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Roger Sherman on The American Brew

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This is a Vintage Selection from 2007

The Banter

The Guys chat about the FDA prohibiting a drink named after an illicit substance and permitting a formerly illicit substance for US consumption.

The Conversation

The Restaurant Guys host Roger Sherman, Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker who created An American Brew: The Rich and Surprising History of Beer in America. Roger tells of beer’s roots, how it survived through Prohibition and what’s happening now 

The Inside Track

The Guys are beer buffs and have quite a collection of imported ageworthy selections and American microbrews. Roger explains why we do beer better in the U.S.

“You know, you talk about Czech beers and German beers. If you go to that town in Germany, you. Can drink that incredible beer that's been brewed for 400 years and not a lot else. I guarantee you there's a brewery in America that makes that same beer. And 12 other varieties of it. Because we're American, we say, ‘Gee, that's good, but what if we put this in it. Let's put extra spices in it. Let's put spruce tips in it. Let's do something else.’ And that's why America is really the place to brew and drink,” Roger Sherman on The Restaurant Guys Podcast 2007


Bio

Roger Sherman is a director, producer, cinematographer, photographer and author. His films have won two Academy Award nominations, an Emmy, a Peabody, a James Beard Award. 

His subjects include social issues, the environment, food, art, history, science, and culture.

Info

Roger’s documentary 

An American Brew: The Rich and Surprising History of Beer in America 

https://www.florentinefilms.com/sherman/2014/07/02/american-brew/


Check out Roger’s other films

https://www.florentinefilms.com/sherman/#



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Mark:

Morning, mark. Hey Francis, how are you this morning? Very well. You know what we're gonna talk about? Uh, what are we gonna talk about? Cocaine. Oh, don't sing. Jackson Brown. Running all around now. Just very old. My brain. Very old. There it is. Very old.

Francis:

If you keep talking over me, I'm gonna sing it until you stop. We're gonna talk about cocaine. I know it's a restaurant show on food and wine, but some genius has, uh, uh, come up with an energy drink.

Mark:

I like to say he's very genius,

Francis:

has come up with an energy drink, uh, that he named, well, cocaine, and then he put it out on the, on the stores, on the markets. And so you could walk into stores recently and get yourself a bottle of. Cocaine, cocaine. Not surprisingly, the FDA had a little problem with this. Uh, I think he was

Mark:

on shelves for about seven minutes

Francis:

and they sent him a letter, uh, and the letter said, stop, stop, stop it. You idiot. Stop. It's your can. Can't say cocaine. False advertising if nothing else. If, if, if that's the only reason. Uh, the FDA issued a warning letter last month that said that Redux, which is a company that makes it, is illegally marketing the drink as a street drug alternative and dietary supplement. The FDA cited as evidence that drinks labeling, which includes statements like cocaine, that in quotes by the way, no, no more quotations. It also says, uh, in a smaller print speed, in a can, liquid cocaine and cocaine dash. Instant rush.

Speaker 4:

Yeah.

Francis:

You can't sell that. See, I'm, I'm, you can, but you gotta sell it like this. Exactly. And then you get arrested. Come over here. Well, and then you can't sell that'cause it doesn't have any cocaine in it. Uh, users of the drink. Uh, well first of all, the, the guy who marketed said it's meant to be a joke. Uh, you know, it's, it is meant to be tongue in cheek. Nobody really thinks it has cocaine in it, but yet it's, you still can't do it. You can't, can't label it wrong. Users of the drink responded to the announcement by leaving dozens of messages, many of them profanity laced on a page credited for the product on the social networking myspace.com. So, let me get this straight. You're gonna tell me that the people who were the avid customers of. Cocaine were the kind of folks who would, who would, you know, lose it and leave profanity laced messages on, on message boards. I can't believe that I get that. It seemed shocking.

Mark:

Wait, my favorite quote of the whole thing, grow up you freaks. Favorite quote in the whole thing In the Associated Press article that came out. the owner says, of course, we intended for cocaine energy to be a legal alternative the same way celibacy is a legal alternative for premarital sex.

Francis:

Yeah, but you don't call celibacy premarital sex. Uh, the alternative to cocaine is not doing cocaine is not cocaine. Right. Exactly. Have a coke. See, have a Coca-Cola. Um, no, but if, if they successfully challenge this mark, and I'll be launching our own line of beverages. and food supplements. One will be a, some pills that you can take, uh, vitamin supplements, what we're gonna call them methamphetamines. And, uh, that's gonna be the, and we're gonna have, uh, ecstasy and we're gonna have cigarettes t we'll call it. Right, right. We'll have cigarettes and we'll, we'll call our brand of tobacco cigarettes, marijuana. Stupid. Okay. It's, you know what I wrote down initially in my notes I wrote, we'll call the brand of tobacco cigarettes, Mary Jane. Now, some of our listeners might remember when marijuana was referred to as Mary Jane, but, but

Mark:

most don't. Yeah. So

Francis:

I'm old. I'm old. What can I say? Okay. So cocaine off the shelves was briefly legal in this country, but now off the shelves onto the next, it was never legal.

Mark:

It was, it was pulled off. No, the non

Francis:

cocaine. Cocaine, that's, I'm, it's, no, it was legal, but you can market it until the FDA tells you to pull it off. But. Now they said,

Mark:

which like I said, was about seven minutes, right?

Francis:

Uh, on the legal illegal drink front. Uh, guess what's legal again in the United States for the first time since before prohibition,

Mark:

walking your dog and not cleaning up after it absent. Oh,

Francis:

that's been legal. The only legal in the seventies absent, um, is legal again, our Ted Brew, who's been on this show, who's the world's foremost expert Onin has developed for Lucid an American company. A legal, genuine American absence. Now, why absence was made illegal was there was a bunch of trumped up charges on what? One of the components that came from one of the botanicals used to make absent called,

Mark:

and this is, and this is back in the teens. This is, yeah. You know, 1912, something like that.

Francis:

Well, one of the, one of the, one of the substances there called thone was thought to be a hallucinogen. Well, Thone is halluc a hallucinogen, but you'd have to drink like nine bottles of absence to hallucinate from it. But, um, nonetheless, they didn't know this back then, which since you'd be unconscious, it would be impossible to, right. There's nine bottles of liquor you can't drink. so, uh, that became illegal and now it's been legal in Europe for years. Uh, it's been legal around the rest of the world. What Ted Brew did was he developed, uh, a type of absence that has almost no thone in it by changing the botanical slightly, but It is an anis based liqueur. Like Pau is, is Anin Replacer, and Pastis is an absent replacer. We have a wonderful Pastis in the bar. It's,

Mark:

and almost every culture has an Anis based liqueur to it, whether it's Arak, if you're Lebanese or Sambuca, if you're Italian or Anna Z if you're French.

Francis:

But they all stem from throughout, all absent Replacers. Well, what what Ted did was he found these old, these antique bottles, OFin. He uh, he's a chemist by trade and he. Chemically analyzed with a spectrometer exactly what was in these old bottles of, absent these pre-prohibition. It really was

Mark:

fascinating. He just took, he took the total chemistry. Line to figure out what was in

Francis:

these, well, to figure out what was in it. And then he took years to figure out how you would achieve that chemical component. So you have a guy who's tasted probably more absence than anyone in the world who has worked with this American company called Lucid, uh, which. Has now made an American absent that has, uh, enough th little enough th jones to get approval from the, uh, uh, BATF. And so it'll be available, uh, starting next month and you can get some at Catherine Lombardi.'cause I can't wait. I'm all at Titter,

Mark:

which is amazing. And, and I don't have any actual Twitter

Francis:

titter or Twitter. What is it? What is, is it a Titter or a Twitter? I don't know. Alright. Anyway, so you were saying

Mark:

it's a Twitter bug, but I think it's a titter. Okay,

Francis:

Well, European governments a long time ago realized that the thone, you know, we basically just analyzed it and realized that the thone wasn't, uh, wasn't that big a problem, was not really a hallucinogen or could not be a hallucinogen in, in the amounts you find it in. Absent. But the problem is we have a, we have a very puritanical culture in America, and no legislature wants to get on the repeal, the absent ban. Mm-hmm. Uh, legislation. No one's gonna be a sponsor. Right. There's no

Mark:

good that you can't win yourself points by being on the well, and you can get, repeal the absence and you can get crucified.

Francis:

Because in our, in our 32nd media culture, someone can say. You know, this politician is for bringing evil liquors back, you know, making more liquors legal. Yeah. You wanna be that guy running for Right. Exactly. Against muds against drunk driving, even though it doesn't make any sense. Anyway, it's, uh, the, the company's called Lucid. Uh, it's a new absent. It'll be available starting next month. It'll be about 60 bucks a bottle. Um, but again, it's a spirit. It's not a wine. So it's about 60 bucks a bottle. Not cheap, but I, you know, I think that we've had it in Europe, but if you haven't ever had absent, it's uh. Cool thing that you might wanna try when it comes out next month. That's your local retailer. We're gonna be talking in just after the next segment about a, less, intoxicating subject. We're gonna be talking about American beer.

Mark:

Oh, that's quite intoxicating.

Francis:

You're listening to the Restaurant Guys, our guest today is Roger Sherman, who's here to talk about beer. Roger was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary short subject for his film, the Garden of Eden. His newest film is The American Brew, which tells the history of beer in America.

Mark:

Roger, I love beer. Welcome to the show.

Roger:

Thanks very much. I'm on my seventh bottle of absence. I'm just trying to

Francis:

full through Joan absence too. I might add. Hey, Roger. Um, so your, your short film for which you were nominated for an Oscar was The Garden of Eden. Now you've done a, a, a, a documentary on beer. Was there any beer in the Garden of Eden? I've always thought there was.

Roger:

I'm sure there was. The beer goes back to Samaria thousands of years ago, and that's the earliest trace of it, but I'm sure it was much older than that. How could anybody live without it?

Francis:

Well, I remember reading in I'm, I'm a Dork for Food History, and I remember, reading in, in the Middle Ages that beer was so important because it was, uh,

Mark:

I was thinking because life stunk and, and there's, you needed to get

Francis:

drunk. Um, but I understand that in the Middle Ages, the beer was, the way to, a way to basically clean water. People would take a bucket, and it wasn't carbonated. People would just take a bucket of water and leave it by the hearth where it would be warm and they'd throw some grain in there so that it would ferment. And it was basically, I guess, more wart than a beer. Um, but that, that was a way to, to, to clean the water. And I remember Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, who did many things used to say of people who, who traveled in, in, uh, hot climbs. He'd say water drinkers die first, and he always put a little whiskey in his water. Was was in, in the development of American beer, was it important to have clean water to, was that part of the allure beer?

Roger:

Actually the, it wasn't just the middle Ages. Uh, even through colonial times and after, we didn't drink water because water could kill you. There were lots of things in there that could make you sick or worse, and, uh, beer and cider. But beer mostly was the everyday drink of the day. And it might sound shocking, but men, women, and children drank beer now. It wasn't. Anything like the beer we have today, it was a very low alcohol. They describe it, historians describe it as a soda pop of the day, but, uh, it's, it's what people drank. In fact, um, on ship crossings, water would go rancid very quickly. Um, and beer was the drink that, get got people across the ocean.

Francis:

Well now, with the beer. How, you know, you said kids drank it. It was what we drank all the time. What kind of percentage alcohol are we talking about?

Roger:

Oh, it's probably less than 1%. Mm-hmm. They would brew three times. Every housewife knew how to brew beer back then, and, they'd send it through three times. So the, the first was real beer. the second was, uh, some intermediate. That you would drink, I guess the guys drank. And the third was just a, uh, everyday beverage.

Mark:

And, and that's as compared to your American beers with which range from three and a half to 5% or so. American beers of today. your average beers of today, your

Roger:

average laggers today. Yeah. Your light laggers. Exactly.

Francis:

So beer was really popular with the founding fathers and, um, and well with the settlers, and then was continued to be popular with the founding fathers. Was it seen as a, as a, a temperate beverage? As a, as less than the alcohol that someone would would get from spirits. I remember reading that Thomas Jefferson used to encourage people to drink wine because they thought it was a great answer that would get them to stop drinking, uh, whiskey. I.

Roger:

All the founding fathers had breweries. Alexander Hamilton wanted to have a national brewery, and they, they saw that it was better to get a taste for, beer than for spirits. People were paid in beer back in the colonial times. So it, it was, it was considered a healthy beverage. Uh, people, especially poor people, didn't have very good diets. And beer was full of vitamin B, the B complex vitamins, all kinds of things. It was actually called liquid bread, huh. And early advertising right up to prohibition. Had beer as a healthy beverage.

Mark:

Sure. Even if you look at Guinness ads, I mean that Guin Guness is good for you. That's their whole shtick is Guinness is good for you.

Roger:

Right. You can say that again now. That's true.

Francis:

I had a grandfather who used a great grandfather who, who had horses in Ireland and a grandfather had horses in the United States. He used to work with the horses. They used to put Guinness in the feed of the horses. Made them run faster so they thought so, um, did beer then fall out of fashion? Or, or did it stay? I know that the beer had a huge, and I want to talk to you about the beer having a huge increase in popularity with the wave of German immigration, but did it sort of fall out of fashion between the founding fathers and the time in the first waves of great German immigration, or did it just. Stayed popular right throughout.

Roger:

No, it, it pretty much stayed popular. But the German immigration in the mid 18 hundreds changed not only our taste for beer, but the taste for the whole world. Um, there was great influx of people gone, going across the country and, uh, the Germans brought their beer with them. They opened beer gardens, which shocked Protestant America having beer on Sundays. Uh, but they wanted to take the day off and have some fun, and they developed these laggers. And then with, um, cold brewing, they were able to develop, uh, a di, a different kind of lager beer, which took the world by storm. It just tasted better, and it didn't. By the end of the 19th century, the entire world had switched from ales to drinking. Lager beers.

Francis:

We're gonna come back in just a moment. We're gonna talk more with Roger Sherman about what a cold brew beer is and how German immigrants in America changed the way the world drinks beer. Roger, before the break, we were talking about how the German immigrants in the United States, uh, started making lager beers, cold brewed beers, and how that changed the way the world drinks. What is the difference between a cold brewed beer? What, what makes a cold brewed beer cold brewed, and why is it so different?

Roger:

Well, very simply, it, it needs to be brewed under cold temperatures. Uh, ale does not need to be brewed under cold temperatures, and we're talking about well before refrigeration. Uh, the Germans came over. They always settled near big rivers or lakes where they could cut the ice out of the rivers or lakes. In the wintertime, it would be stored in ice houses. Caves were dug to store the beer, the ice, the air would flow down as cold air flows down into the caves, keeping the beer cold, but they couldn't brew much. between October and April and on a warm winter, you can imagine the mess that that. Uh, happened in, uh, the mid 1850s, refrigeration was invented and all of a sudden they were able to brew beer. Anytime they wanted, uh, interesting little factoid is that for the first 20 years of refrigeration, they basically did exactly the same as they'd done for decades before they used it to make giant chunks of ice, which they brought into the ice house. Finally, somebody learned how to, uh, put a fan in front of the condenser and modern refrigeration was born

Francis:

well. when these German immigrants came and brought this kind of beer, started producing this kind of beer in America, was this a kind of beer that had always been brewed in Germany that they just recreated here? Or was it a new kind of beer?

Roger:

It was pretty much a new kind of beer. It changed the beer that they were drinking back home as well. Uh, they were innovators and they took on the American dream. And Americans are entrepreneurial. We've always have been. And they started tinkering and lagger as we know it was born.

Mark:

basically, what, Francis and Roger have just described is really the difference between a logger and a ale, which a lot of people, I think, sometimes are always, you know, you go into the store and you're questioning it. It's really how they're brewed, isn't it, Roger?

Roger:

That's right. And, uh, not to get too complicated, it's the, the difference in the yeast, an ale is top fermented, which simply means that the yeast stays on the top of the tank. And, uh, the laggers are bottom fermented. Now, once you open that can of worms with the sophistication of brewing today, there are laggers that are top fermented. There are ails that, you know, it just, you can go crazy with it. But basically that's, that's the difference.

Francis:

And, but stylistically it created a taste that had been there to, for unseen, which was that crisp, slightly bitter, very clean taste beer that, that we now know.

Roger:

Exactly perfect for our hot summers. Uh, a nice, clean, cold beer.

Francis:

Well, I, I think that one of the things that is fascinating that we can't, uh, talk about this subject and not talk about when we come back after the break, we're gonna be talking more with Roger Sherman about prohibition and how that affected beer and beer sales and, and the beer culture in this country, and how we've recovered since Today we're talking about beer, specifically the history of beer in America. Robert Sherman, who was nominated for an Oscar for his short subject documentary, the Garden of Eden. Has, uh, come up with a new film called The American Brew, the History of Beer in America. Roger, we were talking before the break about, uh, things, in older history in America. Now I wanna turn our attention to the, the period before prohibition. Saloons sort of got a bad reputation. they were associated with, uh, gambling and prostitution. Um, was it a deserved reputation?

Roger:

It, it was a deserved reputation. And, uh, to backtrack one second, because you asked about the popularity of beer, uh, between 1860 and 1900, beer consumption in America increased 400%. And at the, Late 18 hundreds, there was a system called the Tide System where, uh, taverns pubs were either owned or licensed by breweries. Breweries were all local at the time, and,, the tavern owners or licensees were not allowed to sell anything. But their own beer.

Speaker 4:

Mm-hmm. And

Roger:

there was something called the 5 cent Beer, which long after that was economical breweries made, uh, pub owners sell beer for 5 cents. So what were they to do? Well, they brought in gambling, they brought in prostitution. They brought in all kinds of things to try to supplement their meager incomes, um, subsidies as it were. So many pubs in America. Some, uh, towns had a saloon for every 80 people. That includes men, women, and children. So you can imagine the competition was fierce.

Francis:

So why the 5 cent beer? Why didn't they respond to the market and and allow beer to be sold and raise the price? Well, they

Roger:

tried to raise the price and there were mass protests. There were almost riots broke out across the country. People were not gonna pay 10 cents for a, a glass of beer.

Francis:

No, they should come to our bar boy. Um, so, so, um. So then we have, the movement for prohibition gain. Steam. Take us through prohibition.

Roger:

Well, prohibition actually starts years before with a Temperance Movement. the, Venereal disease. The, uh, wife battering, the children battering that would come home from only men. Uh, frequented taverns in those days, uh, gave taverns a very deserved bad name. And the Temperance movement. Started gaining, gaining steam. Now, it wasn't just beer. In fact, the brewers tried to distinguish themselves from the hard spirits, uh, by saying the beer is, is is not something you get intoxicated on. In fact, in the 18 hundreds there were numerous lawsuits, people would get arrested and, um, the. Yeah, a number of times was that we are drinking beer. It's not intoxicating. And in fact, those, uh, people were found not guilty. It didn't help that much because, uh, you think that

Mark:

might work in like North Brunswick on a DUI if somebody got one of those? Not anymore. Not with the, the

Roger:

alcohol content of beer. I think we're drinking a few more beers than they did back then, but, um. Before prohibition actually, was enacted. You know, prohibition was from 1920 to 1933. By 1919, um, 33 states had already prohibited or limited the sale of alcohol. So prohibition was just the final nail in the coffin. It was years of protest. Um. Carey Nation, for example, is a sort of whack job, but a very effective whack job who would go in with, with other people, with hatchets and they called it habitation. And they would whack apart a bar and ask the people there for forgiveness to get down on their hands and knees and pray to God that they could kick the habit. And, uh, she got a lot of publicity, but it, but it worked pretty well. Well,

Francis:

and that was the advent of bouncers when they saw Ka Nation coming. They have bouncers outside the. Tavern. Alright. No, maybe not. when Prohibition finally came, there were some breweries that survived, some businesses that were breweries that survived. How did they survive? How, how a

Mark:

brewery survived Prohibition.

Roger:

Yeah. They, they survived by going into other businesses. They, uh. The most common was to, to make soft drinks. There was bevo beer that Budweiser made, that Anheuser-Busch made. Uh, there was ice cream. Yingling made a very, very good ice cream. It seemed that the, the processes, the sterilization, the steel tanks, all of that lent themselves to these other businesses, but they survived, but barely didn't. It was not a good business.

Francis:

I've sold ice cream, I've sold beer. It's, yeah, it's hard to survive on the ice cream. What?

Roger:

It's, it's much harder to survive on the ice cream. You know, at, at the start of prohibition, um, in the 1870s, there were 3,200 breweries. At the end of prohibition there were 185. Hmm. And once you closed your doors, it was just almost impossible to, uh, to open them again. However. There were breweries brewing beer all across America, all through prohibition. And it was because organized crime were able to pay off the police and other public servants to look the other way. And as Dan Re, who's a, a historian, says in the film there was obviously organized crime before prohibition, but they really got it together during prohibition. So you'd have major, uh. Major breweries that were brewing right in daylight into the public. And, uh, they kept going all through prohibition. people really could continue to get their beer. They could continue to get the hard stuff, uh, but beer suffered worse because mm-hmm. Um, it was much easier. You could put a couple of cases of hard stuff in the back of a car and really you'd move a lot of goods. Beer was much heavier, much bulkier, and it was too risky and, and too expensive. You know, you could, you know, for a buck or two, you could buy a fifth of gin and have a whole party, whereas. Beer couldn't compete with that.

Mark:

Some would say that, uh, the, wine industry survived very much the same way. Uh, tongue in cheek, of course, that, uh, wine industry, some, some winery stayed open selling sacramental wine to the church. So, yeah, you know, their own kind of very. Of, or tongue in cheek, I'll say their own kind of organized crime as they were. They're very religious With that, all of a sudden,

Francis:

hey, so, so when prohibition ends it, it, the, the brewers initially thought it was gonna be a panacea, but it, it didn't turn out. The end of prohibition didn't turn out to be the panacea that brewers thought it might be. Why? That's

Roger:

right. A whole generation grew up not drinking any kind of alcohol, especially beer, and, and many people were just not used to it, and they were not going to. It took in, in 1980, there were only 48 breweries in America. And you know, so the turnaround took a very, very, very long time.

Francis:

Yeah. I also remember they saw in your, in your, uh, in your movie, there's the statistic that in 1980 there were 48 breweries. In 1996, there were 1500 breweries,

Roger:

2005, but That's right. That's right. And the craft. Brew Revolution and the microbrew revolution is, is really, um, part of the reason for that. I mean, that they're still a very, very small part, 2% of the entire market, but they're floating all boats. They're making interesting beers and, and the United States is the most interesting place to both brew and drink beer in America. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself

Mark:

in Yeah. You know, the culture and the traditions of other countries and kind of made them our own. I mean, there's, there are people brewing Belgian style ales, and there are people brewing, Czech style ails and people brewing German style ales and all the different kinds of subcultures in, in those ails. In the United States, we kind of have like, like most of the things we do, we've taken everything from everybody and tried to. Kind of incorporated into our own.

Roger:

It's very, very American. You know, I, in making films, I am never an expert when I start. And I feel that that's a very good idea because if you're an expert, you don't know what to include and what not to include. And I can represent an audience that doesn't necessarily know everything there is to know about a subject. In this case, beer. I was a beer drinker. Now I consider myself more an appreciator. But things like the craft brew movement, craft beers were completely under my radar. I didn't know that. You know, there's a brewery within 10 miles of just about all of us, and even the big guys, even Anheuser-Busch, Coors Miller, they're also brewing more interesting beers today that's going out from, from their normal. And you know, you talk about Czech beers and German beers. If you go to that town in Germany, you. Can drink that incredible beer that's been brewed for 400 years and not a lot else. Mm-hmm. I guarantee you there's a brewery in America that makes that same beer. And 12 other varieties of it.

Speaker 4:

Mm-hmm. Because

Roger:

we're American, we say, gee, that's good, but what if,

Speaker 4:

yeah.

Roger:

You know, let's put this in it. Let's put extra spices in it. Let's put spruce tips in it. Let's do something else. And that's why America is really the place to, to. Brew and drink.

Francis:

Roger. Um. We, we've been talking a lot about the history of beer in America and Astro prohibition. We came back with very few breweries and, and, and a generation that grew up without a tradition of beer. The same tradition of beer that we'd had prior to prohibition. Um, was the beer from the end of prohibition through to say the seventies where we saw the birth of the craft beer, craft beer movement. Was it much more ind than it had been? I mean, was was the, was the, was the flavor of beer less good than it was prior to prohibition?

Roger:

I don't think it was less good, but the, the, uh, the bigger breweries were able to take advantage of, uh, the hard times. They maybe had a little more money squirreled away. Um, it became a big, uh, time for marketing, for consolidation. Uh, after prohibition, a brewery is no longer allowed to own a tavern. That's, uh, the distribution system, the distributors. Came about at that time and it just, uh. People, it just took a long time.

Francis:

I remember when the first micro brew I ever had was made by a gentleman that you featured in your film, Fritz Maytag. It was an anchor steam liberty ale that I had in 1986. And I remember that in to my, my, like, my mind exploded. I was like, oh my god, beer can taste like this. Um. But it was more bitter. It was stronger. It was something that, uh, that people weren't used to. And a lot of people initially reacted to these more flavorful beers in a negative way. I mean, and there

Mark:

are still people who do I own two restaurants with two bars. Right. I wanna understand, and there are still people who want an Amyl or Corona the least flavorful beer that I can offer.

Francis:

How, how, was there a lot of consumer resistance to these craft beers? And how did, how did they come about and talk to us about a guy like maybe Fritz Maytag who really made a difference.

Roger:

Well, Fritz was a student at, uh. Stanford University and Maytag. Yes, he is of the Maytag family and he frequented a, uh, spaghetti restaurant in San Francisco. And one day the owner said, you know, the anchor Steam Brewing company is going out of business. You ought to go and check it out. And he went over there and as he says in the film, you don't get up in the morning and decide you're gonna fall in love. But that's exactly what he did. The owners didn't wanna have bad credit on their, on their records and they were about to go outta business, so they sold it to him for a song. And you talk about whether the beer was good or bad. He has a famous story that I guess he tells a lot and tells wonderfully in our film where he went to try to sell the beer to a German restaurant and the guy says, yeah, I know that beer, it's terrible beer bad. And he figured out, and within a few years, he had one of the most sophisticated, highly technical, uh, breweries in America. And who would've known this is the early sixties, that that would be sort of the genesis of craft brewing. Others like him, the Sierra Nevada Brew Brewery. Mm-hmm. That was one of

Mark:

my first Sierra Nevada I think was.

Roger:

And he just said, you know what? I think I'd like to do this.

Mark:

I just wanna say, if anybody wants to learn more about the whole Fritz Maytag story, obviously they can, they can see your movie American Brew also. we did an interview with Fritz Oh,

Roger:

that's great. Was

Mark:

was a very informative interview, but go ahead. I'm sorry about, uh, that,

Roger:

that's okay. That's okay. No, Ken Grossman, uh, there was no craft brew industry, so there was no supplies. The tanks were gigantic. Nobody, you know, starting out would, would be able to afford that. And so he. Scoured Northern California and Oregon and found dairy farms that were going outta business and was able to adapt, uh, dairy equipment. He took, courses at the local community college and welding and other things, and eventually he found some beer that he liked after doing a lot of test brews and throwing them down the, the drain And, uh, Sierra Nevada was born. And, and that's really very typical of the story as. Craft brew progressed. Then in the seventies, you've got the microbrew industry, which is basically, uh, brewing on site in your restaurant. That's somewhat differentiates from a craft brewer. Um, but the lines get blurred and that exploded so much that after a while there were. Too many of them, they didn't realize how difficult it was. Many didn't realize how difficult it was to brew good beer, and there was a, a fallout of, of Microbrewers,

Mark:

I think, well, the ones who weren't doing it well, I think fell away. We have a great one in New Brunswick called Harvest Moon that, uh, brews brews their own beers and some really interesting things.

Francis:

I think one of the interesting things about your film is to, is to talk to those. When you talk to those guys from Sierra Nevada and they have like the dairy equipment that they, they. Purchased and then hybridized and made a Franken Brewery out of, and it's, it's fascinating to see the ingenuity. Uh, I'm, I'm afraid, Roger, we need to leave it there. I could probably talk to you all day, but I need to go and have a beer. Let's go have a beer. Uh, so Amazing glass. It's been great to have you on the show. The film is the American Brew. It's a history of beer in America. You can find out how to get it through our website@restaurantguysradio.com, and we suggest that you do Hey everybody, welcome back. It's Mark and Francis, the restaurant guys from Stage Left and Catherine Lombardi restaurants.

Mark:

You know, earlier in the show we were talking about, I. You know the things that can go wrong with your water and why people choose to drink or chose throughout history to drink beer or drink wine or various other spirits because the river water might be brackish or the, the ocean water. Obviously you couldn't drink you know, through a long voyage or your water would go rancid. Well, Francis, you're, you're aware that recently, uh, I. Went and had a little flood in my basement.

Francis:

I recall nine feet is not a little flood.

Mark:

Well, we got a little water in the basement. Well, one of the thing, one of the items lost. I had one of those wine units in the basement and filled with, filled with river water. Actually, the river came up so high that it, that it entered my basement and I was actually part of the river. And so of course my initial. Uh, response, pulling the water outta the basement, then pulling the, the bottles out of this cooler, which had been filled with river water sludge dirt. Uh, all sorts of nastiness. Mm-hmm. So I picked up the bottles and, and actually not that long ago, uh, I had a gentleman who was in, who was an en environmental biologist. He said, you know what? That, that river water, even if it did somehow seep through the cork, there's really nothing, no pathogen that can survive

Francis:

and no alcohol in the, in the alcohol

Mark:

of a bottle, of a bottle of wine. It's why people drink wine because it. It healthier. It was, well, it killed pathogens, right? You could drink wine or beer, those types of things. Those alcohols. Anyway, uh, so. Francis and I decided to do a little experiment together and I grabbed some of those bottles and I said, all right, let's see what these taste like. We'll, we'll take our chances and we'll, we'll experiment with this. You want, you wanna tell people how that experiment went, Francis?

Francis:

Um, well if anyone would like to know what is the name of the river that goes through your, it is Railway River. Uh, it had a certain sense of the railway river to it, which I don't know that I'd swim in. Nevermind. Do I want to put in my wine? Yeah. So there are a couple, we're sort of a raw river spritzer.

Mark:

I gotta tell you. Yeah. Actually there's one word that I could use to describe the, the wine that was in that cooler gross, it's, I don't how to spell it, but I definitely can say it. Yeah. That's really exciting. Uh, yeah, we, we opened a couple of different things and Well, and the

Francis:

thing was you had, I mean, you, you keep most of your wine in the restaurant, so the bottles that you had at home, you had some very special bottles of wine. Yeah.

Mark:

And luckily not that many, but. But yeah, I'm sorry for that. I'm

Francis:

sorry for that.

Mark:

But, you know, that's another thing. the damage to it wasn't just from the river, from the, you know, the water on the river. The damage was also from the temperature change, which I, which I found fascinating.

Francis:

Let's stop talking about that, that, that bad wine. And let's go have a beer. Excellent. Hope you enjoyed the hour with the restaurant guys. I'm Francis Shot. And I'm

Mark:

Mark Pascal.

Francis:

We are the restaurant guys, central Jersey 1450. The time is 12 noon.