The Pale Paradigm

A recurrent theme through a lot of these blog posts goes something like this: I hate seeing good beer taken for granted. 

It’s not hard to connect the dots between the birth of American craft beer & the countercultural revolution of the sixties.  The original craft brewery – Anchor Brewing Company – was bought & transformed by Fritz Maytag in San Francisco, 1965.  By all accounts, Fritz did not fit the stereotype of asixties revolutionary; he was a pretty clean-cut, college-educated young man from a capitalist lineage.  But no doubt some of the stirrings of northern California in the sixties crept into his consciousness, & may have caught Maytag during a drifting stage of his young adulthood.  Other notable upstarts of craft beer’s second wave, over a decade later, were Jack McAuliffe (a long-haired engineer) & Ken Grossman (a bearded engineer) - again, not exactly hippies, but maybe modern pioneers.  Sixties California was also the birthplace of the organic movement, with the idea that going off the grid & homesteading was utopian in its own way.  The revolution starts with what you grow & eat, & better living unfolds from there, was the mentality.  This DIY push helped birth a greater interest in homebrewing, which really paved the way for the craft beer industry.  [Disclaimer: I didn’t experience the sixties firsthand & have never been to California, but this is what I gather with the benefit of historical perspective.]

And so a handful of homegrown geniuses applied this ethos to brewing, bucking the mainstream & doing something different on their terms.  Part of my understanding of the cultural revolution was that a big catalyst for the shift in consciousness & lifestyle came from the deliberate swapping of alcohol for cannabis as an agent for euphoria (Paul Bowles writes about this excellently).  No doubt, there were plenty of other factors & motivations, but the use of pot (& then LSD) signaled a shift in thought, a new paradigm upon which this culture could build itself.  I see a parallel in the big/little beer dichotomy.  The establishment was awash in lager (& pretty homogenous, at that).  Those who had been abroad had tasted the diversity of beer in the old country & wanted to expand the culture back home in the states.  The revolution in beer built itself on a new paradigm: pale ale.  Pale ale, in itself, was not new, but the west coast upstarts presented it through the new lens of American hops, in particular the Cascade hop, bred at Oregon State University in 1971.  Cascade itself was revolutionary, bolder in flavor & aroma than anything around at the time.  Sierra Nevada’s Pale Ale, mind-blowing for the time in its foregrounding of Cascade, set the stage for pretty much every hoppy beer that’s come down the pike since.  Not coincidentally, the Grateful Dead really found it to their liking.  As pot was to the hippies, pale ale was to the new generation of brewers, built on an affinity for pot’s cousin, hops.  People still play off the “dankness” of uber-hoppy beers, & there are plenty of IPAs with head-inspired names & artwork. 

Anyway, where was I going with this?  Oh yeah – pale ale is the keystone of craft beer.  It’s entrenched in the American scene & has fathered a huge family through its child prodigy, IPA.  On a personal level, I’ve really reconnected with American pale ale lately.  As much as I love the stuff all the other beer geeks are into, I also gravitate toward the overlooked, the “mundane”.  APA is often taken for granted – it’s not crazy or over-the-top.  It’s seldom infused with wacky ingredients.  It tends to be presented simply & honestly, wherein lies its charm.  It’s kind of a calling card for a brewer, a level playing field – okay, you can do a soufflé, now give me the best grilled cheese you can make.  Not overly complicated, but done well, solid, balanced.  I’ve found myself cooking more than I used to; I like to drink a beer when I cook, & nothing goes better with cooking than a flavorful, bright pale.  As relatively restrained as they are (at least compared to today’s extremes), I don’t think I’ve found two alike – each have their subtle variations (this one’s a little more nutty, this one’s more bready, another more citric…).  It’s like a brewer’s handshake. 

So yeah, my show of respect for the often over-shadowed, underappreciated American pale ale, both on a macro & a micro level.  It’s a drink with a significant history, & something worth revisiting when you get the chance.  Craft beer as we know it wouldn’t be what it is without it.  And if anyone who was an actual participant in the sixties & seventies wants to offer some more insight or enlightenment, please do so.

Hats off, once again, to Tom Acitelli’s The Audacity of Hops, as well as The Oxford Companion to Beer (edited by Garrett Oliver) for providing some of the factual info above.