Mildred: “Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?”
Johnny: “Whadda you got?”
This famous exchange with Marlon Brando as Johnny in the movie The Wild One is a great starting point for a discussion of brewing locally in America at this moment in time. Americans are blissfully rebellious in nature. It is awesome to see so many American brewers (pro and home) brewing outside the box in 2016, the 500th anniversary of the German purity law, the Reinheitsgebot.
The pilgrims who settled the Plymouth Colony in the northeast United States, like ancient brewers around the world, brewed beer with whatever beautiful, natural ingredients they could find that came from the earth. They tasted lovely, fermented miraculously, and made them feel closer to their gods and ancestors. Today it’s no different. The rise of small breweries we are currently enjoying here in the United States is often called a revolution by the media. That’s inaccurate. It’s a Renaissance, not a revolution. Prior to Prohibition, there were over 4,000 indie, artisanal, small-scale breweries making distinct regional beers in this country. For everything you have heard about the rise of craft beer in the last four decades as a nation, it took us until 2015 for the number of independent, commercial breweries in this country to eclipse the national high set prior to Prohibition. This is a return to form. The indie craft brewing Renaissance is on. The Reinheitsgebot has been righteously marginalized by today’s intrepid and adventurous homebrewers and craft brewers. This Renaissance is a sort of pilgrimage as well. A return to our early-American brewing roots. (Sometimes literally brewing WITH roots). And to borrow a line from R.E.M., “the pilgrimage has gained momentum.” There is a more specific and (I may be biased) more amazing craft micro-Renaissance happening within the greater craft Renaissance today. As the reader of Brewing Local: American-Grown Beer will soon discover, Stan has done a wonderful job digging beneath the surface, rooting through the history, and foraging the fruitful forests of today’s most adventurous American breweries to bring this micro-Renaissance to light. The Renaissance within the Renaissance is the one where we as intrepid home and craft brewers are bringing back brewing ingredients beyond water, hops, yeast, and barley.
All the stereotypes of postcolonial America are tied up in this story that Stan tells so well. Americans are fearless. We relish opportunities to express our ingenuity. And I think this trait has been amplified in our DNA from generation to generation. Perhaps our colonial brewing ancestors made beer with parsnips and mushrooms, corn and fruit, because they had to. Perhaps they made it with those ingredients because they damn well wanted to, and if you don’t like it don’t tread on me.
Many of us who are students of the American brewing story know the story from the journal of a Mayflower passenger. A strong argument can be made that the settlement in Plymouth was founded on our thirst for beer. Upon setting up camp, our colonial brewing ancestors learned they would need to apply their faith in human ingenuity if they were going to slake their thirst for beer. High-grade, well-malted brewers’ barley wasn’t exactly growing on trees here in the New World. So they began to forage for fermentable sugar sources, for herbs and spices, that they could throw into pots to make their beer.
What an amazing and rewarding journey of vindication and unexpected triumph we have taken part in as today’s American home and craft brewers. Think about it: The Reinheitsgebot is 500 years old; the United States, as a country, is almost 250 years old. As recently as 40 years ago, America’s commercial brewing industry was the laughing stock of the international beer enthusiast community. Eric Idle of Monty Python fame told a joke about that long ago: “How is America beer like having sex in a canoe? It’s f*$%ing close to water.” By the time he made that joke, nearly all of the color, distinction, and diversity of the American beer landscape had been blighted by a handful of massive industrial brewers. Where we once had thousands of distinctly different beers being brewed in this country pre-Prohibition, by the 1970s a single style, the domestic light lager, had pretty much annihilated the diversity we once enjoyed. It was only in the late ’70s and early ’80s with the first waves of the homebrewing and microbrewing movements that we began to get some of that color and diversity back.
God bless brewers such as Bert Grant, Jack McAuliffe, Ken Grossman, and Carol Stoudt for having the guts to make first-generation craft beers that were local and flavorful, and far removed from the light lager behemoth that nearly eclipsed our commercial brewing landscape. The first generation of American homebrewers and microbrewers did the heavy lifting. They built a bridge from light lager terra firma to FLAVOR ISLAND. They brewed diverse styles of fresh local beers, using the world’s best ingredients without cutting costs or corners on their creative journeys. They opened up the American beer consumer’s eyes/mind/gullet for experiences beyond the light lager norm—and we all thank them for it.
It was the second generation of homebrewers and craft brewers that opened the door to the craft brewing Renaissance.
Stan documents the stories of some of these critical breweries within this book: New Glarus, Alaskan Brewing Co. (two of my favorite breweries in the country), and Dogfish Head. When we opened Dogfish Head as the smallest commercial brewery in 1995, we wanted to stand for the ideal of focusing on off-centered ales for off-centered people. We did this by taking a stand against the Reinheitsgebot. The majority of our beers were brewed outside the law back then and the majority of beers we currently brew stand outside that law today. I believe the Reinheitsgebot is nothing more than a relatively modern form of art censorship. When we opened our doors selling beers made with coffee, chicory, maple syrup, and raisins, it wasn’t considered cool or progressive. We were mostly looked upon as weirdos and heretics by the dominant beer community of the time. Over the last decade or so, it has been awesome to see how much momentum home and craft brewers alike have brought into the world of experimental brewing and in our shared approach to considering the entire culinary landscape as the entry point for beer recipe construction.
As Stan writes in Brewing Local: American-Grown Beer, “It is impossible to discuss the role of place without including the notion of terroir.” One of this book’s great attributes is the way Stan takes the reader on a journey—not just through the beer brewing community, both professional and hobbyist, but also through the agricultural community. Moreover, he celebrates how much these things overlap.
In 2016, I was proud to take part in Sierra Nevada’s Beer Camp. Thirty passionate and creative brewers teamed up to produce six different beers from six different regions. The terroir of our geographically different homes is proudly reflected in each of these unique but complementary beers. For example, Pat-Rye-ot, the Colonial beer of my northeast team, includes pressed apple juice from Vermont and Delaware, small batch malted rye from Massachusetts, and old-timey cluster hops. The Midwest team's beer, Family Values, incorporates its own local ingredients such as Indiana Honey, Minnesota rice, Missouri oats, and Illinois toasted cocoa nibs. The ingredients included in these beers are similar to the ingredients Stan has used to brew up this fine book: creativity, curiosity, a patriotic pride in our collective brewing ingenuity, and respect for the land from which our bountiful, wonderful ingredients grow. Stan has written a zeitgeist book for a zeitgeist moment. This book is literally all over the map, and that is a beautiful thing. Namaste.
Sam Calagione
President and Founder, Dogfish Head