Free Travels with Barley by Ken Wells

one-time director of the Great American Beer Festival held annually in Denver, and is currently president of the Brewers’ Association of America (BAA), a group largely composed of the nation’s craft and microbrewers. I’d never met Daniel but I’d spoken with him on the phone numerous times and knew him to be not just a fount of beer knowledge but temperamentally of a type I would increasingly run across on the River of Beer: a total Beer Guy, magnificently obsessed by beer and everything about it. Bradford, in fact, has a beer marriage; his wife, Julie, is editor of All About Beer , a beer drinkers magazine with about 25,000 subscribers that she and Daniel bought about ten years ago.
    The newsy health angle aside, such an event also seemed a good way to get a ringside seat to the craft beer phenomenon, or what seemed to me could be called the Uptown Beer Movement. The folks in Bradford’s organization prefer other terms: the Real Beer Movement is one, the New Brewing Movement another. These designations, I came to learn, were essentially the result of the microbrew crowd, a quarter of a century into their effort to remake beer, seeking a better description of what they were about.
    The technical definition of a microbrewery is one that brews 15,000 barrels of beer or less annually. (Bud, by comparison, brews more than 100 million barrels a year.) But size alone seemed an odd barometer of quality and it didn’t necessarily describe the kind of beer being brewed. Plus, it didn’t fit onetime microbreweries, such as Sierra Nevada, that have grown too large to fit the definition, or well-thought-of regional breweries, such as Yuengling, a family-owned enterprise in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, that make some beer styles interesting enough to fit into the craft beer mold.
    The pairing-beer-with-food wrinkle was new to me—it was clear that this was not about washing down pizza with beer. In fact, I’d learned that craft brewers like Garrett Oliver at New York’s Brooklyn Brewery were these days seeking to align themselves with the Slow Food Movement, a kind of confederacy of high chefs, restaurateurs, and wine makers organized in Italy in 1986 that styles itself as the anti-McDonald’s. Adherents advocate a return to a kind of old-world quality and craftsmanship in the preparation and consumption of food and drink, with an emphasis on using ingredients made by local or regional artisans—the mom-and-pop cheese and bread makers, the free range chicken grower, the organic olive farmer, and the like.
    Oliver, Brooklyn Brewery’s brewmaster and one of the few high-ranking African-Americans on the U.S. beer scene, had dedicated much of a recent book he’d written, The Brewmaster’s Table , to the notion that craft beer belonged in this company, arguing that well-made beer can be as rich, flavorful, and interesting as fine wine, and thus an able companion to food. Indeed, I’d heard him and other craft beer people make the argument that because beer has more ingredients than wine—malted barley, hops, yeast, and water compared with grapes, yeast, and water—it potentially offers more complexity of flavor.
    Now, this view—indeed, the very notion of haute beer—may strike the Bud crowd or even more neutral observers as more than a bit overblown. But I’d chatted with Oliver one evening at a craft beer bar in Manhattan called the Blind Tiger where he’d come to flog his book. His main point was, “real beer is to mass market beer like a loaf of fresh-baked bread is to store-bought Wonder Bread. My feeling is that both wine and beer reach their best expression with food, but that beer is by far the most versatile partner.”
    The seeds of all this got planted (where else) in California in the 1970s. First came Fritz Maytag’s revitalized bottling in 1971 of Anchor Steam ales at the Anchor Brewing Co. in San Francisco; then, an ex-navy man