The cover of the September 2013 issue of All About Beer Magazine.

Chief Oshkosh Red Lager was about to go national. It had found a distribution and marketing partner, and was ready to bust out of Wisconsin. Jeff Fulbright, the founder and president of the brewing company behind Chief Oshkosh, Mid-Coast Brewing, excitedly placed the beer in a spectrum that showed both his ambition and confidence.

“The West Coast has Anchor Steam beer, and the East Coast has Samuel Adams beer,” Fulbright said in a statement. “Through this union, we have created a company that has the strength to distinguish our line of beers as a dominant Midwestern representative of the rapidly growing microbeer segment.”

The idea for Fulbright’s company was born of the larger craft beer movement in the late 1980s and 1990s, right before it entered its period of greatest growth. Information still traveled primarily over the telephone or by word of mouth; and it was at a Great American Beer Festival in Denver in the late 1980s that Fulbright ran into Jim Koch of the Boston Beer Co., which itself had gone national a few years before.

Fulbright, then in his mid-30s, with bushy brown hair and a moustache to match, told Koch of his idea to revive the Chief Oshkosh brand in his native Wisconsin. He had checked on the trademark: It was available. The beer had been brewed until 1971 by the Oshkosh Brewing Co., one of many regionals that collapsed amid the post-World War II consolidation in the brewing industry.

Oshkosh Brewing itself had been formed by the 1894 consolidation of three Oshkosh-based breweries nervous about competition from Schlitz and Pabst in nearby Milwaukee, according to Lee Reiherzer of the Oshkosh Beer blog, who first tracked down Fulbright’s story.

Koch suggested that Fulbright brew Chief Oshkosh under contract at an existing brewery, which was what Koch himself was doing for his fast-selling Samuel Adams Boston Lager. Fulbright took Koch’s suggestion back to the Midwest, where he studied brewing at the Siebel Institute in Chicago and incorporated the Mid-Coast Brewing Co. in May 1991.

Its signature beer would be a red lager that Fulbright devised at Siebel and brewed at the Stevens Point Brewery, a regional 70 miles northwest of Oshkosh.

Chief Oshkosh Red Lager hit the local Milwaukee market in 1991, retailing for $3.99 a six-pack. Fulbright lined up coverage on three TV stations in Wisconsin as well as in the consumer and trade media. He reached out to legendary critic Michael Jackson personally as well as to this magazine—Jackson praised the beer for an “unapologetic, robust sweetness” and All About Beer said it was “just delightful.” Distributors signed on, and by the end of 1992, Chief Oshkosh would spread statewide, with those plans to go national following quickly after.

The craft beer was already a hit, when, on June 17, 1991, a Monday, Fulbright hosted a formal unveiling for about 45 people at the Oshkosh Hilton. He and volunteers poured the red lager from cans.

That’s right: cans.

Surprised?

You’re forgiven. The history of canning in American craft beer is drenched in myths. For instance, ask most industry experts, including the brewers themselves, and they would date the advent of craft-beer canning to late 2002, when Dale Katechis decided to can all his Oskar Blues brands, particularly his signature Dale’s Pale Ale. Oskar Blues, out of tiny Lyons, CO, is considered to be the first American craft brewery to can its own beers.

But it wasn’t the first American craft beer sold in a can. (And it wasn’t the first in North America, for that matter, to can its own beers, with that honor belonging to Yukon Gold in Canada’s Yukon Territory in 2001.) Chief Oshkosh Red Lager predates Dale’s Pale Ale by 11 years, as do at least four other domestic offerings: Pete’s Summer Brew from Pete’s Brewing, Wisconsin Amber from Capital Brewery, Brewski Brewing’s Brewski Beer and Iron Range Amber Ale from James Page Brewing—all hit shelves, either regionally or nationally, before 1999, though each was canned on contract by larger companies.

For Fulbright, the decision to can in 1991 was purely economic, and he was not aware that he was unique in craft beer. “I just saw it was the only means to an end because, well, I won’t say how little money we started with,” Fulbright told All About Beer in April. He estimates that the total was “way under $100,000.”

His decision to can might have saved him an estimated penny per ounce, according to a source familiar with beer packaging. Canning manufacturers, then and now, typically demand minimum orders of several thousand cans. Fulbright was soon producing 2,000 barrels annually—or roughly 660,000 12-ounce cans. He poured the savings from canning into marketing as well as into ingredients that were rare, even for craft beer, including Belgian Caramunich malt, which gave Chief Oshkosh its reddish hue.

Chief Oshkosh would not survive the decade, doomed by a distribution battle with Miller, which by 1993 was aggressively pushing a red lager through Leinenkugel, the Wisconsin regional it acquired five years before. Fulbright’s distribution would grow to 13 states, but it wasn’t enough: In 1994, Mid-Coast Brewing and the last cans of Chief Oshkosh disappeared from shelves. Most of the other craft beer brands in cans would also fold before or soon after the turn of the century under similar pressure brought on in large part by the national breweries (only Capital Brewery remains).

That left Oskar Blues, starting in 2002, to loose the ongoing trend of craft brewers, small and large, canning their beers. The number of craft breweries canning at least some of their beers has increased at least 28,400 percent in the last decade. The biggest addition to this canning roster came in February, when Boston Beer Co. announced it would begin canning its iconic Samuel Adams Boston Lager.

The announcement, however, by chairman Jim Koch, Jeff Fulbright’s informal adviser all those years ago, only added to the myths about craft beer in cans.

The Big Line

Koch’s announcement was front-page news in The Boston Globe. The Feb. 17 article began by framing the decision to can in revolutionary terms—with a capital R: “The project’s code name—Bunker Hill—hinted at the formidable challenge Boston Beer Co. faced: could the craft brewery that revolutionized American beer put its Sam Adams lager in a can without sacrificing the taste millions of consumers expect with every sip?”

Koch’s main concern about canning, according to the article, was that the metal might ruin the taste of his beer, never mind harm consumers’ health. It’s a concern that has dogged canned beer for decades. Fulbright confronted it from retailers and consumers in the early 1990s, and Katechis faced the same questions a decade later.

While some consumers say they taste a difference between canned and bottled beers, the science suggests any difference is in their heads.

Aluminum cans, for one, have been lined for decades with a coating between the metal and liquid. Ball Corp., the nation’s largest can manufacturer and Boston Beer’s partner on its new can, said through a spokesman that it and other manufacturers have been lining since “at least back to 1970 or so for aluminum cans when they were introduced, and even earlier for steel beverage cans.”

Had aluminum cans lacked such lining, it’s unlikely canned beer—canned anything, really—would have taken hold in the marketplace: Over time, the aluminum would have poisoned one consumer after another. As it stands, hundreds of millions have consumed beer from aluminum cans and lived to tell about it.

“The mythology is that cans used to suck because they didn’t have lining and now cans are lined,” said Jaime Gordon, technical sales representative for canning-machine manufacturer Cask Brewing Systems. “It’s a misperception—cans have always been lined. If they weren’t lined you wouldn’t be able to drink out of them.”

Controlled studies have further shown the lack of aluminum seepage into beer. In March 2008, the Health Ministry of Canada, where canned craft beer was born, examined the presence of bisphenol A (BPA) in different canned beers, including Stella Artois and Heineken (though no American craft-beer brands). BPA is an industrial chemical often used in the lining of metal cans as well as plastic containers like water bottles. Too much BPA can be unhealthy, especially for infants.

The Canadian study concluded that aluminum cans allowed minuscule amounts of BPA to seep into beer, not enough to be unhealthy, suggesting that modern cans keep aluminum out of beer but that the lining keeping it out stays away, too. In fact, the same study showed higher amounts of BPA in some canned soft drinks like Diet 7Up and Mountain Dew than in the canned beers.

Still, the myth persists that aluminum affects the beer—and that the single biggest technical, never mind mental, leap for any craft brewer wishing to can remains separating metal from beer.

“A lot of times people say, ‘Oh, yeah, they’ve got these new cans, with new lining,’” said Brian O’Reilly, brewmaster at Sly Fox Brewery in Pottstown, PA, which in April became the first craft brewery to sell beer in cans with completely removal tops, a technology from Crown Holdings Inc. “It’s not like craft breweries jumped on canning just because the lining was good; it’s always been good.”

Green and Green

To hear an early pioneer like Katechis tell it, or a relative latecomer like Koch, the decision to can for a craft brewer arises largely with two goals in mind.

The first is consumer mobility. That is, craft brewers want their customers to be able to cart their brands to the softball diamond, the campground, the shore and other places where glass can be problematic. Here was then-Oskar Blues brewmaster Brian Lutz in a Modern Brewery Age Q-and-A shortly after the 2002 launch of canned Dale’s Pale Ale: Cans “make it easier for outdoor enthusiasts to take great beer into the back country, in the canoe, the ski pack, anywhere they want to.” And here was The Boston Globe in 2013 on Koch’s announcement: “[T]he plans are to roll out cans of Sam’s Boston Lager and Summer Ale in time for beach-cooler weather.”

However concerned craft brewers might be for consumers’ beer mobility, the single greatest driver of the canning trend has been what drove Jeff Fulbright’s decision more than 20 years ago: economics. Once the right equipment came along, it proved a lot cheaper for craft brewers to can than to bottle.

In 1999, Calgary, Alberta-based Cask Brewing Systems introduced a small, manual machine that could can two 12-ounce beers; it cost no more than $10,000 at a time when even used canning machines routinely sold in the six figures. The machine was originally aimed at brew-on-premises retailers; when that trend fizzled, Cask turned to craft brewers. Oskar Blues was its first American client.

The brewery’s success in cans was undeniable. Its Dale’s Pale Ale bested 23 other pale ales in a blind taste test run by New York Times critic Eric Asimov in 2005; and three years before that, Oskar Blues signed a deal with Denver-based Frontier Airlines to carry Dale’s on all fights—a decision, Frontier noted, based in part on the lighter packaging. (Lest another myth arise, Oskar Blues was not the first canned craft beer carried on a domestic airline: In the late 1990s, Continental carried Pete’s Summer Brew and Northwest carried James Page.)

Consumer mobility aside, canning can affect the mobility of a distributor, which can, in turn, affect the bottom line of brewers. According to a source familiar with beer distribution, the typical truckload of 20 pallets of 12-ounce bottles translates roughly to 54 to 60 cases; 20 pallets of 12-ounce cans, however, can total 72 to 84 cases.

The second goal driving craft-canning decisions, to hear most brewers tell it, arises from environmental concerns. Cans, simply put, are easier and cheaper to recycle than bottles. And the fact that distributors are able to ship more cans at a time than bottles can cut the amount of carbon emissions associated with transporting beer.

Canning, though, does have its dark side environmentally: namely, bauxite mining to get at the mineral precursor to aluminum called alumina. Bauxite mining entails leveling large areas of land and then drilling down (or detonating down, as the surface demands) to get at the alumina.

The process is akin to strip-mining for coal. As the New Belgium Brewing Co., which began canning popular brands like Fat Tire Pale Ale in 2008, advises on its website, consumers interested in having the lowest environmental impact should “drink draft beer out of a reusable cup.”

The Greatest Myth

As of May, 2013, 285 craft brewers were canning 956 beers covering 80 styles, according to CraftCans.com, a site that tracks the trend. Lagunitas Brewing Co. was not one of them.

In an email to All About Beer, the brewery’s founder, Tony Magee, said that concerns over the environmental impact of canning—including what happens to the can linings when recycled—had contributed to his decision to not follow the trend. (He also questioned the emphasis on canning as an environmental fix when few breweries try to curb the effects of that most prevalent of greenhouse gases, which is that most copious byproduct of fermentation: carbon dioxide.)

“It’s like if someone made a blanket statement that only lager beers were truly pure,” Magee said of the cans vs. bottles environmental debate. “There’s an implication that there were impurities in ales. It’s the things that didn’t get said that were the most important elements in evaluation.”

Perhaps this is the biggest myth, then, in craft-beer canning: that the trend’s upward arc is an inevitable one. There are major holdouts—Lagunitas is the sixth-biggest craft brewery by sales volume, according to the latest Brewers Association figures. And bottling seems to be inescapably entwined with American craft beer. Two cases in point: Jeff Fulbright began bottling Chief Oshkosh Red Lager as soon as he could, in June 1992; and the man who inspired him to start his own beer line, Jim Koch, allowed Whitbread, under license, to can his cream ale sold in the United Kingdom from 1996 to 1999.

Production was “modest,” according to Boston Beer.

Boston Beer Co.

Boston, MA

Style: Lager

ABV: 4.9

Paired with: Chocolate from TCHO

Staff Review: When this package arrived, eyebrows went up.  A lager with a chocolate? We decided to give it a go. We served the Boston Lager at room temperature thinking it would provide a lot of character. As soon as the bottle was opened the air filled with the aroma of hops and a spicy nose.

The chocolate had a slight burnt quality, then got dry and tangy. Maybe with a hint of orange. When the beer follows the chocolate the effect is very subtle with the bitter of the chocolate sliding in under the bitterness of the hops. They went well together. When the chocolate follows the beer, however, there is a stronger sense of them working together. Not so much a compliment as adding another layer. Like a partner in crime. The mouthfeel really kicks up into something slightly bigger than medium. All in all, two very good products that work very well together. Not such a big wow, but very enjoyable.

Hausner gave his notice at Boston Beer to take “a key sales and marketing position with Anchor, a direct competitor of Boston Beer,” the suit states. Boston Beer brews Samuel Adams beers; Anchor’s Anchor Steam beer is another widely distributed craft brew.

Hausner began to work at Boston Beer in 2007, the suit states. “Boston Beer taught Hausner everything he knows about the beer business.” Soon after he was hired, Hausner was transferred to the West Coast.
“As a district manager, he was privy to Boston Beer’s plans and strategies,” the suit alleges.

Non-competes often are hard to enforce. Boston Beer notes in its complaint that the agreement with Hausner only provides that he not work in what’s called the “Better Beer” category.

Boston Beer wants a court injunction barring Hausner from working at Anchor for one year and the repayment of training costs.

Neither Hausner nor Anchor Brewing had responded to the suit in federal court as of press time.

That two-word tag line says it all, creating a link between love of beer and love of country. The words appeared on the original label for Samuel Adams Boston Lager, above the image of a young, soft-faced Sam Adams, who stares at the viewer, a foaming tankard in front of him.

Over the years, the portrait has evolved: Sam has become distinctly older, more masculine and square-jawed; his smile is broader, and he hoists the tankard in welcome, but the two word-biography remains—this, despite the fact that his family owned a malt house, not a brewery. Adams, the Massachusetts political leader and governor, would not be such a potent icon for brand and country if he’d been billed as “Maltster. Patriot.” Beer has unique appeal.

Boston Beer Co., creator of the Samuel Adams brand, followed a tradition at least a century old when it connected its new beer to American imagery and history. Brewers have turned  to the symbols, people and events of our shared past to boost sales, manipulate their company’s image, denigrate national and commercial rivals, and inspire civic participation and pride. We’ve waved  the flag over the brewhouse for decades—in ways  that highlight our best and our worst traits.

Colonial Heroes

The Colonial Era, more than two centuries behind us now, saw revolution plotted in taverns by players who risked charges of sedition for the cause of independence. Controversial in their time, the revolution’s heroes quickly became respectable…and marketable.

George Washington’s grueling winter with the Continental Army at Valley Forge inspired the name of a post-Prohibition beer brewed by the Adam Scheidt Brewing Co. of Norristown, PA—itself later renamed the Valley Forge Brewing Co. and sporting the logo of a Minute Man in a tricorn hat. General Washington’s headquarters appear on a beer tray from the brewery.

Breweries have been named for Washington, and brewers have produced George Washington’s Porter in tribute to the first president’s love of that beer style.

Although Washington’s own brewing experience is preserved in a beer recipe in his own hand, during the bicentennial, Gibbons Brewing Co. of Wilkes Barre, PA (part of The Lion Brewery) created beer cans to honor patriots with more direct brewing connections: men such as Matthew Vassar, a brewer and the founder of Vassar College for women; and Israel Putnam, a general in the revolution who owned a tavern.

Benjamin Franklin is an enduring figure in both history and in beer, his tercentenary celebrated in 2006 with Poor Richard’s Ale, a single recipe that was interpreted by craft breweries across the country. Franklin’s most famous connection with beer turns out to be a misattribution. He never penned well-loved quote “Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy,” but that fact hasn’t stood in the way of thousands of t-shirt sales to happy beer enthusiasts. Franklin can be all things to all brewers, it seems: Philadelphia’s Independence Brewery won awards with Franklinfest märzen, a beer style he never tasted. As depicted on its label, Ben seems to have been working out at the same gym that transformed Sam Adams: the founding father looks surprisingly buff for his age.

William Penn, honored with the same brewery’s William’s Winter Warmer, also received a modern make-over, and Betsy Ross was a coquettish seamstress on the label of a kristal weissbier.

A more demure Betsy Ross stitched the original flag in a famous lithograph produced in 1909 by the Horlacher Brewery of Allentown, PA. Loyal customers who saved coupons from the bottle labels could redeem them for the historic print. In the picture, named “Making the Emblem of Personal Liberty,” Ross sits by a window, with the half-finished flag draped across her lap and white fabric stars on the floor.

National Icons

National symbols—most powerfully, the American flag—adorn promotional material for almost every product and occasion. When it comes to beer, however, there are limits.

The Tax and Trade Bureau, which regulates all alcohol beverages, prohibits images on beer labels that relate “to the armed forces of the United States, or the American flag,” or that “mislead the consumer to believe that the product has been endorsed,” by a U.S. government or military entity. Breweries have mastered the art of referencing the flag or the armed forces without violating this rule—an approach akin to running right up to the fence but not quite touching the wet paint.

In the years before and after the Bicentennial, Falstaff flag-wrapped cans in a tribute to our 200th birthday. By the late seventies, they had turned this design into “Wake Up America!”, a campaign that urged their drinkers to “buy American.” This was not just intended to resist the growth of imported beers, but to support American-made products in general.

Among American microbrewery images, Stoudt’s American Pale Ale suggests the American flag with red and white stripes and a central blue patch.

Similar promotional sleight of hand implies without being explicit a connection between a New Jersey brewery and the U.S. Marine Corps. Tun Tavern Brewing Co. in Atlantic City is named for the tavern of the same name, a Philadelphia meeting place for Franklin, Washington, Jefferson and the Continental Congress. And, as every Marine knows, it was the birthplace in 1775 of the Continental Marines, later the Marine Corps. The original tavern burned in 1781.

A more metaphorical national symbol is Columbia, a separate and older icon than Liberty, the other robed lady with whom she is often confused. Created over 300 years ago as the literary personification of the United States, baptized with the feminized version of Christopher Columbus’ name, Columbia shaped the image of the new nation.

The Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago marked the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the New World. It confirmed Columbia as the image of western growth, and her name was adopted by breweries in the Midwest and the Northwest, and less so in the east. Seven years after the exposition, the Columbia Brewery opened in Tacoma, WA, and operated until 1979, when Carling purchased it.

The Statue of Liberty, or “Liberty Enlightening the World,” as been a national symbol, but primarily associated with the East Coast since it was unveiled in 1886. Milwaukee brewer Joseph Schlitz understood this connection when they expanded into eastern markets. A tin Schlitz sign from 1941, with the title “Loved by Millions,” shows Liberty in dramatic close-up. At the bottom are the words “Presented by Jos. Schlitz Brewing Company, Wis., 1941,” leaving the reader to make the connection that the beer is as beloved as liberty, itself.

Uncle Sam, the male personification of the country, gradually took over from Columbia, more often representing the U.S. government than its people or ideals. His origins are said to date back to the War of 1812, and a meat packer named Sam Wilson in Troy, NY. Barrels of meat destined for American troops were branded “U.S.” and soldiers purportedly joked that this stood for “Uncle Sam.”

Apocryphal or not, the story connects Troy with the Uncle Sam: naturally, when  the Troy Brewpub opened,  the company put the figure of Uncle Sam on their coasters, blowing the foam off his brimming pint.

Surely no one would mess with the Declaration of Independence for commercial reasons, would they? Well, not blatantly, but a 1998 Boston Beer ad showed the yellowed document with the signature of Samuel Adams seamlessly Photoshopped into a more prominent position.

Is nothing sacred?

My last five-cent hamburger? Memphis TN, in 1944. It was very small, about three inches diameter. I was weaned on 3.2 beer in the Marines during the war, which was all the military could serve enlisted people, It was free, but rationed, in combat zones. That designation indicated that the beer had only 3.2 percent alcohol by weight, the measuring standard of the Prohibition era. America’s pre-Prohibition brewers were mostly of German extraction, and they calculated their beer parameters using the mathematically simpler “by weight” system, which was equivalent to 4 percent “by volume.” Today we all use the universally understandable “by volume,” since almost all other alcohol standards, these days, are in that format as well.

Light Beer vs Heavy Beer

Old brewing texts describe the traditional difference between heavy and light in beer: 12.5 Plato. Less than 12.5 Plato (Original gravity, or OG, of 1050) before adding yeast delivers “light,” while more than that gives us “heavy.” Light beer may therefore be (loosely) defined as a beer with less than 5 percent ABV (alcohol by volume). Truly classic Guinness Draught, is a black light beer at OG 10.3-Plato and 4.4 percent ABV. Unfortunately, there’s no nationally available American brew quite like Guinness Draught, found in a surprising number of American pubs across the country.

As I noted above, most craft brews in this country are actually “heavy.” Worse, even the beer we call “session beer” is often brewed to over 5 percent ABV. Not so in Europe, where most of the beer finishes below the 5 percent edge.

We have become obsessed with the idea that light beer must be tasteless, exceedingly pale and calorie deficient. At the same time, we are taught to believe that any beer with less than 5 percent is weak, wussy beer; hence the fading malt liquor phenomenon: insipid wussy beer with plenty of alcohol. We have even become acculturated to disdain our traditional “3.2” beer (4 percent ABV). In Britain, however, such beer will not be wimpy at all. British milds and bitters will, for the most part, be delicious and very enjoyable. Good taste is possible even in non-alcohol beer. Check out NA Kaliber from Guinness!

But that’s not my point. Our craft brewers (bless them) have taken to brewing some truly magnificent beers: strong and delicious at 10 percent and up to over 20 percent alcohol. There are more such brews out there now than there are of what we formerly called “session beer” or what the British call “mild.” Strong beer cannot take the place of what I call table beer, which, if it is done in the traditional way will have less than 5 percent alcohol content. If one wanders the continent these days, most of the beer served in pubs is of 4 to 5 percent. Since the name “session beer” is no longer available, we need a new name. May I suggest “table beer.”

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.