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Michael Jackson is to microbrews as Michael Jordan is to basketball. Last weekend the beer-writing pioneer came to town to judge the second-annual Portland Rose Festival Homebrew Competition. During a fully scheduled whirlwind three-day visit, he managed a half hour to talk about the lack of beer drinking among today's journalists, the energetic character of Northwesterners and their beers, and how Portland really may be the beer capital of the world. WIllamette Week: How did you get started writing about the beer industry? Michael Jackson: I began my working life as a newspaper journalist. I began straight out of high school--I come from quite a blue-collar family and they couldn't afford to put me through college. I went to work at a newspaper when I was 16 years old. Journalists in those days drank huge amounts of beer, far more than they do today. We'd go cover the local courtroom or something, and when the court finished, we'd go into the pub. Because it was a daily paper, you couldn't go back and write the story; you had to phone it in straight from the pub. People always argued about the beer. The main conversation when the guys would gather was always about the beer: "Oh this beer's terrible. I had to cover a story in the next town, and the beer in the next town's much better." "Oh no, you got that all wrong, that beer's terrible; what you really want is this beer." And I would ask, "Couldn't we do a taste-off, couldn't we do a story about this? I mean, where do all these flavors in beer come from, why are they all different?" And everybody would always say, "Oh well, it's only beer, who cares?" I would say, "Well, we've been talking about it for the last three hours--arguing about it quite passionately--what makes you think our readers wouldn't care about it?" Early on in the micro movement, American brewers brewed mostly ales. Certainly in the Northwest we started to brew in more the British tradition than the German tradition. What do you think of these interpretations? The comparison I've often made is that these ales have a robustness of flavor and a freshness of flavor--the fruitiness of hop character and the dryness and intensity of hop character--as compared to the ales made in Britain, which are really less assertive, less flavorful, less aromatic, arguably more subtle. The United States is a very young country, a very energetic, confident young country, and the West Coast, particularly the northern part, is the most youthful and energetic part of that country. It's almost as if the people are reflected in the beer. That might sound a slightly poetic way of looking at it, but I think it's true. I was asked on radio this morning, "How important is Portland in all of this, and is Portland the beer capital of the United States?" To which my answer always is that it's a private squabble between Portland and Seattle, really, and nobody else comes close. Portland has, within its zip codes, between a dozen and 20 breweries, which is actually slightly more than Cologne has--and it's the most breweried city in Germany. So, you could make an argument for Portland being the beer capital of the world. I'd like to see more evidence of this when the city promotes itself. When I come into the airport, I'd like to see a sign that says, "Welcome to the Beer Capital." The newest issue in craft brewing is the slowdown of the market. Do you have any words of wisdom for American craft brewers? I think the slowdown has been somewhat exaggerated in the sense that it was based on an absurdly high rate of growth. In some ways these things become self-fulfilling prophecies: The more the industry grew, the more people started to throw money at it. Suddenly Wall Street discovered microbreweries. They're like overgrown babies, the people in Wall Street: "Throw money at it, invest, invest!" That was never going to work; any idiot could see that the whole house of cards was going to come falling down. But the well-run breweries making good beer are still there. Which beers do you think are more likely to become international classics or rise above a solely local stature? Somehow, although there are all these very hoppy beers in the Northwest, nobody has made the clear, clarion call that Anchor Liberty Ale makes, for example. I thought at one time that something like Grant's IPA or Grant's Russian Imperial Stout might achieve that kind of status. They haven't quite. You've got this real clamor of very good beers--lots of which I love to drink--but there's nothing that has really come out and said, "I am an international classic." I think there is a point of saturation for the rest of the world regarding Northwest beers. In a way, it's because of their success. It's funny to be talking like this about these breweries because I remember all of these breweries when they were very, very new and very, very tiny indeed, and facing what seemed an impossible situation in trying to persuade people that there was beer other than the type made by Bud and Miller and Coors. I mean, it's astonishing. It's not astonishing in the sense that they certainly deserve where they got. It's something I was tooting my trumpet for and being a cheerleader for from a very early time. But it's great that it got as far as it has got. |
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