Have you ever tried Thomas Hardy’s Ale? If you’re new to great beer and live here in the San Francisco Bay Area, there’s a good chance you’ve never had a chance.

Sadly, it’s been at least three years since this famous English ale, once the strongest beer in Great Britain, has been available here. The importer, George Saxon, of Phoenix Imports says he’s been unable to find a distributor for the Bay Area since Conquistador Distributing folded.

This is the first beer to come out in vintages, bottled once each year with the year on the bottle, whether or not the federal government believes there can be vintage beer or not. I dug out two of my columns on Thomas Hardy, one from the first day of the new millennium and one from two years ago. Check them out here.

What brought this up is that an ace beer blogger and author, Stan Hieronymus did a vertical tasting of a number of “vintage” Thomas Hardy ales, including a bottle of the original, 1968. You can find his report here and a report of an earlier tasting by Realbeer.com here.

Full disclosure. I have a couple of bottles of Thomas Hardy from a ways back, 1988 and 1987. Haven’t opened them, gonna wait some more. These are tasty creatures.

Photo: Judy Ashworth with Andy Musser, former Philadelphia Phillies broadcaster, now Anchor’s rep in Philadelphia. Taken at Anchor’s 2007 Christmas party.

The trouble with blogs is they’re linear. They’re like a moving finger that writes and moves on. Early this month I posted part of an article I wrote for Northwest Brew News about Judy Ashworth, who without a doubt was America’s first craft beer publican. She held court at a place called Lyons Brewery in Sunol, which is in the San Francisco East Bay about 50 miles east of San Francisco.

The comments posted by former Lyons pub folks have been great. Unfortunately the post is buried four screens back….

Here’s the top of the story…

Time Machine — Remembering When…

By William Brand

It’s almost impossible to imagine the Northern California pub world of 30 years ago: With luck, in a typical neighborhood tavern, there were perhaps four taps, Bud, Coors, Miller and maybe, for variety: Schlitz or Olympia. Differences were slight: Bud was fizzy, Coors was light, Miller tasted slightly sweet, Schlitz was dry, Oly was sour.

Anchor was evolving into something splendid, but it rarely made it out of San Francisco and certainly never to neighborhood bars.

There was no light beer; counting calories like avoiding cholesterol and stopping smoking were in the future and bars were smoke-filled; ashtrays were ubiquitous.

The beer was boring – there for the mild buzz, although most of us got our buzz outside with reefer.

We were between wars: Vietnam had dribbled into closure, more crap was ahead, but Billy Joel hadn’t yet written the song. All we wanted _ those of us who had chosen to oppose the war, dropped out and grew our hair long, and those who got drafted and wound up getting their asses shot off in Nam _ was a little peace.

Beer was boring, so what… Well, craft beer changed all that, it was like the Billy Joel song, NewAlbionMendocinoNewmansSierraNevadaWidmer…

But what about the lowly pub? Those smoke-filled arcane places full of stoners sipping tepid lager? What happened to them? They were hit by a whirlwind, her name is Judy Ashworth.

A single mom with three kids, she bought Lyons Brewing, a pub in bucolic Sunol, California in1983. “It was a longneck, Bud-drinking cowboy bar,” Ashworth says. “I was 39 years old, the owner wanted to sell and couldn’t so he sold it to me on a note.”

“I was known as a mixologist, even then. I had a mix, I called ‘Judy’s mix,’ Bavarian Dark and Coors. But I’m not even sure why, but I wanted other beers. READ THE REST OF THE POST…

And here are some of the comments:

A. Ass Says:
April 17th, 2008 at 11:24 pm e
Thanks for the story on Judy Ashworth. That brought back some meories. My (eventual) wife and I stumbled across the Lyons Brewery Depot completely by accident one night and never looked back. What a treasure that place was. I still drink from the glass we got at the benefit, still occasionally wear my LBDCC shirt, and still curse that fire every time I drive through Sunol.

She was always very welcoming, and enthusiastic about her newest discoveries. We learned a great deal about beer from Judy, and I’m glad to hear she is doing well.

William Brand Says:
April 18th, 2008 at 7:07 am e
All hail Judy!! (May she open another pub))

Jessejps Says:
April 26th, 2008 at 9:04 pm e
Lyon’s brewery was such a big part of my life in my 20’s. from the time I turned 21 until I move away to Seattle I was there every Tuesday and almost every Sunday. with the “Tuesday night crew” Rick was our barman, Mark, Dave, Erik, Bob, Brian, and a cast of others who I aplogise for leaving out. Judy’s Pub was where I learned to truly love Beer. She had a “Passport” where you could get a stamp for every new beer you tried at 25 you got a free beer, 50 was a t-shirt and 100 was a huge glass boot full of the beer of your choice. I lost track of how many different beers I tried after 150 or so. It was that kind of place, Judy was always looking for good beers and we watched new breweries come and go or grow and succeed. It was the only place I know of to have barley wine on tap. Judy LOVES to talk about beer, and she definetely knows her beer.
Great friends, great beer, so many great memories. It’s good to hear that Judy is doing well. The Tuesday night Crew still meets at the Hopyard in San Ramon as far as I know, the faces may have changed a bit, I know Mark, Dave, Eric, Dan and Rick are still around. I live in Minnesota now, maybe I’ll make it out there to look them up this summer

William Brand Says:
April 26th, 2008 at 10:36 pm e
Wow Jesse. Those are memories. If you cone back here this summer and go to the Hopyard and those same people are still there, let me know. I’d love to write about them (and you)

You know, you had a front seat on Craft Beer history. Lyons was totally unique. She was far ahead of her time. Thanks for the info and memories. wb

Ahhh April 7, 2008, this day marks the 75th anniversary of the end of national Prohibition in the United States.
WRONG, says Chicago writer-historial Bob Skilnik. On April 7, 1933, the first legal beer – all of it 3.2 ABV – went on sale nationally.
There were big celebrations, 25,000 turned out in St. Louis to greet the first bottles and barrels, Anheuser-Busch says.
However, Skilnik points out,

it was NOT the end of Prohibition.

What brought 3.2% beer back on April 7 was merely a rewriting of the Volstead Act, which created Prohibition. There was no consitutional amendment, no nullification of the 18th nor passage of the the yet-to-be-voted-on 21st Amendment. A month earlier, on March 13, President Roosevelt used the bully pulpit of his office to formally recommend to Congress a looser interpretation of the Volstead Act, which limited alcohol in beer to one-half of one percent. “I recommend to the Congress the passage of legislation for the immediate modification of the Volstead Act, in order to legalize the manufacture and sale of beer…” Read Bob Skilnik’s fascinating account here…

This is an except from an article I wrote recently for Northwest Brewing News, Seattle. This segment is about Judy Ashworthstrong>, the very amazing lady who single handedly and nearly by accident either created the concept of a multi-tap pub specializing in good craft beer or made it famous. I think she actually did both things. For damn sure back in the 1980s no one else had a “Farewell to Bud” party.

I’m posting this as part of a beer bloggers First Friday posting project. On the first Friday of each month, all of us who choose to create a post on the same subject, usually a style of beer. But this month it’s people and when it comes to beer people, Judy’s unique and amazing… Come with me on my time machine…

By William Brand

It’s almost impossible to imagine the Northern California pub world of 30 years ago: With luck, in a typical neighborhood tavern, there were perhaps four taps, Bud, Coors, Miller and maybe, for variety: Schlitz or Olympia. Differences were slight: Bud was fizzy, Coors was light, Miller tasted slightly sweet, Schlitz was dry, Oly was sour.

Anchor was evolving into something splendid, but it rarely made it out of San Francisco and certainly never to neighborhood bars.

There was no light beer; counting calories like avoiding cholesterol and stopping smoking were in the future and bars were smoke-filled; ashtrays were ubiquitous.

The beer was boring – there for the mild buzz, although most of us got our buzz outside with reefer.

We were between wars: Vietnam had dribbled into closure, more crap was ahead, but Billy Joel hadn’t yet written the song. All we wanted _ those of us who had chosen to oppose the war, dropped out and grew our hair long, and those who got drafted and wound up getting their asses shot off in Nam _ was a little peace.

Beer was boring, so what… Well, craft beer changed all that, it was like the Billy Joel song, NewAlbionMendocinoNewmansSierraNevadaWidmer…

But what about the lowly pub? Those smoke-filled arcane places full of stoners sipping tepid lager? What happened to them? They were hit by a whirlwind, her name is Judy Ashworth.

A single mom with three kids, she bought Lyons Brewing, a pub in bucolic Sunol, California in1983. “It was a longneck, Bud-drinking cowboy bar,” Ashworth says. “I was 39 years old, the owner wanted to sell and couldn’t so he sold it to me on a note.”

“I was known as a mixologist, even then. I had a mix, I called ‘Judy’s mix,’ Bavarian Dark and Coors. But I’m not even sure why, but I wanted other beers.

She credits her early education to Bob Hufford, a homebrewer. “He came into my pub and was so excited that I had San Miquel in bottles. He brought in some of his homebrew and I was blown away. I had no idea what real beer tasted like.”

“He said, ‘Hey, there’s this brewery Sierra Nevada going to start and Buffalo Bill’s and Mendocino Brewing. So I met all these people and brought in their beer.”

She took up homebrewing; she became a contest judge. She met fledgling craft brewers from everywhere. On June 6,1986, she had a ‘Farewell to Bud’ party. She replaced Bud with Lighthouse Lager from Santa Cruz Brewing Co.

“I never looked back, I said I’d never have a national beer brand again. Usually, I had to go to the brewery and pick up the beer. The only one that delivered was Sierra Nevada.” It took her six months to convince Anchor to bring their beer all the way – 60 miles east to Sunol.

“I got rid of the national brands and all their promotions. I found out people would actually come in and not swill beer. They’d sit there and quaff it and thoroughly enjoy it. We had Hells Angels. I allowed them to come in, but no chains, no clubs.”

Ashworth has Dec. 23, 1987 engraved in her brain. The pub burned to the ground that day. “Everything was gone. I was standing there and Mark Carpenter and Bob Brewer came up from Anchor. Each had two cases beer. I was standing there crying and the brewers and everybody had a fundraiser for me.

“They told me, ‘You’ve got no choice. You have got to continue. You are our spokesman. They were so busy brewing beer and trying to survive, they had no money to advertise. I was out there teaching people about good beer.”

She reopened in nearby Dublin in 1988. English beer writer Michael Jackson was at the opening. She had multi-taps, all craft beer. She introduced beer and chocolate fests. Her pub became world famous.

“It was an incredible, amazing chapter in my life,” All these people from all walks of life, doing what they loved to do: make beer and drink good beer.” She cracks a big grin. “If I opened a pub, it would be real small and cozy and only carry the best of the best.”

Epilogue
Judy Ashworth sold her famous pub in 1998, not long after she suffered cardiac arrest. A breast cancer survivor with a pacemaker to keep her heart running, she lives on an acreage in Contra Costa and is in training for a 100 mile bike marathon. She’s thinking about opening a small pub when she turns 70.

Photo: This is a one I took with my cel phone at the Anchor Christmat Party in 2007. That’s Judy Ashworth with Andy Musser, who for years broadcast all the Philadelphia Phillies games. He’s now Anchor’s East Coast rep.

The news today is kind of sad. Shared an excellent pint of Pacific Coast ESB at Pacific Coast in Oakland with Dave Heist, proprietor of Hoptown Brewing, late of Pleaasnton, CA. But he had bad news.

Dave says he’s pulled the plug. He delivered his last van load of Paint the Town Red. It’s over for now, he said. He closed his one-man brewery in Pleasanton last summer and has been contract brewing at Sudwerk in Davis, with funds of his own and from an investor.

“But you know,” he said,. “I haven’t brewed beer myself since June of last year. I’m just a figurehead and a salesman. That’s not me. I was running ot of money, I couldn’t continue and maintain a family life. I decided there are some things more important than beer. I’ve been married for 14 years and I have a 13-year-old son, my family’s most important.”

This is not a eulogy. Dave made some damn good beer, the kind of beer that made a lot of us happy. His problems were the eternal problems of the small business person. He’s not alone. Let’s wish him well _ and hey, need a brewer? Look no further than Dave Heist.

Here’s something I wrote about Hoptown six years ago, to close this post…

Work in a small brewery is never done. When I caught up with David Heist, he was trying to pull his 9-year-old son away from Saturday morning television. “I’ve still got a few deliveries to make,” he said.
The Heists bought Hoptown in October 1999, Susi does distribution and sales and David brews. He rapidly earned a reputation for knock-your-socks-off, hoppy ales. His Double IPA has become an East Bay classic.
Hoptown won bronze for Hoptown IPA at the GABF in 2002 and in 2000. David’s Old Yeltsin Imperial Stout won a silver in 2002.
Hoptown currently produces 10 different beers _ most are available in bottles, including his most recent medal winner _ Hoptown IPA.
David considers Hoptown IPA lighter in body than some of his beers. But most of us will find this 6.3 percent alcohol by volume very malty indeed. He adds a great deal of carapils and Munich malts, which, he says, gives it a “velvety” character with no rough edges.
Then, at the end of the brewing process, he says he “pounds the hell of it” by adding a large dose of aromatic hops, including Cascades _ known for their citrus quality,.
He works on the hops to give the beer decent bitterness. “You get that initial bitterness, but it’s erased by the smoothness of the malt. “Mostly,” David admits, “I kind of wing it.”
Wish all brewers could wing it like David Heist.
Credit: William Brand

Photo: David Heist at Pacific Coast in Oakland. Hoptown is no more.

My parents, who lived through the Great Depression and the end of the national prohibition on alcohol,were young and not really drinkers, so growing up in the 1950s, Prohibition was not a subject they ever mentioned. So about all I ever knew about it came from Elliot Ness and the movie and TV series.

But as the 75th anniversary of the end of the that horrendous experience, which gave us the Mafia, approaches, I’ve begun to realize that it was a deal and as the damn thing ended, people celebrated big time. Hard to realize, but the president of Anheuser-Busch August Busch Jr. made a national address on the CBS radio network as the first legal barrels of beer rolled out of the St. Louis brewery. Historians say 25,000 people turned out in St. Louis to celebrate the end of Prohibition. There’s a link to the speech in the post below this one.

This comes from the Brewers’ Association, the craft beer trade group, based in Boulder, CO.

Historians note that Prohibition officially ended on December 5, 1933, with the ratification of the 21st Amendment. But earlier that year, newly-elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt took steps to fulfill his campaign promise to end the national ban on alcohol. He spurred Congress to modify the Volstead Act to allow the sale of 3.2 percent beer in advance of the Twenty-first Amendment being ratified.

Thus, on April 7, 1933, Roosevelt himself received newly legalized beer at the White House to toast what was the beginning of the end for Prohibition. In the 24-hours that followed, more than 1.5 million gallons of beer flowed as Americans celebrated. http://www.75YearsofBeer.org

There are mini-celebrations at brewpubs and craft breweries around the country. Check with your local to find out what’s happening. No, I’m not going to do a roundup. No time. No time.

Want to know what beer must have tasted like when Prohibition ended? Check out Urban People’s Common Lager from Linden Street Brewing in Oakland. One place I know that always has it is the The Trappist Beer Cafe, 460 8th St. in downtown Oakland.

Also Linden Street proprietor/brewer Alex Lamoreaux has an open house with barbecue every Friday beginning at 4 p.m. The beer flows freely. Oakland’s newest brewery, what a perfect place to toast the end of Prohibition.

One Monday, April 7 event I know about will be at Rogue Ales Public House, 673 Union St. in North Beach San Francisco. The event, a Rogue publicist says, will feature casks of Younger’s Special Bitter, beers poured in mason jars, and prizes for best 1930s outfits.

In my next post, I’ll run through what Anheuser-Busch Budweiser Brand Director Tom Shipley, who has researched the issue, told me. Last note: That’s a Sam Adams barrel, once held bourbon, it’s part of the Utopias aging project.

Pete Brown, an English writer, has a most interesting blog. This morning, he writes about that eternal argument: beer vs. wine. Can beer ever stand equally with wine? One factoid, I didn’t know: That there was a time in England and I guess the civilized world that “Burton” the pale ale first made in Burton on Trent in, I believe, the 18th century, was as popular as wine. The successor to Burton, I’m told is Worthington White Shield, which these days is made by Coors, which has kept standards high. This is all true and only tangentially related to Pete Brown’s post. Read on and tell us what you think. Post a comment.

Here’s an excerpt from the post:

Pacific Coast Holiday Beer Tasting Dec. 17One of the strengths of beer is its unpretentiousness, its accessibility. I don’t agree that beer can only ever be a ‘working class’ beverage - Burton pale ale was the most fashionhable thing you could drink for twenty years or so in Victorian society - but I do think that beer is different from wine, and I occasionally get frustrated with people who want to turn beer into ‘the new wine’.

We all know beer can be more complex, can go better with food etc, but when people start trying to talk about beer as if it was wine, they have a tendency to make it elitist. And when people want wine to totally replace beer, drawing battle lines between grape and grain, I lose patience. Anybody who appreciates the subtleties of flavour in a great craft beer and says they ‘don’t like’ wine is either delusional or a liar, and just as bad as those ignorant people who say they ‘don’t like beer’ after drinking one warm can of Bud when they were nineteen.

Elitism is part of wine’s character, so it’s going to be much easier to build in snobbery, mystique, and a sense of specialness. The frustrating part of this is that people can order a bottle of cheap, industrially produced pinot grigio, drink it super-chilled, and while they’re drinking the wine equivalent of Carling Extra Cold, believe they’re actally superior to someone drinking, say, cask ale.

Beer would lose a lot of its soul if it simply aped the culture and mystique around wine.

So I’m not sure. I’d love to see ‘fine beers’ more commonly on the shelves, but can we have that and keep beer as the democratic, sociable drink it has been for five thousand years? Can beer successfully challenge wine at the top level - I’m talking about popular perception, not just among aficionados - without becoming arsey and pretentious? I hope so, but I’m not sure… READ THE WHOLE POST….

One thing about recovering from a computer meltdown, I’ve found items I’d buried and never seen. One of these was Pete Brown’s Beer Blog

He’s English, was a high-powered advertising type who, I gather, discovered real beer, and became a beer writer. His blog is tres intéressant.

Last year, he took an 18,000 mile sea voyage to Argentina then to India, much of it aboard a sailboat. He took along a freshly brewed jeroboam of India Pale Ale (101.6 ounces). It’s how India Pale Ale originated, brewed strong so it could survive the sea voyage from Burton on Trent in England to the English Indian colony. So how did the beer turn out? In a word - Wow! Find out all about it here.

Photo: Pete Brown

It’s true. I’m just behind today. The story on the panel on brewing in San Francisco at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco is coming. Will post by mid-afternoon. Stay tuned. wb

It took nearly two months, but Dixie Beer** and Dixie Blackened Voodoo Lager*** and Dixie Jazz Amber Light** are back in stock in Bay Area stores.

Just got a note from Beverages & More that Blackened Voodoo Lager and the other two are now in stock at their stores. Blackened Lager is a very drinkable, Vienna-Marzen-Oktoberfest style lager; fairly malty, hint of hops.

Background: Hurricane Katrina and the looting that followed dealt Dixie Beer, a century-old New Orleans brewery, an almost fatal blow. No beer’s been brewed there since Katrina. However, the owners are struggling to build a smaller brewery on the site as part of an office or condo development. Nothing’s been done, but they’re hoping.

In the meantime, they’ve contract brewed their first beers since Katrina at a brewry in Monroe, WI. This is the beer that’s reaching the Bay Area now.

My suggerstion and what I’m going to do: Buy a sixer, toast New Orleans tonight.

Find out more about Dixie Beer and Katrina here.