Jack McAuliffe, first craft brewer, dies

CLAY RISEN

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Jack McAuliffe, who in 1976 drew on his experience as a Navy engineer and an avid home brewer to start the New Albion Brewing Co, the first new brewery in America since Prohibition and the inspiration for thousands of craft brewers who followed in his footsteps, died on July 15 at his home in Siloam Springs, in northwest Arkansas. He was 80.

His daughter, Renee DeLuca, said he had been in declining health for several years.

Today, with more than 9,900 breweries in the United States showcasing once-obscure styles like gueuzes, Kölsches, saisons and barley wines, it can be hard to imagine a time when there were just 50, almost all of them enormous, turning out German-style light lagers at an industrial scale.

New Albion offered something profoundly different: handmade ales using just water, barley, hops and yeast. McAuliffe and his partners, Suzy Denison and Jane Zimmerman, ran the label out of a rundown warehouse in Sonoma, California, making just 400 barrels a year, about as much as Coors could produce in a few minutes.

The very idea of small-batch beer was such an anomaly that McAuliffe struggled to find equipment and ingredients. Instead, he fashioned much of the production line himself from materials he had scavenged from a junkyard.

Unable to buy traditional hops in small quantities, he opted for a new variety, cascade, whose notes of fruit and pine didn’t appeal to the big breweries — but which, thanks to McAuliffe, became a prized part of the craft brewing repertoire.

McAuliffe’s DIY ethic likewise became a defining characteristic of craft brewing, said Theresa McCulla, a former curator at the National Museum of American History who documented the history of beer in America.

“He really showed Americans that if you can build it and sheet rock it and weld it, then you can brew your own great beer,” she said in an interview.