The Origin of the Species

by Dick Cantwell

In 1988, at the age of thirty-one, I brewed my first batch of homebrew. Several months later, having received an unexpectedly large 1989 tax refund, I flew from Boston, where I was living at the time, to San Francisco to head up to Davis for a three- or four-day program on the craft brewing phenomenon then blooming about the country like the first hits on the Missile Command game I had loaded on an 800K floppy disc for my Mac Plus computer. Among the speakers was an ATF agent; a representative of a fabricating company somehow tied in with the Davis cabal; Jean-Xavier Guinard, a UC Davis graduate student who within a couple of years would publish the Lambic stylebook; Phil Rogers, a fellow then operating a brewery restaurant in Calistoga who was later to be my first brewing boss; Daniel Bradford, who this spring in Seattle was awarded the Brewers Recognition Award for various exploits but who then was managing the relatively fledgling Great American Beer Festival. And of course the indomitable Dr. Michael Lewis, who was actually quite nice to us.

The level of expertise among the seventy or so participants in the course was far lower than you’d expect today, of course. I, for example, had yet to brew my first all-grain batch of beer (though I doubt I admitted that to anyone, concerned as we all were with nodding a lot and taking the whole thing very seriously). Even one of the graduate students, showing us around the Food Sciences department test brewery—a homebrew system to die for, I can tell you—pronounced trub turb. Very few of us had any restaurant management experience to speak of; we all wanted to open production breweries.

In the course of the long weekend we were indoctrinated, not just in the areas abovementioned, but in the general notion of potential brewpub profitability versus the squeaky margin on wholesale kegs. That part still makes sense to me, but it’s safe to say not enough was said about the importance of a tightly run restaurant side of things. The phenomenon was new back then, and couldn’t miss. There was something of a glow about the whole proceedings—we were pioneers, all of us, and even if we weren’t the first pioneers, enough had been tried already for us to set ourselves up with only minimal possibility of error or failure. If we listened.

The Davis lovefest concluded, I went back to San Francisco to stay with my college friend Lucy (for whom my daughter was more or less named) and her boyfriend Thad, who by ludicrous synchronicity had just won an AHA gold medal for his brown ale. As a member of the San Andreas Malts homebrew club he knew lots of brewers in the Bay Area, some of whom were just then making the leap into the professional realm. In the following few days we visited some of the new brewpubs in the area, and I met some of the people who are still among my closest industry friends. Marin Brewing had just opened that week, and Grant Johnston (later of Third Street Aleworks, Zero Gravity and Black Diamond Brewing) was brewing his first large-scale batches; Teri Fahrendorf, long-time executive brewer in the Eugene-based Steelhead empire, was working at her first job in Oakland at a place called Golden Gate (where some months later she would sustain the very serious burn that many of us remember each time we implement a hot water hose connection in our own breweries). Ed Tringali, who I believe was then working at Triple Rock, was not one of the people I met on that trip, but Thad did provide me an entrée to him when less than a year later I moved to Seattle and walked into Big Time, Triple Rock’s clone.

Within a few months of my arrival in Seattle I found myself, with about a year and a half’s homebrewing experience, in charge of better than a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of brewing equipment in a startup brewery/restaurant (somewhere in there I had made the jump to all-grain). That particular brewery unfortunately didn’t last, but I did; my career was begun.

Would all that happen the same way today? Possibly, but probably not. Presuming the same level of passion and commitment, these days I would probably try to see my way clear to do something along the lines of one of the hybrid programs offered by the American Brewers Guild. It is by no means as easy now to cold-call the way I did when I moved to Seattle, but through local and statewide brewers’ guilds it’s easier to put one’s ear to the ground in the way of assessing general opportunity. Oh yeah, and there’s the internet.

But who are the people who these days are rising to be the next generation of brewers? One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about the wave I’ve been a part of—and I certainly don’t consider it the first—we mainly got jobs working for the people who were the real pioneers—is that before we were brewers we mostly all did something else first. We were writers, photographers, business people, scientists, bicycle mechanics, ski bums—and one of us went to Yale. It’s made for a lot of good interdisciplinary brewhouse—and bar—conversation, and a lot of different perspectives on the curious blend of art, science and improvisation that we practice. More people now are definitely going to school, actually learning how to do what many of us have been either too busy or too lazy to take the time to formally pursue. A solid theoretical grounding is definitely a good thing. A lot of my practice amounts to nothing more than witchcraft, like walking into the cellar to glare at a tank suddenly pouring foamy beer (it works often enough to keep trying). In some cases there is literally a second generation, as kids of brewers and beer enthusiasts become brewers. The main thing is that craft brewer is now a career option, and not just a blind leap. You won’t catch me saying one way is better than another, or crying over the old days—let’s not forget some of us made seven dollars an hour in the old days, or volunteered our services for beer. Considering that in this country not much more than a generation ago brewers constituted an endangered species, we’ve come a long way. Like the bison, the alligator and the bald eagle, we’re back.