The Great American Ale Trail (Revised Edition) Read online




  Praise for The Great American Ale Trail

  WINNER, SOC. OF AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITERS FOUNDATION LOWELL THOMAS TRAVEL JOURNALISM AWARD — BEST GUIDEBOOK 2012

  “. . . Men and women who like their drinks simple, cold and on tap will appreciate The Great American Ale Trail, in which Christian DeBenedetti heralds ‘a new golden age of American beer,’ reporting state by state on the country’s best taverns and brewhouses. ‘Balanced but tangy,’ like the Duet beer he tastes in a mountain town in California, this book whets a prodigious thirst.”

  —Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times, Dec. 16, 2011

  “Christian DeBenedetti’s book is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”

  —Jack Hitt, author, Bunch of Amateurs: A Search for the American Character

  “Here is joyful evidence that doomsayers who lament the dumbing-down of America’s taste are only Chicken Littles. The Great American Ale Trail posits that in fact we are, right now, enjoying the Golden Age of craft beer, offering as evidence a guide to hundreds of bars, breweries, and even barbecues around the nation that make and/or serve the best of it. What a roadmap for taste-bud adventure! With this book in hand, anyone who prizes good beer need never go thirsty again.”

  —Jane and Michael Stern, authors of Roadfood

  “From sea to foaming sea, we’ve become a great Beer Hoisting Nation. And Christian DeBenedetti is our convivial, savvy, and good-humored guide. The result of his dedicated wanderings is a tangy compendium that’s part travelogue, part practical handbook, and part cultural history, giving us fresh perspective on the Hop Revolution that has quietly overtaken our land, one pint at a time. Carry this book with you on your own cross-continental travels, and bring it home stained and sour—a field manual soaked with happy memories.”

  —Hampton Sides, Editor-at-Large, Outside magazine and author of In the Kingdom of Ice; Hellhound on His Trail; Blood and Thunder; Ghost Soldiers; and Americana.

  “Some people know where they are going early on. Take Christian DeBenedetti. He graduated college, received a fellowship and did the logical thing: He used the fellowship to study traditional beer-making in Europe and West Africa. He was then mentored by legendary British beer writer Michael Jackson. Now DeBenedetti is a respected beer journalist with his first book, The Great American Ale Trail.”

  —Lynne Rossetto Kasper, host of NPR’s The Splendid Table, Jan. 11, 2013

  “What a great read this is—packed with places I instantly want to visit and fizzing with fun, enlightening glimpses of the coolest aspects of our nation’s craft-beer renaissance. I can’t wait to take a few of these road trips. They promise a whole new way to see and taste America.”

  —Margo True, Food Editor, Sunset magazine; author, The One-Block Feast

  “The Great American Ale Trail is truly a great book. The premise is simple: There’s a craft brewery revolution happening in America and DeBenedetti spent a year traveling to document it. But the simplicity of the book’s goal belies the complexity of what happens when you crack the cover. On the one hand, this is a travel book. Nothing in recent memory has inspired the same urge to pack up the car and head off in an unknown direction—preferably a direction that includes lots of sunshine and dusty roads and ends with a very big cold one. But instead of being overly factual and list orientated, The Great American Ale Trail is like a craft brew travel guide that just happens to have been written by one of your coolest, smartest, and most discriminating friends.”

  —Anne Zimmerman, Serious Eats, Sept. 19, 2011

  “Christian DeBenedetti provides a useful, if necessarily incomplete, guide in his The Great American Ale Trail. . . . A young and talented beer journalist, DeBenedetti provides extensive descriptions of beer bars, stores, breweries, brewpubs, and restaurants with extensive beer lists (Eleven Madison Park, one of Manhattan’s toniest eateries, also boasts one of the country’s best beer inventories). Tucked between are travel itineraries, regional overviews, and general musings about the culture of beer in America. What could have been a dry mash note to the nation’s beer havens is, in DeBenedetti’s hands, a fluid, entertaining handbook.”

  —Clay Risen, The Atlantic, Oct. 31, 2011

  “Author Christian DeBenedetti spent a year on the road sampling small-batch craft beer. . . . In page after glorious page, he tells the stories of the people behind the breweries, presents their guiding philosophy. . . and describes their signature beers. He talks to the big names of the industry. . . suggests one-day, three-day, and seven-day beer itineraries and includes fascinating sidebars . . . . A fun book for beer lovers everywhere.”

  —June Sawyers, Chicago Tribune, Jan. 10, 2012

  “Christian has been an evangelist for and card-carrying member of the craft brewing community for many years. And now, with this book, his encyclopedic knowledge of American brewery geography and mythology is right at your fingertips. There are over 1,800 commercial breweries in this country and the average American lives within 10 miles of at least one brewery and a short road trip away from hundreds of them. So get truckin’ and explore the vibrant, diverse, craft brewing landscape America is now internationally known for.”

  —Sam Calagione, President and founder, Dogfish Head Craft Brewery; author of Brewing Up a Business

  FOR MOM & CHUCK, THE “TRAVELING COMPANIONS”

  © 2016 by Christian DeBenedetti

  Published by Running Press, A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions

  Printed in the United States.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher.

  Books published by Running Press are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015960852

  E-book ISBN 978-0-7624-6102-8

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing

  Cover design by Daniel Cantada

  Book design by Amanda Richmond

  Illustrations by Ryan Hayes

  Edited by Jessica Fromm

  Typography: Eames, Garage Gothic, and Fenway Park

  Running Press Book Publishers

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  Philadelphia, PA 19103-4371

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  CONTENTS

  Preface by Garrett Oliver

  Introduction

  The Pacific Northwest and Alaska

  Oregon

  Washington

  Idaho

  Alaska

  California and Hawaii

  California

  Hawaii

  Colorado, Montana, and the Rocky Mountains

  Colorado

  Wyoming

  Montana

  The Southwest and Texas

  Arizona

  Nevada

  New Mexico

  Texas

  Utah

  The Midwest

  Missouri

  Illinois

  Nebraska

  Indiana

  Iowa

  Michigan

  Ohior />
  Minnesota

  Wisconsin

  The Northeast

  Maine

  Massachusetts

  New Hampshire

  Vermont

  The Mid-Atlantic

  New York City

  Greater New York State

  Pennsylvania

  Maryland

  Virginia

  Delaware

  The South and Southeast

  Louisiana

  North Carolina

  South Carolina

  Tennessee

  Kentucky

  Mississippi

  Oklahoma

  Georgia

  Alabama

  Florida

  Postscript

  Acknowledgments

  Glossary

  Index

  Preface

  WHEN THE BOARDING PASS EMERGED FROM THE WHIRRING MACHINE AT HELSINKI-VANTAA Airport, I had to admit that I was relieved. I hadn’t intended things to turn out this way, but this is what always happens, and I really should have known better. Only seven hours previously, I’d been at the pub—St. Urho’s Pub, to be precise—a slightly grubby watering hole in one of the lesser-known districts of Helsinki, Finland. Finns speak a language intelligible to no one else on earth, but that has never slowed them down, especially when it comes to socializing. So now here I was, with Markku, Jussi, Kari, and a few others, telling improbable stories. I pinged my pal Matt on Facebook and told him I was drinking his beer in Helsinki. He picked up in England and pinged me back within minutes, asking how it was holding up. The beer was beautiful, and it was a fine evening—all about the ebullient company, and the company was all about the beer. St. Urho’s has more than a dozen taps, all flowing with excellent beers, lovingly kept. I didn’t mean to stay until 3 a.m., but that’s what you do, and the reindeer pizza really was excellent.

  I’ve been lucky enough to experience many evenings like this over the years. I started in the early 1980s in London, where I first fell in love with cask-conditioned British ale. I continued across Europe, racking up epic evenings in Germany, Belgium, and the Czech Republic. In those days, there was one country where great beer was not to be found, and that was the United States. I got back home from a year abroad in 1984 and found that we Americans had nothing to drink. Somehow the United States—once home to 4,000 breweries and the most exciting and varied beer culture in the world—had lost its way among the great brewing nations. Our breweries fell prey to a form of “progress” that involved removing all the flavor from one of the world’s diverse and fascinating drinks. Like many future craft brewers, I started making my own beer at home—not because I wanted to make beer, but because I wanted to drink beer. Slowly but inevitably, beer took over my life, the slope became slippery, and I slid into the mash tun. I bobbed to the surface and never looked back.

  Today, out of nothing, we have built everything. The United States is now the undisputed beer capital of the world, home to the most vibrant beer culture anywhere. It is difficult to overstate how unlikely this seemed twenty years ago. A newly minted craft brewer, I traveled to Europe frequently, and when I told people that I was an American brewer, the scorn was palpable. Yes, we’ve heard of your American beer, they sneered. I protested that Americans were making very flavorful beers now, but heads shook with disbelief. Slowly, however, over the late 1990s and into the 2000s, it dawned on the rest of the world that Americans had woken up to beer, and once awake we’d gotten mighty busy.

  While some built breweries, others built restaurants, bars, bowling alleys, and movie theaters around great beer. Not only did we have our own beer—we had everyone else’s beer, too. The complex beers of Belgium, the fruity ales of England, the malty, bracing lagers of Bavaria—all began to flow from America’s taps. Great restaurants, once content with lengthy fine wine lists and dismissive gas-station beer lists, started to realize that industrial beer was an insult to their food and to their beer-savvy patrons. Today I can find the best beers of Belgium faster in a twenty-minute walk from my front door in Brooklyn than I could walking from Grande Place in Brussels.

  Do you know beer places and beer people? You should, because beer brings on a sort of fellowship that wine rarely inspires. When you get off a plane and head into an American town, do you know where to find the best of everything, places where people speak your language? Frankly, despite having been all over the world, I can’t say that I do. But that’s okay, because we have Christian DeBenedetti to show the way. I’ve read many beer books, of course, but none that capture the spirit, the philosophy, the people, and the feeling of the American beer scene the way that The Great American Ale Trail does. This book will tell you what you really want to know—where to go, why you want to go there, how the place came to be, what kind of food they serve, what types of beers you can enjoy with it, and who’s going to be sitting next to you at the bar. At the same time, you’ll read the stories of men and women who turned their backs on lucrative careers, mortgaged their houses, and put everything on the line to follow their passions and build the kinds of places where they’d want to spend their time. Occasionally, just occasionally, until 3 a.m. So read this book, follow Christian’s well-laid path, and build your own ale trail. You’ll have epic evenings with good people and the world’s most exciting beverage. And if you should miss your plane, don’t worry. Another one will leave soon. In the meantime, there is some awfully nice beer at the airport bar.

  —Garrett Oliver

  Garrett Oliver is the brewmaster of the Brooklyn Brewery and the author of the award-winning book, The Brewmaster’s Table. He is also editor-in-chief of The Oxford Companion to Beer (2011), and has hosted more than 700 beer events in ten countries.

  Introduction

  THE MOUNTAINS AHEAD ARE BRUSHED WITH CALIFORNIA CHAPARRAL AND PIÑON JUNIPER, bathed in low angle sunlight, but I’m pulling over in the quiet little town of Alpine, California—a forty-minute drive into the Coast Range foothills outside of San Diego—to visit Alpine Brewing Company. Now the sweet, earthy smells of steeping grains and the tang of hops envelop me. It is mid-2010. There Pat McIlhenney, a former full-time fire captain with a handlebar mustache, is leading a tour of his handmade brew-house built in an old TV-repair shop. His operation has been racking up accolades in global competitions. “I cannot make beer fast enough,” he says, handing out samples.

  Those beers were among the finest I’ve tasted anywhere: his balanced but tangy Duet is full of the fresh, citrusy flavors of Simcoe and Amarillo hops and a grainy, toasty backbone. Even back then, before his bar or taproom were ready, a stream of visitors—beer pilgrims—comes in to meet McIlhenney and buy fresh-brewed beers to go. (Today, Alpine has wide distribution in a partnership with Green Flash.) It’s a scene I find again and again across the United States, in cozy beer bars and small-batch breweries, even anodyne cul-de-sacs. Where are they going next?

  Ask Tim Belk. On a hazy day in the summer of 2015, he stopped by my family’s farm, in Oregon, clutching a well-loved copy of this book’s first edition, which was released in late 2011. With beer stains, notes in the margins, and, incredibly, fully half the destinations checked off, that exact book had carried its owner from his home in Austin, Texas, across the nation. He’d heard about my little brewery under construction and wanted to pay a visit. If there was any moment I knew I had to update my first literary labor of love, it was then. My handheld, analog, old-school guidebook had led a beer lover on a great adventure, but now there was so much more to share. Tim, thank you again. Aside from getting the book published in the first place, that may have been my proudest moment as a beer writer yet.

  But where to begin? What was true in mid-2011, when the first edition of this book went to press, is even truer today: we are living in the Golden Age of beer, and I have spent the past six years on and off traveling through America to document it. Sure, the big breweries still dominate the cooler aisle, but make no mistake: small-batch “craft” beer (a term related to a brewery’s modest size a
nd independent ownership) is roaring back. After the Great Mistake ended in 1933, only the most aggressive, consolidated companies were able to survive; beer drinkers paid the price in flavor and selection. But from the nadir of just forty-four breweries by the end of the 1970s, there are now more than 4,000 from Anchorage to the Big Apple, Kona to Kentucky, surpassing the national brewery count of 125 years ago.

  Styles and flavor profiles are cross-pollinating like a botanist’s fever dream. Innovation, flavor, choice: all are almost infinite at this stage. Ambitious new breweries are bursting forth like forest mushrooms after a good rain. Since that book first hit the shelves, in late 2011, well over 2,000 new small breweries have opened, and likely as many beer bars, bottle shops, and growler stations. That’s more than ever even existed up to 2011—encompassing the craft beer’s entire, frenetic, three decade–long rise—from the late 1970s on. To size up this frothy tsunami another way, that’s roughly two new breweries per day.

  Not even the drinker wild with curiosity, endless free time, and a bottomless travel budget can keep up. Whole brewery districts have formed in cities where the idea of craft beer was alien just a few years ago. Garage-based startups founded in 2010 are buying whole city blocks and winning World Beer Cup medals. A beer bar and tasting menu restaurant in Brooklyn open for a couple of years has a Michelin star—a level of prestige never seen before in beer cuisine. Every day I get a dozen stories in an e-mail news alert based on the phrase “new brewery.” The number of options and flavor dimensions and travel possibilities within craft beer have gone completely kaleidoscopic.

  There’s a simple reason for this: good beer is part of a good life. The late British beer writer Michael Jackson once said, “You wouldn’t walk into a restaurant and order ‘a plate of food,’ so why would you do the same with your beer?” Craft beer is about originality, flavor, and complexity derived from the many malts, hop varieties, yeast strains, water sources, and even oak barrels a brewer can use, no matter where they live.