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Good beer is a beautiful thing, much easier to find these days than it was in the darkest days of brewery consolidation. Indeed, as the opening credits to American Beer note, there are currently 1400 breweries in the United States, up from 50 in the late 1970s. Moreover, the vast majority of these breweries, in numbers at least, are microbreweries, making smallish batches of high quality, idiosyncratic brews and serving them to the narrow slice of the beer market that cares about quality.
American Beer is an odd little documentary that combines the yuppie obsession with beer quality with frat-boy excesses. In it, the director Peter Kermizian takes four friends on a tour of America's microbreweries, visiting 38 of these establishments in 40 days and covering 12,000 miles. It's a hapless little group -- their roof suitcase falls off the car 20 minutes into their trip, they get stopped for speeding, one of them gains 12 pounds in the first week, and another simply disappears somewhere in California. Along the way, they make the acquaintance of an fascinatingly eccentric group of independent brewers, from the cello-playing brewmeister at Vermont's McNeill's to the Baudelaire-quoting, hat-sporting proprietor of the Kalamazoo Brewing Co., to the aging hippies in charge of, again, Vermont's Magic Hat brewery. And they get stinking, stumbling drunk pretty much every night. The morning scenes are excruciating, with various members of the group throwing up and avoiding direct sunlight and vowing never, ever to do it again. (And then they do it again.)
The trek begins in Brooklyn, but quickly wends its way to one of my favorite places on earth, McNeill's Pub in Brattleboro. The proprietor, Rick McNeill is, we learn, a semi-professional cellist who turned to brewing almost by accident. (One of his bartenders, not in the film, is a fairly accomplished opera singer. As an aside, one of the most bizarre events of the last year was when we walked into McNeill's during a Morris Dancer's convention, people with bells on their pants lining the bar, and dead silence because the girl behind the taps was belting out an aria.) His facility, a converted firehouse, is ramshackle and jury-rigged; there are hoses running from the taps upstairs, through holes in the floor to the brewing area below, and the downstairs is probably not something you should think about too hard if you want to drink at the Pub. Yet the beer, I can attest, is a wonderful thing, perfect for a late Sunday afternoon after skiing or shopping or just bumming around this lovely hippie town. My husband and I used to go there at least once a week, downing a beer or two before the movies, and no film has seemed half as entertaining since we stopped. The final shots, showing Kermizian and his team sampling small glasses of the dozen or so varieties on tap, capture the convivial roar of a great bar well into the evening.
There's a great deal of discussion of the ways to make beer, the many varieties that can be made (one Midwestern brewery has a flavor that takes a pound and a half of cherries per pint bottle) and the perplexing dominance of Miller, Bud and Coors. There's a stop at Pennsylvania's Yuengling's, America's oldest brewery, whose mountainside storage caves might remind you a bit of the champagne caves of Rheims. There are tunnels that were blocked off for prohibition, photos of miners hoisting pints, and even a ghost or two. Now in its sixth generation of family ownership, it's a brewery full of history.
The brewers are an attractive group, strong from hauling kegs, independent and broadly educated. Dog Fish's Sam Calagione ends his segment quoting Emerson. Larry Bell, of Kalamazoo Brewing in Michigan, toasts the group with a long poem by Baudelaire. The Bell segment is, in fact, one of the film's most engaging, as he takes the whole band to an old-fashioned bar named The Old Hat, where they don silly headwear and eat pickled eggs and wax philosophical in the way that only well-educated, well-lubricated men can do. Bell tells a story of a year when, deep in debt and facing high malt prices due to drought, he got a call from a remainder man who had just received a shipment of malt from a train accident. The container had split. The original buyer had refused it, though the inside was dry and still good. Dell bought the malt, which turned out to be of the very highest quality, and got through the year, his brewery eventually surviving to profitability.
To me the whole point of brew pubs and craft beers in general, though, is to have one or two and enjoy them. Kermizian and his friends are on a mission, not just to taste these exceptional brews, but to wallow in them. Thirty-eight brew pubs in 40 days...it seems excessive, doesn't it? However, while the entire team is relieved to have a "day off" late in the film (meaning that they don't have to drink, though they do), there's a sense of sadness at the end. Getting a job -- even as a brewer, as one of the group plans to do -- isn't like touring the country in a crowded car, having deep and meaningful conversations with beer makers and drinking until the world seems like a comfortable place.
Until the next morning, that is. Asked for hangover remedies, most of the brewers recommend hair of the dog, though one comes out and says it: "No, you guys are doomed."
-- Jennifer Kelly
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