The Rebellious Origins of Punk, Hip-Hop, and Craft Brewing

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et us all raise our pint glasses to punk, hip-hop, and the pursuit of hoppyness. The United States of America’s origin story began in a Philadelphia bar — the City Tavern — with a bunch of like-minded people finding common ground over foamy pints of ale and dark porter beer. The Founding Fathers, including John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and many others, fomented revolution over fermented, locally brewed beers. (Far safer back then to drink beer or cider than water.)

That means American beer is inextricably linked with American rebellion, as are two heavyweight, world-changing music genres: punk rock and hip-hop. Both of those emerged, as did the modern craft-beer movement, on or about another important anniversary in America’s history: our bicentennial, in 1976.

All three art forms began on the fringes and pushed slowly, proudly, authentically, toward the mainstream. Their progenitors shared many of the same priorities as our country’s founders: anti-authoritarian instincts; a grassroots spirit; and radical individualism balanced with righteous equality. Within all three biospheres, there have been a whole bunch of Davids up against some mighty Goliaths, and as the founder and brewer of Dogfish Head, they inspire the shit out of me and my co-workers every day.

That critical year, 1976, marked the moment when the small fires of these movements became gorgeous torches for the pioneers to pass around, lighting up not just America but the globe.

1976: The first Ramones album is released. A gang of leather- and denim-clad speed freaks (in most senses of the phrase) with no formal musical educations commuted from their home borough of Queens to CBGB in Manhattan, transporting their guitars in green trash bags, to turn the kids who were sick of bloated corporate rock onto something loud, raw, and fearless. I recently asked Lenny Kaye of the Patti Smith Group for his definition of punk, and it fits perfectly here: “Punk is a sensibility, an attitude that has the presumption to invoke change when it is most needed, by bringing a sense of tear-it-down-to-build-it-up provocation and instinctive overthrow in equal measure.”

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1976: Teenager Sharon Green takes up breakdancing in the South Bronx. Within a year, she joins the proto-rap collective Brothers Disco as Sha-Rock, becoming the first female rapper in a group. This group soon morphs into the Funky 4 + 1, the first hip-hop act to perform on national television, on Saturday Night Live. Someone else might cite an earlier spark on the hip-hop timeline, like DJ Kool Herc plugging in his sound system for a Bronx dance party, or Grandmaster Flash scratching away the itch across two turntables. But for me, the most inspiring distinction of hip-hop culture is how inclusive it is: It welcomes men, women, Black, white, Latino, Asian. And consider all of the modes of hip-hop expression that make it so vibrant, from MCs to breakdancers, graffiti artists to DJs. Sha-Rock proved early on you could participate in multiple parts of hip-hop culture at a world-class level.

The hip-hop group Funky 4 + 1 in 1980.

Anthony Barboza/Getty Images

1976: Jack McAuliffe opens the first microbrewery in America, New Albion, in Sonoma, California. This guy hand-built a brewing system out of pots and pans and used dairy equipment. The commercial brewing landscape by then had been homogenized such that there was pretty much only one beer style left — light lager. While punk and hip-hop were reacting against music trends, craft brewing was reacting against a bland, consolidated beverage industry. Jack created a new vision for the future of beer. Or, in his own words: “History is important.… But if you don’t have a history, you can just make one up” — like the Ramones did with their fake same last names, or the super-creative stage names of early DJs and rappers like Afrika Bambaataa and Whodini. They say the Ramones were the band that launched a million bands. If this is true, then Jack McAuliffe launched 10,000 American indie breweries, and we’re a better country for it.

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The day after graduating from college with an English and creative writing degree in 1992, I moved to New York City with a dream of being a poet or a playwright or an English professor. I took courses at Columbia while bartending and going to as many live shows as I could at venues like CBGB and the Wetlands and Sin-E. One bartending job was at a burrito joint that happened to have a beer menu that was epically diverse for the time — wheat beers, stouts, lagers, and fruited beers from countries and states far and wide.

My timing was perfect — the first wave of American microbrewed beers was becoming widely available. I began homebrewing beer in my Chelsea apartment while blasting albums by the Replacements, De La Soul, and Guided by Voices. I had an epiphany to combine my love of creative expression through homebrewing with my passion for rebellion, the kind I learned about through hip-hop and punk rock. I would open the first commercial craft brewery focused on making beers to drink music to.

By that time, all three movements had achieved significant maturity. The 1990s pop-punk explosion, led by bands like Green Day, took the energy of Seventies punk to the mainstream. Hip-hop followed a similar trajectory, with artists like Wu-Tang Clan and Notorious B.I.G. bringing gritty storytelling to the top of the charts. Meanwhile the number of small breweries was skyrocketing and consumers began to demand IPAs and porters over light lagers. By 1995, the Boston Beer Company, maker of Samuel Adams, went public on the NYSE.

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