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.

Brewery co-founder Steve Hindy, who was a Middle East war correspondent himself before going into the beer business, will interview Junger about his experience covering conflicts, his latest film, and RISC, the program that Junger founded after his friend Tim Hetherington was killed while covering the recent conflict in Libya. Proceeds from all ticket sales for the series will go to RISC to train and equip freelance conflict journalists to treat life-threatening injuries on the battlefield.

On June 12, the series will feature ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff, who was severely injured while reporting in Iraq in 2006 when the military convoy he was traveling with hit an IED (improvised explosive device). Freelance photojournalist Michael Kamber, a frequent contributor to The New York Times and founder of the Bronx Documentary Center, will speak at the Brewery on July 10. The New Yorker called Kamber’s new book “Photojournalists on War: The Untold Stories from Iraq,” a “monumental, eloquent, and devastating compilation of spoken testimony by photographers who covered the war over many years, along with their searing and, in some cases, never-before-published pictures.”

The “War Correspondents at the Brooklyn Brewery” series will run through December. Speakers in the fall lineup include writer Jon Lee Anderson of The New Yorker and photojournalist Robert Nickelsberg of TIME magazine. Evenings will include film clips, photography slideshows, book signings, and Q & A from the audience. Following the discussion will be a reception with the evening’s featured speakers and a variety of Brooklyn beers on tap.

Tickets are $15 and can be purchased at www.togather.com/community/details/32.

The series is produced in partnership with Togather, a new literary resource that connects authors directly with readers to fansource events and make great cultural experiences accessible to audiences everywhere.

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.

Thirty years later, I was living in Brooklyn and dreaming of a brewery. It was not the most auspicious of times. Crime was rife and the “dese and dose” Brooklyn accent was the butt of jokes. But Brooklyn was the home of Norman Mailer, Walt Whitman, Mae West and Neil Diamond, and it was the town that gave Jackie Robinson a chance. I thought it was a great place.

On March 30, 1988, we delivered Brooklyn Lager to five customers. One was Teddy’s Bar in the Williamsburg neighborhood. Teddy’s opened as a tied house in the 1870s, and the stained glass windows still promoted “Peter Doelger’s Extra Beer.” It was owned by a former union organizer, Felice Kirby, and her husband Glenn, a plumber. Felice was involved in all sorts of local causes and we donated beer to help fight plans for a garbage transfer station and later a power plant.

During the day, Teddy’s had an older clientele of Italians and Poles. A bookie set up shop at the bar every morning. Eddie Doyle, the red-nosed bartender, believed in our beer, and made everyone try it. Families congregated at dinnertime. Later, a strange mix of people known as “artists” showed up, along with Spanish-speaking kids from the Southside. On some nights, Hassidic Jews would be there in their funny outfits. I felt proud to be part of the scene: I felt even better when someone ordered a Brooklyn Lager.

Pierogi 2000, an art gallery, served our beer at their openings. Eventually, we sold beer to Bamonte’s, a red sauce Italian restaurant where the feds taped John Gotti’s meetings. The President of Brooklyn appointed me to Community Board #1, the local governing body.

The prized local account was Peter Luger’s Steak House, founded in 1887 and well known to lovers of red meat. I visited Luger’s owner Amy Rubenstein and tried to sell her our lager. She turned me down.

“Mr. Hindy, we don’t change things very often here at Peter Luger’s,” she said. “The last time we changed our beer was when they started making Lowenbrau in Rhode Island. We dropped Lowenbrau and took on Beck’s.”

I think that was in the 70s.

I visited Amy once a year after that and told her of the medals we won and showed clippings about our contributions to parks, charities and arts groups. At that time, we were brewing our beer in Utica, NY. We had a large warehouse in Williamsburg.

One day, Amy said: “I read in the paper that you were going to build a brewery in the neighborhood.”

“Yes,” I said. “That is my goal.”

“Well, when you build your brewery, we will take your beer,” she said. OK, so all I had to do was invest a few million dollars in this struggling neighborhood, and Amy would try the beer.

In 1991, Mug’s Ale House opened a few blocks from Teddy’s. Then came the Thai Café, owned by a Thai man named David and his Italian wife Anna. From then on, it was a blur. Today, there are 300 great bars, clubs and restaurants in Williamsburg. There are dozens of art galleries and cool shops. Somewhere along the way, the “artists” became “hipsters.” Now there are apartment towers going up in every vacant lot.

On May 28, 1996, a proud day, Mayor Rudy Giuliani joined us in cutting the ribbon to open our brewery in Williamsburg. The day after, I got a call from Amy Rubenstein. “Mr. Hindy, do you remember 200 years ago when I told you I would buy your beer if you built a brewery in Williamsburg?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, I see in the paper that you did it,” she said. “Bring me five kegs.”

Beer Appreciation & Style Guides

If there is a single book that has masterfully illuminated the beauty of all things beer in the minds of laymen and experts alike, it is Michael Jackson’s New World Guide to Beer—the undisputed best-selling beer guide of all time. The colorful, oversized volume takes you on a dizzying tour of global beer culture and heritage, leaving you not only with a superb education, but a renewed excitement for your love affair with beer. Information on all of Jackson’s books is available at his website, www.beerhunter.com.

Not the romantic type? Maybe you prefer a more systematic approach to your favorite indulgence. Roger Protz’s latest release, 300 Beers to Try Before You Die!, will help you ply your way through beer heaven. The beautifully-illustrated portfolio of brews gives expert tasting notes for each beer, as well as a little history, a little brewing info and space for the taster’s own notes. Michael Jackson’s Great Beer Guide: 500 Classic Brews delivers a similar experience. Simply put, it is the culmination of Jackson’s life-long globe trot in search of the world’s best beers.

Want to mount your own beer expeditions? For the beer trekker and pub crawler, handy guides have been published for virtually every beer-producing corner of the globe. In the U.S., Lew Bryson has launched a series of books (including Pennsylvania Breweries, New York Breweries and Virginia, Maryland & Delaware Breweries) that have set the standard for trekking handbooks. Paul Ruschmann and Maryanne Nasiatka have recently published Michigan Breweries in the same series. Across the pond, CAMRA (Campaign For Real Ale) annually publishes its Good Beer Guide—Britain’s granddaddy of pub guides edited by Roger Protz. The 2006 edition, as well as CAMRA’s long list of other books, is available at www.camra.co.uk. Taking a trip to Europe? Naturally, the German beer mecca, Munich, has its own guide. The Beer Drinker’s Guide to Munichis now its 5th edition and popular as ever.

Beer History

There are almost certainly more books on the history of the amber fluid than on any other facet of beerdom. Historians Gregg Smith and Carrie Getty give us one of the more whimsical and entertaining histories in The Beer Drinker’s Bible—Lore, Trivia & History: Chapter & Verse. For a more in-depth study of beer’s role in civilizations from Egypt to colonial America, have a look at Origin and History of Beer and Brewing—initially published in 1911 but reprinted in 2005 by BeerBooks.com. For a fantastic journey through German brewing history, get a copy of Horst Dornbusch’s Prost! The Story of German Beer. www.beertown.org.

For U.S. brewing history, Stanley Baron’s 1962 book Brewed In America: The History of Beer and Ale in the United States remains unmatched in breadth, depth and insight. You’ll have to hunt a little online to find a copy, but it’ll be well worth the effort. Conveniently, the book Beer Blast: The Inside Story of the Brewing Industry’s Bizarre Battles For Your Money picks up the story just about where Baron leaves off. Industry insider Philip Van Munching gives an incredible account of the big boys’ competitive battles of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Be sure, also, to look for Maureen Ogle’s opus, Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer, released last fall.