Acitelli weaves the story of American craft beer into the tales of trends such as slow food, the rise of the Internet, and the rebirth of America's urban areas. The backgrounds of America's favorite craft brewers, big and small, are here, including often-forgotten heroes from the movement's earliest days, as well as the history of homebrewing since Prohibition. Through it all, he paints an unforgettable portrait of plucky entrepreneurial triumph.
This is the "book for the craft beer nerd who thinks he or she already knows the story" (Los Angeles Times), an "excellent history" (Slate) "lovingly told" (Wall Street Journal) for fans of good food and drink in general.
Acitelli weaves the story of American craft beer into the tales of trends such as slow food, the rise of the Internet, and the rebirth of America's urban areas. The backgrounds of America's favorite craft brewers, big and small, are here, including often-forgotten heroes from the movement's earliest days, as well as the history of homebrewing since Prohibition. Through it all, he paints an unforgettable portrait of plucky entrepreneurial triumph.
This is the "book for the craft beer nerd who thinks he or she already knows the story" (Los Angeles Times), an "excellent history" (Slate) "lovingly told" (Wall Street Journal) for fans of good food and drink in general.
The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution
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Overview
Acitelli weaves the story of American craft beer into the tales of trends such as slow food, the rise of the Internet, and the rebirth of America's urban areas. The backgrounds of America's favorite craft brewers, big and small, are here, including often-forgotten heroes from the movement's earliest days, as well as the history of homebrewing since Prohibition. Through it all, he paints an unforgettable portrait of plucky entrepreneurial triumph.
This is the "book for the craft beer nerd who thinks he or she already knows the story" (Los Angeles Times), an "excellent history" (Slate) "lovingly told" (Wall Street Journal) for fans of good food and drink in general.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781613737118 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Chicago Review Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 480 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Audacity of Hops
The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution
By Tom Acitelli
Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 2017 Tom AcitelliAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61373-711-8
CHAPTER 1
THE LAST SHALL BE FIRST
San Francisco | 1965
On a breezy, warm day in August 1965, Fritz Maytag walked into the Old Spaghetti Factory on Green Street in San Francisco's trendy North Beach neighborhood and ordered his usual beer: an Anchor Steam. Fred Kuh, the restaurant's owner, ambled over.
Kuh was a bit of a local eccentric in a city increasingly full of them amid the trippy 1960s counterculture. He was a Chicago stockbroker's son and World War II veteran whom legendary San Francisco newspaper columnist Herb Caen would label "the father of funk." Kuh rented a small flat in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood, crammed with Victorian baubles and knickknacks, and called himself "a bohemian businessman." The Old Spaghetti Factory Cafe and Excelsior Coffee House was his greatest triumph. He opened it in 1956, converting a defunct pasta factory into what the San Francisco Chronicle described as the city's "first camp-decor cabaret restaurant," complete with chairs hanging from the ceiling, beaded lampshades, and secondhand furniture from brothels. Kuh plucked a fortuitous moment: his factory became among the few venues in town that San Francisco's beatniks — and later hippies — would frequent, a reliable lefty redoubt that even became the unofficial local headquarters of Adlai Stevenson's doomed 1956 presidential campaign against the staid Dwight Eisenhower.
Fritz Maytag was no beatnik, though it was difficult to pin a label on him just yet. A trim Midwestern transplant with wire-rimmed glasses, close-cropped brown hair, and pointed eyebrows that gave him the appearance of either perpetual bemusement or skepticism, he had come westward originally to attend Stanford, where he earned an American literature degree. He then spent a few years doing graduate work in Japanese through the university, even living a year in the Far East. After president John F. Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, he told himself he had to move on, that what he was doing in grad school "was very minor." He dropped out and moved to San Francisco to collect his thoughts. Twenty-five, married, and the father of two children, Maytag found himself in the midst of what would one day be called a quarter-life crisis. He knew only that whatever path his life was supposed to take ran through the West rather than through any place on the Rockies' other side. He was just in San Francisco to figure it all out.
And he was just in the Spaghetti Factory for what had become his favorite beer — he tasted his first Anchor Steam five years before in the Oasis bar near campus in Palo Alto. It was the only beer Kuh ever had on draft. He loved the idea of a local brewery.
"Fritz, have you ever been to the brewery?" Kuh asked, nodding to the beer that was the color of dried honey and that spawned a head like lightly packed snow. Kuh was a fan of the beer; he liked to patronize local goods made by other San Franciscans.
"No."
"You ought to see it," Kuh said. "It's closing in a day or two, and you ought to see it. You'd like it."
The next day, Maytag walked the mile and a half from his apartment to the brewery at Eighth and Brannan Streets and, after about an hour of poking around, bought a 51 percent stake. When the deal closed on September 24, he controlled what was about to become America's last craft brewery. It was a risky business move, but Maytag could make it. His great-grandfather and namesake, Frederick Louis Maytag, the eldest of ten children born to German immigrants in central Iowa, had founded the Maytag Washing Machine Company more than sixty years before. Frederick Louis's son E. H., moreover, had bought a herd of Holstein cows to raise on the family farm in Newton, about thirty-five miles east of Des Moines. His son, Frederick Louis II, used those Holsteins — and some help from the dairy science department at Iowa State — to churn out a notable blue cheese brand modeled after the Roquefort style in France. And, like the French, Frederick Louis II aged the blue cheese in caves: two 110-foot-deep ones dug into the family farm in 1941. His eldest son, Fritz, grew up surrounded by the cheese business; in fact, he would inherit it in 1962, when Frederick Louis II died. Before that, he'd been sent east, to the elite Deerfield Academy in rural Massachusetts, for boarding school and then west to Stanford. The blue cheese of his father, though, would play a pivotal role not only in Maytag's life but in the culinary life of the United States. It was one of those seemingly uniquely American intersections of moxie and chance.
Maytag bought control of the Anchor Brewing Company for what he later described as "less than the price of a used car" in 1965. Like many a used car, it was in sad shape: cramped, the equipment run down, only one employee with not all that much to do. Maytag could cover the purchase and early operating costs with his inheritance. What of his business acumen, though? What would a literature degree and three years of Japanese studies cover? More important, while Maytag was an unabashed fan of Anchor's signature steam beer, he himself knew nothing about brewing, much less craft brewing — a term that had all but disappeared from the national lexicon.
The signature beer that Maytag made his own was perhaps unique in the world. Steam beer has no one agreed-upon genesis, no creation story (or even myth), though just about all who've looked into it, including Maytag, agree it was developed in California. After that, take your pick. The brewery itself has said, "Anchor Steam derives its unusual name from the nineteenth century, when 'steam' seems to have been a nickname for beer brewed on the West Coast of America under primitive conditions and without ice." The Journal of Gastronomy said the "steam" referred to the "volatile, foamy" behavior of beer from San Francisco when it was warm. Some said it was the additional yeast called for in original steam beer recipes — thus more foam from more fermentation. Others said the inventor was named Pete Steam; others contended steam actually used to rise from a freshly popped bottle top; still others dismissed it all as a mere marketing ploy because of the nineteenth century's fascination with newfangled steam power or as an incongruous byproduct of the Gold Rush (Anchor was originally founded in 1896 and had gone through several owners before Maytag). What was definitively known was that Anchor Steam was amber colored and produced a thick, creamy head when poured properly. Its alcohol content ran to nearly 5 percent per volume. The beer had a slightly bitter taste and a smooth, almost citrusy finish. And, despite its heavier ale-like mouthfeel, it was a lager.
That was important. Maytag's brewery was part of a centuries-old continuum that had found its place in America only a few generations before. Lager yeast, which sank to the bottom of vats during fermentation, birthed a lighter, clearer type of beer that did not spoil as easily as what had become by the early 1800s the world's most popular type: ale. Ale, its yeasts hearty and virtually invulnerable to temperature, could be brewed and fermented just about anywhere. Lager, on the other hand, derived from the German verb meaning "to store," could be brewed only at cooler temperatures — thus its development at the tail end of the Middle Ages in the Bavarian Alps. Lager did not take hold in America until the late 1800s, with the advent of industrial refrigeration, pasteurization to goose its shelf life, and faster ships to transport its mercurial yeast across the Atlantic before spoilage. Once it did, lager, lighter on the palate and less complex in taste than ale, was off to the entrepreneurial and dynastic races. American beer production, driven by lighter and longer-lasting lagers, particularly a Czech-born style called pilsner, spiked.
Competition was fierce, financial reward relatively fast and immense. Brewing became a feature of the landscape of big business in the same baronial age as Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and J. D. Rockefeller. From the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the First World War forty-nine years later, America's domestic commercial production of beer increased sixteenfold, from 3.7 million barrels annually to 59.8 million (one barrel equals thirty-one gallons, or roughly 320 twelve-ounce bottles). More revealing, even though the nation's population grew during this half-century, the per-person rate of beer consumption grew as well. Beer became the de facto national drink, displacing whiskey, rum, and other spirits atop the tippling totem poll — thanks again in no small part to the central European immigrants, who not only eschewed the heavier ales born in Britain, Ireland, and especially Belgium, but who also incorporated lagers into their daily lives, oftentimes drinking on the job without taboo. By 1915, the average American adult was consuming 18.7 gallons of beer a year, up from barely 3 gallons in 1865.
And the beer they drank was a local thing. Breweries and the beers they brewed were delineated by geography. What you got in Cleveland, you couldn't get in Brooklyn; the brands in Pittsburgh would seem unusual to someone from San Diego. The nature of beer was a big part of this: it was a foodstuff that tasted best fresh and could spoil after a few weeks in the bottle or barrel. It was best, then, to have it produced nearby. Every big city — and several smaller ones — had at least a couple of breweries, and some had a lot more than that. St. Louis and Milwaukee were each home to dozens; Brooklyn, New York City's most populous borough, by the 1870s had forty-eight breweries, most clustered in German immigrant neighborhoods (a stretch of North Eleventh Street in Williamsburg today boasts street signs harking back to when it really was a "Brewers' Row"). Philadelphia had about one hundred at one point. From 1865 to 1915, the average American brewery went from producing 1,643 barrels a year to 44,461, and the number of breweries nationwide rose to as high as 2,783. Beer seeped into the national consciousness — president Teddy Roosevelt was known to hoist a cold one and took more than five hundred gallons of beer on safari in 1909 — and it became a cultural fulcrum on which so much of the nation's collective memory turned. Indeed, most beer during this time was consumed in public houses — bars, taverns, locals, pubs — and served from barrels and kegs tapped with colorful tabs; the technology of packaging beer, especially in aluminum cans, had not yet caught up to the demand.
Not that it mattered. On January 29, 1919, came the Eighteenth Amendment: Prohibition. Producing any commercial beverage with over one-half of 1 percent of alcohol became illegal. Following repeal at the federal level in December 1933, American brewing reemerged into a new business environment that size rather than geography quickly defined. Breweries wanted to get as big as they could as fast as they could, and they did this as would most any industry: through mergers and acquisitions. The number of American breweries shrank to 684 by 1940. From 1935 to 1940 alone, with the backdrop of the Great Depression and its grinding unemployment, the number of breweries nationwide fell by 10 percent. Some cities, such as New York, never really recovered their pre-Prohibition status as brewing hubs. There, the number of breweries dropped steadily, through consolidation and simple economic stress, until by the early 1960s there would be only a few left. The same was true three thousand miles away.
At 2:31 in the afternoon on December 5, 1933, word reached San Francisco that the Twenty-First Amendment repealing Prohibition had been ratified. The siren on the city's Ferry Building facing the mainland United States sounded, and fourteen trucks trundled up Market Street to City Hall to present mayor Angelo Rossi with cases of spirits and wine.
While some of San Francisco's windy, wending streets literally ran with booze over the next few days, the actual situation for retailers and for manufacturers was a different matter entirely. Not only had Prohibition wiped out, through neglect and police action, much of the infrastructure for commercially producing alcohol, but San Francisco also emerged from the dry years into a business climate stultified by what was being called the Great Depression. Until the 1930s, Americans had applied that term to the economic downturn of the early 1870s; but this more recent one was something else entirely, with over one-fourth of the eligible American population out of work and no social safety net to catch them and their families. In San Francisco, the number of unemployed jumped an estimated 47 percent from 1930 to 1931. Such statistics got worse and worse for months, and then years, until a cruel reality seemed to settle over the City by the Bay like so much fog.
Into this fog stepped Joseph Kraus. A German immigrant steeped in brewing, Kraus was part of a trio of owners who had kept Anchor going after its original owners, Ernst Baruth and his son-in-law Otto Schinkel Jr., died more than a decade before Prohibition (Schinkel was killed in 1907 in a fall from a San Francisco cable car just as a fresh version of the brewery was going up at Eighteenth and Hampshire Streets). In the spring of 1933, eight months before repeal and with the state's OK, Kraus reopened Anchor a few blocks north, at Thirteenth and Harrison, only to have the brewery burn down the following February (a fire, spawned by the Great Earthquake of 1906, had also destroyed a previous location). Tragedy of a more bromidic kind struck Anchor after Kraus and a partner, brewmaster Joe Allen, reopened yet again at another spot: demand waned so much that Allen, by then the sole owner following Kraus's death, closed the brewery in 1959.
And why not? American tastes in beer were homogenizing, and breweries were consolidating, the Big Beer ones such as Schlitz, Anheuser-Busch, and Pabst either gobbling up smaller competitors directly or rendering their market shares to a trifle. By the start of 1959, the five largest breweries produced over 28 percent of the beer Americans consumed, a jump of 10 percentage points since the end of World War II. That market share would grow to nearly half within a decade, and most of the beer would be a distinctly watery interpretation of the lager style called pilsner. At the same time, new technologies were revolutionizing the way brewers distributed their beers and how Americans drank them. In January 1959, Bill Coors, a Princeton-trained chemical engineer who would later chair the brewery that his grandfather founded, introduced the seven-ounce aluminum beer can; by 1963, with the introduction of the pull-tab opening, aluminum had supplanted tin as the preferred metal for canning beer, as tin sometimes dissolved into the beer. (Despite his pivotal role in this reverberating technology, Bill Coors, asked in 2008 by a Colorado newspaper to name the biggest change during his seventy years in brewing, replied, "That so many breweries have gone out of business. ... When an industry starts to consolidate, you either get consolidated or you consolidate.")
As much as it was once a local product, beer was also something that Americans consumed largely communally: in bars, taverns, pubs, and restaurants; at ballgames, political rallies, and celebrations such as weddings or graduations. Such technology as the aluminum can — and the proliferation of home refrigeration and the development of the Interstate Highway System starting in the mid-1950s — ensured that such communality was doomed. Throughout the 1950s, breweries packaged more and more beer for wider distribution, hundreds of cases at once rumbling over America's new highways, to be shelved in freshly built supermarkets (a word that itself entered the national vocabulary during that decade) and to be drunk in dens and living rooms just beyond the flickering penumbras of thousands, then millions, of rabbit-eared television sets. By the end of the decade, breweries sold well over eight in ten of their beers in packaging — aluminum cans in a six-pack, glass bottles along the beverage aisle. Various state and local governments abetted the trend away from communal to private consumption. Crime associated with Prohibition-era speakeasies having spooked them, legislatures made it more difficult for new watering holes to open. At the same time, a three-tier distribution system was emerging that ran from producers to distributors (or wholesalers) to retailers, ensuring that the bigger the producer the more influence in the distribution system.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Audacity of Hops by Tom Acitelli. Copyright © 2017 Tom Acitelli. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Foreword: Everything Conies from Somewhere Tony Magee xiii
Author's Note xvii
Prologue: America, King of Beer xix
Part I
The Last Shall Be First: San Francisco | 1965 3
Do It Yourself: Dunoon, Scotland; Fairfax County, VA | 1964-1968 12
Beer For Its Own Sake: Okinawa, Japan; Portland, OR | 1970 16
Eden, California: Davis, CA | 1970 22
TV Dinner Land: San Francisco | 1970-1971 24
Lite Up Ahead: Munich; Brooklyn | 1970-1973 29
"Brewed Through a Horse": Los Angeles; Chicago | 1973-1978 33
The Most Influential Beer: San Francisco | 1974-1978 37
Chez Mcauliffe: Sonoma, CA | 1976 41
The Bard of Beer: London | 1876-1977 47
Long Days, Longer Odds: Sonoma, GA | 1976-1977 50
Part II
Tipping Points: Boulder, CO; Washington, DC | 1978 57
"Small, High-Quality Food Places": Sonoma, OA | 1978 66
The Bearded Young Man From Chigo: Chico, CA | 1978 69
The Fireman and the Goat Shed: Novato, GA; Hygiene, CO | 1979-1980 73
The West Coast Style: Chico, CA | 1979-1981 78
Mayflower Refugee: Boulder, CO; Manhattan | 1981-1984 83
How the Brewpub Was Born: Yakima, WA | 1981 88
The First Shakeout: Sonoma, CA; Novato, CA | 1982-1983 90
"That's a Great Idea, Charlie": Boulder, CO; Denver | 1982-1984 94
The Third Wave Builds: Manhattan; Virginia Beach, VA; Portland, OR; Hopland, CA | 1982-1984 97
The Lesson of the Nylon String: Newton, MA; Boston | 1983-1984 109
"This Connoisseur Thing": Manhattan - Estes Park, Colorado | 1983-1985 113
Because Wine Making Takes Too Long: Belmont, GA | 1985 118
More Than in Europe: Boston; Kalamazoo, MI | 1983-1986 120
Beer, It's What's With Dinner: Washington, DC: Portland, OR | 1983-1987 127
Vats and Dogs: San Francisco | 1986-1987 136
To the Last Frontier and Back: Juneau, AK; Amana, IA; Baltimore; Boston | 1985-1986 140
Weeping Radishes, Scottish Lords, And Roller Coasters: Portland, ME; Park City, UT; Missoula, MT; Plano, TX; Abita Springs, LA; St. Paul, MN; Manteo, NC; Vernon, NJ | 1982-1986 147
Here, There, and Everywhere: Denver | 1987 157
Part III
Unhappy Meals: Rome | 1988 163
Second Careers: Brooklyn | 1986 164
Davids and Goliaths: Boston | 1986 167
Five Hundred Miles in a Rented Honda: New Ullm, MN | 1986-1987 170
New York Minutes: Brooklyn; Manhattan | 1987-1988 171
The Revolution, Televised: San Francisco; Cleveland; Chicago | 1987-1990 174
A Manifesto and Arnold Schwarzenegger: Venice, Italy | 1990 180
The Value of Gold: Utica, NY | 1991 183
"The Tyranny of Fast Growth": Baghdad, Iraq; Marin County, CA | 1991-1994 185
Finding Role Models, Defying Labels: Philadelphia; New Glarus, Wl; Burlington, VT; Fort Collins, CO | 1991-1983 191
Ghosts Around the Machines: Washington, DC | 1993 195
Cherry Brew and Naked Hockey: Manhattan | 1992-1993 197
In Prime Time: San Francisco | 1994 199
Critical Mass: Durham, NC | 1995 203
The Potato-Chip Epiphany: Kailua-Kona, HI | 1993-1995 210
The Brewpubs Boom: Denver; Palo Alto, CA | 1993-1995 214
Suds and the City Brooklyn | 1995 218
Attack of the Phantom Crafts: Denver; St. Louis | 1994-1995 221
"Buduook" and the Bull Beer Market: Seattle; Portsmouth, NH; Frederick, MD | 1995-1996 225
Last Call for the Old Days: Hopland, CA; Portland, OR; Portland, ME | 1995-1997 233
Big Beer's Biggest Weapon: Kansas City; Merriam, KS; Chico, CA | 1996 238
The French Lieutenant's Coat: Brooklyn | 1996 243
To the Extreme: Rehoboth Beach, DE | 1995-1997 246
The Total Package: Petaluma, CA | 1995 251
Boos: Boston; Pittsburgh | 1996 255
The Movement's Biggest Setback: New York; Philadelphia | 1996 262
Lucky Bastards: Los Angeles; San Marcos, CA | 1996-1998 272
A Tale of Two Breweries: White River Junction, VT; Philadelphia | 1996-2000 278
The Great Shakeout: Nationwide | 1996-2000 283
Victory Abroad, Defeat At Home: Palo Alto, CA; Boston | 1997-2000 285
Part IV
Plotting a Comeback: Atlanta | 1998-2000 293
"Mcdonald's Versus Fine Food": Manhattan | 2000 298
Craft Beer Logs On: Boston; San Francisco; Atlanta | 1999-2001 300
Growing Pains Again: Brooklyn; Cleveland | 2000-2003 308
Still the Latest Thing: Guerneville, CA; Oklahoma City, OK; Houston | 2002-2005 318
Crushing It: Lyons, CO | 2002 324
With Gusto: Manhattan; Boulder, CO | 2003-2005 328
A Great Passing: London | 2007 334
Beer, Premium: Durango, CO; New Orleans | 2006-2008 337
Exit the Godfather: San Francisco | 2009-2010 345
Big Crowds and the New Small: Santa Rosa, CA | 2010-2011 351
"The Albion Brewery": Sonoma, CA; Denver | 2011-2012 355
Forty-Two Hundred and Counting: Nationwide | 2012-2018 358
"Drink Socially": Santa Monica, CA; Roosevelt Island, NY | 2010-2016 361
Graft Beer Turns 185: Pottsville, PA | 2014-2016 365
Conquering Europe: Fraserburgh, Scotland; London; Rome; Grimstad, Norway; Moscow | 2002-2015 373
The Stockholm Affair: Stockholm; Hallertau, Germany; Berlin | 2013-2016 379
Lessons from Heraclitus: Azusa, CA; Amsterdam | 2014-2016 383
Big Beer Feasts: Chicago; long Island; Los Angeles; Tempe; Seattle; San Diego | 2011-2018 386
Billion-Dollar Worries: San Diego | 2015-2018 390
"The Future Will Not Be Like the Past": Nationwide | 2015-2016 397
Epilogue 403
Acknowledgments 409
Notes 411
Bibliography 459
Index 463
What People are Saying About This
“This is the story of how the “Kingdom of Beer” was returned to the drinker by little guys and gals who loved beer. It’s about the nurturing of the beer epiphany in a time when word of a revolution in the making was passed on one glass of brew at a time. The Audacity of Hops is an absorbing reflection on what goes into every glass of homebrew and professional craft-brewed beer in America. Impassioned millions have taken the kingdom back.” —Charlie Papazian, author, The Complete Joy of Homebrewing and the founder of The American Homebrewers Association
"Everyone who cares about good beer owes Tom Acitelli a huge thanks: his history of American craft beer is lively, substantive, and thoughtful. It’s time to celebrate—and I’m buying the first round.” —Maureen Ogle, author of Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer
"The Audacity of Hops chronicles the rich history of America's craft brewing revolution with deft portraits of the resourceful pioneers, the innovative brewers and the intrepid entrepreneurs who are changing the way the world thinks about the wonderful, inexpensive beverage, beer." —Steve Hindy, cofounder of Brooklyn Brewery, coauthor of Beer School
“This book is a delightful read, painstakingly researched, often humorous, and filled with stories that breathe life into the birth of our industry.” —David L. Geary, president of D. L. Geary Brewing Company.
“This is a highly quaffable and enjoyable craft beer book. You can crack open a section or two , pour over it for an hour or so, and familiarize yourself with the moments and luminaries who contributed heavily to the American brewing renaissance. This is heady stuff.”– Sam Calagione, President and Founder, Dogfish Head Craft Brewery
“[Tom Acitelli]’s thorough research into the craft beer revolution tells a great story and shows how a ragtag yet purposeful group of passionate individuals can build an industry. He did an amazing job capturing the voice of the early characters, improbable tales, and astounding passion that makes up the craft brewing community.” —Ken Grossman, founder, Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.
“All of us in the craft beer business have stories to tell about the American Craft Beer Revolution. Tom Acitelli has woven them together into a fascinating history- adventure story where good beer is the hero. This is an exciting telling of the history of our industry with a happily-ever-after ending for beer lovers all over the world.” —Jim Koch, Founder and Brewer of The Boston Beer Company, brewer of Samuel Adams Boston Lager
“Don Younger, the legendary publican who helped Portland, Oregon, become “Beervana,” once said, “We didn’t know we were making history, nobody does at the time, or we would have written these things down.” Tom Acitelli has discovered an astonishing amount of what did get written down, then done the legwork to find his own story about a new age in American beer.” — Stan Hieronymus, editor and founder of Appellation Beer