Jack McAuliffe Has Died
Jack McAuliffe has died. The brewer who co-founded New Albion Brewing in 1977 (or was it ‘76?—accounts vary) was the first of the small-time breweries to start up in the late 1970s. His role as The First has for forty-eight (or 49) years placed him among an august group of historical brewing figures, one that should persist for decades to come. As such, his passing creates a sense of vertigo or unmooring: the elders who created this thing are no longer here to tend it. It leaves one to wonder, “whose thing is it now?” When we write the obituary of the man, what are we implying about the industry he helped start?
New Albion Brewing was founded by McAullife, Suzy Stern (now Suzy Denison), and Jane Zimmerman. For a discussion with Denison and some interesting insights into working with Jack, see this interview I did with her five years ago.
McAuliffe was out of the business before most of us knew the business existed. New Albion closed in 1983, when there were just 93 breweries in the country. His brewery was a tiny, cobbled-together affair, and in the five (or six) years the brewery existed, it made fewer than 2,000 barrels. Even in the Bay Area, very few people would have ever known it existed, much less tasted the beer. His fame, in other words, came entirely after New Albion was long gone.
That doesn’t mean his fame or the importance ascribed to him was misplaced (though the focus on him, rather than them—including the brewery’s other founders—diminishes the story). We measure influence by more than profits.
He was by all accounts an unusual man, an engineer who wanted to be able to drink the “heavy” ales he enjoyed while stationed in Scotland in the Navy. Building and founding a brewery was infinitely harder in that era, and it took a certain kind of person to give it a shot. Here’s Suzy Denison describing him.
“I will say that Jack was convincing—what’s the word?—he made it pretty enticing. I mean, I guess I’ve always been influenced by and interested in people who are very smart and focused. I was definitely attracted to his brain and the idea of learning something brand new, and I guess I must have had some gut feeling—we all did—about starting the first microbrewery since Prohibition. Jack, he didn't have a dime, but he had a dream. Obviously he had been a very fine home brewer, and this was his dream.”
Breweries then couldn’t be purchased; they had to be built. And that’s what Jack did. Denison:
“Jack went to Petaluma to junkyards and scrounged all of the fifty-five gallon drums, the materials for a mash tun, and so on. It was a backyard operation, but I mean, he was pretty amazing; he could do anything. In fact, I think he had been building a house with a couple of friends at the time. So for him to do sheetrocking and welding and whatever, he could do all of that. That's how it got built. He even taught me a little welding and Jane and I were up on ladders sheetrocking.The brewery was tiny - three stories because it was gravity flow. We were so small, maybe 400 barrels a year?”
By the time New Albion stopped brewing, other small breweries had started in a few states, mostly in the west. Too often the story of the brewery gets told as a causal narrative; we have craft brewing because New Albion came first. Some of the later breweries knew about New Albion, but others probably didn't. Given the consolidation in the beer market, the growing hunger for artisanal products, and the legalization of homebrewing in 1978, the small brewery movement was coming. Jack, Suzy, and Jane got there first, but it would have come, anyway.
Saddling Jack with that label of The First was probably not great for brewing or Jack. In making him the indispensable man in the story, it robs other people of their role in developing this nascent industry. But it also turned Jack into an icon and a symbol, robbing him of his own story. After he closed the brewery, he disappeared from the beer world for decades. I don’t know what he did during those decades, and in a life of 80 years, five (or six) isn’t a whole lot. I’m sure there’s a much richer story to be told, but mostly I’ve only seen into that tiny window of his life.
Well, anyway, one of the elders has passed. Their numbers become fewer each year. It’s a moment to reflect on their impact, to consider them as full, three-dimensional humans, and wish them well on their journey forward.
RIP