Have Beer, Will Travel: Michael Jackson, Beer Hunter

By Eric Van Vleet

The rapid expansion of so many craft breweries making so many innovate beers allows a person drink locally and almost never even have the same brew twice. There is no better time in the US than now to be a beer connoisseur. Yet even as local beer scenes in the US flourish, the consummate drinker should also travel to experience their favorite beer styles in the places where they were invented in order to appreciate them even more.

In your travels you would be well-advised to follow the example of the true OG of beer hunters, Michael Jackson. No, I am not talking about the self-proclaimed “King of Pop”. As the man himself explains in his deep British accent: “My name really is Michael Jackson, but I don’t sing. I don’t drink Pepsi. I drink beer.” Based on his global travels, he has published incredibly informative books on beer and whisky and left us an undeniable gem, his six-part, three and a half hour long The Beer Hunter series, which is available for free in its entirety on YouTube.

Jackson could not have made the series at a better time than 1989. While momentous shifts like the fall of the USSR were on the geopolitical horizon, equally revolutionary changes were happening in the beer world. During his episode about California, he visits a beer festival attended by many of the state’s first craft breweries, then called microbreweries, like Anchor, Sierra Nevada and Mendocino. During this visit, Jackson captures the beginnings of California’s ascendance into a global brewing powerhouse.

Jackson even interviews Fritz Maytag who bought the nearly defunct Anchor Brewing Company in 1965 in San Francisco and rejuvenated it and the California Common or “steam” beer style along with it. If one person can take the credit for relaunching craft beer in America it is Maytag. Yet this is California after all, and the incipient movement comes with what Jackson calls “a distinct whiff of utopia”.
There is a lovely segment where Maytag organizes a “California pilgrimage” to the state’s barley-growing regions with his brewers. Such a beergrimage helps to maintain a connection with the ingredients. In doing so, Maytag wanted to fight against a “factory attitude” and to be apart of the “risk” inherent in any agriculture cycle and harvest. Beer was leaving its ‘industrial’ trappings and to take on an “identity that relates to an actual farm.”

After re-watching The Beer Hunter series it is incredibly difficult not to give here an extended breakdown of each episode. The sheer excitement it produces makes to me want to head out immediately beer hunting. Just seeing the production process and the gorgeous pouring of a cask ale in Britain nostalgically reminds me of our days on that island or how his forays into Belgian lambics brings back an aftertaste of those “sour” beers that contain entire galaxies of different fermented fun. Elsewhere, in the Bohemia, Jackson tours the gorgeous caves and wooden casks at the Pilsner Urquell brewery. In Germany, he explores an all but vanished style of “stein beer”, where brewers would drop incredibly hot stones into the brew in order to bring it to a boil. In the Netherlands he visits Trappist monks and craft brewers riffing on these styles. This series is not just the travels of an eloquent student of beer but the recording of a pivotal moment in the history of beer when craft beer was beginning in America and the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) in Britain was trying to defend its “independent local breweries” from the homogenization of industrial lager.

In The Beer Hunter, Jackson has one foot in the past and one foot in the present. He respects tradition while also celebrating innovation. Any skilled brewer today should try to balance the two as well. As US craft brewers continue to add novel and crazy-seeming adjuncts, they are nearly all based upon beer styles that have been around for hundreds if not thousands of years. Jackson traces those links, explains them in a down to earth way that demonstrates his vast knowledge. We are lucky that his masterful series is freely available to all on YouTube. If you haven’t ever watched it now is the time. Just be ready as immediately after viewing you may be heading to a local brewery or even buying plane tickets to head out on an international beer hunt.