Free Travels with Barley by Ken Wells Page A

named Jack McAuliffe, longing for the English-styled ales he’d enjoyed during a tour of duty in Scotland but couldn’t find in America, opened the nation’s first microbrewery, called New Albion, in Sonoma in 1976. Maytag, scion of the washing machine fortune whose operation has always been too large to be considered a true microbrewery, is still doing great business producing what were, when they were first introduced, positively countercultural ales. McAuliffe’s venture was short-lived. Nonetheless both men are credited with jump-starting the craft/microbrew phenomenon at a point when the number of breweries in America was heading for an all-time low. The U.S. entered World War II with about 750 breweries; by 1983, there were only eighty left, consolidated into about fifty owners. The Big Beer juggernaut, led by Bud and followed by Miller and Coors, had among them 92 percent of the market. Craft brewing has had its own ups and downs but the movement has since put about 1,500 new breweries and brewpubs into operation, creating a renaissance that has made America “the best place in the world ever to drink beer,” Jim Koch at Boston Beer told me. (Much more about this later.)
    At any rate, I’d been to formal wine tastings before but never to a formal beer tasting. I was curious to see what it would be like.
    I arrived a bit early and got a chance to schmooze with David Rehr, the NBWA’s congenially pugnacious president, whom I’d met earlier at his Alexandria, Virginia, offices on an early fact-finding and source-scouting mission. Rehr is a stocky man with a quick smile who carries himself with the bearing of a prizefighter. He is nothing if not plainspoken—well, actually, outspoken—and the NBWA reflects his cheerfully combative attitude. It takes a certain kind of personality to stand toe-to-toe with, for example, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), the organization that has successfully pushed for stringent drunk driving laws in America, and to argue that lowering the drunk driving threshold from an alcohol blood level of .10 to .08, as MADD has pushed for, is wrongheaded because it diverts attention from the fact that it’s the .10 and above offenders who are chief culprits in fatal accidents. But Rehr (pronounced Rare) does this kind of thing matter-of-factly, mostly because he is positively missionary in his belief that beer, consumed responsibly, is good for the body, soul, and spirit, not to mention good for the economy and thus good for the country. The main function of the NBWA, along with the Beer Institute, the lobby arm of the big beer makers, is to keep a keen and protective eye on Washington and the statehouses for Big Beer.
    Outwardly, in fact, this event seemed an odd pairing since Rehr and Bradford essentially represent the opposite ends of the industry: Rehr, Big Beer; Bradford, Little Beer. I was starting to learn that tensions between the camps are real and sometimes palpable. They try not to squabble publicly because that’s considered bad for beer as a whole, though public squabbles happen. In a nutshell, Little Beer chafes at Big Beer’s power over the channels of beer distribution (most beer wholesalers in America make their money off of Bud, Miller, and Coors), not to mention Big Beer’s gorilla-sized marketing muscle. Big Beer gets tired of what it sees as Little Beer’s constant self-adulation, and its chronic insinuation that Big Beer makes mass market swill that Americans drink only because they’re suckers for glib advertising. (It’s actually more complicated than this, but more about the NBWA and beer politics later.)
    However, this was exactly the kind of event—good news about beer—that Beer People of all stripes like to rally around. Beyond that, beer makers themselves are constrained from directly touting any health benefits on labels or in advertising, thus it’s up to trade groups like the NBWA and