By Dick Cantwell

The Redness of the Ale

What the red ale is to Pete's, and Miller and Anheuser-Busch has been hinted at in their advertising and the marketing of their products; what it has been to me has remained unsaid...

Some years ago, when I was working at my first brewing job and augmenting my hours by bartending, I was regaled by a customer who chose to see a lyrical parallel in his assessments of beer and women. The blonde, he said, pointing to the palest of my three offerings sitting there along the bar, held a universal appeal: she was bright, she was fair, she was pure. Some men, he said, shifting his aim, were fiercely loyal to the dark mystery of the brunette or raven-haired woman. But every man (and now he pointed upward, in declaration), held a special place in his heart for a reckless and fundamental attraction to the redhead. And as he concluded he held aloft a pint of what we called a red ale.

Of course I wanted to throw up. The equation of mystery women and beer is poetry best left to ad agency bards, those ablest to metaphorically reconcile a squirt of caramel coloring with a leggy, russet-haired model touting "the temptation of red" as captured in a can of Killian's. But shallow and objectionable as his extemporizing may have been (and despite the amused and indulgent looks of his co-workers and wife -- I forget what color hair she had), he was taking a stab at explaining the appeal of what I knew to be our best-selling beer, and which type is these days filling shelves again and again.

What is a "red ale," anyway? A bitter? Some kind of alt? Or is it just an amber ale, anything brewed with a percentage of crystal malt or a dash of dark roasted grain sufficient to give it some color? Or is it simply marketing?

It came from California, born in the early days of the microbrewery movement. Back then every brewpub in the Golden State, it seemed, had an amber beer they called "red," usually to commercially complement something pale and yellowish and something dark. Maybe it was an anti-fundamentalist feeling at-large that proscribed stylistic identification as stuffy and Old World. Maybe it was something reactive to the nothingness of the pale American beers that had ruled for so long. Maybe it was simply that in its infancy, the movement needed basically descriptive words to appeal to a customer base considerably less in-the-know than it is today. The red ale I brewed and poured had its roots in California, as the recipe I had been given to work with had been brought north to Seattle by my employers from a place they had had in the Napa Valley. We named it after a fish, I recall.

Now, of course, it's a nationwide phenomenon, under the micro-styled rubric. Pete's of Palo Alto (or is it St. Paul?) has introduced Pete's Wicked Red. Blitz-Weinhard has tentatively stretched the envelope with Henry's Red ("fiercely smooth," the ads ahem). And even the biggest industrials have joined the fray. Anheuser-Busch's Red Wolf bays at the moon in a kind of malt-liquorish bid for the barroom voyageur, and Miller has responded to the industry-wide call of the wild in a particularly twisted way with its simply-dubbed Red Dog beer. "You are your own dog," its ads fiercely state, at the same time ducking the obvious inference that it might now be, or at any time in the past have been, a beer even sympathetic to red. So prized, in fact, was the combination of the mere words red and dog to the Milwaukee Monolith that some hundreds of thousands of dollars were funneled into the previously modest coffers of Washington's Onalaska Brewing, which had had the good fortune to unassumingly market a beer called Red Dawg. Some bone. And we won't even talk about the demi-semi-subsummation by the St. Louis Leviathan of Seattle's own (well, three quarters Seattle's own, anyway) Red Hook.

Is there, after all, something compelling and wonderful about the very color? This red hair thing isn't going away, after all, micro-styled henna production facilities having perhaps anticipated our industry's yearning for the reckless and rufous. Blood and fire are the obvious associations with red -- is this simply a bit of vacarious throat-rending made market-accessible to the ranch house neanderthal? Or, keeping things in more or less paleolithic terms, is this just the next step beyond the ice age (itself having followed the less in-your-face ages of dry and light)?

There does seem to be something gemütlich and fundamental about settling in with an amber beer. Perhaps this is that patch of common ground on which we can all agree, hoisting our bottles, cans and straight-sided pints of reddish brew, raising our voices in comeradely song..."It's a small world, after all..." Or perhaps it's just the latest silly chapter in the saga of an industry that never fails to provide an enormous amount of entertainment.