Author Tom Acitelli (Photo by Peter Lettre)

In his new book, The Audacity of Hops: The History of America’s Craft Beer Revolution, author Tom Acitelli takes readers back to the early days of craft beer and beautifully explains the humble beginnings of pioneers like Anchor Brewing Co. and Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. The result, as our reviewer put it, is “a first-rate piece of front-line history.”

An adaptation of the book appears in the July issue of All About Beer, which is now available on newsstands.

Acitelli answered questions by email about his motivation for writing and tracking down the historical figures of American craft beer.

All About Beer: When did you know you wanted to tell this story, and why did you feel it was important to tell?

Tom Acitelli: First, I had been a business reporter in North Carolina and then New York for several years, and had wrote at varying lengths about different industries and events, but nothing at book-length. I was hunting around for a project that would allow me to tell an interesting business story—if there was a larger social or political context in that story, all the better.

Second, my wife and I traveled for a vacation to Belgium in 2010, when I was already noodling with the idea of writing the history of American craft beer. We flew into Brussels; rented a car; and visited all six of the Trappist breweries in Belgium, even staying a couple of nights at Achel on the Dutch border (it was the only one of the monasteries that allowed women in its guest quarters). This led me to read up quite a bit on Belgian beer, including works by Tim Webb, Stan Hieronymus and Michael Jackson.

Finally, like everybody, I lived through the Great Recession. I was luckier than many, but the terrible economic news day in and day out got me to thinking: If I was going to tell a business story with a lot of history, I wanted it to be a triumphant one, one that would be affirming toward an American industry, particularly an American manufacturing industry, which craft beer basically is when you get down to it.

Shortly after I got back from Belgium, I realized I had it all in the American craft beer movement: an interesting business story (with a larger social context); a lot of American history; and a triumphant narrative full of tension and personality.

[The craft beer movement] is one of the great American business and social stories of the last 50 years.

AAB: Nothing better than a trip to Belgium to spark some beer inspiration. As for these personalities, I imagine it must have been great fun chatting with these pioneers about those early days of craft beer. Was that the case? And was it a struggle to track down some of those folks?

TA: It was indeed the case. As Paul Philippon, the founder of Duck Rabbit Brewery in eastern North Carolina, so aptly put it at a Great American Beer Festival luncheon I was at, the American craft beer movement is “asshole-free.” Everyone I reached, beginning with Steve Hindy at the Brooklyn Brewery way back when, was to a large degree happy to talk and, in some cases, to snail-mail me reams of information from their days in the movement, including correspondence, news clippings and photographs. I got bulging envelopes and packages from Matthew Reich, Tom de Bakker, Jack McAuliffe, Bill Owens, Daniel Bradford (All About Beer’s publisher) and others, and am very grateful for that. Tony Magee and Ken Grossman even shared early copies of their memoirs.

Now, reaching people! I was lucky in that regard, too. Writers who had tread this path before were very generous with their time and contacts as well as expertise. Just a couple of examples: Maureen Ogle, the author of Ambitious Brew, put me in touch with Jack McAuliffe and ran questions by Fritz Maytag for me; and Stan Hieronymus, author of For the Love of Hops, schooled me in hops.

I should give a shout-out, too, to every Internet pioneer, heralded and unknown. Digital record-keeping and archiving proved a tremendous help to this book. For instance, being able to quickly search the incorporation records of all 50 states from the ease of a home computer was a godsend. I don’t know how people wrote books before the digital age.

AAB: Even with the help of digital record-keeping, do you think it will be difficult to document the next 20-30 years of growth? Especially considering that there are now more than 2,300 craft breweries and the market doesn’t show signs of slowing down.

TA: On the one hand, no, it won’t be difficult, simply because of that digitization and, more importantly perhaps, the recognition that the craft beer movement is, indeed, a culinary phenomenon here to stay and not merely a passing fad (as it seemed at times in the 1980s and 1990s). People inside and outside the movement, in other words, are more likely to take specific note of what’s happening and when; that was not always the case.

On the other hand, yes, it will be difficult. The digitization, especially the Internet and the Web (two distinct things that have had distinct impacts on the craft beer movement, people forget), has afforded everybody an opinion. I don’t mean that in a snobby, elitist way; I think the more impassioned the opinion, the better—so long as there are facts to bolster it. The Web, especially, affords everyone a platform for whatever they want to say about themselves, their favorite things, their least favorite things, etc. Oftentimes, and usually unintentionally, these strongly held opinions are presented as fact—and are sometimes later taken as such. Plus, they then live forever online. It can, in short, become difficult to separate kernels of fact from bushels of opinion.

I think there are three ways to combat this. One, people could settle down a bit, and realize that their strongly held beliefs about craft beer are just that: strongly held beliefs worth debating. Two, brewers should be stone-cold direct when documenting their own histories (many are already); the “About Us” verticals on their websites, for instance, should have timelines or specific dates, really own their respective histories. And, third, there is such a robust media now covering craft beer in the U.S. that a little deference is in order to scrupulous reporting; there are places (like All About Beer) to find accurate information—seek them out.

Opinion, including criticism, has its place, yes; but that place should be second to facts—or at least that’s my opinion.

AAB: Cheers to that. Speaking of facts, what was the most surprising thing you uncovered during the process of writing the book?

TA: I was actually quite surprised by both the tenor and the growth of the industry in the 1990s.

By growth, I mean just that: The craft beer movement, in terms of numbers of brewing companies, grew by double-digit percentages annually in the 1990s; it was truly torrid growth, the likes of which few manufacturing industries ever see. I knew, obviously, that the movement had grown; but, if you look at the fitful growth of the 1970s and 1980s, you would never have expected what happened in the 1990s, especially given the recession of 1991-92.

By tenor, I mean the often hyper-competitive, sometimes downright nasty nature of the industry in the 1990s. Today, we see craft beer as this folksy phenomenon, of a rising tide lifting all boats and everyone in it together to raise consumer awareness. Not so in the 1990s: Craft brewers were often at each other’s throats over things like contract brewing, awards, beer quality and distribution. People would get maligned in the press, even booed at industry conclaves like the Craft Brewers Conference.

Eventually, however, it became clear to most craft brewers (or so my research leads me to believe) that the bigger multinational brewers were the true existential threat, not individual craft brewers, however large. Anheuser-Busch’s “100 percent share of mind” campaign, which pressured distributors to carry only A-B products, and the Dateline expose on contract brewing, in October 1996, basically ensured a solidarity among craft brewers that, for the most part, holds to this day.

AAB: I think most recent converts to craft beer would be surprised by those stories. Switching gears now, what’s your favorite style of beer? And did writing this book make you look any different at your favorite beers?

TA: I used to fancy myself a hophead, but now I much rather prefer the milder pale, red, session and brown ales out there. To be sure, I do like the occasional “extreme beer,” just not as much any longer. (I add quotation marks as I am very well aware—as I chronicle in the book—that some people fervently believe no such style category exists.)

This switch in preference came as a result, too, of a greater realization of the wonderful geographic diversity of American beer. … My favorite beers now come from the breweries nearest my home base of Greater Boston, including from those in and around Portland, Maine, and New York City.

It kind of irks me when people return from Belgium or Germany (or even tiny Luxembourg!) and rave about the geographic diversity of brewing in these countries. As if that’s not just as pronounced—or more so—in the United States! I would venture to say that there is more diversity of beer style in Massachusetts alone, for instance, than there is in all of Germany.

AAB: Sounds like you might have just come up with another book project. Or do you already have something else in mind?

TA: I am actually shopping a novel about four guys affected by the Great Recession who move to Upstate New York and open… you guessed it… a beer bar. And, nonfiction-wise, I just finished the first couple of chapters of a history of wine and beer criticism—and how that helped American beer and wine ascend to tops in the world stylistically. I can’t wait to interview Robert Parker. He’s sort of the Michael Jackson of wine critics.

The beers will be released periodically throughout the year, starting with the first release in March and continuing until Sierra Nevada’s 30th Anniversary on November 15, 2010. These limited release, 750ml cage-and-cork bottles will be available at select retailers and beer-centric bars, and they will be much more than a tribute. Proceeds from the project will go to benefit charities chosen by the four pioneers.

When we gathered together at Anchor last December, the film crew began interviewing us by discussing our backgrounds and input in the creations. Grossman told me, “We wanted to pay tribute to the original pioneers who helped me and hundreds of others get started.” It was a fascinating day for all of us.

We listened as Fritz Maytag, one of America’s foremost brewers, related how he had saved America’s last “steam beer” brewery. At that time (in 1965) Anchor was not only America’s smallest brewery, but became the only one making really distinctive beer.

Joe Allen, Anchor’s owner, had revived the brewery in 1933, after Prohibition. His beer was not always up to quality for distribution to the 25 or so San Francisco bars still serving it. In 1959, he retired, passing it on to Lawrence Steed and Bill Buck, who moved Anchor from the original Kansas Street location to a smaller, ramshackle, un-brewery-like warehouse under the freeway at 8th Street. By 1965, production was down to less than 700-bbls (21,700-gals).

It was by a twist of fate that Maytag discovered that the beer and the brewery were in trouble. Maytag, at 27, was just out of graduate school at Stanford, and not particularly enthused to return to the family’s dairy farm in Iowa, so he borrowed $15,000 to buy a major share in the brewery. Over time, as he learned more about brewing, he was able to concentrate on basics: all-malt brewing, steady temperatures and rigid quality controls. With hard work he managed to get greater production and distribution and, in 1971, he installed a bottling line. Production increased to 7,000 bbl (211,000 gals) by 1975. By 1979, the brewery moved to a new location at 1705 Mariposa Street with much better brewing equipment imported from Europe.

Maytag found that there is more to beer than water, malt and hops: there’s also character, taste and tradition to consider. He discovered the way to success lay in producing a unique and distinctive product. Today, Anchor is ranked 15th largest among American craft breweries, mostly because Maytag tries to keep his production low. He is not interested in high volume sales.

From Wine to Beer

As for me, I had given up on insipid U.S. beer and had switched to wine. I became interested in making wine during the fall of 1969, and was teaching a home winemaking class for Portland Community College at a now defunct fermentation supply store called Wine-Art Oregon. They had a good recipe using reconstituted grape extract and an excellent production system featuring primary and secondary fermentation. The result was a good cheap product with almost no fermentation problems.

Wine-Art was part of a Canadian chain, whose founder, Stan Anderson, was also the author of a very interesting homebrew recipe featuring primary and secondary fermentation methods, and the actual addition of hops in a real kettle boil. This from water and malt extract syrup only, and little, if any, sugar, quite a difference from traditional homebrew recipes at the time. The resulting beer was very acceptable with none of the off-flavors that were so annoying about traditional recipes. Moreover, one could actually add ground malted barley directly to the kettle for a more authentic product. All of the ingredients were available at the Wine-Art store.

My first batch was a great success: it was a warm-fermented lager beer, not one of the English style ale brews described in the British homebrewing books they sold, but the recipe was a little disorganized so I re-wrote it. Owner Jack McCallum liked my new version of the recipe, and suggested I write a book. That was the last thing I’d had on my mind. I’d never written a book before and for a lazy person like myself, it sounded like a tremendous amount of work, but he kept telling me to get busy. A Treatise on Lager Beer (his title) was only 58 pages, but it proved quite successful (seven editions and 110,000 copies). It took me three months to write, which I did while sipping profuse amounts of cheap vin rose.

Out in Boulder, CO, a budding nuclear engineer turned kindergarten teacher obtained a copy and made good beer. Charlie Papazian started teaching homebrewing, in his home, to classes of up to 20. Before long, he started the American Homebrewers Association, and good homebrewed beer became evermore available. Today, he also heads the Brewers Association, publishing The New Brewer and Zymurgy magazines as well.

California Steam Beer a.k.a. California Common Beer

California steam beer was the bridge between those old styles and the new craft beer movement. This beer type, introduced in the later part of the 19th century, only reached its full potential in the 1970s as the last great American style of the old days and the first great American style of the new craft beer era.

Steam beer originated in about 1851, a little after the California Gold Rush started. It is actually an ale, warm fermented, but with bottom working (lager) yeast instead of the usual top working (ale) yeast normal for that beverage. These mid-nineteenth century immigrant German brewers finished out their beer, in warm California, as they had been taught: that is by lagering it in cool cellars (but not as long, and not as cold). Those German brewers were lager-addicted. In Germany, they had even started lagering their top fermented ales (altbier) and in this new country they were forced to brew bottom-fermented beer at warm temperatures, where cold ferments and lagering were unfeasible.

As time went by, this new beer came to be kräusened in the German (lager) style, rather than primed in the English (ale) fashion. Priming is the addition of sugar to the finished beer, which then causes a ferment in the container, resulting in a small increase to the alcohol content and the carbonation of the finished beer. German brewers felt obligated, even in this new country that had adopted them, to follow the ancient Reinheitsgebot purity law. Sugar was verbotten, so a small volume of kräusen (new fermenting beer) was added directly to the casks before bunging (closing) and delivery. This additional ferment gave the product a rich, creamy head, especially so because the beer was served warmer and therefore under much heavier pressure (carbonation) than we are accustomed to seeing these days.

A beer writer of the time, John Buchner, writing in the Western Brewer, in 1898, gives us the scoop: “Steam Beer is bottom fermenting at high temperatures of 60-69F/15-20C… [the beer] is allowed 10-12 days…from mash tub to glass.” “Steam” refers to strong CO2 pressure 50-60-lbs/in2 caused by kräusening with green beer as priming, thus building steam. Buchner was no fan: “not a connoisseur’s drink… tastes better than raw hopped, bitter and turbid ales.”

Steam beer was a bridge between ales and lagers of the nineteenth century and also a bridge to the twentieth. Even though ice machines became available by the 1870s, steam beer remained popular in San Francisco and other parts of California and, indeed, the nation.

It was at this point that I wondered if it’s possible to drink beer in wine country. Sounds like an oxymoron, but don’t beer drinkers get a chance to enjoy their preferred beverages, after their oenophile partners have dragged them around tasting rooms all day?

The answer is yes. Each of the big wine countries in North America also offers up a good helping of breweries―and the good news is that you don’t have to search very hard to find them.

And forget yourselves for a moment―think of the wine makers. Despite what Hollywood and romanticized books and articles will have us believe, for many of them, there’s only one thing that hits the spot at the end of the day and that’s a nice cold beer.

In fact, as many brewers pointed out, the saying is that it takes a lot of great beer to make good wine.

California

The logical place to start with any discussion of wine in this continent is the most illustrious wine country, Napa Valley.

Both Napa and Sonoma counties are peppered with breweries, and one of the best known is Downtown Joe’s American Grill and Brewhouse in the town of Napa. “People come to the valley and want to taste wine but their whole life is not wine,” said Colin Kaminksi, the pub’s brewer. So, they typically come at both ends of the wine-tasting day, he said―for breakfast and for a change of pace after a day in the vines.

Situated in a historic building on the banks of the Napa River, Downtown Joe’s offers seven regular draft beers, the most popular being Tail Waggin’ American Amber and Lazy Summer American Wheat, and an eighth beer that rotates. The specials tend to depend on Kaminski’s whim―“if I want to explore a different hop, malt or style,” he said. “And that way, I can decide if that element becomes part of one of our regular ales.”

The pub is more British style than American, a very social place where everyone interacts. There’s regular live music and outdoor patios.

Thirty miles to the north, in Calistoga, is the Napa Valley Brewing Co., the Calistoga Inn Restaurant & Brewery.

Here there are four beers on tap: an American wheat, a pilsner, a red ale, and a porter. The wheat and the pilsner are the best sellers in the summer, while the red ale is a heartier winter drink. The porter, according to head brewer Brad Simisloff, is consistent throughout the year and ages very well. Simisloff also rotates in three to five other beers regularly, so there are always seven to nine tap offerings.

“I’m fascinated by the history of beer styles and how they came about so I’m as authentic as I can,” he said. As an example, he uses Belgian malt for his Belgian-style beers and abbey-style yeast.

He also has fun playing around with his tripels, adding flavors like orange peel and grains of paradise, a seed that is spicy with a little fruit. “I make all the spices subdued, however, so they’re just an aftertaste,” he pointed out.

It happens to brewers, too, only in their case it’s usually the culture that’s lacking, not the science. When you look back over the last 50 years of beer in America, you see, time after time, beers that were born too soon. Some held on, surviving until their genius was vindicated. Some went under, leaving only memories and a few bottles on collectors’ shelves. These are the beers that were Brewed Too Soon.

Old School

Not every great beer that came before its time was born of a craft brewer’s fevered brain. Every generation forgets that their dried-up, despised parents were once young, and dreamed their own wild ideas. Now we build double IPAs and pack whole leaf hops into re-jiggered water filters to soak hops into the beer as it runs to the glass. But our fathers and our grandfathers built icons: Ballantine IPA and Ballantine Burton Ale, aged months or years in great wooden vats, and they built stills and distilled hops essence to spike them. You can dream really big dreams when you have the resources of a five million-barrel brewery behind you.

“The normal IPA would probably spend a year to two in storage,” I was told by John Brzezinski, the retired head of Ballantine’s Technical Department, the man in charge of formulation. “It was a magnificent product, if that was what you liked. It was stored in tanks 140-150 barrels in size, wooden tanks, lined with mammet [brewer’s pitch]. Before each batch was packaged, it went through taste tests, and Otto Badenhausen [one of the two brothers who owned Ballantine] would be on the panel. Those batches judged to have the best characteristics were set aside for further aging.” That further aging, in vats, not bottles, could be as much as 25 years.

“Once a year,” John continued, “the Ballantine Burton Ale was packaged from those batches. It was not packaged directly, but blended with IPA. IPA had a BU of 45-50, Burton Ale had something like 60-70 from the additional dry-hopping.”

If that sounds amazing, check this out. Ballantine Burton Ale was the ultimate in limited release beers: none of it was for sale. Every case was given away to people the brewery deemed worthy—executives, politicians, movie stars, athletes. Many of them had no idea what to do with a beer like this: President Eisenhower sent his two cases back to the brewery.

If a brewery made that beer today, and sold 1,200 cases for whatever the market would bear, they’d probably find themselves with a lot of money, and maybe a couple first-born children. Back then? A curiosity, a publicity stunt. Imagine: Dark Lord Day, and they’re giving the stuff away.

There were other beers from big breweries and regional breweries that came along in the 1970s and 1980s, right at the beginning of the craft beer revolution, beers that maybe could have made it twenty, ten, or even five years later, but never got a chance. Beers like Prior’s Double Dark, a nice, sweetish dark lager from the Christian Schmidt (earlier known as Adam Scheidt) Brewery of Norristown, PA (Prior’s is rumored to have been the inspiration for Saranac Black Forest Porter from Matt Brewing); or Schlitz’s Erlanger, the big brewery’s shot at a fuller-bodied lager. It was almost as if the craft revolution had given these brewers the courage to re-visit their roots, but it was too soon…and too late.

It used to bug me a little, but nowadays I embrace it. I no longer mind living on the fringes of acceptability. The popular kids at school—the beautiful people—grew up to be mostly normal, average and boring non-entities. They constitute the vast majority of conventional, mainstream opinion. They’re the people eating white bread, processed cheese and drinking bland macros. They listen to whatever’s popular, watch what critics tell them, and go to bed early. They miss a lot.

As a child, of course, I read comic books. Didn’t all geeky kids? Thing is, I still do. And I recently noticed something about them that neatly parallels craft beer. The first comic books were collected strips from newspapers. Then in the late 1930s original stories with characters like Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Captain America appeared. Sales skyrocketed faster than a speeding bullet. This became known as the Golden Age of Comics. In American brewing, the 19th century’s industrial revolution kicked into high gear so that by 1870 there were over 4,000 breweries. From then until World War I is likewise often referred to as the Golden Age of Brewing. This is when most of the familiar names in brewing history got their start. But when Prohibition began, it sounded the death knell for beer. The Golden Age was over. After 1933, when Prohibition finally ended, less than 1,000 breweries re-opened, effectively decimating the entire industry.

Meanwhile, back in the superhero world, the baby boom after World War II created a whole new audience for comics and publishers flourished selling books on every imaginable subject. But then “Seduction of the Innocent,” a propagandist tome, was published, weakly arguing that comics caused juvenile delinquency. It didn’t matter that the rise in delinquents exactly paralleled the rise in population. Parents and other misguided do-gooders panicked and Congress held hearings. The industry agreed to self-censorship and the “Comics Code” was born, limiting what they published to G-rated fare. Many publishers went out of business.

Then, like a flash, came…well, the Flash; and the Fantastic Four, Spiderman, Iron Man and countless costumed crime-fighters and villains. In the 1960s, comics rebounded in a big way. This was the Silver Age of Comics. Most comic book characters you can name come from this flurry of creativity.

At around this same time, Fritz Maytag bought the ailing Anchor Brewery in San Francisco. Along with Ballantine, it was one of the few American breweries that wasn’t making interchangeable light lagers that could only be differentiated through vast marketing budgets. American beer continued its downward spiral as mergers and closings further reduced their number. Beer was not only on the ropes, but the referee had started counting. Only around fifty remained by 1980.

We all know what happened next. Chances are, if you’ve read this magazine all the way to this last page, you know the story, too. Inspired by Jack McAuliffe’s short-lived New Albion Brewery…and Anchor…and better imported beer…and homebrewing, the time was ripe. Ken Grossman, Bert Grant, Don Barkley and countless other pioneers started brewing flavorful ales at Sierra Nevada, Grant’s and Mendocino, along with plenty of others. This was the start of what I’ve taken to calling the Silver Age of Brewing, an age we’re still in the middle of. And like the comics silver age before it, ours is also defined by creativity, innovation and a break from what came before it while at the same time honoring its traditions. Many brewing superheroes have emerged from this time, and happily none have taken to wearing a cape. All kidding aside, it’s unquestionably the best time for beer in the history of the world. If the Golden Age was all about technology and creating the modern brewery, this Silver Age is about the art of flavor and craftsmanship. If you love beer, you couldn’t have picked a better time to be alive. Welcome to the Silver Age. I’m having the time of my life.

Or it may be an homage to founder Ken Grossman’s wife.

“‘Damn the torpedoes,’ as my wife said. She wanted to have a baby and so Sierra came along.”

That’s Sierra Grossman, not the brewing company, born in 1977. Her father divided his time between working at bike shops around Chico, CA, and his homebrew supply store. In the late 1970s, earning around a buck and a half an hour, Grossman mulled over an opportunity to buy a bike shop while his wife virtually raised Sierra in their homebrew shop.

Grossman recalls, “having a serious internal debate about doing the safer thing and buying the bike shop or risking it all and opening a brewery. I came to the conclusion that after a year or two, I’d probably get bored with the bike business.”

By the time his third child arrived, he no longer needed to work at a bike shop. He put in 14-hour days on average with his “fourth child”—the brewery. Grossman’s son, Brian, now 24, remembers being stuffed into “a case of Pale Ale and he’d push me down the bottling line. That’s just what we did if we wanted to see Pops.”

Today, Sierra Grossman is the brand manager. Initially, she planned on a career in healthcare. But she quickly returned to the fold. At 15, her first job was washing dishes at the on-premise brewpub, the Taproom. That led to career advancements: hostess, accounting, merchandising and various non-production jobs. Brian Grossman similarly climbed the company ladder. Ken Grossman, 54, didn’t ask his kids to work for him—they demanded jobs. He merely enforced the work-from-the-bottom-up method.

“I had to start in the cellar handling beer,” Brian Grossman explains. “I showed up for work and there’s a couple of buckets. I expected to be brewing and it was, ‘No, you gotta go scrub the fermenters out.’ I was like, what?!’” In hindsight, he recognizes how important that was. Though he completed the police academy intending to become a sheriff, he now tackles the production side of the business.

That parents with one or more hungry mouths to feed could quit their careers to open a brewery is no longer such a kooky concept. Each year, a handful of new craft breweries open. Successful family businesses often need to start small and it helps if they are rooted in small towns.

Chico is one example. So is Dexter, MI, where Ron Jeffries, inspired by the creativity of barrel-aged farmhouse beers, founded Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales. After brewing professionally at four different breweries, Jeffries decided it was time to take on the challenges of starting his own in 2004.

“I had hoped they both would want to work at the brewery, “ says Jeffries, referring to his wife, Laurie, and his 19-year-old son, Daemon. Laurie Jeffries is the office manager, logistician and “the friendly face in our brewery retail area.” For Daemon’s part, his father had been a brewer since he was five, so he grew up around the business. By the time he turned 15, Jeffries says Daemon knew plenty about “schlepping kegs, helping at festivals, eating fries and drinking root beer at the bar while Dad checked fermentations and the like.” He adds that it’s only natural his son started bottling, labeling, building pallets and loading trucks.

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.