Part 5: The Sip Tasted Round the World: First Hints of the Coming Revolution.

There isn’t much left to say about the high school years. I did drink, at times more excessively that I ought to have. I learned the limits of my toleration. But the goal was always to find enjoyable beers to try. The best options were the imports, so I mostly avoided buying American. The offerings were limited, but I kept hope alive.

And then, I went off to college. While I had hoped to be in the on-campus dorms, they filled up quickly and I was forced to find an off-campus option. At UCSB, one of the options (and the one I ended up at) was Francisco Torres. These were two towers of dorm living. Each set of two rooms was connected by a bathroom, so 4 people per suite. Not a bad set up.

It was also the site of a couple of very formative beer-related experiences for me. I’ll talk about the second next time.

The first was the ability to sample new beers. Some were very bad, some acceptable, and some were the herald of the future. One of the first opportunities was Superior Beer, out of Mexico. This was an acceptable drinking beer. The selling point was that it was briefly on sale at the local Lucky’s for $8 per case ($2 per 6-pack). It was in bottles rather than cans, and the entire floor of my dorm stocked up. It was a money-smart buy.

 

It is somewhat surprising, in retrospect, the number of people who had fake IDs. I never had one, but knew enough people who did, so that getting something was never a problem.

The beer that really changed everything for me was Sierra Nevada. Sometime in the Fall of 1986, I was with friends on a beer run and we came across a display for Sierra Nevada. I had never heard of them, yet, they had four offerings: Pale Ale, Porter, Stout, and Bigfoot Barley Wine. We got a 6-pack of each. Oh, and the heavens did open, and the angels did sing.

Each of them were phenomenal compared to anything I’d had up until that point. The pale was hoppy and delicious. The stout was dark and tasty. The porter was a revelation. I’d never come across a porter, but it quickly became my favorite style and remains so to the present. Not as heavy as a stout, nice subtle smokiness, pleasant, complex, tasty, and drinkable – what’s not to love. The Bigfoot, I’m ashamed to admit, was overwhelming. It was extraordinary, but it was more than I could handle at that point. The transition was too stark. Raised on banality, the sudden shock of the extraordinary was simply too much. A beer with over 9%ABV!!! It was like drinking 3 normal beers at once. It would be as if the only video game you’d ever played was Pong and suddenly you were introduced to something like Halo with no transition. Game over.

My introduction to Sierra was the starting of the American Beer Revolution for me. By the late 1980s, other craft brewers began to produce and be more widely distributed, My anti-American bias crumbled, and I began to abandon the imported beers that I’d been drinking.  I soon came across Anchor Steam and it became a regular for me as well. With Sierra and Anchor, I began to develop a greater sense of beer patriotism that has evolved into a jingoistic chauvinism. And that the premier pioneers were on the west coast, made it all the sweeter, and reinforced by west coast bias. 

America has gone from the beer cellar to the penthouse, and view is incredible! OK, too much foreshadowing – the glory and totality of the beer revolution had yet to develop. But, at least it had begun in earnest, and I was in on the ground floor.