The Great American Saloon Series / New Albion
Bartholomew, Douglas
NEW ALBION by Douglas Bartholomew "What beauty can compare to that of a cantina in the early morning?" Geoffrey Firmin (The Consul), from Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry Good drinking, as...
...McAuliffe, usually T-shirted, must occasionally don a necktie and keeps one handy in the brewery.'' So much for the old ways of brewing...
...No matter, for the ale, porter, and stout of New Albion vintage can be had-at prices ranging from $1.20 to $1.50 or more per bottle-at any number of drinking establishments in San Francisco and environs...
...There's lots of room in this world for all kinds of people," McAuliffe says...
...He is given to punctuating his rare verbal utterances with a roister-ous, mocking snigger that occasionally peals into a full-blown horselaugh...
...From the brewhouse, the cooked wort is pumped to the fermentation room...
...I consumed my first stout at Jack McAuliffe's New Albion Brewery in Sonoma, California, at nine o'clock on a dewy Saturday morning in March...
...Our beer is not for everybody...
...Brewing is a highly visible business," he continues, sipping a stout...
...Beer drinkers don't like to get messed up, otherwise they'd be drinking Jack Daniels...
...The machine appears to have no beginning nor end, nor any reasonable purpose behind its design...
...So much for the history...
...McAuliffe is resolutely dedicated to refining the practical science of brewing to personal perfection...
...They are returnable, and few New Albion drinkers are so foolish as to employ them as ammunition against Golden State scenery...
...This is the bottle washer...
...He admits to having no scheme to give Sonoma the bomb, although this certainly would be one means of eradicting the obnoxious breed of tourists that infects this tiny hamlet each weekend...
...The commercial demands of crossing hundreds or thousands of miles and languishing unconsumed in saloons or package stores for weeks or months often dictates the use of pasteurization, heading agents, enzymes, or antibiotics in production of the modern-day beer or ale...
...Is this Mecca...
...For what he lacked in proportion, the bibulous Lowry nonetheless compensated with an uncanny knack for surrounding himself with imbibers of a like-minded perspective-surely another requisite...
...This quality is a result of the brewery's slow fermentation in the bottle-a process that takes five weeks in a chilling cellar at the brewery...
...The government is addicted to taxes...
...This part of the brewing process is known as sparging the grains...
...The drained off or sparged contents in the pail are poured back in the tun, to be processed once more until the starch has been broken down sufficiently for the wort to run clear...
...The reader should be cautioned here, though...
...It contains a single large desk (reminiscent of this writer's own garage sale leftover), a four-ton safe of Midas proportions that McAuliffe found in a dump after it had been "peeled" open by nocturnal visitors to a local jewelry, and a bookcase whose contents include such classic tomes as 100 Years of Brewing (1903), The Complete Practical Brewer (1852), Pasteur's Studies on Fermentation (1879), Textbook on the Science oj Brewing (1891), and Preparation of Malt and Fabrication of Beer (1882...
...On bottling day, three workers are assigned to the day-long task oi washing, filling, capping, and labeling...
...New Albion bottles, incidentally, are of the standard dark brown twelve-ounce export type...
...It requires a degree of creativity to sustain, matched with like quantities of stamina...
...Although they are frowned upon, visitors to New Albion find their way around the side of the corrugated structure housing the brewery to the office, a room the size of a garage...
...The one thing that bothers McAuliffe is the fact that his ale, porter, and stout are available only to northern California drinkers...
...Then comes Al, a personable man of some apparent means...
...There are two visual characteristics that are idiosyncratic to the New Albion brews...
...Al New Albion, Wednesday is bottling day...
...Later, when pressed, he launches into his generic tirade against the products of larger, commercial brewers, then backs off...
...Dusty, thirsty, haggard, he asked, "Is this it...
...In all fairness, I must confess that prior to this sumptuous occasion, your correspondent's only experience with early morning consumption occurred a decade ago at 7:15 a.m...
...Half the size of a phone booth, the World model uses a glue pot and a labeling device operated by a treadle clutch to affix label to bottle with the approximate velocity and cadence of a horse swatting a fly with its tail...
...In this country people used to work six days a week, twelve hours a day...
...The ship, McAuliffe informs me, is Sir Francis Drake's vessel the Golden Hinde...
...The only more visible business I can think of is a whorehouse...
...Nor is it a pastime for the timid...
...We're taxed by the barrel, and we turn out something like 360 barrels a year...
...It combines the best of New Albion's heavier, darker stout and the light bodied, traditional ale...
...As McAuliffe, morning stout in hand, observes, "People do like to stop here and chat...
...Back in the office, I am englufed by the pungent aroma of old books and ale brewing, a smell at once felicitous and evocative of a time when men wore handlebar mustaches, women covered their bodies in puffy things that challenged the male imagination, and saloons were places of splendid isolation, of escape, as it were, from the sobering realities of domestic vicissitude...
...It's not ethically or morally right that folks on the East Coast should be deprived of New Albion...
...A ringing telephone jars my stouted and portered senses...
...And Jack's brew is not to be missed, especially the porter...
...McAuliffe is expounding on work and the necessity for the brewery's long hours...
...The first is that any man who can bring decades-old machines to life must have a certain power over existence as we know it (I cannot do this with my own motorcar, and it is only five years old...
...After all, beer is the beverage of moderation...
...Still, for those of us who would like to see New Albion for sale in places beyond earthquake country, there are a couple of propitious signs...
...on a Saturday in Peru (pronounced PEE-ROO), Indiana...
...Such talk, however serious from a man who means business, is not likely to send Anheuser Busch, Miller, and Carling quaking in their bootlegs...
...I hate all government and I despise regulation...
...There's a nice feeling about this place...
...Today he carries a book-length computer printout of gags, which he begins reciting to McAuliffe, vice president and brewster Suzanne Stern, and me...
...In the brewhouse, the first wort runoff from the mash tun is starchy...
...This is not a vineyard...
...But any pasteurized or filtered ale cannot be classified as real ale...
...Toting an open bottle of stout-much ale being consumed by those who labor here-McAuliffe, 35, is a barrel-chested man of medium height with rubicund cheeks and a singularly industrious constitution...
...Brewing, however, is a science...
...He admits he once received a letter from a major brewer's association mildly exhorting him-like a good "light beer" should-not to demean the products of his larger and more established brethren...
...The first is their opacity when decanted from bottle to glass...
...One may drink at the brewery only if properly sanctioned, that is to say, brought into the New Albion fold...
...The second curio is the label on the bottle, depicting a ship precariously navigating between what appear to be two icebergs...
...It is at once sweet and tart...
...Since they are not stabilized by sterile filtration or heat (as in pasteurization), the beers continue to live in the bottle during delivery and when consumed...
...He extends to me an invitation to the Third New Albion Pig Roast at his mountain retreat in June, where the owner of San Francisco's Anchor Steam Brewery is to be present...
...Called a D & L six-wide soaker-hydro, this mechanical beast consists of innumerable gears, wheels, flanges, and locomotive-type arms surrounding an enclosed inner honeycomb of holes, curtains of rubber straps, and endless lengths of conveyor...
...The dark, opaque liquid runs from the run through a transparent plastic tube to a stainless steel pail, where it collects, and Stern offers me a taste...
...The stout is, typically, bitter and throaty, yet somehow lacking in the classic bite of the ubiquitous Guinness...
...Boulder Brewing, a small Colorado outfit just getting started, wants tips on bottling...
...That's fine with me-I respect that...
...In his laudable determination to set brewing back to a better century, McAuliffe has one-upped the soaker-hydro on the Rube Goldberg scale of technology with his answer to bottle labeling...
...All three "beers," as McAuliffe is wont to lump them, are fully natural, embodying only malt, hops, yeast, and water...
...Hops also act as a natural inhibitor of bacterial growth, Stern tells me, but in recent years the hopping rate at many breweries has been reduced in favor of the more popular lighter and milder beers...
...It appeared over a caption that read, "Mr...
...Resembling a Ben Franklin sketch of a printing press, his scavenged semi-automatic World Company 1910 labeler is the antithesis of today's computerized, fully automated bottling lines...
...Drake, who is said to have discovered California, called the land "New Albion" in honor of his homeland, and claimed it for Queen Elizabeth I. Having read of the Albion Brewing Company, a turn-of-the-century brewery operating in San Francisco until the twenties, McAuliffe thought it fitting to revive a local tradition...
...There's lots of room for different beers...
...Such is the tutelage of one who would assume the dubious charge of scribe of saloons...
...Having wheedled still another of his magnificent porters from the aging room's bountiful cache, I listen as the brewmaster once more fusillades the state of modern brewing...
...Fortunately, New Albion has little, if anything, to do with the town, save when the feisty McAuliffe chases from the premises a stray leisure-suited, patent-leathered L.A...
...If you want everybody to be your friend, then you can't have a personality of your own...
...Now hops-the dried blossoms of the female hop plant are added to the wort in the brew kettle to impart flavor, body, and aroma...
...I don't want to tell people what to do," he says...
...An anachronistic figure, McAuliffe would have been better suited as a village farrier in Victorian England...
...The stream of characters who inhabit the brewery on a given Saturday has begun to flow, as has the day's wort from the mash tun to the brewing vat in the tiny two-story brewhouse behind the office...
...NEW ALBION by Douglas Bartholomew "What beauty can compare to that of a cantina in the early morning...
...There it is cooled to 58 degrees Fahrenheit in a device resembling an automobile radiator, and pumped into stainless steel drums where yeast will be added to begin fermentation...
...A woman had been involved-as is often the case in these occurrences- and her male companion's chest had been mistaken as a strop for a straight razor...
...As a daily newspaper reporter, I witnessed, between gulps of warm Bud at the Rainbow Bar on Broadway, a charwoman in the act of mopping a pool of coagulated blood...
...It demands a lusty thirst and a sense of proportion to keep one's drought in check...
...The brewery is situated a mile or so east of the town of Sonoma in the heart of California vineyard country...
...The wort then will have turned to beer, although it will continue to ferment for several weeks in the bottle...
...It's bitter, and lots of people don't like the way it tastes...
...and work ten and twelve hours a day, five, six, sometimes seven days a week...
...Nearby stand stacks of cases of empties awaiting holy Wednesday and their turn in the baptismal waters of the great soaker-hydro...
...His advice comes cheap, if grudgingly, but as he well knows, bottling is expensive...
...His message could be that of anyone who appreciates a fine brew...
...McAuliffe's pronouncements, moreover, should be taken with a grain of malt-one of his co-workers, in fact, observing that marketing is not his long suit, remarked, "Jack should be kept on a short chain at the brewery at all times...
...I'm only after a small part of the market...
...This will, the brewmaster boasts, "give us a real good technical corps here...
...Like all sciences today, it has fallen on hard times...
...The butt of his comic jabs is, more often than not, Uncle Sam...
...After several days, the yeast will have worked its bacterial legerdemain, converting sugars to alcohol and carbon dioxide...
...McAuliffe winces...
...Washing takes place beneath a roofed but unwalled structure adjacent to the brewery, where lurks a white contraption the size of a smal cabin cruiser...
...I'm still interested in modern weapons," he volunteers, "but my talents are better directed doing this stuff...
...Yet McAuliffe, who saved it from an ignominious death as scrap for a mere $150 (the latest model soaker-hydro will set you back $10,000, sans options), assures me that it cleanses and sanitizes hundreds of bottles in succession while simultaneously stripping each of its label...
...The second omen is less finite, having to do with a man who traveled across several states to arrive at the New Albion Brewing Company...
...there are no "tastings" offered here...
...Jack's place, while not a saloon per se, is guaranteed to intrigue anyone seriously concerned with good drinking...
...type who has found his way to the brewery in a futile attempt to taste Sonoma's homegrown brew...
...Invariably, upon emptying a New Albion bottle, there is a thin, irregular coat of yeast that has formed and stuck to the inner bottom...
...The brewery's shut-terbug stops in, bearing photos of a recent party (New Albion products in evdenc) for the staff...
...The porter is a mellifluous blend, a richly hued amber liquid that is cloudy because of final fermentation in the bottle...
...As for the present, I am oitmy second porter after a stout for breakfast, upon which the master brewer insisted...
...His only allegiances to our time, in fact, are penchants for flying and for nuclear weaponry...
...With all due respect, McAuliffe's approach to making beer in 1981 is so utterly outlandish to those who worship modern brewing techniques that Brewer's Digest, as a means of reassuring its readership of his membership in brewing circles, saw fit to publish a photograph of McAuliffe's cravat...
...We start at 7 a.m...
...he soon will sign on a new member of the brewery staff, a young man with a degree in fermentation science from the University of California at Davis...
...Asked his opinion of Anchor Steam, McAuliffe feigns ignorance...
...Some people, when they taste my beer, say they can't stand the shit...
...The beauty that can compare to the Consul's beloved Farolito is that of a brewery making ale, porter, and stout according to the old ways-in the early morning...
...These are not for show, but are used daily...
...Once a haven for Jack London and later for bands of hippies in the 1960s, the town today is beset with busloads of fisheyed tourists whose zeal in sampling its quaint boutiques, prized cheese, and tasty loaves of sourdough is matched only by an army of fleas on a pariah dog...
...First there is Sal, the brewery's "designer," an energetic fellow with a wry countenance who does etchings...
...Geoffrey Firmin (The Consul), from Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry Good drinking, as the Consul and Malc Lowry himself would attest, is an art...
...Finally, good drinking requires, above all, a good brew...
...McAuliffe served on a nuclear submarine support ship in the North Atlantic, and later found employment in California's Silicon Valley as a designer of laser-triggered flashlamps...
...But more for the Brewer may be said, Which nobody can deny...
...This apparent cliquishness, wholeheartedly fostered by McAuliffe and his hard-working clan, limits consumption of the brewery's products on the premises via sale or gift...
...Grinning mischievously, he hands me a copy of an 1888 volume titled In Praise of Ale, open to the frontispiece, which reads: There's many a clinking song is made In honour of the Blacksmith's trade...
Vol. 14 • July 1981 • No. 7
