What Ales Him?

If you can imagine a skinny elf from Oklahoma with just a bit of a cannonball potbelly pushing out the waistband of his trousers, a tousle-haired and lightly balding elf with an affection for galluses, bow ties and little porthole reading glasses unfailingly perched on the end of his nose, well, you’re all but sitting down for a beer with Charles Finkel.

This is the man who has done more than most in the business to teach Americans the pleasures to be found wandering in the world of what he calls “craft brewing.”

Not just beer, mind you. Not beer as it has come to be known on a mass scale in this country. Finkel’s interest is in beer as it always has been. Ale, to be more to the point, and the fresher the better.

What are now common, everyday, pick-up-a-six-pack-at-the-supermarket beers like porter, oatmeal stout, imperial stout, brown ale and smoked beer simply were not available or generally known to the American public until Finkel started importing and marketing them in 1978.

Remember that in the early 1970s, there was only one all-malt brewer in the United States--Anchor Steam Brewery in San Francisco. This was back when people visiting Colorado and California dragged home cases of Coors because the beer was unavailable in their local markets.

This was before Miller Brewing assaulted the hegemony of Anheuser-Busch with an oddball gimmick called “lite” beer. And even if you had a mind to search out craft beer, there were just three classic styles of beer available then--pilsner, stout and pale ale.

It was an entirely different world than the one we now inhabit, in which all 24 classic styles are available, in a proliferation of brands, both imported and domestically brewed. For this, we can thank Finkel.

He had a concept: to sell beer by its brewing style. “Prior to that,” Finkel says, “people thought of beer in a generic sense. And they weren’t at all off the mark, really. What was being sold in this country was more or less all the same.”

So why does the man who has done so much for beer call his company Merchant du Vin? Finkel picked the name because, before there was beer in his life, there was wine.

Finkel left his native Oklahoma in the mid-1960s for New York City and the wine trade. He was a graphic artist by training, and he puts that skill to use designing labels, packaging and displays.

By 1970 he was living in Houston and had his own wine company, Bonovin, at a time when the American interest in wine was just beginning to rise above the horizon. He carried the best of American boutique wines in his line, as well as the best European imports. In 1974, he sold out to U.S. Tobacco and moved to Seattle to take a job with Chateau St. Michelle winery, which the tobacco corporation owned. In 1978, Finkel stepped out on his own and started Merchant du Vin.

“I went after Italian wines,” he says. “By that time, though, everyone was in the wine business. I knew I couldn’t be the best. And beer was really my main interest.”

Within a year, he dropped the wine from the line in favor of beer but kept the company name, believing that changing the name of a living company would bring as much good luck as changing the name of a ship at sea.

The product switch worked. “I figured, how many bottles of a ’73 Barolo is a restaurant going to sell compared to beer in a supermarket? And my intuition at the time was correct. Now I drink the wine and sell the beer.”

Though it took a long time to build his business, Finkel says, “I knew within the first year I had made the right choice. Because there was a consumer out there just like me, someone willing to spend [what I was charging] $7.99 for a six-pack of high-quality beer. This was the highest-priced beer ever marketed in the history of humankind. It led the way for microbreweries, showing them there was a viable public out there willing to pay a premium price for good beer.”

Fast-forward to September 1997--and skip past the enormous marketing legwork of Finkel and his gang to get across the craft brewing message to a reluctant America; skip past the day when Finkel opened his own microbrewery and pub in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, the Pike Place Brewery and Pub; skip too Finkel’s hand in keeping the doors open at Liberty Malt Supply in the Market, one of America’s premiere home-brewing supply shops--and you’ll find it was Finkel who was invited to address the small-scale craft brewers attending the World Beer Forum in Munich. August Busch III of Anheuser-Busch was invited, too. But he delivered an address to the big boys--the Becks, Fosters, Kirins and Heinekens of the world.

Busch’s message was about the globalization of beer, about turning “beer” into something as recognizable everywhere as Coke, about developing a worldwide common appeal with a common-denominator taste, making beer a thing with one universal taste. Something along the lines of, say, Bud.

Finkel says Busch and his fellow mega-brewers want to do to the rest of the world what most American lager brewers have done to America this entire century. They want to make beer drinkers forget how good and how varied the beer drinking experience can be; to make them forget the ales, stouts, porters, iambics, bocks, double bocks and pilsners that are easily available fresh from the tap or supermarket beer cooler.

“Busch talked to 800, and I talked to maybe 40,” Finkel says one morning in his offices overlooking Lake Washington in Seattle.

“He’s out to sell Bud like Levis, making it an American experience. Imported beers, to give you an example, are about 6% of the domestic market, and most of that is the Canadian and Mexican beers that are hard to tell apart from each other or anything brewed right here by Anheuser-Busch or any of their direct competitors. So the slice I’m talking about of that 6% is all but insignificant on that kind of scale, but nonetheless worthwhile.

“I told this wonderful group of brewers to take pride in the individual nature of their product, the regional nature, the diversity they bring to this grand old tradition, that their product is part of their geography and their history, that a small brewery can succeed in the American market with a quality craft product, and you can make the distinction that beer is not another kind of soft drink, which is how Bud and beers like it are sold.”

In a world where the one-beer/one-world vision called globalization is the dominant marketing theme, what’s left for anyone who wants to enjoy a beer with flavor, with character? Plenty, according to Finkel.

“This is the best time in history for people who want to drink good beers,” Finkel insists. “There is more good beer and more kinds of good beer available to more people today than ever before.

“That was part of my message to the craft brewers in Munich: [There are] people who want to drink a creative product, and it’s enough of a market that you can do well. There are more microbreweries in California than anywhere else in the country, and they are making beers in a couple of dozen classic tastes.”

We have been taught this century that drinking beer is a brainless exercise; globalization is a natural extension. The drinking of and pleasure to be found in craft beers, however, is quite different. It has a bit of a learning curve. It demands a certain intelligence, a certain attention to detail. It takes some exploring, some adventuring.

“It’s up to the people who enjoy beer and who are learning to enjoy beer to understand that there is more to beer than what’s sold on TV,” Finkel says. “There’s a little work involved. You have to do the required tasting, then arrive at an informed opinion about what it is you like and don’t like, what it is you feel goes best with one kind of food and what doesn’t and then support that beer and brewery in the face of the mega-brewers of the world.”

Ingle is a Seattle-based freelance writer.