Free The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution by Tom Acitelli

of the Eighth Street brewery on Don Saccani’s trucks in 1975, America’s only craft brewery still was not turning a profit. What to do? Maytaglooked at the calendar and saw a chance for further innovation wrapped in a marketing opportunity: the nation’s two-hundreth birthday, which was fast approaching.
    Maytag had the year before finally started to brew his signature steam beer consistently enough that it arrived to vendors, whether in kegs or bottles, tasting the same time and again. He had also developed the idea for an Anchor Porter, a darker, richer ale once all the rage in nineteenth-century England (its name supposedly came from its popularity among porters along the new railroads). The brewery that Maytag bought in 1965 had been producing a dark steam beer by adding caramel coloring; he discontinued that and brewed a real porter. To his and his crew’s surprise, they learned that no commercial brewery in England was producing one; the Anchor Porter brewed and kegged in the winter of 1972 would be the first in modern times. It was a seminal moment in the nascent American craft beer movement: a brewery from the New World supplanting any in the Old in one of its signature beer styles. Anchor Porter was first bottled on July 17, 1974, and hit the backs of Saccani’s trucks.
    Around that time, Maytag and Gordon MacDermott traveled to England to survey the beer scene—in particular, to case any good ale styles perhaps worth Anchor’s imitation. What they discovered instead was the genesis for an American original that would embitter a generation of beer drinkers. Maytag and MacDermott visited the family-run Timothy Taylor brewery in bucolic Keighley, West Yorkshire, and sampled its Landlord, described by one leading critic as “a bitter with a color of pale honey and a wonderful aroma of hay, earthy with deliciously bready grain flavors lingering in the aftertaste.” Landlord was distinguished by its fruitiness and its “very full-flavored hop presence,” not by any sweeter malt concentration. It was a bitter beer, but one, oddly enough, refreshing in its bitterness.
    At this point, it’s important for our story to step back and learn about the importance of hops in beer, as they will come to play an outsized role in the American movement. Unlike grains, which serve a more utilitarian role in brewing, hops, along with yeast, can make or break a beer as far as its style; and many craft brewers would come to define themselves by their use of hops. Hops are the flowers of humulus lupulus plants. Since the Middle Ages, they have been used as the primary bittering agent in beer. Hops also help stabilize a beer’s foam (or “head”) and act as a preservative. They grow mostly in Northern Europe, particularly Germany and the United Kingdom; Australia and New Zealand; and, especially, the Pacific Northwest. Once harvested, hops can be added throughout the brewing process as pellets or cones, includingafter fermentation (when their addition is called “dry hopping”). They can be added during the earlier “bittering” stage of brewing or the later “aromatic” stage. Until about the early 1970s, no US-grown hops were considered by even domestic brewers worthy of being used in the aromatic stage to give a beer a certain scent; instead, American hops were used for bittering and European hops for aroma.
    Finally, hops are delicate flowers—stored or shipped too compactly or loosely, or under the wrong temperatures, and they can lose their intended flavors and therefore ruin an entire batch of beer. Partly because of this mercurialness, Big Beer after Prohibition stopped using large quantities of hops in their brewing batches; Big Beer’s lagers usually had as little as two ounces of hops per barrel. *
    More than anything, though, the American postwar palate—weaned on soft drinks, fruit juices, sugar-packet bins beside automatic