HOME BREW HERO
MEET THE GRADE SCHOOL TEACHER WHOSE BASEMENT HOBBY HALF A CENTURY AGO SPARKED AMERICA’S CRAFT BEER REVOLUTION
Charlie Papazian, “the Johnny Appleseed of good beer,” as an old friend describes him, “or maybe the Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters and Joey Ramone of beer, overthrowing the status quo,” lives about six miles north of downtown Boulder, Colorado, at the end of a rutted dirt road, in a modest two-story home with views of the Rocky Mountains. He’d fallen in love with the place on sight. The isolated location, the light, the chortling brook in the backyard— perfect. Except for one thing. “You have to understand that I was used to brewing in basements,” he said when I visited him a few months ago. “And this house has no basement! So I had this vision. I’d convert the garage into a single-use facility, the ideal beer-brewing space.”
Papazian installed a glass-walled cooler, plus a custombuilt, walk-in fridge with six-inch-thick foam-insulated walls he’d reclaimed from a defunct turkey farm. He left the original workbench and a few lockers and added several sets of shelves to stow the essentials: buckets of malted barley, rice, and yeast cultures, glass carboys for fermenting the beer, serpentine coils of tubing and strainers for trapping the errant grain, and a freezer full of hops.
These days, Papazian brews a five-gallon batch of beer about once a month—typically a lager or an ale. More in summer, less in winter. He does not sell it, preferring to dole out samples to friends. “I go to visit a buddy, or I give a talk, and I bring some beer,” he explained. “As a hello, or as a thank-you.” He offered me a pour of a recent concoction: a dark lager made with hops he’d grown in the field behind the garage. It tasted soft; each sip melted on the tongue, like chocolate. “It’s got a porter-like quality to it, doesn’t it?” he asked. “Very drinkable. Smooth and not overly assertive.”
Crossing the garage, he found the barley he’d used for a different batch. He encouraged me to taste a small handful of the grain. “You’ll notice that the longer you chew, the sweeter the barley gets,” he said. “That’s because the enzymes in your mouth are breaking down the starches.” He went on, “Now look, I don’t want to get too Zen-like, but what I’ve always loved about brewing is that you’re dealing with organisms. With biology, with chemistry! With life itself! Take yeast, for example: Depending on temperature, pressure, motion, it gives off different compounds. The beer changes with it.”
I followed him into the walk-in fridge. “These are the collectibles,” he said, dragging his finger over the bottles that lined the shelves. “The cooler out there—that has the beers for drinking. These are the beers for remembering.” He pulled down a few
keepsakes. Canned editions from the beginning of his career, when he was still a grade school teacher, homebrewing in his spare time. Some early beers from San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing Company, one of the first microbreweries in the United States. Collectible beers from trips to Denmark, South America, England. A beer he brewed on the occasion of the birth of his daughter, Carla, now 10 years old. He’s saving that one for the day she turns 21 and can enjoy it with him.
I noticed an old poster, a little yellowed with age, hanging above one of the workbenches. “Relax,” it read. “Don’t worry. Have a homebrew.” It was Papazian’s motto. The words had come to him and his fellow homebrewer Charlie Matzen back in the 1970s. The words have since appeared on T-shirts, on bumper stickers and beer caps, and most famously, in Papazian’s beer-making bible, The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, now in its fourth printing. Global sales of the book reportedly exceed 1.3 million copies, but that number, however impressive, doesn’t come close to conveying the book’s vast readership, for dog-eared copies are passed from one generation of beer-makers to the next, an initiation, a rite of passage. Many a successful brewmaster learned the trade from The Complete Joy of Homebrewing. “People still approach me and say, ‘That mantra, it’s changed the way I look at the world,’ ” Papazian said. “What a gift to be able to hear something like that.”
If he sounded wistful, it was not for nothing. Although he continues to brew beer and to speak at beer events around the globe, Papazian, who is 71, is in the process of slowly withdrawing from the grassroots industry he helped create and sustain over the past four decades. He recently stepped down as head of the Brewers Association, the influential American trade group, and he has officially retired as maestro of the Great American Beer Festival, which he inaugurated in 1982. In an unmistakably valedictory gesture, he donated a battle-scarred old brew spoon, an original homebrewing recipe annotated by hand and a first edition copy of his book to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where the items are now on display indefinitely. “I
“I REMEMBER GOING, ‘WAIT, WHAT
THE HECK IS HOMEBREW?’ I HAD NO IDEA SUCH A THING WAS POSSIBLE.”
think the curators were in awe that I would be willing to give them something so personally valuable,” Papazian joked to me. “I’m just in awe that they wanted it.”
Jim Koch, the founder of the Boston Beer Company, which makes Samuel Adams, credits Papazian with popularizing craft beer in the United States. Papazian’s retirement represents “the end of an era,” Koch wrote in an email. “It’s hard to imagine a Brewers Association, a Great American Beer Festival or a craft beer industry without Charlie steering the ship. There’s an adage in business that no one is irreplaceable. His departure is going to put that maxim to the test.”
TODAY, WHEN MANY STATES in the nation are home to 100 breweries and some states count six or eight times that number, it seems almost impossible to imagine that beer was a relatively uniform and even uninspired commodity for most of recent American history. Lagers pale in color and low in alcohol were popular as refreshment but did not engender much connoisseurship or olfactory debate. It was the stuff you slugged back after mowing the lawn on a hot day.
In 1949, the year Papazian was born, the market was almost entirely dominated by big corporations that specialized in largely interchangeable German-style beers: Miller, Pabst, Budweiser, Coors. “I grew up in a mid-century culture, where with food, it was cool to be homogeneous,” Papazian recalled. “You turned on the TV, and it was Velveeta cheese, it was frozen dinners, it was white bread. Wonder Bread! Flavor diversity wasn’t really a thing.”
Papazian was raised in a quiet community called Warren
Township, in northern New Jersey. He remembers his upbringing as idyllic. His mother stayed at home with him and his two brothers, and his father, a chemical engineer, managed a manufacturing plant. Occasionally, his parents would buy a six-pack of beer for guests; they kept a liquor cabinet in the living room, but it collected dust. “They weren’t really drinkers,” Papazian told me.
In 1967, Charlie, who was adept with numbers, left for the University of Virginia to study nuclear engineering. He had few longer-term plans. He mulled the possibility of a career in the Navy, but the counterculture appealed to him, too. He grew his wiry brown hair long, played some music, made the
“WE’D OPEN THE SPICE CABINET, AND SAY, ‘LET’S PUT SOME CINNAMON
IN THERE, SOME ALLSPICE.’ ”
pilgrimage to Woodstock. (The ticket stubs and muddy sneakers he wore to the festival are displayed in a vitrine in his home.)
One afternoon in 1970, Papazian was lazing around his Charlottesville apartment, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, when n a friend mentioned that he’d run into a neighbor, an “old-timer” in his early 70s, s, who’d learned to brew beer during Prohihibition, and was apparently still making it, right there in his basement. “I remember ber going, ‘Wait, what the heck is homebrew?’ w?’
I had no idea such a thing was possible,” Papazian recalled.
A few days later, he paid a visit to o the neighbor, who offered Papazian a bottle e of a Prohibition-style ale: an unboiled, fermented mented mixture of malt extract, sugar, bread yeast and water. “It was crystal clear, pale, beautiful-looking, effervescent beer,” Papazian an said. “And the taste was cidery, almost. I wouldn’t dn’t say it was better or worse than store-bought ght beer, but it was very different, and that was enough. I was completely fascinated.”
Papazian was working part time as a janitor at a Charlottesv Charlottesville day care facility, which had a kitchen and a ca capacious basement. “After the kids had gone home home, my friends and I, we’d formulate the recipe ups upstairs,” he said. “You’d open up the malt, put it in a pail, add sugar, add the water, add the yeast, and bring it downstairs and let it ferment. It was pr pretty basic.”
Severa Several early batches were poured directly down th the drain, but Papazian’s skills gradually improv improved. He learned that dextrose made for better flavor than sugar, and that bread yeast he’d been buying from the supermarket w was no replacement for the more refined yeasts on sale at the wine-making supply store. “The beer got good enough that we bottled it up and started handing it out at parties,” Papazian recalled. “People loved it. They were constantly asking, ‘How did you make this?’ ” In response, he wrote up a two-page instructional manual. “It never occurred to me to keep
it to myself,” he went on. “I was all about sharing it as widely as I could.”
After college, while traveling with a friend to Wyoming, Papazian passed through Boulder, then as now a college town with a healthy population of hippies and a growing tech sector. Papazian decided to stay. “I spent about a month crashing on a friend’s floor, applying for jobs,” he told me. He landed one as a janitor, and another at a shoe manufacturing plant; he quit them both. Then a friend told him that the private elementary school where she worked was looking for a new teacher. “My degree was in engineering. I had no teaching certification. But I went in, and the boss said, ‘Hang out for a day and see if you like it.’” He stayed for ten years.
Papazian had left his brewing equipment back in Charlottesville, assuming his beer-making days were behind him, but his friends knew about his talent, and they wanted lessons. “I remember going, ‘All right, fine, give me the money, and I’ll go get the trash pail at Kmart, and I’ll get the yeast at the supermarket,’ ” Papazian recalled.
He offered classes, once a week, in his kitchen.
There were always more students than spots. “You had attorneys, airline pilots, other teachers, but also people who were just hanging out. Musicians, outdoors-types,” he told me. “A real mix.” Among his earliest students was Jeff Lebesch, who would go on to co-found New Belgium Brewing, in Fort Collins, Colorado, purveyors of Fat Tire Amber Ale, as well as Russell Scherer, who became the original brewmaster at Wynkoop, a Denver brewery co-founded by John Hickenlooper, the former governor of Colorado.
Together with his students, Papazian began experimenting with flavors and ingredients. “The spice cabinet in that kitchen was right above the stove, and every once in a while, we’d open it, and say, ‘Let’s put some cinnamon in there, some allspice,’ ” Papazian told me. “We messed around with tea, honey, fruit.” In retrospect, he was pushing the limits of an age-old art and science—redefining beer itself.
ONE AFTERNOON, PAPAZIAN and I arranged to share a couple of pints in the taproom of his local brewpub, Avery Brewing Company, which occupies a series of low industrial buildings in Boulder, nor far from his home. As we walked through Avery’s front doors, a roar went up—“Charlie!”—and the staff assembled themselves in a reception line, proffering hands and clapping Papazian’s shoulders. We found a seat. Papazian studied the menu. There was nary a pilsner to be found. Instead, there was an assortment of India Pale Ales, promising varying levels of alcohol and varieties of hops; a persimmon-and-wheat ale; a hazelnut, toffee and mocha-flavored ale called “Old Jubilation”; a “PB&J stout,” brewed with raspberries and peanuts and aged in bourbon barrels. Papazian looked amused. “To see the way the palate of the American beer drinker has evolved,” he said, “well, it’s really something, isn’t it?”
I asked if back in the 1970s he could have imagined walking into a brewery and ordering a peanut-butter-and-jelly-flavored stout. He shook his head. “It’s difficult to stress how different things were—at every level,” he said.
Back then, brewing beer at home wasn’t even legal, and selling or distributing homebrew was an offense punishable by hefty fines. But in October 1978, President Jimmy Carter legalized homebrewing nationwide. In December of that year, Papazian and Charlie