Before World War II, the United States supported hundreds of beer breweries, almost all of them regional. Upstate New Yorkers enjoyed Genesee and Rheingold beers, Milwaukeeans swore by Pabst and Schlitz, and for years loyal Los Angelenos had been buying streams of cheap, reliable Eastside beer and Brew 102.
After the war, as brands like Budweiser and Miller began pursuing all-out national marketing strategies, many of the America’s regional and local breweries succumbed, unable to counter the glamour of the mega brands.
Unfortunately, with the demise of the small breweries, U.S. beer drinkers were consigned to sipping a sorry lot of watery, tasteless carbonated brews, deliberately insipid-ized to appeal to the broadest possible mass market.
Even brands that had successfully managed to establish a national presence while keeping a distinctive taste foolishly gave in to the trend toward formulaic brews that could be pumped out cheaply in quantity. The boys in accounting loved it; the brew masters endured it.
Schlitz, the country’s number-three brand in the early 1970s, decided to change its formula and substitute cheaper ingredients so it could pad its bottom line. The company’s managers reasoned that American beer drinkers’ taste buds had been so stunted and atrophied by a generation of indifferent brews that they’d never notice the difference.
Bad decision: Schlitz fans caught on right away and raised a stink so big that the brand never recovered. By the end of the decade, it was almost as hard to find Schlitz in a beer case as it was to find Old Gold or Lucky Strike cigarettes.
But good can come of bad. Surviving small brewers took heart that there was still a constituency of drinkers who liked beers with taste and character. In San Francisco, Fritz Maytag, heir to the washing machine fortune, sank money into an old brewery and began producing limited quantities of tasty, hoppy beer, Anchor Steam. It soon had local aficionados raving like wine buffs about mouth feel and lingering after taste – a kind of enthusiastic discussion that hadn’t been heard among beer drinkers in years.
In Boston, Jim Koch started the Boston Beer Company in 1984, an enterprise he dedicated to making small lots of hand-crafted beer. His first product, Samuel Adams Boston Lager, reached all of 500 barrels in 1985 – a drop in a swimming pool compared to the prodigious output of a Budweiser or Miller.
But word was out. Those relatively few Massachusetts and Connecticut beer drinkers who’d had the lager began spreading the word about it, underlining their passion for it by declaring they weren’t ever going back to regular beer.
Koch further reinforced the mystique around his lager when he got the West German government to approve its sale in Germany. The famous Reinheitsgebot, Germany’s 400-year-old “purity” law had declared that beer sold within its borders could only be made from water, yeast, malt and hops. That simple requirement had acted as a fool-proof moat around the domestic beer industry for centuries, shutting some of Europe – and America’s – greatest beers out of the German market.
Koch’s German coup put his lager on the national map. Along with Maytag’s West Coast product, it emboldened entrepreneurial beer lovers nationwide and led to the microbrewery movement. If tasteless mass-produced beers were the dinosaurs of the beer world, the microbreweries became its little mammals – darting around in the underbrush, happy to live in the shadows even as they inexorably begin gnawing at the supremacy of the big guys.
The Boston Beer Company operates a museum that shows visitors the history of regional brewing, equipment from years past and demonstrations of current brewing techniques. In the U.S., it’s as close to an official beer museum as we’re going to get for awhile. Until Milwaukee gets its proposed municipal museum of beer history up and running, it’s the beer companies that run the venues dedicated to preserving beer brewing history.
Because Jim Koch and his upstart company did so much to restore taste and quality to American beer, we’re willing to point readers in the direction of his museum. (The writer of this article is a Rainier Ale man and doesn’t really like lagers all that much.) Besides, it’s in Boston, where there’s also a million other pleasant things to do.
By Patrick Totty
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