Rose Ann and Charles Finkel deserve more credit. These two Seattleites have had a strangely large impact on how Americans eat and drink. Thirty years ago today, they opened Pike Brewing, a brewery that has anchored Seattle’s craft beer scene, mentored dozens of brewers that have gone on to launch some of the best breweries in the country, and taught countless thousands of people how to appreciate beer.

You can celebrate 30 years of Pike Brewing with a party at their pub tonight, but the story of Rose Ann and Charles as food and drink pioneers begins long before Pike Brewing started. So I recently sat down with the couple in Charles’ office (and beer library) in the basement of their serpentine brewery on Post Alley to talk with them about, well, all kinds of things: moving to Seattle to build Chateau St. Michelle winery, why they support Planned Parenthood, how Charles is the reason oatmeal stouts exist today, and why you won’t see them purchasing a six-pack of Elysian Brewing at the grocery store.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

The Stranger: One of the interesting things about Pike Brewing’s story is that it begins long before the brewery opened 30 years ago. It seems like the story of Pike Brewing really starts with both of you traveling together as newlyweds. How important was that travel to the businesses you would both eventually would create?

Charles: It was everything.

Rose Ann: I think travel changed not just our perception of food and wine and beer, but it changed the world. We like to say it was Boeing and their jumbo jet that changed the way people thought about food. Because for the first time, people were able to travel. You could hop on a plane and fly to Europe.

Charles: We observed the transformation from people not drinking wine. Even when we moved here to build [the Chateau Ste. Michelle] winery in 1974, when we were invited to our friends' houses in our neighborhood, wine was not generally served. It’s unbelievable that would be the case when you look at it now. They we would serve a cocktail or something else but table wine was not part of the picture.

Where did you two meet?

Rose Ann: We met through a mutual friend but our first date was a wine tasting that Charles was doing. And Charles was pouring Yago Sangria, to show you where things were in 1968. [Laughs] That was very exotic. We were at a new wine bar in Houston, Texas but at the end of the evening we ended the tasting and went and drank beer for the rest of the night.

So at this point you're part of the building blocks of a new American wine industry. You’re running a successful wine importing company and you both move to Seattle help build Ste. Michelle Winery in 1974. So what changed to make you decide you wanted to focus on beer?

Charles: Well, nothing really because, as Rose Anne can confirm, I loved beer for as long as I can remember. Like she said, I had beer on our first date.

Rose Ann: Good beer was hard to find.

Charles: That’s an understatement. But I loved beer and wherever I traveled buying and selling wine, including France, including Germany, including Spain, I was looking for good beer. After a day of drinking good wine, or any wine for that matter, a good beer is a godsend.

After working for Ste. Michelle you opened your beer importing company, Merchant du Vin. Why did you import beer before brewing it?

Charles: Originally we did that first because I visited every small brewery in America.

How many did you visit?

Charles: There were maybe 10. In 1978, when we started Merchant du Vin, there were 40 breweries in America, down from 4,000 a hundred years before that. Prohibition, mass market food, TV ads, destroyed a lot. So, there were ten small ones and the remainder were large brands. So, I visited these people and I realized I didn’t know much. I knew I liked beer. I had three or four books but for the most part there weren’t many things to read about beer. So, I visited these breweries and the one thing I did know was the Reinheitsgebot [The German Beer Purity Law which mandates beer be made with only water, barley, hops, and yeast]. So, I would ask if they make beer according to the Reinheitsgebot and in 100% of the cases it would be “no.”

So, I was successful in encouraging a couple of them to make all-malt, Reinheitsgebot beer, and it was pretty well received. And then Yuengling [Brewery], they appointed me as their agent west of the Mississippi, but then along comes Michael Jackson’s book The World Guide To Beer. And that’s where I really learned. And I knew the difference, having read the book, about top and bottom fermentation, for example. What contribution hops made. What malt was and how it was used. And those were impossible to really ascertain [before]. There was no Internet and there were very few books about it.

So at that point I went back to Yuengling and I asked, “Is your porter top fermented?” And they said “No it’s a lager beer called porter.” So my only choice if I wanted authentic beers, which was my goal, was to go to Europe and contact breweries there. And since I was the first person to ever do that I was fishing from the proverbial barrel. So, I ended up with agency for Samuel Smith, Lindeman’s, Orval.

And in case of many of these [imported] beers I created the beer [label] for them. They did the beer, but the name and the label I made. But in some cases, like in Samuel Smith’s Oatmeal Stout, I did more. I had read about oatmeal stout. And I loved the sound of it and how wholesome it sounded. I had never tasted it but I called Michael Jackson and said, “Michael, what does oatmeal stout taste like?” He said he didn’t know, the last one had been made 100 years before. So I went to the [Samual Smith] Brewery and said, “Could you make an oatmeal stout?”

Rose Ann: And they said, “What’s an oatmeal stout?”

Charles: So to make a long story short, Rose Ann said I wrote the most diplomatic letter after they sent me one that was thin and listless. And then I wrote back and tried to describe to them what taste characteristics, round and luxurious and velvety, that I presumed such a beer would have. And then they came up with what they have now and 30 years later it is their best-selling beer.

So we were doing the products. We were doing the labels. We were doing their brochures, advertising, public relations... So, I was doing all of that and ultimately I was the marketing manager for these breweries. And so, I thought as long as I am doing it, why not do it for myself as well as them? And originally, the local breweries like Redhook, like Grant’s Yakima Brewery, got unbelievable publicity, no matter the quality of their beer. The publicity was prodigious. So, it was frustrating because I knew I had phenomenal beer.

I’ve heard about the beer Redhook was making when they first started and I heard that it was kind of questionable.

Charles: Kind of questionable is an understatement.

Rose Ann: It was banana beer. Michael Jackson was at the opening [of Redhook] with us. And he was asked what he thought about the beer. And the only thing he could think of was to say, ‘It was sort of reminiscent of, it has those banana flavors of a Belgian beer." He was so diplomatic because what it was, was an infected beer.

Charles: Grant's, also, was not a good beer.

When you guys opened you had this booming international importing business but for Pike Brewing to survive you would need buy-in from the local market. Was it nerve-racking or scary when you started?

Rose Ann: Trust me, it is still scary. It has never stopped being scary. We didn’t have a pub when we opened in those days. When we opened the brewery we were a block west and a block north at 1421 Western Avenue. And there was no pub to support the brewery, it was strictly the beer to support the brewery.

But that said, the beer we brewed was absolutely delicious. But we started with Pike Place Ale, which was a pale ale, and XXXX Stout, and shortly after that we introduced probably one of the first IPAs in the country, in 1990.

I read a New York Times story from 1997 that you guys are featured in. It was around the same time when Pyramid Brewing and Redhook Brewing went public and people talked a lot about craft beer stock prices, but it was interesting that one of your quotes in the story was that you had no plans to be a national brewery. So what were you trying to do when you first opened the brewery, especially when you expanded from the very small original location on Western Avenue to your much larger current space?

Charles: We wanted a restaurant because that’s what breweries did in Europe. That was not typical here because Prohibition had outlawed it. So, it wasn’t until 1978 that Carter signed a law that would change that so people could actually have a brewpub.

You sold the brewery in 1997 and then bought it back in 2016—why did you sell it and how did you end up owning it again?

Charles: We sold it to Samuel Smith Brewery, who in turn owns Merchant du Vin Corporation [the Finkels' former beer importer]. They wanted to control their long-term destiny in the United States. They’re a very idiosyncratic company and they wanted it to appear that we were still the principals, but we weren’t. We had nothing to do with it anymore. In fact, we didn’t care too much for how they ran it and we boycotted it as a result of that. So we were really inactive in terms of beer.

What made you want to buy the brewery back?

Charles: So, we went to China with the idea that China was where everything was happening. And my goal was to create beer that could be sold in China. I didn’t have a preconceived plan as to how to do that.

So we came back from China, and as I typically do when I visit someplace, I write a story and I do a painting about that place. And in this case I wrote a story and I circulated it to various friends, including this guy who had bought Merchant du Vin and Pike [Brewing]. And Pike was just part of Merchant du Vin. So if he wanted Merchant du Vin he had to buy Pike. And he calls me and says, "You’re the only person capable of marketing our beer in Asia. Would you and Rose Ann come and stay at our house and talk about that?"

So we wanted to see this other fellow in Vienna, so we visited him in Yorkshire, England, and I criticized the way they ran the [Pike] Brewery. So, he said, “Well if you don’t like the way we run the brewery, why don’t you just buy it back?” So I looked at Rose Ann.

Rose Ann: I looked at him, and said, “If the numbers pencil out, we’ll do it.” And you know that’s tough for the Brits, at that time women really had no place in business. This was very unusual for us to be a husband and wife team.

Charles: When in fact Rose Ann is the one that is business savvy, anyway.

Rose Ann: He was the sales person, I was the one that made it all work.

Was that because of your time starting the Laurelhurst specialty food store Truffles? Because you were a dental hygienist before, right?

Rose Ann: When I graduated high school back in 1964, a woman could be a teacher, a nurse, a secretary, or you could go into a medical field like dental hygienistry. And I looked at that and none of it was very appealing but dental hygiene pays well. [Laughs]. So I thought I could get into that. So, I chose that medical career that was sort of a means to an end. My parents had no money, so it provided me with a good income and I could live on my own. I was good at what I did.

What was Truffles, the specialty food store, like?

Rose Ann: It was in Time Magazine in 1977 as one of the top five specialty food stores in the country, and I was the buyer. So I was doing the purchasing. It was really more of the food that interested me but you have to know the business side to make it work.

Charles: Rose Ann is really good, she’s a numbers person and she’s always, in our 51 years of marriage, she’s the one that has handled the business aspect of work.

Rose Ann: I paid the bills.

What is it like to spend nearly your entire marriage in a second relationship, your business relationship?

Rose Ann: It’s the same relationship. We are partners, we are life partners in all of it.

Charles: When you have a business partner who you have ultimate trust in, that’s a very nice thing.

Going back to when you sold Pike Brewing. This gets back to a big issue in craft beer right now which is local ownership and whether it matters. So where do you guys land on this, do you think local ownership is important for the craft beer movement?

Rose Ann: My perception is that it’s the autonomy, it’s adhering to the central business on which the business was built. And if another investor allows you to have the autonomy to run the business as it should be run, I think that’s OK because it still has that local autonomy. It’s when a big company, i.e. Budweiser, comes in and gradually eats away at the philosophy of the company and the beers. And overtime they hope their customer is not going to notice the differences, but you do notice the differences. You notice when the beers have been compromised.

So you guys aren’t buying Elysian Beer [which was bought by Budweiser’s parent company in 2015] when you go to the grocery store?

Charles: No, we are not. We don’t personally, we would never, and we don’t as a company… There’s a reason they don’t put Budweiser on the label. It’s crafty rather than craft. It’s deceptive. And further to that, they are just a bunch of bastards. I have several books here about the history of that company [Budweiser] and it’s not a nice history.

I think when you started you wanted people to respect beer more, do you think we’ve gotten there? Do people respect beer enough?

Charles: Well I’d like to take the credit but I’m not sure I can. But, absolutely. At the time that we started there was so little knowledge of beer. Like with IBUs [International Bitterness Units], we were one of the first companies to put IBUs on the label and now almost everyone that comes in knows what IBUs is.

And the styles of beer have changed. It started with wheat beer, the easy-to-drink beers, the training wheels of beer. And that style is not so successful anymore. What’s successful now is IPA, and stout, and sour beers.

Both of you have been involved with Planned Parenthood for a long time. How important is it for you to be politically aware as a business and why support Planned Parenthood?

Rose Ann: Well we feel strongly about Planned Parenthood. I grew up in a time when there was no Planned Parenthood and fortunately I didn’t need the services of Planned Parenthood but I did know people who could have used Planned Parenthood in those days. I am strong proponent of women’s rights, I think that for years were second class citizens.

Charles: When did those years stop?

Rose Ann: No, they are still going on, but when I got married I couldn’t be a signer on a credit card. Even though I was managing the money, I had to put Charles on the telephone to authorize me to have access to that credit card account or a checking account or whatever it was. So, I think Planned Parenthood is at the root of that, it’s where women's rights begins. Women need to have access to their health, to their bodies, and I think it’s vital for our world to not overpopulate the world. I feel very strongly about it and Charles was actually on the board of Planned Parenthood in the ‘80s.

Charles: And I loved being on the board. It’s a very devoted and good quality organization. Like I said, I was born in Oklahoma and I would say a majority of my high school peers had to get married because they had impregnated one another. It’s the most confusing society, but significantly, it ruined a lot of lives.

What do you see for the future of Pike Brewing? What do you want Pike Brewing to be 30 years from now?

Charles: Well we hope that it will be not dissimilar to where it is right now. A good brewery. A healthy brewery employing a hundred-odd people and that provides a service to the community in having a shrine to beer. You come here and you are immersed in beer, from all of our decorations, to the products we sell, to the affinity it has to the food we have, to the knowledge that our staff have.

Rose Ann: It would be nice to be here in 30 years, but as you are probably aware we did share ownership with some key employees four years ago… it was part of our plan to have it continue. By having the people in place that have been running it and can continue to run it, it can go on and be relevant, and be producing exciting beers. I think the beers that we are producing now are more exciting than they have ever been.

Details about the Pike 30th Reunion can be found here.