“Are you Charlie Pike?” I’m asked more often than you’d think. It’s usually when a guest at The Pike Pub or Tankard & Tun, or even someone at the opera identifies me as the founder of The Pike Brewery. Perhaps someone told them, or they saw or read about it from the scores of framed photos from books, magazines, and newspapers that line the walls on the way to our restrooms. “Well’ sort of”, I tell them, “I founded the Pike Brewery but my name is Charlie Finkel.”  “Then why’s is it named Pike?” “Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?” I think... “Pike Place Market” I tell them, almost embarrassed.” “How did you get into the beer business?” “Was your family in it?” “Are you the brewer?” “Are you originally from Seattle?” “Have you tasted the IPA from the Smelly Skunk Brewery in Mana, Mississippi?” and more often than you would think; “Can we take a picture with you?” People have more questions than I have time to answer.

Not long ago, I dined with Jeff Pyatt at a charity auction dinner we donated at Tankard & Tun. Jeff was a super guest -- enthusiastic, fun to talk to, and curious about everything, especially me. Thanks Jeff for inviting me to share my story, almost as movie-like as the film clips from “The Lady Eve,” but true. Is it a coincidence that Charlie was from the Pike Brewing Company and that their beer was Pike Pale or did the stars (no pun intended) align just right? It won the 1941 Academy Award for comedy, two years before I was born in N.Y.

 

My family moved from the Bronx to Broken Arrow when I was three. Our town had 3,000 people and the closest telephone was at the phone company, a half a mile away. When I would meet someone, the first thing they would ask was “What church do ya’ll go to? “I don’t go to church,” I told them. “We’re Jewish.” Next question, and an ecclesiastical query that I have pondered since, “Do you all believe in dancing?” As a side note, you may have read recently, there is an initiative currently being circulated in Okla. banning sex! Yep, they say it can lead to dancing! It was at that time that I learned just how accepting everyone was. They really didn’t care what church you went to, or even if you believed in dancing as long as you believed in Jesus. I didn’t, but by the time they figured that out, we were friends and they were convinced that Jews didn’t actually have horns. I later learned that many of the towns business owners were Klan members, and a “sunset law” prevented “colored” people from being in town after sunset.

Though we don’t agree on all things political, I stay in touch with many childhood friends. Thank the lord for the internet. “Growing up in a dry state, how did you decided to make a career in the alcoholic beverage business?” I’m asked. It’s true, I was raised during prohibition. It was not repealed in the “Sooner State” until my sophomore year in high school. Our favorite son, Will Rogers said that “people in Oklahoma stumble to the polls to vote dry!” My parents normally law abiding citizens took a criminal turn however, each time we drove to Missouri, buying fancy decanters of Jim Beam Bourbon and illicitly driving it back home to be given as gifts. On one occasion I remember taking a trip in the back seat of a `36 Desoto a few miles out of town. My 16 year old brother, the car’s owner, and his friend met up with a bootlegger from whom a case of whiskey was purchased.  If I had the cash, he would just as soon have sold it to me at age 11.

 

As long as it was 3.2 or under, beer was legal, you could even drink it while driving. My first exposure to what Pliny the Elder described as “barley wine” was at Earl’s pool hall. Locally brewed, Progress, Missouri-made Stag, and Griesidieck were a nickel. Premium beers, those that were from further away and advertised like Pabst, Schlitz, Falstaff and Budweiser cost a dime. They all tasted the same so I asked for the local one that was the coldest. Sometimes I added tomato juice – significantly improving the taste! On our annual travels back to N.Y., my uncles shared tastes of their Piel’s, Shafer, and Rheingold with me. As an artist and budding entrepreneur, my first job was painting in Old English text.  my pals girlfriend’s names on the back of their Mercury’s, Chevy’s and Ford’s Then as now, I am crazy about communication through letterform. My best grade ever, an A+ was given for creating an alphabet in a college design class. Beer became a subject that I wanted to learn much more about -- I studied the packages, especially the labels, collected caps, coasters, and matchbooks, and imagined the history of each company. The culture was as fascinating to my culinary sensibilities as a trip we took to legendary Chateau Petrus was a decade later. My rural community grew hay (which I hauled as a summer job,) alfalfa, tomatoes and other vegetables, all commodities with no identity after the farmer sold them, usually to a co-op. Beer, I learned was made from barley and hops and had a label on it. Falstaff advertised “The Finest Product of the Brewer’s Art”. To me that art meant brewing, naming, packaging, and advertising, mostly, in their case done with beautiful women. From this I began to understand the merits of “value added” marketing! 

 

When I went off to college in 1962, my girlfriend’s bon-vivant, bachelor-uncle presented me with an assorted case of wine. I fell in love, but not with his niece. The next year, on an ROTC trip, I toured wineries in sleepy Livermore and Napa. It would be another 5 years before the first new winery since prohibition was built in the Napa Valley. Between my junior and senior year, a friend and later, my business partner, and I toured Europe. We drank ales in English pubs, wild beers in Belgium, lager and Weiss-bier in Bavarian beer halls. We drank wine, of course, in Italy. By my senior year, strong beer, wine and spirits had then been legal for 6 years. I got a job managing a liquor store. At first I was inundated with a myriad of names and designs but I soon learned the brands, order, styles, and tasted as many things as I could. By talking to my sales reps, but mostly by reading, I learned as much as I could about wine, at that time still not part of the mainstream American lifestyle. Over time, the liquor store became a profitable wine shop. The head of the state’s largest wholesaler recognized me and suggested that I consider a career in alcoholic beverages. He gave me letters of introductions to his favorite suppliers, all in N.Y.  At 21 brands, the importer of Ballantine’s Scotch, the big game hunting owners of the famous 21 Club interviewed me in a trophy room with a table made from an elephant penis, sitting on a zebra skin rug.  At two large corporations, spirits like gin, bourbon and Scotch, and Canadian Whiskey were the dog, wine was the tail. I was offered a job at each one but instead I choose Monsieur Henri Wines, a smaller company specializing in fine wines. Three brothers had inherited the company from their dad, Harry Feinberg. Since there is no French name for Harry so they called it Monsieur Henri. I remained friends with the two of the three brothers for as long as they lived and am still in touch with Herbert, the youngest brother 54 years after they hired me. After working there for a couple of years, I was chosen “salesmen (there weren’t many women in the trade at that time) of the year” and was sent to oil rich Texas, an emerging market for fine wine. It was there, at a wine tasting that I conducted that I met Rose Ann. For me it was love at first sight. I knew that she loved me when she was willing to change her name from Martin to Finkel. We celebrated our 50^th anniversary last December. In early 1969, we took our second honeymoon on a trip to the vineyards of France, Germany, and Switzerland. At the suggestion of my boss’s wife, in Paris we stayed at the Crillon and dined at Lamloise and Tour de Argent. In Bordeaux we spent time with now legendary wine makers and chateau owners including those at Lafite Rothchild, Latour, Mouton Rothchild, Haut Brion, and D’yquem. We had lunch with the owners of famous Cheval Blanc in St. Emilion. In Macon we were invited for dinner to the home of newlywed Beaujolais growers, our only really bad French meal! Fortunately, the following day we had a “Cordon Bleu” lunch accompanied by Les Montrachet at The Chateau de Puligny Montrachet. Dumas said that you should drink this wine kneeling and with your head bared. Down the road, a dinner included Grand Echezeaux, and Richebourg with Monsieurdam Charles Vienot.  We celebrated with Champagne, Cote Rotie, and Condrieu at La Pyramide, at the time considered the best restaurant in France. We had incredible experiences with vintners in Germany and fell in love with Swizerland. We were graciously hosted and made to feel welcome wherever we went. Significantly, I soaked in information, sights, smells, and tastes that improved my career opportunities and still bring pleasure to this day. That year, having married a wealthy woman who as a dental hygienist made $100.00 more per month than I did, I started a wine importing company with Monsieur Henri as my role model.

 

I returned to France and Germany and was successful in convincing excellent producers to appoint our company, Bon-Vin, Inc. as their exclusive US Agents. Our portfolio was impressive, not because we had the most money (we didn’t) or because we were so smart (we weren’t) but because we were the first young company since repeal of prohibition, to specialize in family-owned, estate-grown wineries, many from lesser known regions. It was on a trip to California to sell these wines that I saw a case stacking of Ste. Michelle “American Wine.” I later learned that they felt that if it said Washington, it wouldn’t sell! Having served my country as a “Sign Painter First Class” at Ft. Lewis, I had experienced Washington wines a few years earlier. There were only a few table wines, mostly under the NAWICO and Pommerelle labels. Years later I discover that these were the same wines, under different labels sold by different wholesalers and next to one another on grocery store shelves. By this time I had also become the agent for boutique California wines including Sutter Home, Kenwood, Fetzer, and Ficklin.   I asked the retailer, Darrell Corti of Sacramento about the Ste. Michelle wines. I was honored, I just didn’t realize how much, when he opened Cabernet Sauvignon, Semillion, Grenache Rose and Johannisberg Riesling for me to taste. “Mon Dieu”, these are great wines I proclaimed! He explained that he was the first retailer outside Washington State to sell them and gave me the name and number of the manager. I immediately called Vic Allison at the winery which I discovered was located in a romantic location, between Boeing Development and Kenworth Trucks on East Marginal Way South. “I tasted your wine” I told him. “Could I come up to meet you about selling it nationally through or company?” “Why, he answered.  I wasn’t sure I understood his question but said, “Because it’s so delicious.”  “We can’t give the god-dam stuff away” he told me!  The next day I flew to Seattle and proved it to the martini drinker. I bought a bottle of Schloss Johannisberg at the state liquor store and compared it to Ste. Michelle white Riesling, then called Johannisberg Riesling. He conferred with the owners and within a couple of weeks, Bon-Vin became their sole United States agent outside Washington and Oregon. I then traveled the country preaching the gospel of Washington State wines selling them far and wide. At the time, there were only two wineries in the state producing vinifera wines – today there are now more than 1,000!

 

Five years and many cases of wine sales under my belt, we moved to Seattle where I became Vice President of Marketing for the company. I immediately changed the appellation from “American” to “Washington State”. Later I worked with architect, Chester Lindsay to design the chateau. I also decorated it, created tours, designed the tasting room, and designed a back label that equated the latitude with Bordeaux. I worked with wine writers and retailers to put our state on the wine map.  If traveling to Europe to visit wineries equated to a “Bachelor of Wine”, working there with famed winemaker André Tchelistcheff was a “Masters”. That said, my job was limited because by that time, we were unable to keep up with the demand.

 

With Rose Ann’s encouragement, I decided to leave the winery in 1978 to start Merchant du Vin, a beer and wine company.  Though I had every beer book available at the time, my discovery later that year several months after starting the company, of Michael Jackson’s seminal “World Guide to Beer” was to me, the equivalent to providing the bible to cannibals in Papua, New Guinea. Had it been available to Charlie Pike, he would have learned the difference between Ale and Lager. I did and in doing so, became life-long friends with the most famous beer guru in the world. 

 

After a year, we decided to drink the wine and sell only beer. We were American’s first craft beer marketer. At the time there were 40 American breweries down from 4,000 a hundred years before. Only two made their beers in the spirit of the world’s oldest purity law, the Bavarian Rheinheitsgebot of 1516 with only barley malt, hops, yeast and water. At first I approached smaller American breweries of which there were about a dozen. MdV became the agent for states west of the Mississippi for D.G. Yuengling of Pottsville, PA, America’s oldest brewer. We added August Schell in New Ulm, Minnesota, the second oldest, both still in family hands, and Cold Spring, founded in the Minnesota town of that name in 1874.

 

While we were successful in encouraging all malt beers, it became obvious that if we wanted to offer the world’s best beers, we had to turn to family-owned breweries in Europe. Fortunately, we were fishing from a barrel. The majority of imported beers were light, lager beers, foreign examples of American factory beers, made with large volumes of lower nutritional corn syrup and rice.

 

We were the first company to offer a wide variety of different styles of craft beer, all made primarily with malted barley. Alas, many traditional beer were no longer made.  As I learned more about beer, it was my idea to resurrect several of them including Porter, the foundation of British commercial brewing, Oatmeal Stout, originally for nursing mothers and athletes, Imperial Stout, the favorite of Catherine the Great  mixed with Crystal Champagne, and Scotch Ale, then no longer made in Edinburgh.  We were the first to offer Belgium beers in America, introducing the first fruit, sour, and Trappist Beers.

 

According to the founders of Washington’s first two craft breweries, our success encouraged them to get started. When they did, they received incredible publicity. I was jealous. If I could create styles of beer, award winning labels, and successfully sell beers other people’s brews at the highest price that beer had ever been sold for, why not create our own craft brewery in Seattle, inspired by the breweries that we worked with. These include Samuel Smith, founded in 1758, “Yorkshires Oldest Brewery” To this day, products of my creativity are sold by The Old Brewery in America, China, and Europe.

 

Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, in their considerable estate, is perhaps the most famous pub in England. Samuel Johnson drank beer there while he was writing the dictionary. Guests read like an English literature chronology. When you visit, take a look at the bars. The labels on spirits, wine, beer, and soft drinks, along with a history of the pub on the menu are my creations.

 

One day I received a long distance call. “May I speak to Charlie Finkel” a voice that sounded like Robby Burns said. “Who’s calling?”, I answered. “This is Peter Maxwell Stuart. I knew about him from Jackson’s book. He was 21st Laird of Traquair, a 10 thousand acre estate and the oldest inhabited home in Scotland. He told me that he had inherited the place from a wealthy Uncle who he had never met and discovered a small brewery in a barn. He became Great Britain’s first microbrewery. Michael Jackson told him about me and suggested he contact me about selling his beer in America. Would you be interested in representing Traquair? “Is Mary Queen of Scotts Catholic?” I thought! 

 

Another, Pinkus Home Brew house is the world’s first organic brewery. It has been in the Muller family for 7 generations. If you haven’t been to Pinkus, you haven’t been to Munster.” We are the only pub in America to offer their organic non-alcoholic beer.

 

At Brauerei Gasthof Aying, the brewery only dates to 1878, but the hotel, gasthof and beer garden date from 1370.  Over the years we’ve attended family weddings, funerals, and May Pole erections there. Their Maibaum (May pole) is the tallest in Bavaria. In 2000 we spent a month in Aying helping the family open an expanded brewery, a fantastic new gasthof that, like The Pike Pub and Tankard and Tun overlooks the brewery. They provided us with a red Smart car and we can confirm their slogan: “The best road in Munich is the road to Aying”. Franz Inselkammer, the Brau Von Aying and a long time Rotary Member tapped the first keg of Pike beer. He walks across the street to attend
Rotary meetings which are held in the Gasthof. To attend Oktoberfest with him is like touring Hollywood with Meryl Streep.

 

Traveling north, I’m likely the only Jewish person that you have met that represented a Catholic monastery that brews beer. Orval dates from 1078 and its beer is often rated, the world’s finest. 

 

Lindemans Farm Brewery dates from 1811 and adds no yeast. They just open the louvers in the barn and let nature takes it course. I named and designed the label for their most famous beer – Cuvée Rene, a bottle conditioned Gueuze.

 

1989 seemed as auspicious a date to start a brewery as 1758, or 1811, and Pike was born. Since beer is liquid bread, we choose America’s most famous food attractions, a farmer’s market that now attracts about 12 million visitors a year as the venue. There we acquired Liberty Malt Supply, a retail and mail order shop founded 1921. The shop was at the Western Avenue entrance to The LaSalle Hotel, the former domain of Nellie Curtis, Seattle’s most infamous madam. In the same building is Pike Place Fish tosses salmon, romantic Place Pigalle, where painter Mark Toby hung out, and thanks to The Market Foundation, low income housing is now located in a space that Nellie rented out by the hour. Our first beer, by total coincidence, is the same style as the fictional Pike Pale in the Lady Eve, is now a cause beer. Part of the proceeds go to The Market Foundation, providing child care, medical services, a food bank and housing in our unique neighborhood. The brewery moved to its current location in 1996, a three story space entered from 1^st Avenue or Post Alley, between Pike and Union Streets in what was once called Skid Road, now among Seattle’s most stylish locations. We added The Pike Pub. In 1997 Merchant du Vin and with it, the Pike brewery were sold to a British Brewing Co. At that time, Rose Ann and I took an extended sabbatical, visited different parts of Italy every year and on one occasion, took a 6 week tandem bike trip through the flattest region, Emilia Romagna. In 2005, we visited China. As I usually do when we travel, I painted a picture and wrote a story about the experience, The story “Reflections on a Chinese landscape” hardly mentioned beer but I circulated it to friends, including the brewery owner. I got a call the following day – “You’re the only one capable of marketing our beer in China” He invited to be flown over, stay in our home (a Georgian Castle) and discuss it it.  We did but when we criticized the way they ran the pub and brewery, were told: “If you don’t like the way we run it why don’t you buy it back. We did, in May of 2006 and haven’t looked back. Since then, we completely remodeled the pub creating The Pike Microbrewery Museum, a two level space that serves as a private party space that boasts one of the world’s largest archives of beer related ephemera. We expanded the brewery twice. In 1017 we added Tankard & Tun, an oyster bar and seafood restaurant; a new kitchen; and over it The Brewers private loft, a dandy space for smaller private events; a brew deck sports bar, plus additional museum exhibits throughout the atrium. I love beer, especially the Pike beer that we craft, to the best of our ability. We were the first brewery to brew with malted barley from the five year old Skagit Valley Malting Company. Fortunately, Washington State is the World’s largest and among the best hop producer. We use hops from Yakima and Chelan, exclusively.  Several years ago we were approached by a Japanese beer importer. Last year, they opened Pike Brewing Restaurant and Craft Beer Bar in The Flight of Dreams, a pavilion featuring the first Dreamliner at Nagoya’s Centrair Airport. I was the decorator.

 

Please ask for our beers on draft at Pike and other pubs, restaurants and hotels. Beer goes so well with food and in the tradition of classic beer cuisine, ours is superb, sourced locally. Next time you visit The Pike Pub treat yourselves to a Broken Arrow Burger, made exclusively with grass fed beef from Harlow Ranch in Centralia, recommended with hoppy Pike IPA, now one of America’s oldest IPAs. For a genuine local treat, slurp fresh oysters on the half shell at Tankard & Tun, perfect with black, rich XXXXX Stout, first brewed in 1989.

 

Last year with the addition of a high tech Wild Goose system, we switched from bottles to cans, a move to improve both beer and environmental quality. Pike cans are available at local chains like PCC, Metro Market, and Central Markets but not as much at chains like QFC where although they advertise “local, local, local” you have to fly to Cincinnati to see the buyer.  Stores like this will respond if you ask for our beers but better yet, we encourage you to shop locally. When is the last time you visited the Pike Place Market? It is not only one of the World’s great food purveyors, it is a proud symbol of Seattle’s unique independence featuring local entrepreneurs like Pike. Speaking of local, as a result of the success of craft beers, there are now 7,000 in America, the big industrial breweries have been buying independent craft beers with reckless abandon. Their labels hide who owns the brewery. Look for the independent seal on the label or can. It insures consumers that beers comes from independent craft breweries. It’s a great way to separate craft beers from crafty beers! With the support of many thoughtful people that vote with their pocketbook, and dedicated team that decidedly “like Pike” our tiny enterprise will celebrate our 30^th anniversary on October 17. We haven’t exactly become rich, like Charlie Pike, but our story is real, we employ a team of over 100  which we consider as a part of our family, we have lots of fun, there’s plenty of beer to drink, and the journey continues to be an Academy Award winner.