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

coffeemakers, and Tang—had simply grown unaccustomed to bitterness in drinks. A brewer by the early 1970s would be foolish to produce a drink many times bitterer than a cup of coffee. Consequently, most American beers of the time registered on the low end of the zero-to-one-hundred International Bitterness Units scale used to measure beer’s bitterness. A bottle of Miller Lite, for instance, was around ten IBUs.
    The idea that Maytag took from Timothy Taylor in West Yorkshire back to Anchor in San Francisco would end up creating a beer with as much as four times that bitterness. First, the idea. The nation was turning two hundred, and Maytag figured that a lot of breweries, big and small, would be doing special brews—or, at least special packaging—to commemorate the bicentennial. Maytag opted out of the scrum by deciding to brew something to commemorate the two-hundredth anniversary of Paul Revere’s April 18, 1775, ride through the Boston area to warn of a British attack. It also undoubtedly imbued what he brewed with a delicious dose of irony, since the beer would be an ale in the tradition of what he had tasted in England, particularly the Landlord at Timothy Taylor.
    Maytag found the hop he would use via a friend from his early ownership of Anchor in the 1960s. John Segal was a second-generation hop farmer with land in Upstate New York as well as the Yakima Valley of Washington. Segal’s father, George, discovered hops while selling cheese door-to-door in the 1920s, during Prohibition. Hops then were available through retailers, including candy stores—ostensibly for brewing tea. George learned the hopstrade from one of his customers, and for a time he had a sales office across from Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal, complete with a walk-in refrigeration room for storing and showcasing varieties. George’s son developed a reputation in the industry as someone willing to take risks in the pursuit of new varieties of hops for the marketplace. And it was a risk: for every new variety of hop that made it into a commercial beer, there were several, perhaps dozens, that flopped in the experimental phases.
    One of John Segal’s Oregon contacts, a USDA researcher named Chuck Zimmermann, who would help create some of the world’s most used hop varieties, was growing just such an experimental strand—known at that point only as “56013”—at the USDA’s Corvallis, Oregon, hop-breeding farm overseen by Alfred Haunold, himself a major force in hops cultivation. On a 1968 visit to the farm, Zimmermann showed Segal 56013, which was born in 1956 of a lineage that included Russian and English hops. Segal rubbed it between his fingers and liked what he felt; he took some roots back to his Yakima Valley farm for cultivation. Coors had already approached Segal about using an American-made hop for aroma because of concerns about pesticides in European hops and a blight that hit Central European yields in the late 1960s. The farmer suggested 56013. In 1972, Coors brewed a test batch and liked it; the brewer bought Cascades at one dollar a pound, a half to one-third more than what other hops commanded. The exact origins of the name remain unknown (maybe it had to do with the Oregon mountain range), but the Cascade hop as a going concern was born. It was the first widely used, American-made aroma hop and the first hop variety from the USDA’s hop research program to be OK’d for sale since Prohibition. Its scent would help define American craft beer.
    The first craft beer to use it was what Maytag decided to call Liberty Ale in honor of Paul Revere’s ride. It was bitterer than any domestic beer on the market and more robust in flavor than even many imports, especially the German and Czech pilsners that had come to be the rubric for Big Beer. The recipe would evolve over time, and Anchor did not have the capacity to brew it regularly; but that original Liberty Ale