Even as bud’s pitch-dog Spuds MacKenzie was leading major beer makers in an ever more frenzied dance of fads and marketing gimmicks designed to sell ever blander drinks, a countertrend was developing —a sidebar to the yuppie food revolution of the 1980s. Some beer drinkers, tired of a steady diet of near-tasteless lagers and one or two imports with only slightly more emphatic flavor, were discovering an alternative.

A new crop of American micro- and specialty “craft” brews were aiming to redraw the beer map, traditionally divided between “domestics” and “imports,” as a choice between “mainstream” (bland) and “sophisticated” (not bland). Ultimately, the most commercially successful would be the Boston Beer Company, founded in 1985, and its Sam Adams Boston Lager brand, whose patriotic label with its faux-colonial design suggested a return to the honesty and integrity of traditional New England craftsmanship. It struck just the right note in the Reagan eighties, when patriotism was making a comeback and movements to preserve America’s cultural heritage were scoring noteworthy victories.

Much of it was, needless to say, hype—not so much anti-fad as an anti-fad fad. The Boston Beer Company did not actually brew its own beer but had it made according to a proprietary recipe at a large regional brewery in Pennsylvania. (This followed an arrangement made a few years before by the New Amsterdam Brewing Company, whose beer was produced at the large F. X. Matt brewery in Utica, New York, in what had once been traditional ale country. Matt now also brews for the Brooklyn, Dock Street, and Massachusetts Bay breweries.) As Boston Magazine wrote of Sam Adams soon after its appearance, “[Boston’s] beer is currently made and bottled in Pittsburgh, a perhaps forgivable eccentricity for a beer named after a man who never drank a lager and who was not a brewer at all.”

But drinkers didn’t really care about authenticity; they cared about flavor, and Sam Adams Boston Lager had it, as did specialty-brew competitors like Pete’s Wicked Ale. In this, the commercial craft brewers were building on, and cashing in on, a trend that had begun in the West in the late seventies: a new generation of flavorful American ales, carefully brewed in small batches with all malt and no additives, by a group of dedicated amateurs, many of whom had started as home-brew hobbyists. Inspiration may have come from Fritz Maytag, of the washing-machine-and-bluecheese family, who took over San Francisco’s old and ailing Anchor Steam and in 1975 created the first of the new breed, Liberty Ale, in commemoration of the bicentennial of Paul Revere’s ride. Huge in flavor, intensely aromatic, and bursting with the delectable bitterness of hops, it bore the same relation to subtle, understated European beers as California wine did to French. And like California wine, it went great with the spicy new American cuisine.

Maytag was followed by a few visionary small craftsmen who built the first brewpubs