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.

Shortly after New Albion closed, McAuliffe vanished from the beer scene, a figure of some mystery to those who succeeded him. Then, this past spring, he attended the 2011 Craft Brewers Conference in San Francisco, in what he called “just a momentary appearance.” The industry he helped to launch had grown to support a 4,000 person sold-out annual meeting and trade show.

You recently enjoyed a fair amount of celebrity in San Francisco at the Brewer’s Conference. What was that like?

Actually, I didn’t enjoy it. I never have. I don’t like crowds and that sort of thing. It’s just not my cup of tea.

What questions did you take from the CBC audience?

Everyone wanted to know, ‘Why did you start in Sonoma, California?’ It’s really easy, dummy. That’s where I lived! What do you think I’m going to do? Start a brewery in East I Don’t Know Where?

So this could have started anywhere. It just happened that Northern California was the place where it all began.

But also, at that time, there was Alice Waters and her California cuisine restaurant. The wineries were starting to bloom, and commercial artisanal cheesemakers like the Marin French Cheese Co. By happenstance, I was in the right place.

Can you remember when you suddenly thought you would build a small commercial brewery? No one had done that before.

Probably when I returned to the San Francisco Bay Area and went to the city college there―Cal State Hayward. I went down for a tour of Anchor Brewing Co., and I thought, man, I know how to make beer, I can do this―just the same thing Ken [Grossman] said to himself four or five years later when he saw what I was doing.

You’ve seen remarkable changes in the beer world. Nowadays, people can walk through a trade show and simply place orders for all the things you had to build by hand.

I’m overwhelmed there’s an industry like this. That’s what amazes me the most. Sierra Nevada’s the sixth largest brewery in the United States. I was up there for the 30th anniversary, thanking Ken for flying me out and putting me up, and Ken said “It was you that made all this possible.”

How did you know how to construct a brewery?

I was a homebrewer, as we say. Of course, I was reading all about the biochemistry and microbiology. I’m interested in heating things up and cooling them down quickly―mechanical engineering stuff. I designed a gravity flow brewhouse. You don’t have to use any pumps; you let gravity do the work. At the top was the hot water back, then it went down to the mash tun, and then to the brew kettle and the hot wort receiver, over to the cellar. I like that sort of stuff.

Did you have a chance in Europe to visit any small breweries?

No, I should have but I just didn’t. But you can learn the darnedest things in books.

Where did you get the equipment?

The stainless steel tanks were from Pepsi Cola. When they shifted to bulk transport of the syrup in a tanker truck, they had all these 55-gallon drums, and they just put them on the junk market. I must have purchased 15 of them, stainless steel food-grade containers that I just had to modify to suit my purpose.

Where did you sell your first beer?

There was a place in Marin County, high-end wine and beers. They came up to visit, and they were very excited about this. They wanted to be first on the list when we got ready to go to market. I’ve forgotten the name.

So there was a lot of buzz about this new beer.

No, it wasn’t a buzz at that time. It was an almost inaudible hiss.

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.

In the process, the large brewers began dumbing down all of their own beer types. Beer color was as pale yellow as the brewers could make it. The hop levels fell to barely detectable amounts, close to the human taste threshold. By 1978, the world’s largest brewers had just about totally ruined the great beer styles of the world.

Cold-fermented and aged, lager beers had become the world’s major brewing style since their introduction in the mid-19th century. The cold-brewing method made lager beer smoother, more mellow and less bitter than the old ale beer types, which were warm-fermented quickly with top-fermenting yeast (above 60 degrees F/15.5 degrees C).

The faster ale ferment produced beer with heavier and more intense taste factors. The British and Belgian brewers were masters of the old traditional ale beers. In this period, only a very few American brewers pursued the ale tradition.

Prohibition also had the effect of destroying the good name of homebrew. My stepfather’s homebrew was a classic example of that miserable breed. His recipe: one 3.5-pound can of Blue Ribbon Hop Flavored Malt Syrup, ten gallons of water, ten pounds of corn sugar and a cube of Fleishman’s yeast. His lone fermenting vessel was a beautiful 10-gallon porcelain crock that stood behind my mother’s kitchen stove. At the end of ferment (about a week signaled by a low-key bubble formation on the surface of the beer), he bottled it in reusable dark quart bottles. A secondary ferment in the bottle, initiated by the addition of a level teaspoon of corn sugar, served to carbonate the finished beer after another week or so.

Unless you really needed an alcohol fix, this beer was truly wretched. It cost my dad a penny per quart, and he continued brewing the stuff until I was in college after the end of the war. By then, he was investing two cents a quart, but it satisfied the alcohol needs of my friends and me. We were after the cheap alcohol effect, and you couldn’t beat the price (free to us) nor the alcohol content (about 6 percent)—especially so since I didn’t reach legal drinking age until 1947, after service in the Marines, where I enjoyed American “3.2” beer (4 percent ABV) on military bases during the war. What I learned from all this was that drinking homebrew was only for the desperate among us.

Say ‘Hello” to Good Beer

When I was recalled for the Korean War, I sampled my first really good beer in Japan (Danish Tuborg). I was amazed at how good that tasted. I’d had no idea that beer had such potential. I became acquainted with delicious imported ales and American-brewed Rainier Ale, a strange concoction that turned out to be a bastard ale, i.e., brewed warm with bottom-fermenting (cold-fermenting) lager yeast. At least these beers had taste, while the mainstream mega-brewers were busy removing all vestiges of flavor from their ever more miserable products.

In 1967, I traveled down to San Francisco, the city of my birth. There, in the company of a friend, I chanced to visit the Old Spaghetti Factory on Green Street. They served San Francisco Steam Beer from the Anchor Brewing Co. Now that was a beer to note! My friend commented that Anchor Steam reminded him of homebrew. I had to wonder where he might have sampled any homebrew of such distinctive quality. But the idea stuck with me, and I began to wonder if one really could brew a beer like that at home.

I soon gave up on beer, and concentrated on exploring the good wines that this country produces. I started to make my own, with the help of Wine-Art, the local Portland home-winemaking shop. My wines were good, and Jack McCallum, the owner, suggested that I should teach a winemaking class for the local community college in 1968. It was great fun, and I discovered that the shop also had a great homebrewing section, with a Canadian recipe for a European-style lager beer, which was fermented warm in the manner of most homebrewers. It was quite different from that made by my stepfather.

This one was based on using only malt extract syrup and/or dry malt extract, with no sugar to ruin the taste. Moreover, the production system called for a brewery-style large kettle boil-up of the wort, during which one added real dried hops, and then transferred the cooled hot wort to an open primary ferment. This, along with a closed secondary ferment (a major feature in winemaking), under a fermentation lock in a winemaker’s glass carboy, made me say, “Wow!” There was a big difference in taste. This beer was like no other beer brewed in anyone’s home that I’d ever tried. It tasted pretty much like one would expect good beer to taste. I incorporated this recipe into my winemaking classes, even though homebrewed beer was still illegal.

Wine-Art owner Jack McCallum was so impressed with my re-write of his very good homebrew recipe that he invited me to write a book on the subject. In 1969, I did just that. A Treatise on Lager Beer came out in 1970 as a small, 52-page, booklet. We sold 110,000 copies of the book’s seven editions or revisions.

At that time, there were only 73 U.S. brewing companies operating 133 brewing plants in 31 states. Industry predictions told us there’d only be 10 by 1990. One could speculate that they’d all be brewing Budweiser clones by then.

But as the techniques of modern, scientifically-based homebrewing appeared, curiosity about small brewing began to rise. Fritz Maytag’s San Francisco Steam Beer techniques also began to draw interest. This culminated in the first American microbrewery the New Albion Brewery in Sonoma, CA, opened in 1976 by Jack McAuliffe.

Enter Michael Jackson and Charlie Papazian

Meanwhile, in England, Michael Jackson appeared with his monumental, soul-satisfying World Guide to Beer in 1977. I had suspected that there was a great variety of good beer out there, but I had no idea of the magnitude. Most of the beers found in the United were sold by the country! Who knew there were also styles?

Ale and lager, light and dark? What other kinds of beer could there be? Charles Finkel soon showed us, when his importing company, Merchant du Vin, brought in some of Jackson’s recommendations, including the great Belgian Orval Trappist and Lindemans Kriek, as well as British Samuel Smith Nut Brown Ale and Pinkus Ur-Pils from then-West Germany. Good beer had returned to America.

In Boulder, CO, in 1978, Charlie Papazian formed the American Homebrewers Association, our country’s first national homebrew organization. In December of that year, he introduced their journal, Zymurgy. He had been teaching and encouraging modern homebrewing in that city for several years by then, and he published his first book The Joy of Brewing (1976), whose sequel, The New Complete Joy of Homebrewing (1991), is still the definitive text on that art. The end of 1978 also signaled the legalizing of homebrewing along the same lines as homemade wine had always been, even through Prohibition.

The Return of the Ales

The year 1980 was a banner year, as homebrewers and other interested folks began opening small micro-breweries, including Sierra Nevada in Chico, CA by homebrewer and homebrew shop owner Ken Grossman, and Boulder Brewing in Longmont, CO.

These events brought Papazian and myself together with Michael Jackson at the first Great American Beer Festival in 1982, which included beer from some 40 breweries. Although not very impressive, what it did signal was that one could open a small brewery and enjoy modest success.

From 1981 to 1987, some 80 new microbrewers opened their doors in this country and Canada, due to the efforts of mostly new homebrewer entrepreneurs. By 2002 there were 1,503 breweries operating in this country! Not all have survived, of course, but some 1,449 were in operation by the end of 2007. Microbreweries have spread across the world, producing a wide variety of Jackson’s styles, showing up in such strange and disparate places as Japan, Korea, Europe and even Africa and southern Asia. Most of these new brewers produce ale beer on draft, which can take as little as seven to 10 days from brew kettle to beer tap. None of this would have happened without the work of Charlie Papazian and his brainchild, the American Homebrewers Association, which helped build a home for all these new brewers.

OK, maybe it was 1965, when young Fritz Maytag took over Anchor Brewing (24th-ranked in the U.S.), America’s smallest then-failing brewery. He built his flagship brand—San Francisco Steam Beer—into what has become a world-class beer. Maytag is clearly the father of the Craft Beer movement within the U.S.

Or was it 1967? That’s when serious degradation of American beer really began with the introduction of low calorie, so-called “Light/Lite” beer. American beer became completely bastardized, with water as the super ingredient, to the detriment of malt and hops. Dark beer and ale beer began to disappear from market shelves.

Or was it 1970? The CAMRA (CAMpaign for Real Ale) began in England in 1970, as British beer lovers were alerted to the fact that their large brewers—the “Big Six”—were copying their American counterparts: buying small breweries and doing away with many long-time favorite British beers. The beloved British “cask-conditioned” real ales were gradually being phased out. This was the beginning of what became parallel brewing revolutions in the U.S., Canada and Britain—and it had a big effect on beer drinkers in those countries. CAMRA spurred a young Michael Jackson to begin writing about the wonders of world beer, culminating in his book A World Guide to Beer. That volume spurred wide interest across the U.S., Canada and Britain about the spectacular gift of our ancestors—the world’s great beer styles.

The restless people who kept moving west and further west had to stop here or step into the ocean: maybe all that restlessness got channeled into innovation?

Viewed from afar, West Coast-style brewing is a phenomenon: audacious, ground-breaking, and hop-heavy. There are communities “ out West” where craft beer outsells the Big Three, where it must be as daunting to open a new brewery as it is to open a new restaurant in New York.

The hard brewing facts support the sense that this is special territory: the four American states and one Canadian province that make up the West Coast of the United States and Canada contain over 30 million people, about 15% of the total. However, they are home to over 440 breweries, microbreweries and brewpubs: about 25% of the total.

The western states and British Columbia gave their countries their first brewpubs and they take home a disproportionate share of national brewing awards. In short, things are happening there.

For 15 years, Celebrator Beer News has been the voice of West Coast beer. We asked Tom Dalldorf, Celebrator’s publisher, to help us make sense of it all.

—AAB

A Stanford University graduate student in Japanese studies had only lunch and a cold beer on his mind that fateful afternoon in July 1965. But when Fritz Maytag ordered his usual Steam Beer, the server suggested that he savor it because the brewery was to be closed.

Fritz, the scion of the Maytag washing machine family, was by his nature positively Jeffersonian in his eclectic pursuit of quality and substance in everything he found worthy. He saw in that quirky beer brewed under primitive conditions something that was distinctly San Francisco and he had to learn more. Thus began an almost single-minded dedication to reviving lost traditions of brewing that is the hallmark of the Anchor Brewing Co.

Fritz dropped by the brewery and discovered that it was indeed to be closed after so many years, having survived even the devastating consequences of Prohibition. He wondered what he could do to help out. With a small investment and a lot of hard work, Fritz became the proud owner of a historic brewing property with rather poor prospects. Even with the San Francisco Chronicle’s Fearless Spectator Charles McCabe singing its praises, Anchor’s Steam Beer was a bastard child of the beer business and an unruly one at that. Fritz set to work cleaning up the brewery and stabilizing the beer.

Eventually, Maytag discovered the adage to be true in beer as it is in wine: the way to make a small fortune is to start with a really big one. This expensive avocation could not continue for long. A new location and some more modern equipment and quality control improved his product to the point where Maytag could actually sleep at night without worrying about the beer going bad.

Anchor produced fewer than 800 barrels of Steam the first year, but demand increased after the quality issues were addressed. Maytag’s research and travels to England and Europe convinced him that other styles might be equally attractive to a country notably devoid of beers of color or flavor. He introduced Liberty Ale in April 1975 to commemorate the midnight ride of Paul Revere, and the beer became so popular that he had to make it a year-round brand. Old Foghorn, a traditional English-style barley wine, was introduced that same year—another first. This was Anchor’s most extreme beer yet. Given its high alcohol and robust flavor profile, it must have been quite a radical move in a beer market awash in an ocean of light industrial adjunct lager.