All Mark Stutrud wanted was a good beer, not a revolution. But when the thirty-four-year-old Minnesotan gave up his job as a social worker and opened a tiny brewery in St. Paul, he inadvertently joined a movement that may change American beer drinking habits. Stutrud's Summit Brewery offers a freshly brewed, uniquely flavored product, completely different from the likes of Budweiser, Coors, or Miller.
Revolutions have a way of sneaking past the eyes of experts. Fifteen years ago, Julio Gallo dismissed the production of Californian vintage-dated varietal wines as "silly." Today over 1,200 U.S. wineries - including Gallo - are producing vintage-dated varietal wines.
The American beer industry is also on the verge of a major change. In the 1970s breweries were in decline: there were only forty left in the United States - less than there were in Wisconsin just three decades earlier. This was due to a consolidation of the beer industry: 90 percent of the market was controlled by six corporate brewers. It appeared that no small brewery could survive the competition of the corporate breweries.
Small Breweries Reemerge
Yet today, small breweries are popping up like mushrooms around the country on the average of one a month. In the last decade, almost one hundred have opened for business. These breweries are the opposite of their corporate brethren. They are usually little more than a two-man operation, are local or regionalized, do little or no advertising, and produce highly distinctive brews.
Microbreweries produce fewer than ten thousand barrels a year and are the smallest and most common of the new breweries. The microbrewery, coupled with the rediscovery of varietal beers, is the cornerstone of the new beer revolution.
"I think the movement toward smaller breweries brewing more distinct beer is part of a revolution much like the wine-drinking revolution of the last decade," says Joseph Owades, director of the San Francisco-based Center for Brewing Studies. "But this one is going to be even more pervasive because beer is more general than wine, and it moves through better marketing means." Owades ought to know. He observed, and directly influenced, the beginnings of the northern California microbrewery movement in the 1970s.
It was the mid-1970s when a disgruntled beer drinker named Jack McAuliffe opened his New Albion Brewery in Sonoma, California, in a utility shed, using a series of fifty-gallon stainless steel drums as his brewing equipment. McAuliffe, whose taste for beer had developed during his navy service in Scotland, decided he could brew and sell a more flavorful beer than the large American brewers' "lawnmower" beers. Although New Albion Brewery was too small to become a viable business, its tasty, unique beer gained a reputation across the United States. It was the idea, rather than the beer, that caused changes across the country - the idea that a small brewery might become prosperous by making good beer for a local area. A spark was ignited in home brewers and beer lovers all over the nation. Barely a decade later, there are over sixty microbreweries operating around the country, with a new one opening every month.
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