Here, There, Elsewhere: Stories From the Road Read online

  Of all the stories I’ve written, “A Glass of Handmade” has had the widest circulation and impact, and even a quarter-century later, I continue to hear responses to it. If only other casus belli I’ve tried to champion in short pieces and in books could have been so quickly and happily concluded! But their time also will come.

  For this piece, I have let stand references to dates as they originally were in 1985 so that now the story is partly a history of a movement. To bring a couple of details forward: Redhook Brewing got bought up by giant Anheuser-Busch which later got bought up by an international corporation even bigger, and the day of my being able to sit down over a pint with a brewing pioneer has passed. Instead, my town now has a pair of brewpubs, two of nearly two thousand now across America, the most since the 1880s. A local grocery carries some two hundred kinds of malt beverages made by independent American brewers: ales, porters, pilsners, stouts, Oktoberfests, lagers, and wheats, some made from or flavored with cherries, peaches, vanilla, chilies, agave, cocoa nibs, hemp seeds, sorghum, and, for all I know, kohlrabi and turnips.

  One last detail: In 1986, a small company making home-brewing equipment sent me a kit as thanks for the reportage, a gift I forwarded to the Venerable Tashmoo who spent his last years concocting a variety of (usually) toothsome suds we often shared at his home in the foothills of the Bear River Mountains in northern Utah. Our final conversation was mellowed by a wedge of sharp cheddar and a glass of his Tashmoo Titillator.

  My curiosity about beer began in 1949 (I was nine years old) near the shore of Pelican Lake in central Minnesota. One morning, as I was picking blueberries from a thicket, I found an empty cone-top beer can; although it was a near-relic even then, that wasn’t why I picked it up: I liked a brand name that sounded like a gulp.

  A Glass of Handmade

  Jack Kerouac often went in search of the perfect American bar, a quest I have furthered for different reasons and with results steadily diminishing, mostly because of the continuing absorption of American breweries into larger corporations. Today [1985], only ten companies brew 95 percent of American beer, with Anheuser-Busch and Miller controlling more than half of that output. By 1990, I read, they will have two-thirds of domestic brewage. Now, if you consider Lite a beer rather than a mere beverage, or if Budweiser satisfies, then you have no need for concern. On the other hand, if you desire beers regional and traditional, even idiosyncratic, in those statistics you may see alarm. After all, how can a perfect bar exist without genuine brews? Drinking Lite in an estimable bar is like watching donkey ball at Wrigley Field.

  A longtime friend who appears in my work here and there as a handy foil and commentator, a journalism professor and a Canadian expatriate of Scotch and Ojibway ancestry, had recently heard that an authentic, traditional brew was available in Albany, New York, once an Erie Canal city known for good ales. He (I call him the Venerable Tashmoo) and I set out for the capital in quest of a glass of genuine handmade. In an industrial-district warehouse not far from the Hudson River, we found the tiny operation William Newman opened in 1981 after learning the craft in England. Standing in the brewhouse, he explained how he made his Amber, Winter, and pale ales in the traditional way, using nothing more than barley, water, hops, and yeast. Because his annual production was fewer than ten thousand barrels (a barrel holds thirty-one gallons), Newman’s operation is a boutique, or micro-, brewery. Last year he handmade some 4,600 barrels of ale, about what Anheuser-Busch pumps out faster than I can, on a hot day, finish a bottle of it.

  One September afternoon, the Venerable and I watched Newman brew, and we tasted grains of his various malted barleys, and helped him stir the mash; we sampled the sweet wort (pronounced “wert”), the hopped wort, the green beer, and the finished ale fresh from the maturing tank. Young Newman (to be a microbrewer is to be under forty) wanted to give his city a choice of flavors and fill a vacuum industrial breweries have left as they bought up makers of regional beers. He wanted something distinctively local and good, worth a customer’s effort to find his products, and he planned to make it all himself rather than resorting to contract brewing whereby a larger company turns out a beer according to a recipe provided by a would-be brewer. New Amsterdam of New York City and Samuel Adams of Boston are contract breweries, not micros. But now that demand for Newman’s ales has grown, he uses the Schmidt Brewery in Pennsylvania to make his bottled lager, although he is in attendance.

  From Bill’s old warehouse, Tashmoo and I broadened our search for good beer—beer of another time, we believed—to Rochester, New York, at the other end of the Erie Canal. There the California Brew House (a tavern, not a brewery) offered 178 different labels. We refreshed memories of domestic brews we hadn’t poured in years—like Yuengling’s Porter and Ballantine India Pale Ale—and imports we’d never poured, from Norwegian Aass to Polish Zywiec. “When I was about thirty,” Venerable said over an Old Peculier of peculiar orthography, “I ordered a corned-beef sandwich and a beer. The waitress said, ‘What flavor?’ That was a time when a brand meant a distinctive taste.”

  In October, we learned of a bar in the basement of an old Washington, DC, apartment building where the Brickskeller offered nearly five hundred bottled beers. Before the winter was out, we’d visited twice. Late on the second trip, dedicated to foreign beers, we shared Pfungstadter, Stingo, Gorilla, Leopard, Bombardier, Double Dragon, Damm, Zipfer. As Tashmoo finished half of a Samuel Smith’s Taddy Porter from England and I a Smith’s Nut Brown Ale, I noticed inside our glasses the drying foam created strata called Irish lace. Looking across the table at the other empty glasses still splendidly layered, I pointed out the stratifications, the archaeology of an evening. Tashmoo, raising his glass as if hunting a small shard, said, “Try to get that with a mug of insipid American brewage.”

  At the next table, a man raised his Thousand Oaks Cable Car and said, “You gents need to try a West Coast beer. Meet the future of American brewing.” That was the sentence that offered what was to become a kind of salvation, a knowledge forever bringing either joy or sorrow—the first when you have it, the other when you don’t.

  Still, our quest might have turned out differently had I not misjudged the climate of southeast Alaska and overloaded my backpack with unneeded cold-weather gear. On my way north to write a story about fishing and logging among the Tlingit and Haida Indians, I stopped over in Seattle for an interview. Later, walking down Madison Street toward the Alaska State Ferry slip, and wanting to get from beneath my pack of miscalculations, I happened on the Mark Tobey pub. It was what they call well-appointed, right to the blackboard menu: Scotch eggs, smoked salmon, mushroom canapés, brandied bread pudding. The tap handles gleamed with local names I’d never heard of: Redhook, Pyramid, Bridgeport, Hale’s Pale, Grant’s Russian. Because I liked the name, I ordered a Redhook and lifted the pint for a gargantuan gulp, dimly aware of a fellow watching me. The ale rolled and jumped in my mouth, in my head. It made me drink with palate, tongue, cheeks, nose, throat, and—according to my observer—with my eyes. “Well?” Brian Milbrath asked, and I mumbled it couldn’t be an American who brewed anything like that.

  “Yep, right here in Seattle,” he said. Milbrath understood my need to taste, to fight guzzling, to keep silent for the concentration. “I see you’re not a Wet Air or a Green Death man.” Wet Air is the insanely popular American light beer with the orthographic cuteness which, he believed, was its single claim to distinction. Green Death is a local term for the large-selling green-labeled beer named after the grand Seattle volcano.

  Milbrath told me he was a keg specialist, one who installs and maintains beer-tap systems. While I sampled my way down the draft line, he listed the microbreweries of the Northwest: Redhook, Thomas Kemper, Yakima, Hart, Hale’s, and Kufnerbrau, all of Washington. In Oregon there were Bridgeport, Hillsdale, and Widmer. In California, Sierra Nevada, Palo Alto, Stanislaus, Thousand Oaks.

  Along the entire West Coast, more were appearing. Throughout the region were also brewery pubs,
and in San Francisco was the microbrewery that outgrew the term but retained the quality, Anchor. Seattle is a wellhead for people who honor taste buds as much as appetites: Cooper’s Alehouse had twenty-two taps, eighteen of them microbrews; Jake O’Shaughnessy’s restaurant had a backbar of more than a hundred-fifty bourbons and fifty single-malt Scotches; even a Safeway not far distant sold thirteen roasts of coffee beyond the cans of Maxwell House and Folgers. Seattle, Milbrath was saying, had become the city in America for serious beer explorations because the citizens prefer to taste what they pay for. Maybe it was the frequent vapors of the Northwest coast: Even they had more color, flavor, and aroma than Wet Air. Light beers did not sell here as they do in, say, Phoenix or Cincinnati or Atlanta. In Seattle, it was becoming more difficult to peddle a beer with a lone attribute: chilled wetness.

  The conversation drew a circle around us as if we were rolling dice. Everybody, including one brewing chemist, had a charge to make against the big beer companies. The group hooted down a couple of patently loony claims, but on three there was consensus: (1) Industrial brewers are turning more and more to “heavy” or high-gravity brewing whereby beer is made with strong alcoholic content only to be watered down before bottling. (2) The “beechwood” aging proclaimed by Anheuser does not mean beer stored in wooden casks; rather, it refers to thin strips of wood thrown into the steel maturing tanks. (3) Miller Lite contains propylene glycol alginate, a seaweed extract supposed to leave a residue on the tongue to hold a bit longer what little flavor there is. That charge, the chemist said, could be checked in Chemical Additives in Booze, a booklet published by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Before I got under my pack again to leave for Alaska, I wrote a postcard to Tashmoo: The quest—Next stop, Puget Sound.

  Home again, I bought the booklet and found these compounds listed for Miller Lite: propylene glycol alginate, corn syrup, chemically modified hop extracts, amyloglucosidase, papain enzyme, liquid sugar, potassium metabisulfite. I phoned the company and got spokesman Bob Bertini, who said, “We have no additives in our beers.” I read the list to him. He answered with what sounded like a dismissive snort: “I won’t get into the items one by one, but there’s no way that list is factual. Other than corn syrup, yeasts, hop extracts, and water, we don’t discuss our recipes—for competitive reasons.” Wasn’t that rather convenient? “Look, we’re advertising purity now because we saw a growing concern regarding any product with preservatives or additives. We haven’t changed our beers—we just changed our labels.”

  Tashmoo and I arrived in Seattle on an English spring day—dim and damp—just the kind of weather for a small tap house in the late afternoon with an occasional seagull flapping down the street. Cooper’s, although not in Kerouac’s perfect-bar category, nevertheless had the feel of a neighborhood place, a corner tavern, but this one was a tabernacle of handmade brews and side-order food. Despite the loudly testosteronerated, meathook softball teams which meet there to swill plastic pitchers of Green Death, other customers, although young, generally knew what should and should not be in a glass of real beer. Zymurgy was a serious topic.

  We had just sat down when, as if choreographed for us, over the television came a loud Boom-diddy-boom-boom… Made the American Way!… No preservatives!… No additives!… Purity you can see and trust! To the beer commercial, a young chap called out a common term for male bovine scat. Pleased by my smile, he said, “Clarity ain’t purity! You gonna trust a company that manipulates its beer so it can put it in clear bottles?”

  While the city dripped, the Venerable and I sat snug and judged Northwest handmade. He considered Bridgeport the best, we both deemed Pyramid Ale with its high hoppiness a splendid thing, but I chose the whole line from Redhook Brewing Company: Redhook, Blackhook, Winterhook, Ballard Bitter. I liked moving from one to another. It kept the taste buds alert.

  A man trying to save money—microbeers are about half-again higher—ordered a Bud Light. The Venerable said to him, “If you want to save money, order a seltzer with lemon.” Soon after, Tashmoo, becoming bold as a zymurgical evangelist, lectured a young woman dithering about her thighs and the calories in a Bud Light. “Miss,” he said, “that beer has only a third fewer calories than a regular Budweiser. The same ratio between Miller and Miller Lite. Fifty calories less, that’s it. You know what fifty calories is? A half-cup of soybean sprouts. Light beers are jokes as beer and hoaxes as dietetics.”

  That’s when I reminded him of what we’d seen at lunch in a place downtown: A man—fifties, blue blazer, penny loafers, Wall Street Journal under his arm—ordered a Hale’s Pale Ale, took a single sip, handed it back to the bartender to dump, and ordered a Heineken. The Cooper’s bartender, who’d begun listening in, said, “The beer a guy drinks at twenty-five is the one he drinks at fifty-five.” Considering it, Tashmoo, just beyond the half-century mark himself, said, “Then I should still be drinking Old Wooden Shoe of Minster, Ohio.”

  Over the course of the evening this notion emerged: The microbrewers confront a generation of World War II servicemen who learned beer from the 3.2 percent stuff in olive-drab cans, men who came to believe that taste in beer, like taste in water, was to be avoided. With a younger generation, small brewers must face those brain-stunned by television advertising that has made them unwittingly want to drink only what corporations want to sell. Tashmoo, ever the commentator: “Shape the audience to your product—that’s where you make money.”

  The small brewers of traditional lagers and real ales must address customers who will consider a lo-cal lunch to be a diet soda with a side of fries. Yet, in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Denver, and even Dallas of all places, microbrewers, if not nipping at the heels of the industrials, were at least growling low in the corner. The next day, the Venerable and I went off to a growler.

  The Redhook brewery was in a former transmission-repair shop in Ballard, Washington, near the waterfront of Seattle. Although the lower area was still a kind of seagoing place, now it also had galvanizing companies and genetic-engineering labs. Ballard stood with one leg in the past, one in the future—about the same position as Redhook Brewing.

  Paul Shipman, president of the company, grew up in Philadelphia, was graduated from Bucknell in English literature, received an MBA from the University of Virginia, learned winemaking in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and, in the seventies, sold wine door to door as if it were encyclopedias. When he moved to Seattle, he worked first for a winery even though he had long been passionate about beers of full flavor. He never gave any thought to improving wine, but he knew that beer in the United States was another territory. Travel in England had confirmed how far Americans have strayed from their earlier tradition, but, he told us, “I just couldn’t see any kind of a business in beer.” Then, in 1981, his friend Gordon Bowker, chairman of Starbucks Coffee and Tea Company, gave him “a pitch” about opening a boutique brewery.

  Shipman said, “The brewing industry showed signs of being ripe for a small entrepreneur.” The megabrewers, growing huge by absorbing regional breweries, had such a lust for profit they moved all of their beers toward the middle of a public taste they could create and control. Their lager-style beers became ever less flavorful as they proved Americans would buy slightly alcoholic carbonated water, a solution one small brewer calls “lawn-mower beer—what you drink mowing the yard.” The brewing process changed as zymurgical chemistry developed and per-barrel cost dropped. Industrial chemists found ways to control the highly erratic nature of beer fermentation, methods requiring chemical inducements. “The bigger the scale of operation,” Shipman said, “the safer a corporation wants to be. It moves toward the middle to avoid risk, and chemically manipulated brewing helps reduce risks.”

  With the repeal of the Volstead Act, in 1933, of the some fifteen hundred American breweries in 1918, only about 750 resumed operation. By 1980, of those remaining 750, only forty had survived. But even these numbers deceive: Virtually all of the few regional breweries hanging on today
imitate the industrials by turning out chemistry-set beer. The result? Corporations like Anheuser, Miller, and Heileman have been able to wipe them up like so many wet spots on a bar.

  In the pogrom, the behemoths, as if using the science-fiction novel The Space Merchants as a guide, took on the public taste primarily through commercials and made it serve their ends. But for at least one megabrewer, Schlitz, cost-cutting through abbreviated brewing in the mid-seventies caused sales to drop by half in five years before the Stroh Brewing Company swallowed up Schlitz.

  By 1980 retailers began to notice increasing requests for imported beer, never mind that an import is rarely the same here as in its native land. People, their tastes awakened and maybe even informed by various new American wines of California, looked unsuccessfully for something genuine in domestic beers while buying imports to strike back at corporations controlling choices. Import profits soared.

  Shipman and Bowker noticed all this and in August of 1982 brewed their first batch of Redhook. Emphasizing his qualifying words, Shipman said, “We wanted an individually crafted, top-fermented brew, a real ale made from only the traditional four ingredients—malted barley, hops, yeast, and water. We started with Redhook to create a bold statement, an ale people would not confuse with something already available. If our brew had to be more expensive, then we had to give a customer a reason to change. Well, we got that with Redhook. Today it’s the most radical beer in America.”