The Secrets of Book Publishing

A note. Many people have taken this post to be a harsh indictment of publishers, particularly Workman. That wasn't my intent. I am very grateful and indebted to Workman for giving me a chance on this book, and they have been great partners in making it a far better product than I could ever have managed on my own. I offer the criticism in the same spirit I would in a book or beer review--a critique of mistakes made. In this case, those mistakes have directly affected me and those who have been waiting for this book (including a lot of breweries and informants who made it possible). I felt I owed it to them to reveal exactly why it's been taking so long.

__________

Why does it take so long for books to go from ideas to paper and ink?  We live in an age of advanced digital tools that make it easy for even amateurs to produce professional-looking books. Why then do publishers still proceed as if it's 1958?  Good questions all.

Roughly five years ago, I changed professions.  I scrapped a reliable paycheck as a researcher at the local university for the very unreliable prospect of writing a book (or books). In conventional terms, the period has been a success: I signed four contracts, completed three manuscripts and am at work on a fourth--but in that time I've published zero real books. (The Beer Tasting Toolkit was a funny little side project that included a 6,000-word pamphlet, so it's not exactly a book, though it did actually make it out into the world.)  Why it took so long is--to me, anyway--a fairly fascinating story; for those of you who started asking about The Beer Bible years ago, it may help answer the question of why it's taken so damn long.

The Pitch/Playing Footsie
Publishing a book is expensive and risky; the large majority of books never earn back their advance. As such, publishers adopt a wise policy of skepticism toward any books pitched to them. In order to convince them to publish a book, it's nearly mandatory to have an agent (who, more than anything else in the pitching process, is the person who vouches for you). To get an agent or a book contract, it is absolutely mandatory to have a proposal. This is a document that not only describes the project (including sample chapters), but outlines who the audience is, what the competing books are, what the market is, and how you're going to sell it. It's as much a business plan as literary document.

In my case, I put together a proposal for what was essentially Lisa Morrison's Craft Beers of the Pacific Northwest. That proposal was good enough to find me an agent and then, when my agent pitched the book to publishers, good enough to attract the attention of Workman Publishing. They had been thinking to do a companion to The Wine Bible and were looking for the right author.  The Beer Bible was a far better project than the one I was pitching, so I immediately agreed. Over the course of the next year, I submitted a prospective table of contents and then sample chapters, and finally, because those pieces weren't reassuring enough, a full proposal. (Which was weird, since it was Workman's project.) 

At the publisher's, a book will typically begin with an acquisitions editor or, in the case of The Beer Bible, the editor who would be overseeing the project. That person must convince other people at the publishing house that the book (or author) is both right for the company and a decent financial prospect. It works its way up the ladder until someone decision-making authority green lights the project. Joy!

In the graph above, you can see the different amounts of time it took for this phase (in gray).  It took a full year for The Beer Bible.  My first contact with Workman was March 2010, and I got conditional approval a year later. Around the same time, I was approached by Chronicle Books about doing The Beer Tasting Toolkit, which was also based on an earlier wine version of the same thing. As with Workman, editors at Chronicle were judging me, not the book.  Cider Made Simple was also Chronicle's idea, and they pitched it to me exactly three days before the manuscript for The Beer Bible was due. Since we'd already worked together, there wasn't a lot of footsie on that one.

The current project, which I'll describe sometime soon, was the first book I pitched that actually got accepted. Since  it wasn't a publisher's idea first, my agent spent quite a long time trying to coax Workman and then Storey into signing me. That one took nine months.

Contract
When a publisher offers you a book, they outline the basic contours of what will become the contract. This is a pre-negotiation that usually happens quickly. (Either you will work for the advance they're offering or not, and while there's wiggle room there, it's immediately evident whether the deal is going to be adequate.)  This is another great moment to have an agent. Book contracts aren't especially difficult to understand, but their implications are. If you don't understand the subtle ramifications of legalese (rules by which you'll have to live for years or decades), you can find yourself in trouble down the road. Once you've settled on the contours of the agreement, you can begin work on the book while your agent and the publisher hash out the details. Since contracting usually takes a couple months or more, it's time you do not want to waste.

Writing
This is the one phase that went pretty much like I expected it to.  The contract contains the due date for the manuscript, and they expect you to turn it in by then. (In the graph, the writing portion is in blue, and the diamond corresponds to the due date.) I've found that while you're writing a book, editors pay no attention to you and it can even be hard to get a response to questions along the way. Don't take up book-writing if you need someone to help you manage your time. Workman gave me two years to write The Beer Bible and Chronicle a year to write Cider Made Simple. I'm proud to say I've never missed a deadline.

Acceptance
There's a pretty big moment after you've completed the manuscript where the publisher formally accepts it. This means they believe it's up to minimum snuff--and it's when they release the rest of the advance. It usually takes a month or two.

Editing, Layout, Publishing
This is easily the most mysterious part of the process. When you buy a book, very little of what you're paying for is the physical expense of ink and paper. It's paying the writer along with the salaries of copy-editors, photo-editors, content editors, layout people, publicity people, and salespeople.Once you deliver the manuscript, they swing into action to turn it into a polished, attractive, tangible object.  In roughly chronological order, here's what they do.

• Content editing. An editor goes through the entire manuscript and helps you sort out the pieces that don't make sense, or are draggy, redundant, and so on. At Workman, they used three editors and went over every sentence with a microscope. I had to battle one editor who didn't like my voice and wanted to rewrite most of my prose (which would have been bizarre in just a third of the manuscript).  At Chronicle, they used an incredibly light hand and only adjusted confusing parts. I'm not sure which is better, actually. The central benefit of a published book--as opposed to self-published--is good editing. Writers have collaborators who can help them get to the place they were shooting for. Although it took weeks more of time, I didn't hate Workman's strong hand.
• Copy editing. Grammar, punctuation, and continuity. At Workman, they use freelance copy editors, and the woman they assigned to me was spectacular. She was super detail-oriented and seemed to get stressed by ambiguity, which was reflected in her anxious comments. I would love to run everything I write through her.
• Layout and design. This is where professionals make a book look like a book (and one of the obvious ways in which amateurs self-publishing their own material reveal themselves). I tried to offer very little in the way of strong preference here because, honestly, I know bupkis about layout and design. This is a big part of what sells books, and that's a publisher's business, not an author's. Nevertheless, some of the different cover designs Workman considered are suggestive of the amount of time it took to settle on one they like. (They advance chronologically left to right, and I think the one on the far right is the final.)

•  Print layouts and galleys. As the book is in various stages of editing, the layout people begin to plug the text into the format the book will take. This includes page design, font selection, colors, and art.  Publishers have a strong vision of what they want to do here. Workman, for example, wanted me to snap a bunch of pictures on my travels, preferring the narratively-specific (but photographically limited) quality they'd bring. Chronicle, by contrast, decided to do illustrations rather than photos in Cider Made Simple. Once the layout is coming along, they do various digital and print versions, including what's called a print or bound galley--sort of a rough draft of what the thing will look like. This is the copy that goes out to booksellers and reviewers in advance of publication.

For reasons completely inexplicable to me, the process takes far longer than it should. If you asked an ad agency to publish a book, they'd be able to turn it around in less than six months. The publishing pipeline takes a long time, and this is one factor. Publishers release catalogs they use to secure contracts from booksellers, and these go out months in advance.  But they also just fart around and miss deadlines. I submitted The Beer Tasting Toolkit manuscript in December of 2010, and Chronicle sat on it until Feb 2012.

With The Beer Bible, it was far more egregious. They received the manuscript on May 1, 2013 and accepted it on July 19.  The contract stipulated that the would release it within 18 months, and they told me they expected to release it in Fall 2014. As far as I can tell, they sat on it for an entire year and did absolutely nothing. We began to wrangle when I realized what was happening, and things got very tense. (According to the contract, if Workman didn't publish the book within 18 months--a date we passed in January--I could take the advance and the book and walk. It nearly came to that.)

The bound galley arrived yesterday.

It illustrates the structural imbalance of the publisher-author relationship.  The publisher has quite a bit of power over the work of the author; the author has no power over the work of the publisher (or, often, any idea what the publisher is even doing). The author needs his book on the market in order to earn his living (and is therefore motivated by deadlines); publishing employees get a paycheck either way. The author is one person; the publisher is many people. As this process has unfolded, I have had very little influence over events, so when Workman blew by their own deadline, there wasn't a ton I could do. To illustrate just how incredibly incompetent they were in managing their own affairs: I will have managed to write and publish an entire book in the space of time it took them merely to publish the Beer Bible.  Put another way, it took me 24 months to write the 230,000-word book; it will have taken Workman 27 months to get it inside paper covers.

Publication
Eventually books do get published. In the fall, I'll be doing some kind of book tour to support The Beer Bible (and maybe Cider Made Simple, though Chronicle hasn't responded to my inquiries about that.)  A writer starts earning royalties once a book earns back its advance, and that can take months to years to accomplish. So publication is actually just another middle state in the whole process.


Freelance writers have to pick their poison--books or articles. It's possible to do both--Stan Hieronymus seems to pull it off--but juggling the two is a challenge. I still think book writing was a good choice for me. I managed to get decent enough advances to make the books worthwhile and I have the expectation there will be royalties down the road. I also work better in long form. With books, you have pretty much carte blanche over voice and content. But, as I now understand, the process is more convoluted and opaque than necessary, and takes far longer than it should. So we'll see. After this current project is complete, I may go sniffing around Portland State University to see if they still need researchers.

Honest Pint Act Rises From the Dead

I don't have the time to do this justice--reporting on it by calling sponsors, etc--but I got a tip that the Honest Pint Act is back on the docket at the Oregon legislature. You will recall that back during my tenure as half-assed champion of honest pints in 2009, the Oregon legislature actually took up a bill to make it law. (Yes, I know you don't recall; humor me.)  I testified in Salem, it made it out of committee on a (barely) bipartisan vote, and ... died on the floor.  That bill, almost verbatim, is back:

House Bill 3413 

Sponsored by Representative HELM; Representatives BARNHART, WITT

Allows holder of full on-premises sales license or limited on-premises sales license to obtain verification of capacity of pint glasses used at licensed premises for draft malt beverages. Allows holder to obtain display sticker from Oregon Liquor Control Commission if glasses at premises hold pint of malt beverage under standard conditions.

Briefly, what it does is this: a restaurant or pub can request someone from the state come and do a random sampling of their glassware. If they hold at least 16 ounces "when dispensed under standard conditions established by the director" (I think that language is to allow for headspace), they get a decal certifying that they're purveyors of an honest pint.  (Seriously, "honest pint" is in the language of the bill.)  There's a fee to apply for certification, and although it is not explicit, that is probably the way the law pays for itself. It expires after two years, and then you have to re-up. The one change I see is in section 2, which previously assigned oversight to the Department of Human Services.

In the current version, it falls to the Oregon Health Authority. I have no great confidence that the bill has any shot of becoming a law, but it's cool to dream.  Pay for an honest pint, receive an honest pint.  Seems like a damn fine idea to me.


Oh, this is a cool blast from the past (can't believe it's still cached somewhere):

Beer Flavors Are Not That Subtle

There's a new ad by Anheuser-Busch floating through cyberspace that attempts to slyly suggest that Budweiser, served blind, would be accepted by drinkers even in enclaves as upscale and hipstery as Brooklyn:



In order to accept this facsimile of reality, you must believe a few things that are logically problematic:

1. Anheuser-Busch is showing you an accurate reflection of what happened in that pub, not a heavily-edited version.  (Assuming, and some won't, that you think these are patrons and not actors in the first place.)
2. Telling people you are serving them a "special beer" will allow them to appreciate Budweiser with what Buddhists call "beginner's mind" and give it a chance to impress on its own merits.
3. People offered Budweiser blind would be shocked and amazed to learn what it was.

The most unbelievable thing, though, is the subtext Bud expects us to accept. The ad is structured to suggest that these are sophisticated drinkers who would normally be ordering Dogfish Head, Sixpoint, or Brooklyn Brewery's beers, and that merely recontectualizing Bud is enough to put it in their camp.  Absurd.  Yes, it's true that blind tasters have mistaken cheap plonk for good wine; people have even mistaken white wine for red wine.  Anyone who has done a blind tasting has come to terms with their own sensory frailties.  But those frailties are exposed when we are offered relatively subtle differences. Budweiser is not subtly different than an IPA or even a pale ale. It's not like trying to pick out cheap wine from expensive; it's like distinguishing chocolate ice cream from vanilla.

What? It's a Bud? I'm shocked!

Although it was excoriated by good-beer fans, I thought Bud's Super Bowl ad was a successful bit of counter-programming directly squarely at the people who were still accessible to Anheuser-Busch.  This ad will convince no one. People looking for an excuse to drink the beer they enjoy will not find it in the reactions of the Brooklynites in this ad. (Brooklyn, and maybe Portland and San Francisco, are punchlines for people who drink Bud, not cultural guides.)  It obviously won't convince people who have already discovered the delights of ales and more robust lagers.  It's an ad with no constituency and it pretty much insults everyone who watches it.

The World's Most Secretive Brewery

Today's post on All About Beer is a special holiday feature.  You can attempt to guess the brewery in question:

“We do have a legendary process and there is element of mystery behind it—and you’re not going to get that out of me.”

I do have one addendum.  This is a brewery that rejected my entreaties to see the inside (the real inside, where they actually make the beer) and I wrote, "If you do much research, you discover that this has been true for a while—no one has seemed to so much as glimpsed a mash tun for years."  It turns out that's not entirely true--Brian Yaeger has been inside.  I'll have to get him drunk and find out what he knows.

Follow-up. I had forgotten this report from Martyn Cornell of a visit to the brewery organized by the European Beer Bloggers Conference (including illicitly-snapped pics of Brewhouse #4).  Nothing there makes me regret calling Guinness the world's most secretive brewery.

Growth in the Craft Beer Segment *Accelerating*

I am slammed today and don't have the time to add a lot to the latest numbers put out by the Brewers Association. They're just pretty staggering:

• Craft* now has an 11% share of the beer market's total volume and 19% of the dollars.
• That's growth of 18% over last year's totals to 22 million barrels (the segment only hit 10 million in 2010).
• There are nearly 3,500 breweries, up from around 2,900 last year.
• So called "microbreweries" now outnumber brewpubs, which at the very least ought to give new entrants pause (though only 46 breweries closed last year, amazingly enough).

These numbers really help drive home the logic of consolidation and acquisitions. There is a ton of money in beer ($20 billion in the craft segment alone)--figures that make future purchases inevitable.  (And which will, paradoxically, make these numbers mean less and less as companies like 10 Barrel and Elysian are pruned from the rolls.)

_______________
*As defined by the Brewers Association.

Who's the Villain?

Update 1.  Innovation has posted their response to Bell's response.
Update 2.  A nice piece at MiBiz covering the fracas (h/t Alan).  More here, here, here, and here.

Let's spend a few paragraphs considering events of the past 24 hours.  It illuminates a few things about business, trademark law, and the folly of over-personalizing the two.  First, the local paper in Asheville, NC put out a sloppy report accusing big, bad 'ol Bell's of bullying local concern Innovation Brewing.

Bell's has filed a federal action against Innovation over the use of its name. Bell's says its unregistered advertising slogan "bottling innovation since 1985" could lead to confusion with customers. While the slogan is used on bumper stickers, it's not present on any of the brewery's beer packaging....

"We are very disappointed," said Nicole Dexter, who founded Innovation in 2013 with her partner Chip Owen. The two came up with the Innovation name after finding creative means of assembling their brewing system.  "Innovation is what we had to do to make everything work," Owen said. (h/t All About Beer)

 This appears to follow a familiar script: a small brewery is just trying to make their way in the world, when along comes a corporate behemoth to crush their dreams with a trademark lawsuit.  If you read further in the article, though, you get more of the picture (though obliquely).  It's actually the small guys who are trying to trademark the word "innovation," not Bell's.  After initially fumbling the response (Citizen-Times: "Bell's founder Larry Bell would not discuss the issue"), Bell's today clarified their position.  Go read the whole thing, which radically alters the story.  This is the key point, though:

We have not, and are not asking them to change their name or their logo. There is no lawsuit. We are not suing them. We have not asked them for money. We have not asked them to stop selling their beer. We are asking them to withdraw their federal trademark application.

There are a few lessons to be learned here.

Trademark Law Creates Conflict By Design
Trademark law is brutal.  The way it works is that anyone can apply for a mark on anything.  One of the stopgaps is that during the registration process, other parties have a right to contest the mark.  There are a lot of marks that, if granted, would substantially damage existing brands.  This is where we are in the "innovation" situation.  Think for a minute what trademarking "innovation" might do to other US breweries--for whom innovation is not only an article of faith, but a regular part of publicity, branding, and labeling material.

That leads to the second important part of trademark law: owners must defend their marks.  So, if Innovation does get the mark for that word, they must protect the mark.  Trademark Office: "the owner of a registration is responsible for bringing any legal action to stop a party from using an infringing mark."  This sets up a case where Innovation could easily look at Bell's use of the word innovation and slap them with a cease-and-desist letter and lawsuit threat.  If a company fails to do this, it can lose its mark if other companies can make the argument it has lapsed into the public domain.  

Trademark Disputes Are Not Personal
There are 3,000+ breweries in the United States making, conservatively, 50,000 brands of beer.  In order to protect their names and brand identities, these breweries register trademarks.  Because of the way the law is structured, this means tons and tons of disputes.  These disputes are not personal--they are the result of the way the law is written.   It creates a catch-22 for breweries on the publicity side: if you don't register your names as trademarks, someone else will, so you risk losing your entire brand identity (which is, obviously, super bad for business).  If you do register your mark, then you have to go out and police it or risk losing the mark.  When beer geeks read into this a kind of malevolence, they misunderstand the logistics of what breweries are forced to do.  Yes, there are times breweries are overly litigious and sue people needlessly--a justified cause for irritation--but mostly beer fans should not be over-personalizing disputes over trademarks. That's just how it works. It's time to let this outrage machine run out of gas.  (Not that I have even the slightest hope that will actually happen.)

Make Sure You Tell Your Story First
One amazing part of this is that Bell's did not tell their story immediately when a newspaper came calling.  I fault the paper for writing an overheated, largely misleading piece, but Larry Bell should have gotten in front of it.  Elysian made a similar blunder after deciding to sell to Anheuser-Busch.  They waited days to put out their own explanation for the story, long after they'd been torched on social media.  There's no way to fully control a story, but man, you have no chance if you don't get your version out there.  Even now, after the clarification, Bell's is still getting hammered. People are still charging Bell's with crimes they have not committed.  This is the problem when you find yourself behind a story--the "narrative" gets established, calcified, and becomes reality.  Bell's may still pull out of this, but they must now spend days or weeks in damage control mode.  

 ___________

For those who think Bell's is absolutely in the wrong, let's use an analogous case: the trademark to "Beervana."  It is currently owned by Texas-based Gambrinus and used to hawk BridgePort.  There is nothing horribly sinister about that, but I think most Oregonians would agree that the word should never have been trademarked.  It should have stayed in the public domain where it was of use to all--like "innovation."  I really wish someone had intervened at the time and stopped Gambrinus the way Larry Bell is trying to stop Innovation.

Do Portlanders Line Up at Bars? John Hodgman Speculates

Okay, hive mind, I have an interesting case for you. I was listening to the latest episode of one of my three or four favorite podcasts, Judge John Hodgman, wherein he adjudicates minor disputes (with support from bailiff Jesse Thorn).  John Hodgman is known to most as the "I'm a PC" guy, though possibly also for his deranged millionaire spots on the Daily Show.  In this recent podcast he ruminated on a topic that flatly mystified--but also intrigued--me.  It touches on one of my very favorite topics, the culture of pub-going.  (I have a whole section on it in The Beer Bible.)  Here he turns to Portland, but espies something I don't really recognize:

"There's one city that I've been to in the United States, Jesse Thorn, where people line up at bars.  They form an orderly line without being asked, and the line is sacrosanct.  Can you guess what city in the United States that I've been to where this is part of the culture of the bar."

[Jesse guesses Walla Walla.]

"You are not far off; it is a Pacific Northwestern city known as Portland, Oregon... In Portland, you'd think, 'oh, it's because people are very polite.'  But in fact, it's because people in Portland who go to bars, especially cool bars, don't actually feel comfortable dealing with one another--in my opinion.  So, they line up in order to adhere to a social code that will make outsiders feel unwelcome and will make them feel sanctimonious and self-righteous.  And, with the added benefit of, they never have to deal with the messy human interactions like, 'oh sorry, I was here first.'  Or, 'hey, do you mind if I just get this before you because I gotta go out, or do whatever.'  Do you know what I mean?  Those minor, tiny, little negotiations that humans make with each other all the time in order to get their alcohol and do other things in life.  It feels like when people line up at a bar in Portland, that's to my mind what they're avoiding.  If there are people from Portland, Oregon who disagree with me, who feel that I am unfair, write me a letter and I'll engage with you.  Maybe I broke your rule and you're rolling your eyes.  But that's how I feel."

Hodgman is principally a liquor man (he jokes that rather than a sweet tooth, he has an "alcohol molar"), so he may be talking about upscale bars in the Pearl for all I know.  But I throw it out to you, Portland bar-goers: does this make a lick of sense to you?  I don't recall ever encountering a line in a bar.  I think it's even more unlikely that his interpretation about the meaning of these (possibly apocryphal) lines is accurate.  In my experience, Portland bars are communal and unfussy.  I'd say interaction is one of the key elements of Portland bar culture.

But it's also the case that locals are sometimes blind to manifestations of their own culture--culture that smacks visitors across the face with its weirdness.  So I'm reluctant to dismiss it out of hand; maybe I'm just missing it. I'd love your feedback in comments.  We can pass along our collective opinion to him.

Finally, a couple of notes in terms of tone.  Hodgman's comic style is sardonic, which doesn't come across so well in print.  He's also not only very familiar with Portland, but seems to consider it a dwelling of his immediate tribe (he currently lives in Brooklyn).  He therefore kids Portlanders like you do a sibling.  There's been tons of Portland content on the podcast over the years, including probably the best episode ever, Rashomom, which gave birth to the quantum "Gray House Universe" theory.  There are others like this transportation dispute (of course), and inevitably, one involving a food cart.  I guess what I'm saying is, don't spend a lot of time analyzing him. (But do listen to a podcast if you're intrigued.) I'm much more interested in getting to the bottom of this lining-up question.  Do Portlanders form lines in bars?  Where have you seen it?  And, if we do line up, any theories as to what's going on?

Dive Bar Challenge: Montavilla Station

Today we have the latest entry in our ongoing Dive Bar Challenge: Montavilla Station.  Recap: this series is a barometer to determine just how far good beer has seeped into the crevices of supposedly good beer cities.  I'm testing the waters here in Portland, but if enterprising bloggers elsewhere felt their cities stacked up against Beervana, we could have a friendly competition.  Either way, the idea is that good beer towns should be measured by the places you are least likely to find good beer, not the best.  (Read more here.)


Montavilla Station, 417 SE 80th Ave
Throughout this experiment, it has been my intention to continue to work from Portland's inner beer geek core to the outer fringes of the city.  I held a vague hypothesis that the further out you went, the less likely you were to encounter local craft beer.  For the latest installment, I ventured to Montavilla, a neighborhood snuggling up against the great dividing line of 82nd Avenue.  (In Portland, 82nd has long divided the two halves of the east side in the way the Cascades divide the two halves of Oregon.  You go from Portlandia to lower-middle class suburbia in cultural terms when you cross that line.)

Montavilla Station is just a block away from Roscoe's, the good-beer bar that helped lead the renaissance of the neighborhood's tiny commercial district.  From the building's exterior, you might expect a seedy, old-Montavilla interior.  Not so.  It's a large, airy, well-lighted space with a couple of pool tables, a stage, and a well-stocked, full bar.  It also has an amazing tap list.  When I visited last Wednesday, they were pouring Barley Brown's Pallet Jack, Boneyard RPM, Double Mountain Hop Lava, and Alameda Black Bear Stout, among other, more predictable craft offerings.  And the amazing thing: on Wednesday, all craft beers ("microbrews," as the bartender styled them) are three bucks.  "Tell all your craft beer buddies, boss," he said.  We continued to chat, and someone tried to order Busch.  (He had four mass market lagers, but no Busch.)  Afterward, he told me, "This is a working class pub, boss. But we got 14 taps and they're a lot cheaper than Roscoe's." The he struck up a little tune and said, "I'm here to kick Roscoe's in the balls."

A couple regulars who were not impressed by the $3 Pallet Jack.

This is decidedly not in a hipster neighborhood, but it goes to show where the gravity is.  As Roscoe's moved into the neighborhood, their insistence on a giant taplist of obscure, strong craft beers looked like madness, but a few years later, a pub like Montavilla Station is feeling the need to get with the program.  And it means that if my thesis is correct, Montavilla is nowhere near far enough out. To Lents!


The Stats*
Breweries in ZIP code: 0 (soon to be one)
Distance from the heart of downtown: 7.2 miles
Neighborhood hipness factor (1-5): 2.5
Seediness factor (1-5): 2.5, sort of seedy
Beers on tap:  12
Mass market beers: 4
Craft beers: 8 (four IPAs, a lager, a pale, a wheat, and a stout)
Imports:  0
Ciders: 1 (Spire Mountain)
Verdict: Super crafty

________________________
*I may tune these up over time, but this seems like a good start.  Breweries in ZIP code determined by the Oregon Brewers Guild listing.  I selected Pioneer Courthouse Square, "Portland's living room" as the heart of downtown.

What Can We Learn From 170-Year-Old Beer?

I got an email yesterday alerting me to this technical paper of analyses done on 19th century beer recovered from a shipwreck. Interestingly, they have no idea what the provenance of the ship was--nor, therefore, any idea where the beers came from.  But when they cracked two of the bottles open, this is what they found.

Bubbles of gas, presumably CO2, formed during sampling, producing a light foam. Both beers were bright golden yellow, with little haze. Both beers smelt of autolyzed yeast, dimethyl sulfide, Bakelite, burnt rubber, over-ripe cheese, and goat, with phenolic and sulfury notes. As the samples warmed to room temperature, the smell of hydrogen sulfide disappeared and that of butyric acid (particularly strong in C49) strengthened.

Hmm, those don't sound like particularly inviting qualities.  Some of this was the result of time (autolyzed yeast, goat and cheese), but I've never heard of DMS or butyric acid developing in aged beer.  Sounds to me like bad beer to begin with. 

I was instantly drawn to the study, but then wondered: is it really of much use? There is a trove of chemical analysis here for the nerd--esters, phenols, carbonyl compounds, hop levels and compounds, and so on.   But what does this really tell us?  The authors give incredibly detailed analysis, but the sum seems far less than the parts:

In summary, these two about 170-year-old bottles contained two different beers, one (C49) more strongly hopped than the other (A56) with the low α-acid yielding hop varieties common in the 19th century. Both beers exhibited typical profiles of yeast-derived flavor compounds and of phenolics. Present knowledge of the long-term chemical and microbiological stability of these compounds is not adequate to assess how closely the observed profiles indicate the original flavor of the beers. The flavors of these compounds were hidden by very high levels of organic acids, probably produced by bacterial spoilage. The composition of the microbial mixture used to produce these beers is unclear, but it probably did not include many strains producing the Pad1 enzyme responsible for the volatile phenols characteristic of wheat beers. Pad1 activity is common in wild yeast, and its absence suggests that the yeasts employed were domesticated rather than wild.

These kinds of analyses will probably add some knowledge in the margins.  As far as I can tell, there hasn't been a ton of study on the aging process in beers past a certain point.  (Those who pay for these studies--beer companies--have wanted to know what changes happen in the normal lifetime of a beer, not what changes happen years or decades later.)  So what we know by taking a snapshot like this comes with a pretty serious cloud of mystery.  Personally, I think there's quite a bit of evidence from the primary sources historians have lately been studying--evidence that is more relevant to the layman's understanding of beer evolution. 

Oregon Beer Sales, 2014

Each month, the Oregon Liquor Control Commission releases details for the amount of Oregon-brewed beer sold in Oregon.  They are all fairly interesting if you're into sales data, but the biggie comes out in late February, when the year-end totals are released.  You can view them here in pdf.  Here are the topline numbers.  In 2013, Oregon breweries sold 490,000 barrels of beer in Oregon.  They added over 70,000 barrels in 2014 (a 14.4% increase) and sold 566,000 barrels.  According to the way the OLCC calculates these things, there are 189 breweries currently operating in Oregon.

Of course, the share of the sales goes to a very small group of breweries.  Deschutes and the Craft Brewers Alliance (Widmer, Redhook, and Kona) account for a third of all the Oregon-brewed beer sold in Oregon.  The five best-selling breweries account for half.  The top ten account for two-thirds, the bottom 179 the final third.

Below are the top 20 best-selling breweries in Oregon.  Keep in mind that this is beer sales by Oregon breweries in Oregon.  This list does not reflect the beers sales by Oregon breweries in other states, nor the sales in Oregon of beer by out-of-state breweries.  The second number (in parentheses) is the brewery's position on the 2013 list; the third number is the actual barrels sold in Oregon; and the final number is the growth or decline over 2013.  I have highlighted sharp growth in bold and decline in red.

1 (2) Redhook/Widmer/Kona - 94,731, 17.1%
2 (1) Deschutes Brewing - 89,778, 2.1%
3 (3) Ninkasi Brewing - 43,118, -6.4%
4 (4) Portland Brewing - 31,309, 8.2%
5 (7) 10 Barrel Brewing - 25,848, 60.5%
6 (5) Full Sail Brewing - 24,520, 0.7%
7 (6) Bridgeport Brewing - 21,227, -10.6%
8 (13) Hop Valley Brewing - 18,504, 175.1%
9 (8) Rogue Ales Brewery - 15,294, 5.5%
10 (9) Boneyard Beer - 14,536, 14.6%
11 (11) Hopworks Urban Brewery - 9,579, 20.6%
12 (14) Fort George Brewery - 8,744, 47.7%
13 (10) Oakshire Brewing - 7,786, -2.1%
14 (22) Worthy Brewing - 7,783, 177.0%
15 (12) Double Mountain Brewery - 7,671, 1.3%
16 (18) Caldera Brewing - 6,283, 41.6%
17 (15) Cascade Lakes Brewing - 5,968, 10.0%
18 (20) Breakside Brewery - 5,646, 77.7%
19 (17) Edgefield Brewery - 4,881, 3.9%
20 (16) Laurelwood Public House - 4,833, -8.8%

Notes
It's worth noting that CBA is a troika of three essentially separate breweries, so its appearance at the top of the list should include a mental asterisk.  Most breweries sold more beer in Oregon in 2014 than they did in 2013, but some actually fell in position on the list (Deschutes, Full Sail, Rogue, Boneyard, Double Mountain, Cascade Lakes, and Edgefield)--a result of not growing as fast as neighbors on the list.  I personally don't read much into sales declines without knowing a brewery's strategy.  If they were making moves into other markets, they may well have sold more beer in 2014.  That said, Ninkasi, BridgePort, and Laurelwood saw decent declines and can't be happy about that.  Finally, just as a random note: Portland Brewing is quietly putting up very large numbers.  They're now selling 6,000 barrels more a year in Oregon than they were two years ago.

Friday Notes

A few things to tide you over for the weekend.  First up, my latest post at All About Beer, wherein I take a look at one of the most influential breweries most people haven't heard of, Brasserie Thiriez.

As Americans have taken up saisons, [Dupont is] not the direction they’ve headed. Instead, they make beers with less assertive, more familiar esters in the citrus family that are light in hopping and only medium-dry—something like a kellerbier crossed with a Belgian pale ale. If you start tracing these beers back to their source, you find yourself not in Belgium, but just across the border, in Esquelbecq, France. This is where Daniel Thiriez started his farmhouse brewery (also named Thiriez) 19 years ago and where he started brewing beers that look a lot more like American saisons than does Dupont’s.

Next, you might have a gander at Martyn Cornell's most recent, if for no other reason than to remind yourself of the mutable nature of beer style. 

Meanwhile, here’s a small rant ... about how Greene King IPA is “not an India Pale Ale”.... You don’t have a clue what you are talking about....  Do you complain because today’s milds are nothing at all like the mild ales of 200 years ago, 7% abv and made solely from pale malt? Beers change, and beer styles are not carved on stone tablets. A 19th century IPA would have been kept for up to a year in cask, would have lost all its hop aroma and would have developed a distinctly Brettanomyces flavour. Nobody at all is brewing an IPA like that. 

Oh, and somebody's mad on the internet.  And no, not about dress color.  But lest you get too hot and bothered, I'd say this is a standard the-world-is-changing, get-off-my-lawn-you-damn-kids wheeze.  It really doesn't have anything to do with beer.

Craft beer culture must die, or at least stop taking over all the pubs where I like to go. If it were contained to its own small bars where I never drink, it’d just be another niche subculture, where it belongs. 

Finally, go have a look at Pete Dunlop's fine description of the knotty situation A-B, Maletis, and 10 Barrel Brewing find themselves in.

You may recall that 10 Barrel was purchased by AB last year. The intended outcome of that purchase was that 10 Barrel brands would be distributed by AB-owned Western Distributing in this area. The problem is, Maletis owns the franchise rights to 10 Barrel here.

Have a good weekend--

Oregon's Best Beer

This week our local alt-weekly Willamette Week released their annual beer guide.  It includes their picks of the year's best beers and, for the first time ever, winners of the "Oregon Beer Awards" in 15 different categories.  Most people are pretty desensitized to best-of lists these days, particularly in this moment of online listicles.  Who cares what WW thinks, so goes the thinking, since we all have our own favorites?  I've got one foot in that boat, too, but there are a few reasons why this is a good and healthy development.

Upright's Alex Ganum. (WW's Arts and Culture editor,
Martin Cizmar, smiles in the shadows at right.)

Let's start with WW's pick for best beer: Upright Engelberg Pilsner.  Awards are only effective so long as they're credible.  I absolutely love this pick.  It follows pFriem's Strong Dark (2014) and the Commons' Urban Farmhouse (2013)--also excellent choices.  They're all good beers, but WW is also effectively using its bully pulpit to identify important beers.  Oregon breweries have been trying to make traditional pilsners for decades, and they just never sold.  Brewers love them, but the market is a tyrant--no sales, no pilsner.  Upright managed to finally break through, though.  I suspect it had something to do with restaurants--I would regularly find it on places with well-curated taplists.  (Chefs know that pilsners are great with food; they're versatile and won't overwhelm the dishes they've worked so hard to perfect.)  Since Upright came out, Oregon has now become a safe port for pilsners, and there are a ton of excellent ones around.  I've noticed restaurants often seem to reserve a tap handle for pilsners the way they do for IPAs.  Give Alex and Upright a lot of credit for that--and give WW credit for recognizing it.

This hints at why awards may have lasting value.  We don't fool ourselves into thinking there is such a thing as a "best" beer--subjectivity can never be quantified.  Yet collectively, awards are a great way to give a snapshot to a particular time and place.  Willamette Week's awards can't reflect the actual best beers, but they can illuminate where the beer world was at that moment.  Awards are really a way of saying, "here's where we were in 2015."  Done well, they act both as a pretty good time capsule and year-end wrap up all in one.

Willamette Week publisher Richard Meeker

I don't know if the Oregon Beer Awards will have legs, but I also think it's worthwhile to have a bit of pomp and celebrate an industry.  On Monday, WW announced the awards at the Doug Fir Lounge, and there was quite a turnout.  Kurt Widmer, rarely sighted in the wild, was in the house.  Matt Swihart, rarely cited in Portland, was too.  You couldn't swing a bottle of High Life without hitting a brewer (bottles of which started popping up after the beer lines downstairs got too long).  I was part of the selection committee that created the categories and made nominations.  (It was mostly brewers and people inside the industry, not writers.)  WW sent the names of the ten nominees in each category out to a couple hundred industry types for the voting.  The recognition came from inside the industry and allowed some smaller entities to shine.  It felt like the kind of collegial event that has been the hallmark of Oregon brewing for so long--and I could imagine it surviving well into the future.

So while I don't need WW to tell me what Oregon's best beer is, I'm glad they did anyway. 

Full Sail Voting to Scrap ESOP, Merge With Investment Firm

A fascinating tidbit I thought I'd pass along.  Today, Jamie Emmerson and Irene Firmat announced that the company is considering whether to end its Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) and merge with an investment firm.  This is a little different than the standard A-B news we've been hearing lately.  John Holl explains:

The number today of employee owners—called shareholders—is 78, and on Tuesday Founder and CEO Irene Firmat and Executive Brewmaster Jamie Emmerson sent a letter to those folks, asking them to vote on a proposal to merge with a San Francisco-based investment firm....

Shareholders were given ballots earlier today and those votes will be tallied at the end of the month. If approved, the investors could take ownership by mid-March. For the existing shareholders there will be a stock-option plan, but it will no longer be an ESOP company, but Firmat said it will enable employees to benefit along with the company as it continues to grow....

Firmat noted in an interview that the investors do not have a brewing background, so they will need the existing employees with their wide range of expertise to stay on and helm Full Sail. If the vote is successful, Firmat and Emmerson plan on staying at the brewery they founded in 1987.

I am not close enough to Full Sail nor smart enough about business to be able to parse this, but maybe some smart reader can give us some insight as to the pluses and minuses for the employees.

Beer Sherpa Recommends: Cask Deschutes River Ale

Last week I glanced up against the subject of cask ale, and by chance I managed to end the week by encountering an actual glass of the stuff when I had dinner at Deschutes.  Bend's finest is one of the last refuges of cask ale in the city, and you can always find two handles devoted to it when you stop in.  Rarely, though, do they offer something in the English mode--a low-alcohol, low-hop session beer.  As a traditionalist, I love these the best.  (Though Ron Pattinson, when he was in town a while back, swooned over the Fresh-Squeezed IPA on cask.  It was also on cask last Friday, and I admit I was impressed.  Still think the flavors don't go through the full transmutation of smaller beers, but still, mighty impressive.)

I have never had much success convincing people hat 4%, 28 IBU beers are the pinnacle of cask accomplishment, and I may not convince you now.  But do me a favor, and drink a pint of real River Ale and see for yourself.  (I have no idea if it's still on or how often it comes on--but let this stand as a plea to the brewery to do it often.)  The wonderful thing about this beer is that it is 100% American.  It's got the classic pale-and-caramel malt base and a troika of juicy American hops (Nugget, Crystal, and Cascade).  On cask, the body seems to swell; it's full and rich.  The hops are zingy and zesty in that unmistakeable American way.  When you swallow, the malts turn golden in your mouth, departing with the essence of honey.  It's a lovely duet--American beer, English package, all in perfect harmony. 

Make it a point to try this beer if you ever see it there again. I know, I know--IPAs and all that.  But I just can't believe you won't be transfixed.

________________
"Beer Sherpa Recommends" is an irregular feature.  In this fallen world, when the number of beers outnumber your woeful stomach capacity by several orders of magnitude, you risk exposing yourself to substandard beer.  Worse, you risk selecting substandard beer when there are tasty alternatives at hand.  In this terrible jungle of overabundance, wouldn't it be nice to have a neon sign pointing to the few beers among the crowd that really stand out?  A beer sherpa, if you will, to guide you to the beery mountaintop.  I don't profess to drink all the beers out there, but from time to time I stumble across a winner and when I do, I'll pass it along to you.

A Different View From London

A couple of days ago, I posted a piece on All About Beer wherein I mentioned with some alarm the ubiquity of American-style beers in London.  I specifically name-checked The Kernel, and yesterday one of the brewers, Toby Munn, left a really thoughtful comment on the blog.  With his permission, I'm reprinting it in full.

_______________________

I commented on your All About Beer page, but I like repeating myself. This is just regarding point 1. These are all valid points, and your concern over the health of British cask beer is not insignificant. But, I would like to point out that, although there are a few breweries and a few beers that are attracting headlines, there are still a huge amount of beers produced that are quintessentially British.

This is just my tiny little opinion, but I happen to think that the influx of outside influence is good for traditional beers and breweries. I think that the younger/newer drinkers are bringing with them a different, critical look to beers. On the one hand, traditional brewers are concerned that newer drinkers are just after a 'grapefruit hit' in their beers, and concerned with only IBUs and intensity of flavours. In the short term, this may be true, sadly. Long term, I think that these newer drinkers will understand more about the technicalities about what makes beer great, and the subtleties that makes beer great. To reference a post that I think is perhaps relevant, and almost certainly true.  [Note: Toby added that link, not me.]

I think that the introduction of these different styles and new flavours is only a good thing. These modern drinkers will have a fuller and more rounded view and opinion of beers, and are more critical in general. If we are to follow trends of the US, we will see that producers of truly great beer are in demand. This, I think, will happen here in the UK, and elsewhere. Actually, it is evident already.

The problem with many indigenous beers, whether in Britain, Germany, or, especially, Belgium, is that, after years and years of little progression, the only point of difference has been price point, and the only change has been a deterioration in standard. There are many traditional beers and breweries that are truly awful. And there are many that have stuck to their principals and are outstanding. I think with the newer drinkers, armed with more discerning taste buds, will raise the expectation of what good beer should be, irrespective of style, and make our tiny little world of beer a better place. Other opinions are, of course, available.

When you came to Britain in 2011, I am sure that you found many beers that were dreadful. Just because it is served from a cask does not make it good. Similarly, just because a beer is doused in Mosaic is no guarantee that it is any good.

Your concern for traditional styles is valid. It is not insignificant. But I believe that your concern will be proved to be moot.

Respectfully
Toby

A Grab Bag of Interesting

Let's skip the usual preamble and launch straight into the many interesting tidbits I have collected for you.

1.  I have both a new post at All About Beer and one I think I forgot to tease.  The new one concerns how London's beer scene looks a lot like ... Portland's (or any American city).  They love them some American-style IPAs--but it leaves me wondering who will champion cask.  It has already provoked one rebuttal--or call it an addendum--from Boak and Bailey.

The earlier post I forgot to mention emerged from Gigantic's Massive! barley wine, a beer that endures a nine-hour boil.  It gave me an opportunity to haul out my old Lacambre and throw around words like "maillard reaction."  Read it here.

2.  While we're on All About Beer, you might consider checking out this post about the proposed new Mikkeller brewery slated to go into San Diego later this year.  Interesting experiment.

3.  A beer fest in Reykjavik features two Oregon breweries (of 13 total)--Hopworks and Breakside.  From the press release:

“Our focus has been on breweries from Oregon simply because we like the way people from Oregon think and how the craft beer movement has been developing in that particular state,” said Ólafur Ágústsson, restaurant manager at KEX. “We feel that we can connect to people from Portland and all of Oregon. Reykjavik has a lot in common.”

The next question is: how do I swing a junket to Iceland?

4.  The rare brewers dinner that features multiple breweries.  It's at Higgins and it ain't cheap, but you get the Commons, Crux, Boneyard, Barley Brown, and pFriem in one meal.  And Higgins is never cheap, anyway.  I do wish more restaurants would do this kind of thing.  Italian beer dinners, German beer dinners, sour beer dinners--there are many organizing principles one can deploy that don't involve one brewery.

5.  We drink less beer.  Ron Pattinson has a fascinating group of charts showing how much less we drink now than we used to.  In the past fifty years, per-capita beer consumption has fallen markedly:

• Belgium, -38%
• (West) Germany, -6%
• UK, -25%

The US is slightly weird because of prohibition, but another chart, in which he looks at the last six years, is equally interesting:

• Belgium, -12%
• Czech Republic, -9%
• Germany, -4%
• Ireland, -20%
• Netherlands, -11%
• UK, -21%

So the period corresponding to the biggest worldwide brewery boom in--well, forever--is also the period in which per capita consumption is tanking.  (True in the US, too, though numbers are lagging.  Consumption fell 7% from '08 to '11.)

6.  According to my Facebook alerts, February 18th is the birthday of Crux's Larry Sidor, Pink Boots' Teri Fahrendorf, and Double Mountain's Matt Swihart.  That seems like a damned impressive coincidence.

Portland's Favorite IPA

The Oregon Hophouse has recently been running a little experiment.  They invited patrons to try a flight of twelve IPAs and vote on their favorites.  In a certain sense, the free market functions as a way of determining patrons' favorite beers, too.  But in that case, people may be influenced by price, ad campaigns, the image of a brewery, peer pressure, or proximity.  Here it was just twelve unmarked beers and the palates of the tasters.  The flight contained:

• Barley Brown’s Pallet Jack
• Boneyard RPM
• Breakside IPA
• Crux Outcast
• Double Mountain Hop Lava
• Fort George Vortex
• Gigantic IPA
• Goodlife Descender
• Hop Valley Alphadelic
• Laurelwood Workhorse
• Migration Luscious Lupulin
• Ninkasi Total Domination

Care to guess which one came out on top?  Before I tell you, last year the champeen was Boneyard--but the beers weren't served blind.  This year, 864 people cast a ballot and the results looked like this: 

Barley Brown Pallet Jack: 160 (18.5%)*
Breakside IPA:132 (15.2%)
Boneyard RPM: 123 (14.2%)

I'm interested in this experiment because I think it tracks the momentary preferences of Oregonians.  Boneyard has definitely been the most recent example of the Oregon palate, with its thick body and saturated late-addition flavors and aromas.  Pallet Jack is lighter and sharper and more dank--to me it seems a bit more Californian. (A characterization I suspect would make a good Baker Citian cringe.) Breakside is a more classic interpretation, with tons of citrus and a hint of pine.  So does this suggest a move away from the Boneyard mode to something a little more universal?  Probably that's going too far--Boneyard did hang in at a respectable third.  But still, it's at least suggestive.

Interesting side-note.  In an email, the Hophouse's Kirsten Seitz added this bit of detail: "Breakside was in fourth/fifth place until the third week, when both locations saw a drastic increase in votes for Breakside.  It even earned the most votes during a week at each location in total votes, but it still wasn't enough to surpass Pallet Jack's monthly totals.  It was incredibly interesting to witness the change, and the staff felt certain that it was a new batch of Breakside."  I offer that without a lot of commentary--though I'd love it if someone from Breakside would care to weigh in with theories.

________________
*Does this prove Pallet Jack is definitively Portland's fave IPA?  No.  It was not a scientific study and there are any number of variables that were not controlled for.  But it was a blind tasting, and so I'd be leery to dismiss it outright, either. 

Spontaneous by Proxy

The juice beginning fermentation.

A few months back, I mentioned trying an experiment with spontaneous yeast.  I was racking a batch of spontaneously-fermented cider, and when I discovered that lovely yeast cake at the bottom of the carboy, I wished I had some wort to throw on it.  Well, I got another bite at the ... err, another chance.  Kevin Zielinski, who makes some of the best cider in America, set me up with ten gallons of juice from his orchards (a mix of mostly French and some English bittersweet varieties).  He suggested I try one in the English mode, racked once and fermented to dry, and once in the French mode, with multiple rackings to try to get the yeast to exhaust the nutrients in the juice and go dormant (which is how they end up with sweet ciders that don't turn the bottles into bombs).

In any case, this afternoon I finished up a three-gallon batch of wort and transferred it to the barm of one of those ciders.  It smells like a great ferment has begun, with a lovely, fresh juice aroma and the beginnings of that wild yeast funk (and a bit of sulfur, which Kevin says is normal).  If this works, I'm going to call it "spontaneous by proxy" and hope the title catches on.  Of course, if it doesn't work I'll call it "a debacle" and hope everyone forgets quickly and moves along.

I am slightly less sanguine than I was before, though, owing to the lab report Kevin shared with me of the yeast and bacteria found in the juice sample.  It has lots of saccharomyces, which is great, and very little brettanomyces, which is curious.  But it also has tons of acetic acid bacteria, something called Hanseniaspora uvarum, and something else called Pichia membranifaciens.  I can't predict whether these would normally be found in a spontaneously-fermented beer, so who knows what they'll do in my wort.

Whatever happens, never fear--I'll let you know.


Update.  Well that was fast.   The yeast cake went into the wort at about 3pm yesterday, and by 7 this morning it was rocking.  I'd chilled the wort down to 55 so the yeast wouldn't be shocked by warm temps (the apple juice is outside and is probably around 45-48).  I therefore expected a slow ramp-up, but no:

(And to be clear, I don't leave the carboy on the sunny deck to ferment--that was for photographic purposes only.)

Maine Flirts with an Honest Pint

Yesterday, a ripple went through social media about a proposed bill in Maine that would make "cheater pints" illegal.  This is an issue dear to my heart, and one with which I have some history.  Years ago, I attempted (in my usual, half-assed bloggy way) to be an advocate for "Honest pints."  When you go to a gas station, you don't worry about getting 120 ounce gallons; a quart of milk may not be 29.2 ounces.  So why on earth should we allow a pint of beer to be 12-15 ounces, as it regularly is in pubs and restaurants around the country? 

That said, I'm not entirely sure Maine's strategy will be effective.  As that Guardian article describes (with, full disclosure, lots of quotes from me), this has already been a two-time loser.  It generally comes down to cost and enforcement.  Most everyone agrees that the idea is good (those willfully cheating customers excepted), but putting a regulatory and enforcement structure in place causes people to balk.  A point foes rush to make:

It was a point echoed by Sean Sullivan of the Maine Brewers' Guild. "We believe that crafting a beer-specific bill, targeting something that is already illegal, and shifting enforcement responsibilities to our already-overburdened liquor enforcement officials, would not be useful," Sullivan said.

I'm not actually convinced this is a legitimate argument (foes are never disinterested bystanders), but it does appear to be an effective one. Somehow the burden does not overwhelm the governments in Germany, the Czech Republic, and the UK.  The bill is completely vestigial now, and with public policy, the devil is always in the small print.  If they do pull it off, it could be a beachhead for future legislation.  Godspeed, Mainers, may you go where no Americans have gone before!

In All the Little Ways, Newcastle Really Says "Macro"

Last week we had some nice chat about a large beer brand proudly proclaiming itself "macro."  When one of these craft-vs-macro debates springs up, we always get lost in the definition weeds: what do the terms mean?  Back at the dawn of the new-brewery age, there actually was a standard charge against macro (a term born when craft beer was "micro").  It was made cheaply of filler ingredients, hid that it was made in a factory plant far removed from the town it claimed to be from, was owned by a foreign company, and survived mainly because of a massive ad campaign that kept the truth hidden and the reality safely locked away.

That actually doesn't sound like last week's macro--Budweiser--which has always been extremely forthright about their beer and production.  It does, however, perfectly describe Newcastle.  Behold:

A spokesman for Heineken confirmed: “We are in the process of changing our recipe for Newcastle Brown Ale and it will no longer include caramel colouring.

“We will now achieve the distinctive colouring and flavour of Newcastle Brown Ale, that our consumers enjoy, by using roasted malts instead.”  

This is pretty amazing--and revealing.  I thought caramel coloring went out with leisure suits.  I heard rumors that various companies would turn their regular lagers into "dark lagers" with judicious use of caramel color, but those were crude times when people thought "dark lager" was something impossibly exotic.  That Newcastle, presumably to shave a few pennies off the bottom line, has been using it well into the new millennium--well, just spectacular.  Better to spend all the money on ads like these instead:



Other things to know: the brand is owned by Heineken and brewed in this brewery, in Tadcaster, by John Smith's:

It is largely an export product.  Boak and Bailey, who sent me a wonderful report showing that it has only 4.5% of the bottled ale market in the UK (and ales are a wee minority of the beer market), said, "We've only ever seen it in bottles but it's pretty widely available in pubs in that format, hidden behind the bar in the fridges next to Hofmeister Pils and Mann's Brown Ale."  Mark Dredge agreed, "You might see it occasionally in supermarkets or a dusty bottle at the back of a bar fridge, but that's about it." 

For what it's worth, when I was writing The Beer Bible, I tried to contact someone from the Newcastle division to hear about how the beer was made and maybe get some archival photography.  It was I think the only English-language brand that completely blew me off.  I have a clearer sense why now.

So to recap: made cheaply of filler ingredients? Check.  Hid where it was made while still trading on the reputation of the old location?  Check.  Owned by a foreign company?  Check.  And finally, keeps the truth safely hidden away behind a massive ad campaign?  Check and check. 

You want an authentically crap beer where the cost of production is scrimped on to make way for the cost of sales?  You could hardly do better than Newcastle Brown.

Beer Sherpa Recommends: Double Mountain My Little Runaway

There's been entirely too much chat about the business of beer: let's talk about beer itself for a change.  Today's selection comes to us from Hood River, where Double Mountain founder and orchard-owner Matt Swihart has been making tasty fruit beers for several years.  His pièce de résistance is Devil's Kriek, a wild cherry ale that bubbles away under a Brettanomcyes cap over in one corner of the brewery throughout the year.  He may actually have topped himself with My Little Runaway, however, which is one of the best beers I've tried in recent memory.

Photo blatantly stolen from Ezra at the New School.

There's not a ton of info about Runaway except that it was fermented with the Ardennes yeast, made with Van and Bing cherries and "a tiny stolen blend of next year's Devil Kriek to commingle as sweet, refreshing cherry ale with the ghost of bitterness."  (Someone at the brewery has lately gotten poetic with the press releases.)  I considered trying to track down more info, but sometimes the less you know, the more you taste, so I let my mouth give me the tour.

Superficially, Runaway presents itself like a light frolic of sweetness and cherries, frothy and kissed with sweetness.  Uncareful tasters might not notice anything more and be plenty happy with that.  But there's more going on.  It's got a touch of acidity, which gives it some vinous balance (I think wine drinkers would absolutely love this beer).  A mouthful evolves in short order past the fruit into something earthy and spicy, which read to me like tannins.  (Cherry pits?)  A hint of leathery Brettanomcyes accentuates this quality and also dries the beer out as you swallow.  It is a wild ale, but just barely--and in this I think there's a lesson. Breweries often let their wild beasts roam too freely, and the aggressively sour and/or dry beers that result are too much for all except the most inveterate sour-heads. If all wild ales were at this level of intensity, though, they could find a mass audience. (Maybe the fact that the label nowhere identifies it as such is telling.) It's hard to imagine who wouldn't enjoy this beer. 

There has been a lot of talk about brewery ownership structures and "fussy" beers lately, and My Little Runaway is instructive for another reason.  It may well have mass appeal, but it's the kind of beer that's probably almost impossible to make on a mass scale.  It employs whole fruit, which is a pain in the ass to work with in large volumes, but more importantly gets its secret ingredient from an aging wild ale, the king of the unscalable beers.  You might be able to find a workaround to get a beer something like this if you wanted to brew 2 million barrels, but those spicy tannins, that delicate dryness--I can't imagine how you could mass-market that.  Little breweries often make the best beer because some of the best beer can't be made in giant volumes. 

Do yourself a favor and track down My Little Runaway (bottles are supposed to be available in PDX, but if you happen to be in the Gorge, make a special trip to Double Mountain)--it will remind you of just how good beer can be.

_______________________
"Beer Sherpa Recommends" is an irregular feature.  In this fallen world, when the number of beers outnumber your woeful stomach capacity by several orders of magnitude, you risk exposing yourself to substandard beer.  Worse, you risk selecting substandard beer when there are tasty alternatives at hand.  In this terrible jungle of overabundance, wouldn't it be nice to have a neon sign pointing to the few beers among the crowd that really stand out?  A beer sherpa, if you will, to guide you to the beery mountaintop.  I don't profess to drink all the beers out there, but from time to time I stumble across a winner and when I do, I'll pass it along to you.

Bud Finds Its Voice?

This is easily one of the most interesting beer ads I've ever seen:

"Budweiser, proudly a macro beer.  It's not brewed to be fussed over." (Shot of a contemptible hipster with old-timey stache.)  A bit later, "It's brewed for drinking, not dissecting."  (More contemptible snobs.)  "Let them drink their pumpkin peach ale."  There's a bunch of other familiar text in there, but when the minute-long add winds up to its booming conclusion with the tag "this Bud's for you," it carries a different resonance.  This Bud, the brewing giant says with a wink, is for you, not one of those poncey hipsters.

It's not even subtext--it's text.  Budweiser VP Brian Perkins told Ad Age that "occasionally we do have a little bit of fun with some of the overwrought pretentiousness that exists in some small corners of the beer landscape that is around beer snobbery. That is the antithesis of what Budweiser is all about."

This is not a beer ad targeted toward you and me.  It's an ad targeted at the huge slice of people who are casual, promiscuous drinkers who might go for a Bud, a Blue Moon or a Sierra Nevada Pale depending on their mood.  Mass market lagers have been taking a beating among that cohort, and Bud's ad is bid to reel them back in.  Those drinkers are attracted to new things said to be tasty, and the ad is an attempt to remind them that Anheuser-Busch believes their beer is plenty full of cred, thanks.  It's a fascinating ad because it's unexpectedly pointed and effective.

More thoughts:

1.  The big companies can no longer ignore craft brewing (and I use that term advisedly).  It was a contemptuous acknowledgement, but the shots at dissecting pumpkin peach ales are still an acknowledgement. 

2.  It definitely tweaked a lot of people, but they're wrong to call it "defensive."  That's echo-chamber thinking.  Many craft fans have internalized the narrative that Bud is both evil and low-grade.  But Bud never accepted those terms--nor have the millions who continue to drink the beer.  To them, this looks like the appropriate retort to a bunch of hipper-than-thou snobs.  It wasn't targeted at the beer geek, whom Bud has already lost.  What really looks defensive are the responses from the geek community who are miffed that Bud is using exactly the same tone (in-your-face, irreverent, dismissive of the competition) that craft has been using for thirty years against Bud.

3.  This approach won't stop Bud's decline.  The truth is, we are a vast, diverse country, and the idea that any single flavor could so totally dominate the market as mass market lagers did for decades, is impossible to entertain in the 21st century.  What is Bud's natural market--16 million barrels (today's figure), 10 million, 5 million?  Hard to say, but no ad campaign is going to reverse the diversification of the market in beer. 

4.  It might well slow Bud's decline, though.  Throughout the decades from the 1960s through the 1980s, big beer companies had honed their advertising strategies to compete against each other over a pretty indistinguishable commodity (fizzy pale lagers).  They didn't advertise beer--they advertised frogs and dogs and lots and lots of bikini-clad women.  It became self-parody, and made it very easy for competitors to paint these products as industrial crap fit only for gullible rubes. That's all fine if the product is a commodity, but once craft brewers came along, it changed the calculus.  If those fizzy light lagers are going to hold onto some share of the market, they're going to have to make a pitch for the beer.  This ad suggests that Bud may have gotten the memo.

5.  "Craft beer" (again, using that term advisedly) had better watch it's own image.  The fact that The New Yorker and Budweiser are both mocking craft beer is not so good for craft beer.  Hipsters are probably the single most hated group in America (so much so that I don't think I've ever heard anyone call himself one), so this association is not good.  Craft beer could take a lesson from the bigs on this point: beer is the common man's drink.  The more craft beer is known as a white, upper-class, urban, metrosexual drink, the more it will be ripe for mocking. 

No grand conclusions here--it's just all fascinating to see.  We do live in interesting times, don't we?

Sam is Dead in PDX

Good luck trying to find some Sam Adams Boston Lager in Portland. It's been a long time since I've bothered to look for any--I need it for symbolic purposes for a little party that begins this afternoon--and I had no idea what a rarity it has become.  The five sixers that constitute the usual stock at my local Fred Meyer* were long raided, and shoppers could not bring themselves to snag that last sixer of Sam Adams Light.  There were a few Rebel IPAs left--but as symbolism goes, "west-coast style IPA" doesn't really get it done.

Great beer selection; no Boston Lager. (source)

So off I went to Plaid Pantry**.  Apparently they don't stock it at all.  (Thirty brands of local beer, a few mass markets, but nothing from Boston Cincinnati. Then to Zupan's***.  Nyet.  Finally a hail Mary to Belmont Station, one of Portland's best bottle shops--and success!  Ordering maven Chris Ormand had the good sense to make sure some Boston Lager was on the shelves for just such an occasion.  I think there's something instructive in this story, but I'm not entirely sure what it is.  Just that, I suppose, a beer I thought was absolutely ubiquitous turns out not to be.  Good thing Jim Koch has that cider thing to fall back on.  Had I wanted a sixer of Angry Orchard, I could have gotten that anywhere.

_________________
*Fred Meyer ("Freddy's" to locals) is an old local supermarket chain.  It's owned by Kroger, but Fred Meyer was beloved to locals, and the home office--also in Cincinnati--made the wise decision to leave the name.  The stores are giant and have hundreds of beers and ciders for sale.

**Plaid Pantry is a local convenience-store chain

***Zupan's is a local high-end food market chain.  Also a huge selection of beer.  That we have so many weird local businesses is probably also instructive, but we'll leave that rumination for later.