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Washington has led the way in reviving the craft brew business, starting in the 1980s with a few breweries in Seattle. Today close to a hundred small-time brewers, including Fish Brewing Company in Olympia, have taken up the crusade. The brewers are out to tempt a new generation of beer drinkers by tweaking traditional recipes and crafting new organic ales (above). Photo by Robert Hubner.

Prohibition changed home brewing as well. The raw materials for beer were in abundance, but brewing spirits in your own kitchen was still against the law, which stigmatized what for many families had been a way of life.

In 1979 California senator Alan Cranston introduced federal legislation to make home brewing legal again. President Jimmy Carter signed it into law and sparked a revolution. Stores started stocking and advertising beer-making materials. Well-traveled beer fans like Charlie Papazian, author of  The Complete Joy of Home Brewing, announced that there was more to the beverage than the few lagers America could find in its stores. In their own homes and kitchens, brewers rediscovered stouts, ales, and bocks. What people like Papazian were saying, and what the homebrewers discovered, was that it really wasn't that hard to make a good beer, and that there was something out there to suit anyone's tastes.

After honing their beer-making skills, many home brewers went into business, starting up the first modern microbreweries and boutique beer-making operations in the country. Again, the West Coast was a center of activity, particularly Seattle. In the early 1980s, Redhook's founders, Gordon Bowker, who started Starbucks, and Paul Shipman, a former wine maker, were serving European-style brews in an old brick trolley car barn in Fremont. They noted that Seattleites were big tap-beer drinkers, and they understood the charm of a local beer. Their Trolleyman pub, a warm haven on a rainy day, tapped into that near-forgotten nostalgia for the old-world beer hall, where anyone, this time including women, could step inside, have a beer, and unwind.

A century after the first brewing boom in Washington, beer was back. Kalama's Hart Brewing released its first Pyramid Pale Ale. Thomas Kemper started producing lagers out of Poulsbo in 1985. Hales Ales opened its doors in Colville.

And Seattle had its share: Noggins, the Pike Place Brewery, and the Big Time Brewing Company.

In 1989 James Bockemuehl and several business partners recreated the Fort Spokane Brewery. Housed in an old brick hotel in downtown Spokane, it drew customers eager to sample the award-winning Red Alt and Bulldog Stout. It was a lively time for beer in Spokane, says Bockemuehl. The Fort Spokane shared the city with at least three other microbreweries, and none of them were hurting for business.

But in the mid-'90s, microbreweries all over the state hit a plateau. Domestic consumption of beer had declined from a high point in the 1980s. Many of the early efforts, including the Fort Spokane project, did not survive. "It did produce some great beer, but did not have proper management," says Bockemuehl, a financial advisor for whom opening a brewery was a side project.

In a recent annual report, Redhook's managers attribute the drop in business to changing tastes, citing concerns over health and safety, and attitudes towards beer of a generation born after World War II. Many had traded their craft beers for cosmopolitans and martinis. It may also be that those home brewers who started commercial breweries in the late 1980s didn't have the stamina or the business plans to keep going. "They may have not had enough of a cushion for challenges," says Arlen Harris, head of the newly formed Washington Beer Commission.

Arlen Harris '93, head of the newly formed Washington State Beer Commission, gave up a job making beer to go into lobbying and marketing on behalf of the state's craft brewers. Photo by Robert Hubner.

Like many of the craft brewers, Harris started home brewing in college. Little did he know his hobby would become a career. The notion of home brewing came to him after a visit to his uncle in Bellingham. "We made beer together and sampled some beer from a previous batch," he says. "The flavors and aromas that filled the kitchen—it was just a blast." Harris could make home brew in his college apartment for less than the cost of two cases of cheap beer, and it tasted better.

After graduating in 1993 with a liberal arts degree, he landed a bank job at "a desk in a back office staring at a computer screen all day." When a friend with a brew pub in Anacortes called asking for help, Harris jumped at the offer. He worked eight years at the La Conner Brewing Company as assistant and then head brewer, before getting tagged by Rogue Brewery. As a member of the brewing community, Harris got a taste of the issues facing the craft breweries in the region. It's a highly competitive market. First the beers have to compete with the mega-beer corporations, which dominate beer sales and flood the market with their products. Then the local breweries have to compete with a new wave of craft brews from Colorado, Oregon, and California. And lastly, beers from around the world have arrived on our supermarket shelves. More than 90 percent of the beer consumed in Washington comes from out of state.

In a way, that's good news for the consumer, says Harris. Now more than ever, the consumer has the most choices. But it's bad news for the small-time brewers. Something had to be done to give the modern braumeister a boost, says Harris. First, a Washington Brewers Guild was reorganized in 2000 to lobby the state legislature and local governments on behalf of the beer makers and build a community of brewers. Together the breweries work on issues like supporting a bill allowing brew pubs one additional retail location, and another that would strengthen laws regarding stolen metal, including kegs.

Harris has traded his life as a brewer for that of a lobbyist, moving to Olympia to work on behalf of the guild as its executive director. His efforts to unite the craft breweries in the state paid off in November, when, after polling the state's 82 craft breweries, Washington Department of Agriculture approved a Washington Beer Commission to market for and promote Washington's microbreweries.

The brewers are taking a leaf from the book of Washington's wine industry, which started its own commission in the 1980s and has since developed an international reputation for high-quality wine. The experience of the wine industry shows the brewers that by joining together to market their beers, they can reach a wider audience, says Harris. In the 1970s Washington had no wine at all. Today it has more than 450 wineries and a worldwide reputation. Washington's beer is just as unique and high in quality as its wines, says Harris, and it's more affordable and was part of the landscape when the state was founded. "I think beer goes better with food than wine does," says Arlen. "I might want a pinot noir with my tenderloin, but if I'm having oysters on the half shell, I want a pilsner from a local brewery."

The beer commission is supported through a 10-cent fee on every barrel. The money will be well spent, says Harris. "First and foremost, we want to educate the people of Washington. When you go to the store, buy local beer. It's better simply because it's better. And it's fresher than buying beer from out of state."

With all the history and the past success of the microbreweries, why aren't craft beers, particularly Washington's, more popular?

Maybe it's time people start thinking of beer as less of a blue-collar beverage reserved for sports events and the summer. It's a treat, a regular feature at the dinner table, and part of our history.

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