WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL, I WAS IN LOVE WITH Busch Light. Since I was just seventeen, I kept this affair secret. Busch and I met only on weekends, long after my parents were deep in their sugarplum dreams.
Long past the witching hour, my band of suburban Ohio miscreants would congregate in my backyard. As moonlight bathed our pimply bodies, we would climb into my parents’ hot tub armed with a frosty 30-pack of Busch Light purchased at a lenient beer-and-wine drive-through and watch Geoff assemble his latest invention. Geoff was an engineering whiz who, these days, maintains the navy’s nuclear submarines. His smarts were paired with a deviant streak. During high school, that meant constructing things like flame-powered potato guns and, more pertinent to this story, colossal beer bongs.
For the enlightenment of those who did not attend public college or join a frat, a beer bong is a funnel attached to plastic tubing. Though it recalls a torture tool, something that the boys at Gitmo might have dreamed up, we would fight to insert the tube betwixt our jaws. On the count of three, a Busch can was cracked and dumped into the funnel. Gravity sent the foamy brew racing down our gullets like a burst dam. If you finished the funnel, we cheered. If you vomited, we cheered—quietly, lest my parents rustle. When we were seventeen, the beer bong was a portal into an adult universe. We pretended to be mature by pounding Busch.
That early conditioning, combined with a healthy dose of advertising, convinced my taste buds that Busch Light was America’s best beer. My belief endured through my undergrad days at Ohio University, when I’d occasionally flirt with wincing Natural Ice—Natty to those in the know. And when it came to beer, I knew no better. My peers cared about quantity, not quality. Me too. Why spend $10 on a six-pack when the same money could purchase 24 cans of inebriation? Or perhaps a half dozen 40-ouncers of Phat Boy, the malt liquor made with ginseng?
My Tastes Improve with Age
I graduated in 2000 with a journalism degree as worthless as a week-old newspaper. Nursing a case of wanderlust, I embarked on a cross-country road trip with my platonic pal Bari. She and I steered west, across Kansas and Nevada and up California’s coast-hugging Highway 1. The scenery was as rugged as our fights were fierce. Bari and I were polarized magnets, drawn apart by proximity. By the time we reached Great Falls, Montana, we made like bananas and split. “Just drop me off at the Greyhound station!” I screamed, gathering my belongings. “Where are you going?” she asked. “I don’t know!” She screeched off in a cloud of dust, just like they do in the movies.
At the bus station, I sat on a bench and pondered my future. I had a pack of smokes. I had total freedom. I had nowhere to go. On a payphone, I called a friend in Boulder, Colorado, and pled my plight. “Come on down. We’ll drink some beer.” Twenty bumpy, sleepless hours later, I arrived at my friend’s home. I was greeted with hugs and a trip to the megastore Liquor Mart. Wandering the aisles stuffed with six-packs bearing then-foreign monikers such as Avery and New Belgium and Boulder, I felt as clueless as a newborn lamb. My friend bought a sixer of Avery IPA, and we headed home.
“What is that?” I asked my host, cradling the bottle as if it were a rare talisman.
“It’s from Colorado,” my pal said. “It’s a nice, bitter India pale ale.”
I took a sip. My taste buds were pummeled with citrus and sweet caramel, with an aroma of resinous pine needles. This was Fourth of July fireworks compared to the wan sparklers to which I’d become accustomed. I sought out other local elixirs, such as Boulder Brewing’s hoppy, unfiltered Hazed & Infused and Flying Dog’s floral pale ale. Though I was in the land of Coors, I thirsted for more flavor than the Silver Bullet could offer.
After a wasted week, my friend Aaron called. “What are you doing out there?” he asked. “Drinking.” “Well, do you want to come get a drink in New York City?” Aaron and his then girlfriend Emily had just moved into an apartment in heavily Greek Astoria, Queens. They had a free bedroom. Did I want it? My other option was returning to Ohio to split a bunk bed with my younger brother. New York, here I come.
Big Apple, Big Beers
Unlike the average New York transplant, I had no dreams of conquering the Big Apple. I wanted only to drink good beer, hit dive bars, eat dumplings, and pay my meager rent. By day, I toiled as a temp receptionist at financial firms, learning to answer phones with a polished, honeyed “Hello, how can I help you?” By night I hit bars downtown, searching out great microbrews such as Victory’s bracing and bitter HopDevil and crisp Brooklyn Pennant Ale. These were heady, hop-filled times, where every cooler contained another six-pack portal to a new, ever-more-delicious drinking world.
After several increasingly disillusioned years of temping—and thousands of dropped calls—I dusted off my journalism degree. I began writing about the alehouses I uncovered and the beers I consumed. The alternative weekly New York Press hired me to pen a column on my nighttime ramblings. I wrote beer articles for Time Out New York and New York magazines. Then beverage magazine Imbibe asked me to start writing beer-focused features, followed by a gig at the dearly departed Gourmet as its online beer columnist. This led me to consume more delicious beer than most livers process in a lifetime. One evening, it would be a stout aged in bourbon barrels. The next, a sour ale spiked with virulent yeasts. Each beer was wilder, weirder, and tastier than the next. Like any good junkie, I always wanted more.
I flew to Portland, Oregon, to partake in the Oregon Brewers Festival, then checked out the English-style ales of Portland, Maine. San Francisco, Philadelphia, Austin, Asheville—I navigated the nation in search of the finest brews and brewers. I traveled light so I could pack beer into my luggage. Pint by pint, I was sampling a liquid revolution. And every revolution needs an intrepid chronicler.
However, Brewed Awakening does not begin in 1965, when Fritz Maytag bought what became the Anchor Brewing Company. It also doesn’t kick off with Ken Grossman hand-delivering clattering cases of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. And sorry, Jim Koch, but I’m not rehashing Sam Adams rolling off the bottling line. While this book could not have existed without their tireless efforts, Brewed Awakening looks to now.
The Revolution Has Arrived
Concerning beer, the last decade has witnessed more seismic changes than any time since Prohibition. There are more than 1,700 craft breweries in America, from community-based nanobreweries to the new breed of national brands such as Dogfish Head and Stone. Untethered from stodgy tradition and driven by unbridled creativity, American brewers are leading a boundaryless charge into the global future of beer.
In the United States, the bitter India pale ale has birthed the burly, super-aromatic double IPA. Alcohol percentages have climbed above 10 percent, on par with wine—and now join pinot noir at dinner tables and on tony restaurants’ drink lists. Wild yeasts have been harnessed and are used to inoculate beers that, in the best way possible, taste like a barnyard. Naturally carbonated cask ales have now achieved cult status. And brewmasters have begun aging their creations in wooden casks that once contained bourbon, brandy, chardonnay, and even tequila, reviving techniques last seen more than a century earlier.
But it’s not all happening in America. Brewed Awakening explores the creative fringes of craft brewing, touching down in Nebraska, Norway, New Zealand, and everywhere that better—or stranger—beer is being made. I dig into the oddball hops making beer taste like white wine or tropical fruit, and how IPAs have turned to the dark side and brewers are acting an awful lot like farmers. I find beer styles, like salty gose and tart Berliner weisse, that have been saved from extinction. I walk the blurry line separating amateur and professional brewers, and uncover pint-size breweries popping up in basements and garages. I interview brewers taking beers to extremes, wresting out wild flavors seemingly designed in a mad scientist’s lab. Salt and coriander in beer? Why not? How about low-alcohol beers as flavorful as suds that are twice as strong? Or a brew made without barley or wheat? No problem, thanks to the world’s Brewed Awakening.
You’ve already cracked this book. Now crack a beer. Next round’s on me.
