turn out excellent beer consistently and be a financial success.

And yet it would be presumptuous to say that the West Coast revived the tradition of craft brewing in the U.S.

We on the East Coast never lost it.

Those ’70s Beers

Let’s time-travel back to the mid-1970s. America is largely a beer wasteland, with Miller Lite cresting on the success of its “Tastes great, less filling” tagline, and Coors—a clean-tasting but otherwise undistinguished Rocky Mountains brand—acquiring an almost cult status.

But there were oases for the serious beer drinker. I found one in Williams’ Café, a long-defunct watering hole in St. Clair, PA, just outside of Pottsville. The bar served two beers from the nearby Yuengling Brewery, Lord Chesterfield Ale and Yuengling Porter. You could get them separately or blended together as a half-and-half. The heady combination of the citrusy American hops and roasted malts was a wake-up call. Beer did not have to be a homogenized commodity like pork bellies and tomato paste.

Yuengling still makes the ale and porter. They’re hybrids, fermented with a lager yeast but at higher temperatures to bring out the fruity, ale-like characteristics. Yuengling has added an amber beer (Traditional Lager) to its product line as well as a pre-blended Black-and-Tan that utilizes Yuengling Premium rather ale.

The Institute for Brewing Studies does not officially recognize Yuengling as a “craft brewery” because it uses corn grits in its beer. And yet, Yuengling’s executive vice president David Casinelli reflects, “In many ways we are a craft brewery. The way our company is run is closer to small businesses than to the large national brewers. Until recently, we had guys racking kegs with rubber mallets.” Yuengling pumped out over 1.3 million barrels in 2003—it’s now the fifth largest brewery in the country—but still relies largely on word-of-mouth to sell beer.

In northeast Pennsylvania, the Lion Brewery in Wilkes-Barre marketed its own Stegmaier Porter, sweeter than Yuengling’s, with a curious licorice-like taste. (It’s still available, reformulated as a true top-fermented ale.) The Naragansett Brewery in Cranston, RI also made a porter. In fact, the Northeast United States was one of a very few areas on the planet where you could order a glass of porter long after the style had disappeared in its native England.

C. Schmidt & Sons of Philadelphia, a sizable regional with a branch plant in Cleveland, made a Munich-style Dunkel called Prior Double Dark. In his 1978 The Great American Beer Book, a systematic ratings guide to over 550 beers then available in the U.S., James Robertson wrote, “Had there been no other ‘finds’ in all the beers sampled…, discovering Prior Double Dark would have been worth the effort.”

Schmidt’s closed in 1986, and the brewery site is now a vacant lot awaiting development. F.X. Matt, a family-owned brewery in Utica, NY, acquired the brand and recipe. “We made a draft-only version almost exclusively for McSorley’s Ale House in New York,” said company vice president Fred Matt. “We sold 400 kegs a month like clockwork.” Eventually, Heileman/Stroh underbid F.X. Matt on the account, and the production of Prior ceased. However, the brewery today makes a similar brew called Saranac Black Forest, which Matt feels has even more character.

“We used to do a whole specialty line for Utica Club; the Saranac thing is a return to our roots,” he added. During the 1970s, the brewery marketed a top-fermented cream ale and a malt liquor called Maximus Super, which, at 7.5% ABV, was the strongest lager beer then available in the U.S. “We went after a lot of the college markets; it did well for a while, then tailed off,” Matt recalled. “The nationals saw an opportunity and made a fortune going ethnic. We didn’t go that route.”

One of the East’s more obscure operations was Horlacher Brewing Co. in Allentown, PA. During the 1920s this little brewery allegedly produced bootleg beer for gangster Dutch Schultz. After Repeal, the company survived by doing private labels—scores, even hundreds of them—for supermarket chains, drug stores and liquor stores. Horlacher, however, produced a top-of-the-line, bock-style beer called Perfection, which was dry-hopped, fermented to an alcohol content of over 6% ABV and aged a remarkable (for that era) nine months.

Back in 1978, I stumbled across a musty case of the Perfection on the floor a Pennsylvania distributor. The brewery by that time was in its death throes, and the recipe had probably been compromised. But I still regret passing over the Perfection in favor of some commemorative Bicentennial cans holding ordinary beer.