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the fact that twelve million home gardens have been started in this country in the past two years.”
    We should not overstate this informational shift as it pertains to beer. Americans were not running out to buy all-grain homebrew kits (there weren’t any legally for sale then in the United States) or setting up yeast cultures in test tubes next to the toaster. There was, however, a perceptible attitude shift in the early 1970s among those who, like the Maltose Falcons members, were paying attention. Ken Grossman, who would at the decade’s end cofound the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, opened a homebrew shop on the second floor of a former fleabag hotel in Chico, California, in 1976. For him, the hobby gelled with what he called the “other homesteading activities” he and his wife pursued at their small, creek-side stead in the nearby town of Oroville: raising goats for fun as well as for milk and cheesemaking. Charlie Papazian, who would, also by decade’s end, cofound the American Homebrewers Association and pen the early draft of what became the bestselling homebrewing guide ever, saw the hobby he took up while a student at the University of Virginia as something that made people happy when they drank it, rather than stupid, which seemed to be the case when they downed sixty-nine-cent six-packs of Big Beer. And Jack McAuliffe simply got a kick out of sharing his now years-old pastime with his father once he shipped out from Scotland for the States.
    Along with this shift among homebrewers was a more general Everyman realization that something was missing from the once grandly heterogeneous tradition of American brewing, that barely a hundred breweries was notenough for a nation of two hundred million splashing across a continent and over the Pacific. In early 1973, the
Chicago Daily News’s
Mike Royko, famed for his columns about Windy City politicians and criminals (and criminal politicians) and the recipient of the previous year’s Pulitzer Prize for commentary, lamented that “America’s beer tastes as if it were brewed through a horse.” The column touched a national nerve. How dare he criticize the national drink! One reader gave him a Plan B: “Go to hell, if you don’t like this country’s beer. Maybe you’ll like what you are served there.”
    Royko responded by organizing what may well have been the first beer taste test by a newspaper. The results, printed on July 9, 1973, were telling. Of the twenty-two beers, including imports, blindly sampled by eleven tasters, Budweiser, the signature brand of the nation’s biggest brewery, finished dead last, with Schlitz, then the number-two brewery, just ahead of it (judgments regarding Bud: “a picnic beer smell,” “lousy,” “Alka Seltzer,” “yeccch”). No brands from the nation’s top-five breweries, in fact, finished in the top five (and, we should note, Anchor Steam was not among the twenty-two sampled). The overall winner was a West German pilsner, followed by England’s Bass Ale; and the domestic champ was Point Special, a pilsner from the regional Stevens Point Beverage Company in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. “Great flavor and a great beer smell,” as one judge put it; “light and lovely,” said another. The 116-year-old brewery, which would change ownership several times in the next thirty years and add cola making to its activities, enjoyed a 20 percent sales bump from the win. But it turned down a request by airline TWA for two hundred cases a week because it would deplete its supply and hurt local distribution. When a liquor store in the Rockies requested Point Special, it got the same answer. There were consumers out there; there just wasn’t that much variety available unless you made it yourself.
THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BEER
San Francisco | 1974-1978
    T hough the first Anchor bottles meant for points beyond California had headed out