Why Everyone's Open and Friendly in America

Two days back (really three, since we trail England by a day already), British writer and blogger Melissa Cole sparked multinational debate about which country's breweries were more open, the US or Britain. In one corner, BrewDog's James Watt, author of the hypothesis. In the other, Melissa and the rest of Britain. She concludes her spirited assault this way:

I also know for a fact that brewers all over the country regularly borrow raw ingredients off each other, seek advice on things that have gone wrong or just ring each other up for a natter about their next beer; I could go on but it would seem pointless in a way because I'm pretty sure it will fall on deaf doggy ears.

What I will say is this though: this is utter, utter rubbish and I would implore you not to listen to it.

The UK brewing industry is not only booming and forward-thinking, it is also fabulously friendly and I feel, quite strongly, that BrewDog owes the industry as a whole a bloody enormous apology.*

I will leave the debate to her comment thread (where James and other brewing luminaries duke it out), but there's some context here that's very important: the US and Britain have very different markets. They are structurally very different--British breweries can own pubs, for example--but also different in terms of development. In Britain's ale market you have new craft breweries competing against venerable brewing institutions. American craft brewing is brand new by comparison with only a couple older, regional breweries in the mix.

But the biggest difference is growth: the American market has been growing in double digits for years now. To fail, a brewery has to make unwise business decisions or produce terrible beer. In an expanding market, competition means fighting for those new drinkers, not protecting your core line. Britain's market is stable and the ale segment is even growing a bit, but at nothing like the rate it is here. Over the past generation, there has been huge churn in British brewing, and it was quite possible to steward your company wisely, make good beer, and fail. In that environment, you're fighting not to see how fast you can grow, but to see if you can survive.

Sometimes we forget these are businesses. They aren't community organizations. If American breweries are open and friendly, it's because their livelihoods aren't jeopardized. If British breweries are more wary, it's because the market is tighter and they feel the sense of competition far more keenly. It's not one big happy family, it's a market. Collaborations are not only fun, they're profitable. At a certain point, America will find equilibrium in its ale segment, and then things will change. There's nothing innately open about US craft breweries; it's the market that's open. Wide open.

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*Melissa muddies the water when she brings "friendly" into it. James never said anything about friendly, he said "open." It's not a small difference.

Brewery News: Proef, Hair of the Dog, and Samuel Smith's

Fascinating developments. First, Yeager with the good news:

For the last five years, much-decorated Belgian brewmaster Dirk Naudts, who develops beer recipes for brewers throughout Holland and Belgium, brings an American brewer over to his village, Lochristi, to collaborate. The chance to work with Naudts at his Na De Proef Brouwerij is much sought.... This year the honor goes to a Portlander, Alan Sprints from Hair of the Dog.

Now to Daily Mail (hat tip BeerNews) for the bad:

A pub landlord and landlady face losing their jobs and their home after brewery bosses accused them of serving too much beer in their pints.

Pete and Debbie Gibson say they were forced to close the Junction Inn pub, on New Year's Eve, following a surprise visit by millionaire Humphrey Smith, owner of brewing firm Samuel Smith, who in front of shocked customers said he was shutting it.

The couple, who have run the pub, in Royton, near Oldham, Greater-Manchester for 12 years, have now been told they owe the company £10,733 in lost stock for topping up people's pints.

Of course, the extremely secretive brewery refused to comment. Having been a close follower and sometimes blogger of politics over the past decade, I have learned to identify coverup spin when I hear it, and there are a few things in this story that just don't add up.

First, while Samuel Smith's has a reputation of treating tenants and employees poorly, they are extremely solicitous to punters. They proudly serve their pints at rock-bottom prices--like, 1970s prices. It seems odd that they'd slam a pub for topping up; that is, after all, a nice service to the punters.

Second, Humphrey Smith is so reclusive I didn't even know his name. During my visit, the brewery would only mention "the family" (la cosa nostra resonances abounding). So why does he show up, on New Year's no less, to shut down the brewery himself? This looks like a case of using the proverbial tank to kill a fly.

My guess--and perhaps the lads across the sea can comment--is that the Gibsons committed some other crime, one so severe it warranted not only sacking, but a public hanging (in the commercial sense) as well. Of course, we'll never know.

I should also add that this is all pure speculation and in the absence of real data, we have to take the case at face value. Maybe the Gibsons had regularly flouted instructions not to top-off the pints (an obscure dictate, but not inconceivable) and the sacking was richly deserved. Another caveat: I have written about the old Victorian brewery and the beer it turns out, which I admire enormously, but that doesn't mean it is exempt from public scrutiny.

Items You May Have Missed

Some detritus that has managed to get caught my memory's holey filter.

1.
The economics of Sierra Nevada's new brewery, viz. the proximity-concentration trade-off:

As breweries expand there is always a tension between growing big on one site and capturing the considerable economies of scale and getting close to customers thereby reducing transportation costs. In international economics this is known as the proximity-concentration trade off and some interesting empirical work has been done to understand where the tipping points are. It is interesting, then, to see where that tension resolves itself in craft beer. Sierra Nevada is up to an annual production of around 800,000 barrels, New Belgium is up to about 600,000 barrels annually, but Deschutes is still less than 250,000.

Anecdotally it would appear to make sense for breweries to grow pretty darn big on one site before opening a second. Of course, a big factor is how much you currently sell and expect to sell in the future to east coast customers. Also factoring into the equation is the desire to reduce the carbon footprint of the business. Beer is heavy and bulky and it take a lot of energy to get it from Chico California to New York. But this gives us some idea of where the tipping point is 600,000 to 800,000 barrels a year.

I would add that placing a brewery near your customers is important in terms of freshness. And no brewery is more concerned with freshness than Sierra Nevada.

2.
Keg-lined can. I was unaware of this bit of beer history:

It wasn’t until 1933, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the 73rd Congress passed a series of laws repealing the Volstead Act, that American Can again took up the cause of canned beer. Working at a rapid pace, its engineers solved the exploding-can problem that September, producing the world’s first beer can. In addition to traditional tin, they reinforced the can with steel, which proved able to hold up to beer’s pressure. Drinkers opened the can with a “church-key” opener, a slice of metal with a sharp bill to punch a hole in the can’s flat top. But with this innovation arose more problems. Designers had to find a way to combat the fact that beer packaged in metal began to taste metallic or tinny. To counteract this, American Can inventors slathered the inside of the cans with brewer’s pitch, made from pine tar. The pitch insulated the can walls from the beer just like the inside of a keg; thus, their cans came to be known as “keglined.”

Turns out that didn't last long. Union Carbide's Vinylite to the rescue. And by rescue I mean certain poisoning of the first generation of canned-beer drinkers.

3.
Although he's muscling in on my turf, I love Pete Dunlop's analysis of new brewery growth. (Much as Bill invented the pub crawl, I invented bar charts.)

Now look at how the number of planned breweries keeps creeping up on the number of existing ones. There's a clear trend here. In 2008, planned breweries (207) represented a small fraction of the existing count (1,496). By the end of 2011, the planned number (915) approached half the number of existing breweries (1,949). Wow!

Below is another way of looking at what's going on. It shows the number of planned breweries at the end of each year against the actual increase in total breweries at the end of the following year. For example, there were 207 new breweries in planning at the end of 2008. A year later, we saw a net increase of just 50. And so on.

To get the full effect, you should click through and see the charts. Fine analysis, Pete.

Bière Blanche de Paris

Yesterday the Beer Nut wrote in comments: "Spare a thought for all the styles that didn't make it." I did a bit of that last week, but the Nut reminds me of one style I didn't mention--bière blanche de Paris. Of all the old styles Lacambre mentioned, this one sounded the most intriguing (far better than some of those lime-poisoned, 15-hour boil jobs they were making in Belgium).

It was a relatively new style to Paris at the time, and his information about it was incomplete (also partly because the brewers were secretive. It was made with wheat and followed the usually somewhat-convoluted mash procedure of the time. (The Franco-Belgian brewers were not big spargers.) It went through a trifling boil for the time-- 2 1/2 hours. Paris White was a pretty strong beer, weighing in at 1.066 and was made with coriander and elderflowers. Lacambre specifically mentioned that brewers used the finest floral hops--presumably to accentuate the spice. There was one offbeat ingredient--a starch syrup extracted from potatoes. Meant to be served fresh, it was available from the cask a week and a half after brewing or in bottles within three weeks.

Here's my cleaned-up version of a Google translate rendition of Lacambre's original (which is to say, consult the original if you want something more authoritative).

“It is very white that is to say, very little colored and very clear without being absolutely transparent, foam very strong and persistent and very pleasing to the eye and it moistens the palate pleasantly. This beer whose production has grown significantly and very significantly improved in recent years is very enjoyable, especially in summer, and deserves to be mentioned as one of the best known white beers.”

I have endeavored to entice Breakside's Ben Edmunds into brewing this beer and we have a tentative plan to put something together in June. I'm thinking maybe honey in place of the potato-starch syrup (however alluring that might otherwise seem) and of course, we both instantly thought of a saison yeast. More to come on that score.

End of Gueuze

Things are about to get meager around here. I woke up on Monday and it occurred to me that I have a May deadline coming up. That may sound like a long ways off, but I have to write as much between now and then as I have between now and last May. Yikes. So you'll probably get stuff like this...

I was listening to my audio tape of Frank Boon, and he made this observation:

“In the 1950s and 1960s, this was a time when breweries were closing and all the local styles were disappearing. Everywhere in Belgium. Louvain white disappeared, Peeterman disappeared, [others?] disappeared. If gueuze had disappeared in the 1960s, nobody would ever have imagined to make such a beer. It’s an absolutely crazy way to make beer.”

It never really occurred to me, but it's probably true that lambic was at one time on the verge of extinction. It's not a massive segment now by any means, but it's thriving in its small way. Whew.

Decided: West Coast IPA is ...

The definitions are in. West Coast IPAs are:

• 1) no caramel malts 2) unbalanced (really, no desire to be balanced), leaning heavily toward hops, both of these contributing to 3) a drier ipa than non-wcipas.
• A heavily hopped IPA with at least 6 percent alcohol and 60 IBUs.
• The key is a complete lack of balance, no strong malt backbone competing with the hops.
• It is used to describe an IPA that is high on the bitterness scale and that typically exudes citrus, grapefruit, pineapple, and other fruits. It is thrown around pretty loosely.
• Gloriously lacking in balance. Just a liquid hop delivery vehicle.

On the other hand, they are also:

• Just IPA made on the West Coast.
• If a "West Coat IPA" is all of the things that has been mentioned in this thread, what, then, is an American-style IPA? Do we honestly believe there's enough of a difference between the two to the extent that "West Coast IPA" should be substantiated as its own style?

And finally, Jim F characterized how I was feeling about all of this when he wrote:

I think the term West Coast IPA charitably implies that NW IPA's have intense hop flavor (exceptions exist, but to me NW IPA's are characterized by balance). ["West Coast"] really ought to be California IPA, because that, to me, is where the hop bomb was popularized.

Ultimately, I think you have various flavors of the same fruit. Even if we grant that West Coast IPA is a low-malt, dry, super-bitter hop bomb, it's not really enough to peel it off from the IPA category. It's a step further out on the spectrum, but it's part of the family. I hope (but have no confidence) that the style lords in Denver never decide to add this "style."

That said, I do think that whatever this beast is we're pointing to is very much a species of California. We have scads of IPAs here in the Northwest, but these descriptions just don't fit. (Lots of Northern California IPAs are in the NW camp, too.) The balance point on a beer like Ninkasi Total Domination or Fort George Vortex--or hell, even Hair of the Dog Blue Dot--may be toward hops, but they never jump off a sweet, balancing hop base. Those beers are also deeply aromatic and flavorful, not just bitter. You don't get those juicy. funky/citrusy aromas and flavors if it's cranked too far toward bitterness.

So there: sort of a style, but not enough of one to start arguing about names.

It Has Come to This: a Black Pale; Plus Two New Ones From Widmer

BridgePort's new beer is called Dark Rain. It is a hoppy brown ale or, in the fashion of the day, a black pale ale. But let us not dwell overlong on the terrible collapse of the English language.

Instead, let's consider the beer, which is actually damned nice. The whole black pale is meant to suggest something, and Dark Rain delivers. Pale ales feature the toothsome marriage of lightly sweet malts and pleasant, aromatic hopping. American pales are usually at turns caramelly, citric, and floral. So a black pale would suggest those characteristics but also a roasted note balanced right on top of everything else. Which is a pretty good description of Dark Rain, a roasty-smelling, tangy beer. The roast does have a tinge of that thin, metallic bitterness you find in a cup of Starbucks, but otherwise, this is an interesting, unusual beer and a good one.

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If it's January, it's time for a new Widmer W' Series beer. The Brothers now have lots of non-core side projects: this one, the Rotator IPAs (see below), the Brothers' Reserve, and seasonals. Last year, Widmer brewed sixteen different brands, and this year it will be 23 [!]. The '12 W beer is a Dark Saison, brewed with Wyeast's French Saison yeast, about 10% wheat, and some malts dark enough to stain but not deepen the beer. I attended a release party, and the assembled crowd of writers was largely ho-hum about the beer (I think--we can watch the blogs and magazines to see), but I think it is pretty nice. Brewer Joe Casey fermented it at a relatively low 75 degrees, which meant the esters never really got revved up. Nevertheless, it does have a fair amount of zesty character. The series gets a nationwide release, and so it will be the first saison many Americans taste. If they move on from it to Dupont, say, they will note the family resemblance. W '12 isn't the most characterful saison on the market, but it's tasty and authentic.

We also got a chance to take the next Rotator IPA out for a test drive. The brothers reached out to QUAFF, a San Diego homebrew club to do what was in effect a collaborator beer. The beer they ultimately chose was Spiced IPA, made with a chai blend from Tao of Tea. In a reverse of the saison experience, the room lit up with this beer--while I found it a bit ... spicy. Actually, the spices are mainly aromatic. It was the asharply-astringent tea itself which I found off-putting. Weirdly, no one I spoke to could even taste it. It's made with a black tea and an assortment of spices--ginger, star anise, cardamom, clove, and black pepper. These are infused into water which is then mixed with the beer in the conditioning tank at a rate of a pound per ten gallons. A fascinating experiment. I will be interested to hear how it's received.