‘Washington Beer’ delves into state’s highly hoppy history

If anything unifies this spread-out state, it must be beer.

And not just any beer: intensely hoppy beer. Surely it’s just a matter of time until the Legislature declares the India pale ale our official state libation.

“I’m sure the primary reason is, we grow 70 percent of the hops in the country” — and 20 percent of the whole world’s hops — said author Michael F. Rizzo.

The hop flower isn’t just an essential, stabilizing ingredient in beer; it also adds what’s become the signature, supremely bitter flavor of the crafty Pacific Northwest. (Opinions about that signature vary, with some detractors insisting that widespread love of punishingly hoppy IPAs must be trendy affectation, not real affection.)

“Here in the Northwest, we are so close to so many varieties of hops,” Rizzo said. “Breweries have great access, and it’s easy for them to experiment.”

Rizzo, who hosts a podcast called “Northwest Brew Talk” from his home in Skagit County, will stop by Vancouver’s Loowit Brewing from 3 to 5 p.m. Sunday to discuss his new book, “Washington Beer: A Heady History of Washington State Brewing.”

It was pioneer Ezra Meeker who took a delivery of hop roots from an Olympia brewer and planted “six hills of hops” in Steilacoom in 1865, Rizzo writes. It was a rewarding cash crop, and within a few years, Meeker and his hops were sought out by legendary Portland brewer Henry Weinhard, who had previously worked at, purchased, renamed and resold an establishment called Vancouver Brewery. In the next 26 years, Meeker planted hundreds of acres of hops and even expanded his business to England. It wasn’t until 1892 that a widespread hop lice wiped him out.

Worldwide and local hop crops have waxed and waned since, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently issued a glowing status report about hops in the Pacific Northwest this summer and even predicted that 2016 is on track to set a 100-year record for acreage planted (37,475 acres of hops in Washington and 51,115 acres total in Washington, Oregon and Idaho; that’s a 17 percent increase over 2015).

Prohibition, rebellion

“Vancouver was one of the places where breweries took off,” Rizzo said. “It was close to Portland. Lucky Lager was the big one there for many years.”

The long, storied history of Lucky Lager in downtown Vancouver finally ended in 1985, when its plant was dismantled and shipped to China.

Before Lucky, Northern Brewing Co. of Vancouver was the big dog here, and it went to court in 1914 to try fending off local foes. That’s because, when Washington voters approved statewide alcohol prohibition to begin in 1916, Vancouver hurried with its own booze ban, setting it to begin one year earlier, on Jan. 1, 1915. Northern Brewing sued for the right to ignore the local ban and keep manufacturing beer until the state one went into effect.

It lost.

Other Washington breweries tried other tactics. They started concocting “near beers,” fruit drinks and sodas. Some packed up and moved to California. And some just rebelled. Rizzo writes that police “raided a scow in the bay near Seattle belonging to the Rainier Brewing Co. in May 1916 and dumped 12,000 quarts of beer in the water.” Meanwhile, a former Seattle police officer named Roy Olmstead became one of the biggest bootleggers in the American West by importing alcohol from Canada.

“By April 1916,” Rizzo writes, “nearly every brewery in Washington had closed or gone out of business.” Three hundred saloons closed, too. But new drug stores opened that could supply alcohol concoctions … by prescription only, of course.

All of this was years before national Prohibition took effect as the 18th Amendment to the Constitution in 1920. It was repealed in 1933.

Details, details

Rizzo hails from Buffalo, N.Y., where he bought a historic house and became fascinated by its past.

“It triggered something in me,” he said.

And he delved into research, eventually writing a series of articles about historic Buffalo homes. Then he took his new detective skills and moved to other subjects that interested him, especially the history of Buffalo as viewed through its buildings, its department stores, its mayors and its gangsters. He has compiled books about all of these topics.

Compile is pretty much what Rizzo does. Numerous online reviews of his other works confirm this reader’s experience with “Washington Beer”: For a book about suds, it sure is dry.

The 176-page volume is essentially a vast list of names, dates and corporate happenings — launches and liquidations, mergers and moves — that are simply stacked one on top of another in chronological order. “Washington Beer” presents a mountain of facts but contains precious little tale-telling; it feels more like a reference volume than readable prose. It’s published by a foodie imprint of historical publisher Arcadia, which has also issued numerous, narrowly focused sister volumes with titles such as “Idaho Beer,” “Houston Beer,” “Eastern Shore Beer” and even “North Jersey Beer.”

But fun anecdotes do occasionally shine through, such as the recruitment of fading movie star Mickey Rooney to help revive Rainier Beer’s reputation. Rainier, the struggling rival of Olympia Beer, got imaginative with its TV commercials in the 1970s, first by employing frogs that croaked “Rainier” and mosquitoes that buzzed “Beer.”

Then it haggled with Rooney, who was appearing in a play in Seattle and who rejected an offer of $2,500 to make a commercial. Rooney held out for $3,000, Rizzo writes, and when the commercial shoot was finished, he promptly bought himself a $3,000 car at a nearby lot and drove home to Hollywood.

That brings us to the 1980s, when all the elements were in place for what’s become the craft beer revolution, although nobody realized it at the time, Rizzo writes. The 20 people who invested $500,000 in a new Seattle concern, Independent Ale Brewing Co., which later became Redhook, turned out to be trendsetters. The microbrewery scene has been growing and experimenting by leaps and lurches ever since. There are at least 20 breweries in Clark County now, and something like 300 breweries and pubs across the state.

Who are all these dedicated brewmasters?

“It seems like a lot of people who always wanted to run a small business. Some have full-time jobs,” Rizzo said. “The vast majority are home brewers who just decided that they want to do this, because beer is good.”