In fact, import beers were beginning to find increasing favor with consumers who were returning from their travels overseas and demanding the same full-flavored beers they had enjoyed in Europe. These consumers demanded foods and beverages of quality, and they knew quality. They defined “quality” by a product’s ingredients, not by the brand name. This search for quality continues unabated.
If Jack McAuliffe was the father of the U.S. microbrewing industry, then Bert Grant gets the credit for making the brewpub, a brewery with a restaurant or a restaurant with a brewery, part of the North American food service business. It was in 1982 when, for the first time since Prohibition, Bert Grant’s Yakima Brewing and Malting Company was permitted not only to sell beer at the brewery but also to serve food. The brewpub was born. Two years later, in 1984, the small breweries (breweries that produce fewer than fifteen thousand barrels of beer annually) began to spread, including Riley-Lyon in Arkansas, Boulder in Colorado, Snake River in Idaho, Millstream in Iowa, Columbia River in Oregon, Kessler in Montana, and Chesapeake Bay in Virginia. That same year, on the East Coast, New York City could boast of a microbrewery when Manhattan Brewing Company opened its doors in the SoHo neighborhood and Jim Koch established the Boston Beer Company in Boston.
