Travels with Barley (34 page)

I did ask Selena before I left whether she ever felt harassed by her customers. She said she didn't and that the vast majority of men who came in here understood the rules. She didn't articulate the rules this way but it occurred to me that the Hooters tableau was essentially a live beer commercial in which the customers played a part and were expected to behave as if they were in Cheers, not in some strip joint where you stuck dollar bills in G-strings.

I later phoned up the Hooters headquarters in Atlanta to get the corporate skinny, talking with Mike McNeil, vice president of marketing. He laid out the bare-bones history: the first Hooters opened as a beach bar in Clearwater, Florida, in 1983, with six transplanted Midwesterners chipping in the $140,000 of start-up capital. Twenty years later, Hooters had expanded to about 350 locations in forty-three states and a dozen foreign locales and was the fastest growing restaurant-bar chain in the nation. It thinks 1,000 restaurants might be possible one day—a projection sure to send shivers up NOW's spine.

Annual revenues had grown to about $750 million a year and beer sales comprised about 26 percent of that. All Hooters are required to sell Bud, Bud Light, and Miller Lite and then can mix in a few other brews depending upon local preferences. But Hooters is both Budweiser's and Miller's largest collective on-premise account in the U.S., McNeil told me.

The concern is closely held, with the company itself owning about 120 franchises and private investors the rest. It has since expanded into stock car and powerboat racing, a golf tournament, and magazine publishing: in 2003 Hooters started a four-plane commercial airline with Hooters Girls serving as flight attendants. It's hard to know yet how the airline will fare but it has already generated enormous publicity for the company.

McNeil told me that Hooters represented the wry, blue-collar, middle-class vision of its six original founders—two painting contractors, a brick mason, a retired service station owner, a liquor salesman, and a real estate broker. They would never claim they invented the connection between beer sales and pretty women; only that they'd noticed that, even in bad financial times, the place that did well was usually the “local roadhouse that had pretty good food and, working behind the bar, was the good-looking daughter or wife of the owner. But we've taken the whole concept to the next level.” Hooters, besides dishing up mildly spicy chicken wings, simple seafood, and sandwiches, also considers itself a sports bar, with the requisite widescreen TVs and sports paraphernalia about. Throwing sports into this mix is pretty much a no-brainer. Finding a good number on the connection of overall beer sales to sports is difficult, since no one tracks things like, for example, beer consumption by recreational weekend warriors. But consider one barometer: beer sales at the nation's ninety-six major league sporting venues, plus horse-racing tracks, accounted for the bulk of the $8.84 billion that consumers spent on beer at stand-alone venues and concessions in 2002. Also consider that 70 percent of Hooters' customers are sports-loving males between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four.

The Hooters people also say they wish Hooters detractors would pay some attention to the Hooters sense of humor. True, in 1986, it launched the annual Hooters calendar, a glossy, four-color flip album of cheesecake featuring Hooters Girls in skimpy bikinis. But the months were out of order and there was a joke on every page, even if many of them were corny Midwestern jokes about people from Iowa or tasteless ones about Tammy Faye Bakker. (Example: “It's not just Jimmy I'm depressed about. Last night, a Peeping Tom threw up on my window.')

On Hooters' official Web site, you can watch a video claiming to be an inside look at Hooters Girls Bootcamp. The whole thing is a parody of its bimbo image: in one scene, a stern drill sergeant stands at a blackboard pointing at chalk drawings of a mug of beer and a chicken wing while Hooters Girls, brows knitted in great seriousness, take notes. McNeil directed me to the company's Web site to get the official riposte to its feminist critics. It is unabashedly unapologetic:

Beyond that, McNeil took pains to note that being a Hooters Girl isn't necessarily a dead-end job: Kimberly Rivera, who started as a Hooters waitress, is now the company's vice president of training and human resources. “People have tried to copy us,” McNeil said, “but it's one thing to sell the sizzle, it's another to deliver the steak.”

It was only sometime after I talked to McNeil that I learned two things: other people were indeed building franchises based upon the Beer Goddess model, and Hooters itself was, well, sizzling about it. In early 2003, the company sued one rival in U.S. District Court in Orlando for “unfair competition and trade dress infringement.”

One interpretation of its claim is that it held a trademark on the Beer Goddess.

“That's it in a nutshell,” Crawford Ker, founder and CEO of the sued rival firm, Ker's WingHouse Bar and Grill, told me over the phone when I called him to ask about the suit. “It's ridiculous.”

I discovered the lawsuit while trolling a public relations wire service for Hooters press releases. I spotted a release by Ker instead in which he said his company had filed a motion to dismiss the Hooters suit while accusing Hooters of trying to “stifle fair competition in the marketplace” and “maliciously” trying to stomp out his company.

Ker is a former Dallas Cowboys lineman who opened his first WingHouse in Clearwater in 1994 only six miles away from the original Hooters. He said it was his view that Hooters didn't care so much until the company realized that Ker's had grown rapidly to twelve locales—all situated in Hooters territories—and was beginning to rack up big revenues. It had sales of about $19 million in 2003—a drop in the bucket to Hooter's $750 million but extraordinary growth for a company only nine years old.

I went on Ker's Web site and certainly saw Hooters similarities: Ker's dresses its waitresses in black tank tops, black short-shorts, and flesh-colored stockings not terribly dissimilar to the Hooters Girl look. His restaurants serve chicken wings and the kind of generic bar food that Hooters serves. But Ker said that his places are much more sports-bar-oriented than are Hooters restaurants, with some of them having a many as thirty TV screens. And, anyway, in his view, under the Hooters analogy
Playboy
magazine, by example, could have sued to keep all other competitors out of the market. “Hooters doesn't have a monopoly on attractive women or ‘sex appeal' as they claim in their complaint,” Ker said. “Trademark laws protect against unfair competition but not all competition.”

I got a copy of the suit that Hooters had filed and it did in fact say that “the Hooters Girls add an element of female sex appeal that is prevalent in the Hooters restaurants and is
unique
[my emphasis] in the industry.” I phoned Hooters, tempted to ask whether this didn't seem like a tempest in a C-cup but … of course I didn't. And McNeil told me that the real issue wasn't just the Beer Goddess but what Hooters considered the WingHouse's copying of its “decor and atmosphere.” As of this writing, Ker's motion to dismiss had been denied by the judge in the case and the matter was now in discovery and would likely drag on for months before a trial.

Meanwhile, I was left with a final bit of wisdom that I'd gotten from Selena at the Hooters in Jackson. She told me she was glad Hooters only served beer and not hard liquor.

“Otherwise,” she said, “who knows what would happen.”

Portland, Ore.
—How to describe Mary's Club?

A neon sign marks the entrance at the faded end of a downtown block that has no dearth of panhandlers. Inside, it is dark, loud, and cramped, tables scrunched together like a poorly put-together jigsaw puzzle. The air is stale. It is a place, by proclivity and location, clearly perched on the edge between sleaze and camp.

And yet: Beer Geeks would be thrilled to find a wide selection of microbrews at this downtown hotspot. Widmer Hefeweizen is on tap; McMenamins Pale Ale is, too. There are offerings from New Belgium, Full Sail, Deschutes, and Sierra Nevada, among others. In fact, 70 percent of all beer here is craft beer, though you can find Coors, Bud Light, and the anti-globalization crowd's ironical favorite, Pabst Blue Ribbon, on tap.

I ask one of Mary's Club entertainer/servers about
her
favorite.

She has just come from the stage, where she has been dancing (among other maneuvers) to loud salsa music, wearing at the end of her act no more than a smile. She is wearing just slightly more than that now and her smile has given way to a thoughtful pursing of her lips as she seriously contemplates my question.

“I have to say, I love the Widmer Hefe but I'm also a big Fat Tire fan,” she says.

I ask her what the club sells the most of. She replies: “I'm not sure, really, but I know what we probably sell the least of—Bud Light.”

It's not every town where the strippers qualify as Beer Geeks, or where strip clubs are on the front line of the craft brew revolution, or where the patrons of strip clubs seem to be mostly twenty-something
couples
who think the combination of sleaze and craft brew is a swell way to spend an evening.

But then, there's only one Portland—Beervana, to the locals.

This hilly, handsome Pacific Northwest town of about 540,000 is the laid-back nexus of a greater metropolitan area of about 1.5 million people. Sun-drenched in summer, often drizzly and drab by winter, it is hemmed in by vast forests, beribboned by the Willamette and Columbia rivers, and accentuated on its eastern skyline by the snow-capped peak of Mount Hood, a dormant volcano draped with eleven gleaming glaciers. People here seem always to be hiking, hiking, jogging, skiing, climbing, windsurfing, and kayaking. Yes, you can find Republicans here, and the usual assemblage of rich and powerful chamber of commerce types. But many Portlanders indulge in progressive politics leaning toward the libertarian side; they think it not the least bit peculiar that there is an anarchist saloon in town, even if anarchism and capitalistic beer retailing wouldn't outwardly seem to be a good mix. Imagine San Francisco's monochrome liberalism cut with a laissez-faire attitude toward life and a slightly cranky edge to its politics. That's Portland.

But what Portlanders are mostly about and interested in is beer and not “industrial beer” as mass-produced lager is called hereabout. While craft beer sales account for about 3.4 percent of all beer consumed in America, in Portland's city limits craft beer represents 40 percent to 50 percent of the beer sold—a staggering statistical anomaly. In fact, by dint of the density of breweries to population and the beer styles made, Portland can stake a strong claim to being not just the contemporary Beer Capital of America but even the Beer Capital of the World. There are seventy-one microbreweries or brewpubs in Oregon and twenty-six of them are in the Portland city limits. Milwaukee, the former brewing capital of America, has one remaining big brewery, the SABMiller plant, and about a half-dozen brewpubs. Munich has a half-dozen breweries; Cologne, the other world brewing power, has ten or eleven. All produce many more barrels of beer than does Portland but they basically make one beer style: lager. Portland's last big lager maker, the Blitz-Weinhard Brewery, went belly-up in 1999, its Henry Weinhard label sold off to SABMiller. Except for the 280 people who lost their jobs, nobody much misses it.

Oh, and yes. There are brewery-hotels here and it's hard to find a movie house that
doesn't
serve craft brew with the popcorn.

“Portland
was
a lager town, say twenty-five years ago, but now it's a town where as far as beer goes, anything goes. Oregonians in general have a pioneering spirit. We aren't afraid to try all kinds of new beers and our brewers aren't afraid of making every kind of beer possible. Of course, we have the best-educated beer population of any place in America.”

I've come, toward the end of my beer travels, seeking the deeper meaning of Beervana, a place that, everywhere I went along the River of Beer, was spoken of as a kind of beer Shangri-la. The speaker trying to elucidate it for me now is Jim Parker, a onetime journalist who, until 1992, wrote about beer, then changed jobs and “moved two and a half feet, to the other side of the bar” and opened a brewpub. He's since worked in breweries and for the American Homebrewers Association. For the past four years, he has been director of the Oregon Brewers Guild, a trade group founded in 1992; it represents forty-six Oregon craft brewers, twenty-six suppliers like hops growers and malt makers, and a gaggle of “enthusiast” members known as SNOBs (Supporters of Native Oregon Beers). You see their bumper stickers all over Portland.

Parker is standing under the Brewers Guild tent on a virtually perfect day: a warm, cloudless, deeply blue skied Friday on the grounds of Tom McCall Waterfront Park, a flat swath of green space flanked by a macadamized bike path that separates the park from the Willamette River. Beer donuts (made with beer-infused batter) are frying in the background. There are hops people about, offering hops candy (and surreptitiously, home-distilled hops liqueur to a chosen few, I being one of them). The setting is the July 2003 sixteenth annual Oregon Brewers Festival, which the Brewers Guild lends a hand in organizing but whose major driving force is a scrum of energetic volunteer Beer Geeks known as the Oregon Brew Crew. Before it's over, the festival will draw about 80,000 people over three days and they will drink up almost the entire barrelage of the seventy-two beer makers, most of them from Western states, who have been invited to contribute a single favorite beer here. Twenty other beers, made by in-state brewers, are being dispensed from the Brewers Guild tent.

There are bigger beer festivals elsewhere but none quite as dedicated as this one to the range of beer styles—about twenty-five in all (with multiple, exotic interpretations of each style) are represented among the ninety-two beers that can be sampled. If you've never had an Uzbeki raga ale, a ginseng porter, or a watermelon wheat beer, here's your chance. (Oh, and though this isn't a lager town there's a rare black lager, called an imperial
Schwarz bier
, on the festival style list. Even Beer Geeks will stoop to lager so long as it's geeked-up lager.)

A more consumer-friendly event you can't find. Entry is free; $3 buys you an official Oregon Brewers Festival plastic mug with a notch one-third up the side. A $3 token gets your mug filled but a $1 token buys you a sample of any beer up to the notch. That makes it easy to sample lots and lots of beers, especially over three days. Some Beer Geeks will go for all ninety-two beers offered, a tricky thing requiring not just artful pacing, but also determining which beers might sell out before the festival ends and getting to them first.

All the beer is draft and legions of volunteers man the pumps to keep the lines flowing briskly. The kegs are kept in bins fronting a series of huge, open, billowing white tents that provide shade while queuing up and picnic tables for sitting down. You can also take your beer out and sit on the grass and sip it with a view of both the river and Mount Hood. Or, if you're the slightest bit warm, you can take your beer and walk through a mist garden set up at the northern end of the festival grounds.

Too much to drink? No worries. There are squadrons of Alcohol Monitors, staffed by volunteers as friendly as golden retrievers, who will find you a cab or a nice place in the shade to recover your dignity. I saw two guys (the craft-beer-loving homeless, I'm guessing) who seemed to be in a race to see who could get plowed first. The Alcohol Monitors corralled them and politely sent them to the bratwurst stand to get a little something in their stomachs before allowing them to take another sip of beer. (So indignant were they of this deferential treatment that they stalked off; I later saw them drinking Bud Light at a saloon down the street.)

That's the backdrop. To complete the image, imagine thousands of Beer Geeks milling about in the bliss of expectation, as though they had just gained the gates of Paradise. People in line are saying things like “an organic IPA at 75 IBUs? Dude, I've gotta go for that!” A woman sports a T-shirt that says, “Make Beer, Not War.” So much beer has been spilled on the lawn and trampled into the turf that the ground exudes a kind of Earth-Mother-Beer aroma. It's strangely
pleasant
. There are bands playing on bandstands and guys walking through the crowds, guitar amplifiers and drum kits strapped to their personages, wailing away at the blues or some interesting interpretation of World Music. Yes, you can get bratwurst with your beer but there are also gourmet food stands cooking macrobiotic Mexican tortillas and the like.

And get this: about half of the Beer Geeks here are women, another staggering statistical anomaly given that, nationwide, women are only 16 percent of the beer customer base.

Every moment seems to be nirvana in Beervana.

Jim Parker speaks again to remind me, however, that Beervana isn't possible without some dynamic tension. “Here's the deal,” he says. “If you don't brew good beer in Oregon, you don't last long. It's Beer Darwinism—survival of the tastiest.”

I'm going around gathering other opinions on this matter before tackling a serious job: there will be a beer tasting for the media. The program says we will sample twenty beers and not just any old beers. About half of them would easily fit under the definition of Extreme Beer. We'll have an hour to do it in.

I run into John Forbes, a former marketing man at Bridgeport Brewing Co., a Portland mainstay and the state's oldest craft brewery. In bicycle clothes, Forbes, a festival regular and onetime festival organizer, has cycled in from the surrounding hills and will soon cycle out again. He says Portland's portal to Beervana is as much a matter of geography as it is of attitude. “We live in an area where we grow a lot of the raw ingredients for good beer—lots of hops and lots of barley. Great Western Malting Co. is just across the river here [in Vancouver, Washington]. Wyeast [the yeast lab] is right here in Oregon, too. And we have really good water.” He offers a couple more reasons. Portland is an extremely young town demographically and young people tend to be more experimental with things like beer choice. Second: “There are a lot of cheapskates here. Years ago, since the national beer wasn't any good, people said, ‘Hell, we'll make our own.' So homebrewing caught on in a big way and craft beer always follows.”

I run all these theories by Tom Dalldorf, editor and publisher of
Celebrator Beer News
, who is manning a
Celebrator
information desk at the festival. The California-based publication calls itself a “national bimonthly brewspaper.” Dalldorf, a cheerful, bearded man who gravitated to beer journalism after starting in the wine import business, says Portland's craft beer anomalies have a lot to do with a kind of positive parochialism. “The beer scene here is very sociable and people here support their own… . One stat I can tell you for certain: Widmer [headquartered in Portland] has more beer taps in the city than does Anheuser-Busch. I've never heard of a craft brewer anywhere else doing that in a city the size of Portland.” (Of course, careful readers will recall that those shrewd people at A-B have a minority stake in Widmer.)

Dalldorf says the long existence of a high-quality wine industry in Oregon clearly paved the way for the craft brew movement here. Portland's earliest microbrewery was founded in 1980 by a vintner; the brewery didn't last but the enthusiasm Portlanders showed for homegrown beer was unmistakable. In 1984, two more vintners, Dick and Nancy Ponzi, launched BridgePort, which thrives today (in 1995 the Ponzis sold BridgePort to the Gambrinus Co., San Antonio, Texas, one of the nation's top beer import concerns).

In 1985, Dalldorf adds, the Oregon legislature adopted one of the nation's first laws enabling brewpubs, under the argument that serving beer on the premise of a brewery wasn't any different than vineyards serving wine to consumers in tasting rooms. Small brewers got another lift in 1999 when the legislature passed a bill allowing those who made 500 barrels of beer or less per year—in essence brewpubs—to distribute their own beer, bypassing wholesalers, who often gave scant place on their trucks to the beers of small breweries. (The 500barrel limit has recently been raised to 1,000.) It hasn't hurt either, says Dalldorf, that Oregon's beer excise taxes are relatively low (though there was an effort, beat back at the last minute, to raise them in 2003; in fact, the anti-tax people were out in force at the festival).