What Will Drive Beer in 2025? (Hint: Not Beer)

I fell down the unnecessary rabbit hole of nomenclature yesterday when discussing the question of independence. I don't actually care what we call breweries and mentioning the name "indie brewer" was a distraction. And, as many people pointed out on social media, you can co-opt pretty much any name. "Indie music" no longer has any connection to record labels; it's a reference to genre, like country or R&B. The same thing could happen to independent brewery. (Not to mention the gray areas--and, hey, let's not mention them.)

So let me put my main point more clearly. In the past decade, a new American brewing tradition emerged, and we spent the decade getting to understand it. What really drove everything in beer was the beer.

Looking to the next decade, I think we're going to see structural issues driving beer. Until recently, beers became best-sellers by a combination of quality and timeliness and business savvy. In the next decade, I think we'll increasingly see best-selling beer driven by a combination of lower price, distributor access, and marketing support. Take an example. Last year, one of the big successes in the IPA category was Deschutes Fresh-Squeezed. It managed to capture the trend of huge juiciness (timeliness), was very expressive (quality), and was marketed cleverly (the name, mainly).

But, in a harbinger of things to come, another IPA that rose to the top was Goose Island's. It actually joined the top-five best-sellers. Now, Goose IPA has been around forever, so how did it manage to grow 260%? Because it had all the advantages of a multinational beer company. I quoted Charlie Papazian yesterday identifying these structural issues as "economic, technical, supply chain, distribution dynamic, retail dynamic"--and I'd add their unique ability to scale popular products, both on the production as well as marketing and distribution level. When ABI decides to roll out a national brand, everything is already in place to accomplish that. And they can roll it out and put it on shelves more cheaply than the local brewery can put out its own Super Tasty Citrus IPA.

Excluding Blue Moon and Shock Top, four of the top ten makers of "craft beer" are partly or completely owned by large beer companies. In ten year's time, probably only two or three of the top makers of beer within this segment is going to be independently owned. There will of course still be thousands of small breweries scattered across the country, but a large portion of the craft segment will be made by big breweries. There may still be a lot of great beers on the best-seller list, but this will be almost accidental. Like Goose IPA, large breweries will decide which products have the capacity to be major national brands, and they'll push them into all markets. And this phenomenon, not the beer itself, will be driving beer.

I'm pretty sure that's what I meant to say yesterday.

Indie Brewers

In 17 days, this here blog will celebrate it's tenth birthday. That naturally puts an old geezer like me in a nostalgic mood: ah, youth!, remember those salad days, back when I was a mere pup of 38!? It got me thinking that, in the 40-year scope of the modern American brewing revival, we really only came into modernity in the past decade. But it also gets me thinking about the future. If the past decade was the pivotal moment when American brewing came into focus both in terms of size and tradition, what then of the next decade?

I suspect it will all be about independence.

A recent blog post by Charlie Papazian brought things into focus for me. In it, he musters a hearty defense for the organization he founded and nurtured, arguing for the two, unrelated prongs that have long formed the confused mission of the Brewers Association (independence and "authenticity"). It's that second one that has never been very defensible. His post was inspired by the threat buy-outs pose to small breweries, and in restating the Brewers Association's mission, he inadvertently explains why these buyouts have been damaging. He writes of craft brewing: "It is a framework that defines a cultural view of the spirit of what it means to be craft brewer. In spirit it defines the cultural view of what a small and independent American brewer(y) is." All this business about craft and spirit and authenticity turns out to be dangerous business. It's vague and imprecise and ripe for plucking by large breweries.

An Indie brewery

But Charlie also describes something far more essential in this battle for the future. Independence is a status worth protecting. We have seen how things degrade in other countries with too much consolidation (or "rationalization," as the Brits say). Here Charlie's right on the money:

Without an organization that represents the interests of small and independent brewers their voice in the economic, technical, supply chain, distribution dynamic, retail dynamic would be totally dwarfed and overwhelmed.

This is the battleground of the next decade. The waters are already hopelessly muddled with regard to what "craft beer" is or what a "craft brewery" looks like. But an independent brewery? There's no ambiguity there. In the next decade, the vague, abstract talk of authenticity and craft will inevitably give way to the more concrete, pressing issue of independence and consolidation. Everyone will clamber to claim abstract virtues, but the marketplace will be defined by the degree of consolidation and variety. There are very good reasons to want a robust network of independent breweries competing with large, powerful interests--they're the ones Charlie listed. It's why we're seeing breweries like Yuengling and Schell now (rightly) placed on team "craft," and why the Brewers Association will focus more narrowly on independence in the future.

We have recently begun seeing this phrase "indie brewery" come into vogue. It's a good, clear term that dispenses with abstraction. Indie breweries may be big or small, and they may make good beer or bad, but you know who owns them. I anticipate using the term more often myself, and expect it to slowly creep into our regular lexicon. "Craft brewery" is meaningless. "Indie brewery?"--that's a very useful term.

The Range of Cider

On Wednesday evening, Nat West started uncorking bottles of cider and perry made by Hereford cider-maker Tom Oliver ten years ago. Nat managed to score them a few years back and has had them squirreled away waiting for the right occasion. And what better occasion than the arrival of the cider-maker himself for CiderCon?

Tom Oliver (left) and me.
Photo: Steven Shomler

I'd seen Tom earlier in the day, and he described these bottles, fearfully, as "the most oxidized cider in the world." In the event, they were not oxidized much at all; the flavors were deep and intense. Unlike IBUs in beer, tannins do not disappear. Cider, as a chemical solution, seems more well-suited to age than beer, too. The biochemistry changes but does not destroy the best flavors in cider. As I held it under my nose, it created the immediate impression of soil, or earth. Good, healthy soil is alive; you know it immediately by the scent. Tom's cider had that quality; the tannins were earthy and complex. Sally said, "daikon radish." Since we had the cidermaker on hand, I put my phone out and had him describe what he tasted.

"What I was anticipating was a removal of any sort of sweetness. By that I don't mean a sugar-sweetness, I mean what I call 'apple sweetness.' It's perceived for me as apple skins, but over time oxidation will remove that and turn that apple sweetness to cardboard--which has the effect, when you drink it, of there being a massive hole in the drink. What you're expecting to get--you instinctively do that [gestures] to your tongue because you're trying to find something that doesn't exist. But there's none of that.

To me, this is like a German dry sherry. It's slightly intensified and it's got that dryness which is--Germans do this dry sherry which is sort of oxidized. Hungarians do one as well that's a bit like that. It just has a lovely charm of its own. And this is--I have to say, I'm so relieved. Everyone's standing around and I don't mind them drinking this stuff now."

I have basically stopped cellaring all but a few beers I know handle age well. Nearly ever beer--and I mean all but a tiny handful--will begin pass their peak after a couple years. They might evolve into something interesting and even tasty, but they will be lesser beers than they were at birth or peak age. Cider seems to be different. I've only got an intermediate understanding of the flavors cider can and should produce, so I leave a big asterisk next to this statement. But that cider--and the perry, too, which was wonderfully balanced and lively--I could drink it all day long.

All the Culture That's Fit to Print

Two notes for your reading and listening pleasure. In the first case, I respond to Mark Dredge's comments on the unsessionability of session IPAs. He's working from the British context, and I totally agree. However, I had to make a pitch for how these things work in the American context, which I have done here:

I have long been an American defender of European palates. I have spent many a session (and blog post) defending half-liter pours of Bavarian helles beer or imperial pints of cask bitter. Mark gives one of the best one-sentence description of the pleasures of cask ale—and helles lager: “There’s a simplicity to these beers that belies their depth and balance and makes their drinkability somehow increase as you go from pint to pint.” Totally true.

But I think it’s time I defend American palates for our European friends.

The second note is the new podcast, in which Patrick and I consider Trappist ales. Not all abbey ales, just the monastic ones. The idea came to us as we considered the lingering winter and the absence of American winter ales (which get pulled from shelves Jan 1), and which beers we--all right, I--turn to in these desperate months. If ever there was a beam of liquid sunshine on a winter's day, it was one of the Trappist ales of Belgium. Listen to it below or on iTunes. (And bonus production note: new mic!)

Welcome Ciderfolk!

Gorgeous!

The little city of Portland is fortunate to be the center of the cider world this week. CiderCon, the annual conference for cider makers, is for the first time being held outside Chicago this year--and Portland was the lucky city that got to host it. (Chicago will have highs just above freezing during the period of the conference, whereas here in Portland it will be a delightful, drizzly mid-40s!)

There are a lot of events happening around town, and cider fans should really make an effort to get out and sample because the city will never be this suffused in cider again. Here's a very handy run-down of all the events happening in Portland this week.

I'd like to do a special call out for an event happening tonight at Reverend' Nat's. The celebrated Herefordshire cider-maker Tom Oliver will be visiting at 8pm (1813 NE 2nd), and Nat will have some of his ten-year old cider (!) on hand. Tom was one of the two cidermakers I spent extensive time with in England, and whom I wrote about in Cider Made Simple. He is both a very engaging and warm person, and also one of the most erudite proponents of traditionally-made English cider. He's also probably the most accomplished perry-maker (fermented pears) in the UK. So, if you want a chance to chat about tannins, natural fermentation, and keeving in Herefordshire, this is one of the very rare chances you'll have. I will definitely not be missing it.

And go have a good, cidery week.

Why the Beer Matters

Yesterday, I discussed the beer Cartwright Brewing made when it launched an early microbrewery in Portland in 1980. It was definitely the most interesting part of the papers posted by The Oregon Hops and Brewing Archive. But there is an element that's almost as interesting. Chuck Coury, Cartwright's founder, came to the project from wine-making. He'd already seen the change that had taken place in wine, and he gave an incredibly prescient overview of where beer was heading. (Although a small handful of American microbreweries had opened within the year or two before Coury started thinking about opening his own, they were far too new and tiny to suggest that any of his predictions were imminent.)

In the review he made of his own project at the time, here's what he observed about the coming beer market:

• "There is a market for quality domestic beer. Note the rise in import sales. Compare to the explosion in fine wines. Prohibition theory: America's beer palate is only now recovering."
• "Not everyone will enjoy your beer. That is good."
• Things to stress about your brewery: "Local, small-scale production. Traditional/European quality. Re: chill haze and sediment; stress positively as 'real beer.'"

Kurt Widmer at the recent
release of Hopside down.

This is exactly what happened. It's remarkable that he had this insight into the market, because it took the rest of the country more than a decade to catch up with him. For basically all of the 1980s, it was touch and go in terms of whether what he wrote above would actually come to pass. Karl Ockert once told me that when the Ponzis were looking for bank funding to open BridgePort a few years later, the banker said (paraphrasing), "Nobody opens breweries; they just shut them down." But here we are, a generation later, and it turns out there is a market for domestic beer. Not everyone like every brand, and that is good--it means we have a very rich and diverse market. He even correctly identified that elements of craft beer that would be anathema to a large industrial brewery like haze could become a marker for hand-made authenticity.

Which raises the question: why did Cartwright fail?

Part of it was that the market Coury envisioned wouldn't emerge for years. Sometimes visionaries suffer a first-mover disadvantage (you could say Cartwright was the MySpace of beer). But a far bigger reason was the beer. It just wasn't good. There are still lots of people around who remember it, and that's the overwhelming memory; even on Facebook people were recalling the beer with amusement as a crapshoot. Apparently there were a few good batches, but they seem to have been the minority.

When you look at the breweries that survived the 1980s, nearly all of them did so by making very good beer. But it's also true now. A glance at the largest breweries in the roughly "craft" camp (Boston Beer, Sierra Nevada, New Belgium, Craft Brewers Alliance, Lagunitas, Deschutes, Bell's) confirms that quality really helps a brewery. It's not the only thing that matters. Good branding, smart distribution, fortunate brand performance, good location--all these things can really help. Good beer alone is not sufficient to become a big brewery, either; there are thousands of small breweries worldwide, from Block 15 and Breakside to Dupont and Schlenkerla, that make world-class beer. Some breweries making great beer even fail for reasons unrelated to the beer.

But an iron rule is that without quality beer, it's very, very hard to build a successful brewery if you're competing in the "quality" category. (I'd say impossible, but wise hive mind is going to point out a case where it's happened.) Coury understood where the market was headed. Unfortunately, he charged into it with bad beer and that insight didn't do him any good.

Cartwright Brewing's Weird Steam(?) Beer

In June 1979, Fred Eckhardt reported two items in Amateur Brewer:

"PORTLAND, OR -- The Pabst Brewing Company of Milwaukee announced that it was acquiring the Blitz-Weinhard Company..."

and

"PORTLAND, OR -- The country's [missing word] (very) small brewery will produce its first brew in June, according to brewmaster Charles Coury, of Oregon's new Cartwright Brewing Company...."

Both of these things probably made very little impression on people at the time, but they augured big things to come. Henry's would be shuttered 20 years later, after it was clear Oregon had become a "craft beer" state. And although Cartwright brewing vanished after a couple years, Coury's quixotic venture would inspire others to consider the possibility of brewing their own beer. I recall Rob Widmer telling me once that he and Kurt saw the brewery and later agreed, "we could do that."

Charles Coury.
Source: Fred Eckhardt

But peering through the looking-glass from this side of history distorts things. While the scale of Cartwright must have seemed comprehensible, the actual act of brewing turned out to be a bigger trick. I have long heard about Cartwright's troubles, but the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archive posted a remarkable document that explains the nature of Coury's challenges. It was an assessment of the brewery by Coury himself. The whole thing is worth a read, but I want to focus on the beer itself. The business stuff is interesting, but a look at the beer Coury designed in late 1979 or 1980 tells us a lot about the state of beer then. Here's the recipe:

"The basic formula: 93% pale malt, 7% caramel malt, about 1 pound of hops per barrel (2/3 boiling--Cluster, 1/3 finishing--Cascade), typically a bottom yeast is used."

That's an odd recipe (more in a moment), but it's nothing compared to the process.

•  He started out with a 3.5 hour mash in apparently three steps ("rests for protein reduction, saccharification, dextrine production")
• "Lautering takes 3-4 hours" (!)
• "The wort is boiled for 2 hours 15 minutes."
• "It is cooled overnight by recirculating cold water in the kettle's steam jacket."
• "The cool wort is racked and pitched the following morning."
• The final beer was bottle-conditioned and spent a month carbonating.

It's a funny, almost frontier beer. I wonder if Coury consulted Fritz Maytag, because the recipe looks quite a bit like Anchor Steam. There's no evidence he had any lagering equipment, so it seems like he was fermenting lager yeast warm, like Steam. The hops are different (Anchor uses Northern Brewer), but with the Cluster they would definitely have an old-time American authenticity. It took the poor man over nine hours to brew one batch of beer--and that doesn't include the time spent milling grain, which he called "a tedious and difficult task." And then there's the business of leaving it to cool overnight. One of the most common descriptions of people who tried this beer was "infected," and I have an idea that nice 8-hour cooling period before pitching didn't help. This formulation and process reads a lot more like a 19th century brewery than one from the 21st century.

Cartwright Brewing. Source: Fred Eckhardt

(Other amusing tidbit. He listed "problems with the process," and included this one: "Clean-up after brewing. Shoveling the spent grains and scrubbing the equipment takes a good part of the day." You don't say? Oddly enough, the first two modern Oregon breweries were founded by winemakers. Reading between the lines, it seems like Coury hadn't bargained for how much different, and more laborious, brewing would be than wine-making.)

There's a sheet of paper among the documents from Fred Eckhardt, who was apparently taking notes on the beers Cartwright made. He describes two beers, "Original" and "New." The stats on Cartwright's original beer are these. It was brewed to just 11.2 P (1.045) and finished out at 3 P (1.012)--which would have made it a 4.4% beer--and had just 18 IBUs. The "new" beer was 12.3 P (1.049) and finished drier, 2.4 P (1.009)--a 5.4% beer. It had 40 IBUs (of rugged Clusters, no less), which even today would seem plenty bitey. I have no idea if the second beer was ever made.

Coury thought his product was quite distinctive. He compared it to "traditional/European quality" beer and thought the bottle conditioning could be spun as a positive--though he seems to have fretted it would seem strange to consumers. What's interesting is that the beer is so similar to commercial beer at the time--it's just a half step in a different direction. It's a 4.4% copper-colored steam beer with 18 IBUs. The color and fuller flavor would have been unusual, but hardly unrecognizable, to consumers in 1980.

Source: Fred Eckhardt

The Archive includes a contemporaneous article from the Eugene Register-Guard that offers a bit more insight into the beer. "[Coury] says he found century-old beer beer-making recipes in 'beautiful, old brewing textbooks' in the stacks of the Multnomah County Library in Portland." Coury also gives a specific nod to Anchor Steam. It seems history, tradition, and a desire not to get too far outside the mainstream guided the development of the beer.

Two other random facts going out. Cartwright was selling the beer for $.90-$.95 a bottle, which is $2.59 to $2.73 in today's dollars--a fairly steep price. And according to the newspaper article, he was also planning on brewing a stout. Wonder if he ever made it that far?

From Cartwright to Session IPA in 272 Words

I'm a bit short for blogging time this week, though there is a remarkable post over at Oregon Hops and Brewing Archive that will feature prominently in (hopefully very near) future posts. A trove of documents reveals what the state of brewing was like in the late Carter administration as Chuck Coury struggled to make one of America's first microbreweries a viable enterprise.

Original Cartwright site.
source

I don't want to step on that blogging too much, but suffice it to say that what brewers and drinkers understood then--a long time by one measure, but well within living memory--was shockingly primitive. That article contrasts nicely with a piece that provoked a lot of debate on the nature of Session IPAs. In that post, Londoner Mark Dredge argues that there's nothing sessionable about this style. Unsurprisingly, his British commenters all offer their hear-hears (as did Alan, in a thread that sadly took place on Facebook). I'll leave aside for a moment my strong dissent of Mark's point--"sessionable" may be a British word, but which flavors Americans choose for their sessions is not under British oversight*--but what's striking is the distance between Cartwright and Session IPA.

We've gone from a time when Americans neither knew how to brew beer nor what most beer tasted like to a time where we argue about "sessionability" and "session IPAs"--two concepts that would have been abstruse to the point of gibberish just 36 years ago. I have a decent shot at being alive in another 36 years, and it's hard to even imagine what world we might inhabit then.

____________________
*Okay, I didn't entirely leave it aside.

But the Horse Has Already Left the Barn...

...and lived a full life and passed into the next. But Coors, discovering the door ajar, is racing to close it.

Latest marketing push uses "Whatever your mountain, climb on" to lure back diverse crowd of consumers curious about craft brews

The campaign opens with a panoramic shot of hiker scaling a snow-covered peak, which is followed by a "Rocky"-style montage of boxers, bull riders, runners, climbers and welders.

"Our mountains make us who we are, your mountains make you who you are," the ad says, winding up with "whatever your mountain, climb on."

It's a far cry from hot babes and cold beer.

The new comprehensive marketing campaign from MillerCoors, the Chicago-based joint venture of Denver-based Molson Coors and SABMiller, targets women, consumers with diverse ethnic backgrounds and adults aged 35-44, hoping to draw customers back to the venerable brand.

On the positive side: at least now they're aware they have a problem. On the negative side: they've skeezily objectified women for 35 years.

Marks of the Modern Era: Hop Breeding

Looking back on a decade of blogging, one of the biggest revolutions has been the emergence of hops as the central player in craft brewing--a phenomenon that stretches all across the globe.  This has been driven by a couple things. First and foremost--and the subject of a future post--the way in which beer styles have evolved to take advantage of the flavor and aroma of particularly New World hops (US, New Zealand, Australia). But a possibly overlooked dimension in all of this are the hops themselves.

Breeders have been busy for the past four decades adding to the world's inventory of hop varieties. The focus in the early decades was on alpha acids; every few years, breeders managed to goose the alpha acids in hops so that "high alpha hops" went from 8% up to the low teens. When they kept going, breeders invented a new category, "super high alpha," to describe them. Large industrial breweries were driving these innovations, because the higher the alpha acids, the fewer the hops they had to use in a batch of beer.

Craft brewing changed that calculus, as drinkers became attracted to the vivid, often exotic flavors of New World hops. There were a decent number of first-gen varieties to choose from, principally the classic "C-hops" (Cascade, Centennial, Chinook). As craft brewing turned more toward hoppy ales and brewers started focusing more on techniques to enhance these hops' flavor and aroma, breweries started to look for new varieties to give their beers distinctive flavors. Stan Hieronymus would probably be able to comment more knowledgeably on this than I, but it appeared that the development of Citra, led by the Widmer Brothers and Sierra Nevada, marked a turning point. 

Developing hops takes a long time and is expensive and laborious. Unusual, off-putting compounds in these new hybrid hops are not always evident until they've gone into a number of beers. (Summit has a compound that tastes of onions to a minority of drinkers, Sorachi Ace a dill note--flavors not generally admired by those who detect them.) Producing a winner like Citra means finding several also-rans. Nevertheless, the blend of incentives created by the new direction of craft brewing post-2005 has shifted hop breeding firmly in the direction of aroma varieties. 

After Citra, a succession of new hops has hit the market--Mosaic, Equinox, Meridian, El Dorado, Palisade--all bred to give breweries more options. This is only the start of things. Breweries have a huge interest in finding hop varieties that will (generally in combination with other hops) give them IPAs that taste like no others on the market. They're looking not only to newly-bred ones, but forgotten varieties (Comet has made a comeback), indigenous varieties, and uncommon foreign varieties. What follows is an incomplete list of hops you may see appearing in your local IPAs:

• Azacca 
• Brooklyn 
• Buzz Bullets
• Caliente
• Canadian Red Vine 
• Cashmere
• Eureka 
• Enigma  
• Fantasia
• Jarrylo 
• Jester
• Lemonaughty 
• Minstrel
• Neomexicanus (Amalia, Latir, Tierra, Chama, Mintras) 
• Pekko
• Summer
• Sussex 
• Tahoma
• TNT
• Vic Secret
• Waimea

What's been really amazing is how these effects are translating to new varieties in Germany (Mandarina Bavaria, Huell Melon), the Czech Republic (Kazbek, Vital, Bohemie), and the UK (Sussex, Sovereign, Endeavour)--all places where classic varieties had previously been sacrosanct. The British strains seem to be the most New-world of the bunch, and Americans may soon be turning to the new varieties there to trick out their hoppy ales.

When I started this blog, it was possible to keep track of all the hops used in commercial brewing. As a homebrewer, I was able to brew with most of them and learn how they behaved and tasted. Now it seems like every week I encounter a beer made with some new hop. The very popular ones, like Mosaic and El Dorado, find their way into enough beers that we can hope to identify them. But Tahoma? Minstrel? TNT? It's getting harder and harder. I suspect this will slow down at some point, but it's the new normal for now. And it's been quite a transformation.

From Understudy to Star: Craft Brewing's Decade

Craft beer doesn't seem like a recent phenomenon. (For the purposes of this post, "craft beer" means anything made by smaller American breweries from the late 1970s onward.) Most of us will recall hearing something about it before I started this blog a decade ago. Some will remember drinking it back as far as the Reagan administration. But in some very real ways, it is recent. Until the middle 2000s, craft beer was a niche product in all but the beeriest of cities. Let's trot through some numbers to illustrate just how stark the change has been.

This draft array, sighted this week in Yuma, AZ,
is typical of what you used to find--in, say, 2006.

In 2005, craft breweries combined to brew 6.3 million barrels, which was just 3.2% of all beer sold in the US that year. At the end of 2014 (the most recent date with numbers), that figure had more than tripled to 22.2 million barrels, or 11.3%. (Total barrelage was nearly identical for both years at just over 197 million.) When they finally get to totting up the figures for 2015, it should be around 25 million barrels, or 14.5% of the entire market. Since 2005, the craft beer segment's worst year-over-year growth was 5.8%; it fell below double-digit growth only twice, and that was during the throes of the great recession.

In 2006, Oregon was well ahead of most of the country in adopting craft beer, with Portland and Bend leading the way. I couldn't find the statistics for overall consumption in 2005, but I think it was probably close to the national stats we'll see in 2015. In 2006, craft beer was already a generation old, and it had only managed to cobble together a 3% share of the beer market. There was a general sense that it was never going to become a huge player, and when people looked at Oregon's stats, they tended to dismiss them as cultural outliers. No one believed the rest of the country would ever achieve that kind of penetration.

I'd argue that the psychological change in the last ten years has been far greater than even the growth in barralage. In 2006, craft beer could provide owners with a nice little business. No one imagined that it constituted a real threat to mass market lagers. Last year, big breweries paid tens of millions, and in one case a billion dollars for modest-sized craft breweries. Even in 2006, there were craft breweries the size of 2015's Ballast Point and Lagunitas, but the idea that a large brewery would spend half a billion or a billion on them would have been inconceivable. The reason is because the idea that craft beer would one day become the dominant force was also inconceivable. Now it's conventional wisdom, and large breweries are willing to pay a massive premium in order to position themselves to compete in this world in the future.

Beyond sheer growth, there's a change in the distribution of breweries as well. Have a look at the total production by type of brewery. These are the Brewers Association's categories; a regional brewery makes more than 15,000 barrels and a micro makes fewer than 15,000.


Production by Type

_____Regional__Micro__Brewpubs__Contract 
2005___64%______11%_____11%________14% 
2014___79%______14%______5%_________1% 


The share of production by big breweries is now over three-quarters of the market, and that's the segment of real barrel growth. In the coming few years, the percentage of beer produced by the biggest craft breweries will likely pass 90%. In a market where there are fewer bigger players, you'd expect consolidation, and that's what we're already seeing.

One of other interesting trend is the types of new breweries getting founded. If you wanted to identify a bubble somewhere in the market, this might be a place to look. It appears that people are betting on production facilities rather than brewpubs.


Percentage of Breweries by Type

______Regional___Micro___Brewpubs 
2005______4%______25%______71% 
2014______4%______55%______41% 


This again isn't surprising; with all the potential money to be made, starting a production brewery looks like an attractive option. But it means that there will be many more players trying to compete for a piece of the pie dominated by large breweries. I expect that means we'll start to see brewery failures rise in the future--even if, overall, there's not yet a bubble.

In 2006, as I started this blog, craft brewing was just a sleepy little current in the overall beer market--still a "boutique" segment. In the next decade, growth has been so strong that it is now a given that it's the future of beer. Imagine what the next decade will hold.

A Beer With "Lift"

On Saturday I had the pleasure of judging at the evolving Willamette Week Oregon beer awards. During one of the sessions, a judge (I'll let him identify himself if he wishes) was describing why he liked one of the beers. He was praising its liveliness and described the finish as having "lift." It was an adjective that received appreciative nods and smiles around the table.

A beer with "lift?"

Describing or judging a beer can often be a deadening experience, as we default to a list of familiar attributes. But the experience of drinking a beer, particularly a very good or very bad one, sometimes means using the language of metaphor. "Lift" is not a descriptor that will ever be usable in the way "diacetyl" will--it's not a quantifiable quality. But in the case of the beer being described, it was perfectly accurate. We all understood what he meant. It wasn't only liveliness, but the way the beer evolved in the mouth. It went out with a rising, spirited snap, with lift.

I've heard other beers described as having "bass," a kind of thrumming resonance full of deep flavors. It's not only the sense of heft or roastiness, but gravitas. Some beers seem "hollow," in that they have at the mid-palate collapse--perhaps the opposite of "bass." In a world where we use the same, tired old language ("the beer pours out copper and smells of nuts and citrus") it's great to hear new words that capture a beer's essence.

Happy MLK Day, everyone--

Beer Sherpa Recommends: Upright Fantasia

Upright Brewery recently convened a media event to introduce the specialty beers they'll be releasing throughout the year. Upright, for those of you who may not know, is a small brewery that--well, let me tell you an anecdote by way of introduction. During the event we were sampling one of the beers and Willamette Week's Arts and Culture editor Martin Cizmar asked founder Alex Ganum how he planned to market the beer. Mind you, breweries are businesses, an arrangement that obliges breweries to convey their products to consumers in exchange for money. In nearly every case I can think of, the brewery would have had a ready answer. Instead, Alex got a surprised look on his face and admitted he'd never considered the question.

Upright's name is an allusion to the jazz musician Charles Mingus, and never was there a more appropriate choice. Like Mingus, Ganum (and his conspirators Gerrett Ill and Bobby Birk) thinks only in craft, not dollars and cents. Unlike Mingus, Upright's beers are rarely challenging--they are more often compositions of layered nuance and balance. The barrel-aged selections are usually so balanced they don't get mentioned with awe alongside the more famous American wild-ale producers, which are more aggressive. That's a shame, because they are making some of the most interesting and accomplished beers in the country.

Take for example the lineup Upright will be offering this year. Hearts' Beat and Shades are sister cherry ales, the former made with blood-red Chelan, the latter Rainier cherries. Hearts' Beat plays on the depth of fruit flavor, which thrums with tannins and rich flavor, while Shades keys off the fruit's acidity, which tends toward white wine. Fatali Four and Billy the Mountain are longtime faves--well, Billy's a fave to a small group (me included; it's in the Beer Bible), but we really love it. And then there's Oregon Native, which gets its vinousness from the use of actual pinot grapes and aging in pinot barrels. That one, still too young to render a final judgment, has the potential to be a spectacular beer. Rarely do the delicate flavors of pinot noir grapes survive commingling with beer, but in the young version of this one, they were perfectly intact.

But for Sherpa purposes, the beer I want to bring to your attention is another long-time favorite, Fantasia. It's a lightly tart beer made with tons of peaches. It has always been one Upright's signature beers, but five years in and it's still evolving. For this batch, the brewery decided to try to preserve the unique ecosystem of microorganisms that developed as a result of wild yeasts and bacteria from the fruit skins. Birk was tasked with taking off the metal hoops from the barrels and removing the old fruit, then reassembling the barrels in preparation for the new batch of beer and peaches.

What all this trouble produces is a beer that smells like a warm, tree-ripe peach on an August afternoon. It tastes the same, and you might imagine a dribble of juice running down your chin. Because of the acidity produced by the wild microorganisms, that flavor and aroma is set and preserved; the acidity also balances the fruity sweetness and gives it a dry, crisp (and balanced) finish. It is hard to imagine anyone who wouldn't smile after a mouthful of this beer, from the most hardened, cynical beer geek to that cousin who only drinks Rainier.

Fantasia goes on sale tomorrow at the brewery, which is open from 1pm to 8pm. There's a three-bottle limit, but you can augment with a nice draft pour while you're there. I believe Four Play was on tap at the event, and that alone is worth a trip to the brewery.

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"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.

Ten Years Blogging: The Modern Age of Brewing

I have always had a bit of trouble dating this blog precisely. By the time I started it, I had already been blogging for a few years in the political sphere.* The first post, really just a placeholder, consisted of four words and went live on January 20, 2006. Things sat idle for more than a month. I did occasional beer blogging at BlueOregon, one of the sites I co-founded, and I started moving those posts over here in February. The first actual post came on Feb 26, a review of a now long-forgotten BridgePort experiment called Supris.

My better-looking, younger doppelganger, Bolt Minister.
His career is a study in change. When I took this photo
in 2009, he was at Astoria Brewing. He went on to work
at three (?) more breweries before founding 54-40
late last year.

In the life of a blogger, ten years counts as a significant amount of time. In the life of beer, it's so short you can't even see it. In the life of American beer, it's more than you'd imagine. At the end of 2005, there were fewer than 1500 breweries in the US, which was actually fewer than there were in 1999. Craft breweries made just 7 million barrels then (when "craft beer" was actually a pretty discrete category). They brewed 22 million in 2014 and will probably be over 25 million when we look at the numbers at the end of this year.

Ninkasi is now sells the third-largest amount of beer in Oregon; it didn't exist when I started. Breakside, the Commons, Block 15, Upright, Oakshire, Fort George, Double Mountain, Upright, Boneyard, 10 Barrel--none existed when I started this blog. (You can play this game with a lot of breweries. I just got off the phone with Sam Richardson of Other Half Brewing in NYC, a brewery most big apple beer geeks agree is setting the standard now; they will have their second anniversary later this month.) Back in 2006, only historians had heard the term "gose." No one had heard "session IPA." The concept of kettle souring may have existed, but basically no one knew about it. I certainly didn't. Mosaic and Citra hops didn't exist.

I could go on and on, but I think you see the point. This blog's life corresponds pretty closely to what we might call American brewing's "modern age." When breweries first started opening in the late 1970s, there wasn't any "American brewing tradition." It took at least half a generation before anything really started to change. (Beer in 1982 and beer in 1995 looked a lot alike.) It took another decade for breweries to understand what that change would be and begin to refine it. And it was about the middle 2000s that it came into focus.

Instead of a traditional look back at what I did on this blog over the last decade, I plan to look back at beer over the past decade. It was the pivotal time in American brewing, both as an industry and as a craft. It will be fun and I hope edifying and illuminating to pore over those years and see what we've learned.


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* The Oregon Blog and Notes on the Atrocities had already been born and died, but Low on the Hog was still going strong and BlueOregon was in its heyday and actually affecting the trajectory of Beaver State politics.

Touring the Cascade Barrel Room and Blending Facility

Ron Gansberg (r) gave Edwin Johnson the
hat off his head.

On Monday, I had the good fortune to tour Cascade's impressive new(ish) blending facility in Beaverton. It's a place the brewery hasn't spent much time advertising or opening to the public, but it's big, growing, and really impressive. Brewer Ron Gansberg has something on the order of 1,300 wine and liquor barrels (including a small array of cognac barrels that arrived just recently) and maybe ten medium-sized wine foudres (or foeders in the Flemish) of around 55-65 hectos. (They vary.)

John Holl was in town for a bit over 24 hours and had arranged the tour; I got lucky enough to be offered the chance to chauffeur, which of course meant taking the tour and ending up on an epic bottle tasting as Ron and the gang started raiding the library for vintage rarities. By the end of the tasting, everyone on-site had joined in the fun, and I'm afraid we dented their productivity. Fortunately, a lot of the newer guys hadn't tried some of the older beers, so I think it can be written off as a training/team-building exercise.

 At one point, Ron dispatched one of the guys to go get the last bottle of Blackberry Ale dating back to around 2007 or so. It had been hidden somewhere, and only a couple people knew where it was. We also tasted a Kriek from that vintage, which was spectacular. The Blackberry was never as good as the Kriek--with fruit ales, you deal with terroir and the vagaries of the quality of the fruit in any given year--but drinking it was more sacrament than indulgence. We let the history pass across our tongues and considered the arc of this brewery's history.

Anyway, here is a photo essay of the day. What I didn't capture were large conditioning tanks where fruit was sitting for months on beer--cherry, raspberry, apricot. They don't look all that magestic compared to the French foudres, but one of them contained nine tons of fruit. You had to use your mind to apprehend that majesty. All right, here goes.

The barrels are packed tightly. Once they're in
place, they stay in place.

These foudres should last thirty years.

More after the jump.

Was it Inevitable?

Yesterday I served as the chauffeur for John Holl, editor of All About Beer, and sort of my boss. We began our day at the Cascade barrel-aging and blending facility, which is secreted away in a mostly-undisclosed location off Denny Road in Beaverton. We ended up spending way more time there than we anticipated (the voluble, affable, and wildly entertaining Ron Gansberg gave us a tour and so we lingered). For a nightcap, we dropped by Gigantic and were fortunate enough to encounter Van Havig and Ben Love.

And there I got in an intriguing conversation with Van on the question how national beer preferences emerge. Take any country that makes its own kind of beer (as opposed to making generic lagers) and you can ask the question: why this beer? Why cask ale in Britain? Why dunkel lagers in Bavaria. (Or take the even weirder example of Cologne and Dusseldorf--why a pale ale in one and a dark ale in the other?)

You can do this on down the line. Van and I got in an abstruse conversation about how IPAs developed (we had a heated debate, but by the end I couldn't tell what we were disagreeing about; I suppose that's typical for pubby conversations about beer). We both agree that an American tradition has emerged and that it is characterized by the way Americans use hops. I have harped on this enough I think you all know about it. But Van posed a question that has become my philosophical white whale, the great unanswerable riddle in beer. Was it inevitable that Americans were going to develop in this way?

Remove some important antecedents. Say Fritz Maytag had decided against buying Anchor and Ken Grossman became an aerospace engineer. Imagine that, instead of providing a market for those lovely Cascade hops that Coors didn't want, those brewers never existed and growers pulled the American-bred hops from their fields. Would we still have gotten here?

You can run this mental experiment with any country. What we know is that regional preferences develop, not why. We can trace the history back, we can look at extenuating circumstances (war, famine, tax law), we can consider local ingredients--but like an onion, we can keep peeling and peeling and never get to that answer. You end up with Cologne and Dusseldorf, sister cities making different beer.

It seems inconceivable that America would end up where we are if you changed up some of those early variable, but I can't seem to find the (math-like) proof that would affirm or contradict it one way or another. 

A Long-Winded Way of Saying: Quit Counting Breweries

On Tuesday, in one of my least-viral posts in recent history, I pointed out that assessing countries based only on the growth in number of new breweries gives you a limited perspective. It's better if you also consider existing breweries and total beer production. Germany produces a ton of beer and still managed to support 1,300+ breweries, so despite its anemic new-brewery growth, you still have to acknowledge its preeminence among brewing countries. Owing to the wild success of that post, I'm back for more.

Now we turn to the US for a similar look at state-by-state numbers. These figures come from a paper in The Journal of Wine Economics from a couple months past. They were working with 2012 numbers, but they still paint a very rich portrait. Here are the brewery counts from that year for the top ten states (they look woefully out-of-date, but probably line up pretty closely with the current top ten and demonstrate a similar distribution).

But now have a look at the top ten states by production (this is craft brewery production only). It paints quite a different picture.

California had nearly three times as many breweries as Pennsylvania in 2012, but actually brewed less beer. (Also not that  theMassachusetts number is misleading. It comes principally from Sam Adams, but of course, the amount of Sam Adams brewed in Mass is a tiny trickle--the state's production is actually south of 500,000 barrels.) Washington made less than a tenth the amount of beer as Pennsylvania. It would be great to run this with 2015 numbers, because the effect would be far more dramatic. Nearly all of the breweries that have opened since 2012 are brewing a tiny fraction of the beer. So all the talk of new brewery openings and total breweries would obscure that fact that two states brew a huge share of all the craft beer in the US, and the top four are far ahead of the rest of the country.

And the effect can get very pronounced the further you go down the list. Illinois, for example, had 59 breweries in 2012, but collectively only brewed 81,000 barrels--less than many larger craft breweries. (North Carolinians, who do a lot of bragging about the number of breweries they have, should probably be a bit more circumspect; in 2012 their 59 breweries only made 156,000 barrels--about a tenth the amount of Oregon.)

If you think I'm on a weird bender about possibly extraneous measures, well ... there's more! Over at All About Beer, I try to make the case that brewery numbers are themselves not terribly reliable. (Barrel numbers, which are tracked by the tax man, are rock-solid.)

If you’re like me, you suspect there’s an actual number of breweries in these locations, one that is knowable and countable, and if everyone adhered to the same rules, we could tot them up officially. We know quarks exist, for god’s sake; surely the number of breweries in London, England can’t be beyond our ken. It kind of is. Here we drop into something like a quantum state, where arithmetic may no longer suffice. There exist what we might call Schrödinger breweries, entities that can simultaneously be said to exist and not. I’ll describe the difficulty by way of example.

All of which is to say that counting breweries doesn't make a lot of sense. Cities and states do not try to burnish their cred by citing stats on the number of restaurants or karaoke bars or pet stores. What we actually care about are important, excellent, interesting, or unusual breweries, right? I propose that we quit harping on total numbers.


Update. In the manner of blogs, this post sort of developed as I was writing it. (Note to self: don't do that.) Let me clarify the actual point by responding to Stan Hieronymus' comment:

"Right now there are four breweries within 3 miles of our house (in St. Louis). If plans for 2 more go through, likely, then there will be 6 breweries. At a personal level, the number matters. And shouldn't beer always be personal? Put another way, the big picture that interests me is a sum of all the little pictures." 

Yes, exactly. My real belief is that there is way to much focus on the number of breweries to the exclusion of other factors. Production is a proxy for popularity at both the market and brewery level. They suggest a market where a lot of people are drinking a lot of beer. Illinois looks like a good beer state until you consider that people weren't drinking the beer. In Stan's example, it's great to have a lot of breweries near your house if they're good breweries. Having a bunch of mediocre breweries is no bonus at all. By only focusing on numbers, we miss other important factors. It should be a consideration, but it should never be the only consideration.

Seeking Sponsors for this Site

As my abortive effort a couple of weeks ago hinted, I am actively trying to earn a bit of revenue here at Beervana. For ten years, this site has been mostly ad-free, an experience I appreciate when I visit other sites without ads. But I'm also a working writer, and I'm going to have to start getting a bit of revenue for the words I write here.

Toward that effort, I am now looking for some sponsors for the website. I am thinking of these folks as "sponsors" because I'm asking a little bit more of them than I would random advertisers. The most important thing a blogger has is his independence and the trust of his readers. I've built up, I hope, that trust over the decade I've been blogging here. I don't do anything like objective journalism, but I hope you believe that I've been transparent in my likes, dislikes, and opinions, and that they come exclusively from my brainpan, not some hidden influence behind the scenes.

For this blog to have any value at all, that transparency and trust will have to continue, so I'll ask my sponsors to agree to advertise with the knowledge that there's absolutely no quid pro quo--they won't receive any special considerations, additional coverage, or favorable content. If there's any value in advertising here at all, it's because people come to read honest opinions.

I firmly believe, however, that that honesty is also good for breweries. Not every beer they release is going to be a winner; not every press release is going to hit the mark. I may mention failures along the way. But that transparency means that, when I do praise a beer or person or brewery, you know it's real praise. Sponsors may not be delighted by every post I write, but if they've followed my content, I think they'll realize the value of having honest brokers out there discussing them and their beer. The internet is choked with social media buzz marketing, lame listicles, and clickbait. Sites with good, informative content are rare and they are a value not just to readers but the businesses they cover.

I've written up some sponsor guidelines to describe my approach. I've also created a media kit so you can see the value of the site and advertising here; it includes information about my traffic and the pricing scheme.

If you are interested in being one of these sponsors, shoot me an email at the_beerax @ yahoo.com. I'll be happy to send you all the information I have.

To all the folks who've read this blog for years, I ask you to be vigilant during this new experiment, to give feedback about how it's going, and to absolutely tell me if you're losing confidence in my independence.  I have also learned in these ten years to trust you to call me on mistakes of fact, judgment, and bias. Please continue.

Thanks and cheers--

Update. I forgot to mention: we'd also love a sponsor for the Beervana Podcast. Everything I said above applies, but of course the medium is different. Give a holler.

New Brewery Numbers Do Not Tell the Whole Story

Ron Pattinson has a nice post today that looks at the growth in European breweries by country in the five years between 2009-2014. What jumped out to him was the tiny growth (2%) in the number of breweries in Germany. He ran, Pattinson-style, a table with raw numbers. Allow me to render that statistic visually (click to enlarge):

It's true that the growth of 2% lags the rest of Europe. But percentages can sometimes be a little deceiving. The 21 breweries Germany added weren't that far behind the 24 Ireland added--but that was good enough for 92% growth on the Emerald Isle.* So what if we instead look at total breweries? How does Germany fare then? Quite a lot better, as you'd expect.

That brings me to my final visualization--and probably the most illuminating. We often look at brewery counts as a valuable metric for ... something. (I do it too, and I don't know why it's so compelling). But what if we look at the actual amount of beer a country produces rather than the number of breweries? Does that shed light on matters? It does.

(There is one final number crunch I could have shown, but it's not dramatic; it compares the production to population, but the differences weren't large. Italy was a bit of an outlier on the low side and the Czech Republic on the high side, but most were within close range of each other.)

The moral of the story is this: new brewery numbers are not a good measure of the entire health of a local beer market. You have to look at the total number of breweries and total production of those breweries. No single number tells a complete enough story on its own--you really need to look at all of them together. All countries went through massive consolidation in the 20th century, but Germany less so. It stands to reason that Germany would be repopulating its breweries more slowly now. (Which is not to say that Ron's initial observation isn't interesting--it is. And many would love to see more rapid growth of young, adventuresome breweries in Germany.)

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*As commenters on Ron's post noted, those numbers are probably not quite accurate. It turns out counting breweries is a real challenge for existential and semantic reasons. More on that in due course.

The Argument Against (Henry's Hard Soda)

There is a lot to be said about the wave of consolidation among the larger American craft breweries right now (and I will say some of it later this week). In the meantime, I offer you a case-in-point for one of the reasons that argues against selling your brand, and particularly your name, to another company. Once it leaves your possession to become a brand in someone else's portfolio, terrible violence may be done to it. I forthwith offer you Henry's Hard Orange Soda (in a classic corporate move, where marketing precedes everything else, the website is not yet live). The bold is mine.

Today, MillerCoors proudly unveils Henry’s Hard Soda, a new line of deliciously refreshing hard sodas made with real cane sugar. Crafted for beer and non-beer drinkers alike with 4.2 percent alcohol by volume, Henry’s puts a playful spin on familiar flavors with Henry’s Hard Ginger Ale and Henry’s Hard Orange Soda.

“One of the main reasons why I love this product is because life is busy with work, kids and bills, but there’s always time to sneak in a little fun with friends,” said Bryan Ferschinger, MillerCoors senior director of innovations. “Beer is great, but now we also have Henry’s Hard Soda – an option that gives a little more flavor and excitement.” 

The new hard sodas are inspired by the spirit of Henry Weinhard, a brewer known in the Pacific Northwest for making flavorful beers and great soda for over a century. When Portland unveiled a new public fountain in 1887, Henry offered to pump beer through the fountain for everyone to enjoy. Today, Henry’s fun-loving personality lives on in this refreshing hard soda. 

MillerCoors will support Henry’s Hard Soda with a national marketing campaign, kicking off at the end of the month with advertising on primetime networks and high-profile cable partners such as ABC, FOX, TBS, Food Network, and Bravo. A custom digital presence in top pop culture sites, traditional print media support, dual-language public relations programming and influencer initiatives complement the rollout.

Henry is now a playful cartoon figure, like the Hamburgler or Twinkie the Kid. All he needs now is a catchphrase. Sad face on behalf of all the good citizens of Portland.

The Year in Pixels

Below I offer a year in beer, filtered through the particular lens of my perambulations. There's an unexpectedly large number of All About Beer editor John Holl in here. With CBC in Portland, OBF, GABF, and me visiting the East Coast, I got to see him more often than usual. There is a more national theme this year, as I wandered about on my book tour travels. But also shots of brewers in lederhosen, brewers playing banjo, and very small brewers in skirts. There are technology shots, bar shots, people shots, and even one art shot. All in all, a very good year.

They're mostly chronological, so have a look.

How my year, and 47th birthday, started out.

Early last year, Alex Ganum captured Willamette Week's Beeer
of the Year with Engelberg Pilsner.

The release of Pliny the Younger at Roscoe's.

Niki Ganong released her book.

Espied at FH Steinbart, my local homebrewing shop.

Oregon brewing royalty at CBC: Rogue's John Meier (l)
and Pelican's Darron Welch (r)